Neighbourhoods

Civilised streets

Is it actually possible to design a street that meets everyone’s needs?

'Most of our streets are not civilised, enjoyable places to be. They are mainly noisy, polluted, hazardous and unpleasant – with serious social and environmental problems the result.'

This is from a new CABE briefing on Civilised streets.

'This briefing is about the sort of streets that are – or are intended to be – used for a range of different purposes, such as walking, driving and shopping... It is about why, and how, we should be creating streets that are civilised...'

CABE rightly argues that streets that have no casualties simply because people have deserted them are actually failures in terms of their social function.

'We think it is vital that streets are designed and maintained in a way that attracts people and we support street design that encourages users to consider others.'

I gave someone a lift in my car recently and she was bemoaning the high cost of petrol. When I told her I thought the price should be considerably higher to reflect its real cost, it shut her up completely - I suppose because some people find it hard to think beyond their own lifestyles.

So given the gloomy prognosis that the voice of the car lobby will for some time remain dangerously strident, this document is for me a contribution to the sound tactic of undermining it by subversion rather than confrontation. We may well come to be very thankful for the political balancing acts that outfits like CABE are playing.

What Robin Hood did for the poor

There's a short BBC news piece by David Sillito about growing disagreements over the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in east London - yer classic slab estate, or a masterpiece of twentieth century design? As David says:

It's a familiar process, blowing up the sixties' and seventies' mistakes.

Cut to Lord Rogers taking the chance to tell us how marvellous the architecture is. More here on the campaign to get it listed. Hang on, what's it like to live there? According to Sillito 80% of the residents don't think it should be saved.

Here's an alternative take on the architects in question, the Smithsons:

Robin Hood Gardens, a 213-home council housing complex in East London, gave them the chance to practise what they preached on a grand scale. It was disastrous. The brutalist concrete structure turned out to be defective, but the social aspects were worse: Robin Hood Gardens became a hotbed of crime. The Smithsons were exposed as both arrogant and fallible.

I'm not qualified to conclude what would be best here, but I want to just note the way in which the architects' arguments tend not to give primacy to the question of what it's like to live there. There seems to have been thirty-five years of accumulated misery for a lot of people, but that's not necessarily part of the equation. The terms of the debate about Robin Hood Gardens, for the professionals, risk putting housing as artwork (or perhaps prescribed lifestyle as artwork) right in your face, non-negotiable. Which is interesting because the lifestyle prescription was problematic precisely because so little of it was negotiable.

Here's a flavour of the recognition for the building (from):

As a crucial part of the very small built oeuvre of Alison and Peter Smithson, it is hardly impossible (sic) to overestimate its value, esp. with regard to the international debate on modern architecture in those years.

We're invited to help save this building because of its iconic aesthetic status, according to standards largely independent of the quality of everyday low-income life. Maybe there could be an argument for such detachment, but it gets clouded by the economics of social policy. I guess the folk at CABE work all the time where these tensions are crackling.

And the trouble is that as soon as you see Peter Smithson mouthing about it as 'an exemplar of a new mode of urban organisation' (in a spooky clip reminiscent of Peter Cook) you know you're up against that fundamentally stupid human habit of telling other people how they should live and using some system to try it out on them. (Stupid in the sense of repeating an approach that has failed in the past). Modern architecture was fatally corroded by insistent rhetoric (still echoing) about brutalism, which sought to deny variety.

One of my lasting early memories was of going round some east end estates with my dad, delivering christmas parcels for Stepney Old People's Welfare Trust: I didn't know it at the time but I glimpsed a moment in the exhaustion of working class culture. The ghostly poverty that brushed against me was very modern in its disconnectedness, which I suppose is why we were there, being hesitantly philanthropic. At a relatively tender age I knew about not imposing, about what I now call 'allowing people', but I didn't realise the architecture was the supreme imposition, the supreme way of not allowing. What I think I did understand vaguely was to do with people's right to be different within their commonality. And the way we built in those days was unmistakably trying to deny that right.

Neighbourhoods in an ageing society

The UK government describes its National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society, published today, as 'the first of its kind in the world,' which if true is slightly depressing but these things always take longer than you expect. Anyway, this is the sort of thing this government does well.

What I like about the approach is that this is not just about building to age-friendly designs - desirable and long-overdue as that is - and supporting that with  repair and adaptation ('handyman') schemes. It also seems to be driving deliberately at the idea of lifetime neighbourhoods and 'age-friendly cities' (which is one of the ways in which the new eco-towns are being packaged).

The Government is clear that urgent action is required now to better design communities and support older people. The Strategy is key to better meeting older peoples' aspirations to remain independent in later life.

Am I being naive and over-optimistic to think that lasting initiatives promoting neighbourliness could be built on this platform? I really think it can happen.

Press release.

Street of data

Here's an enticing, nicely-paced extended sketch on uses of technology in the high street, by Dan Hill over on City of Sound, arguing that

the patterns of data in the streets, the systems that enable and carry them, the quality of those connections, their various levels of openness or privacy, will all affect the way the street feels rather more than street furniture or road signs.

I quite like the vignettes he didn't develop, like ‘a writer denotes the ghostly presence of a 12th century market using psychogeographical markup language’ ...

This piece got me leafing back through stuff by Stephen Graham and William Mitchell, and other work that hasn't really aged but is nicely crystallised by Hill's crisp scene-setting. Enjoy.

Places to Go? conference

The latest Living Streets newsletter tells us that to get back to child-friendly public spaces we need 'a range of concrete measures.'

We can be sure that the real and the metaphorical will be clearly distinguished at the conference Living Streets are running with Play England, Sustrans and the National Children's Bureau:

The Places to Go? conference will explore the opportunities represented by The Children’s Plan and address some of its challenges. It will present policy and practice for professionals in planning, landscaping, play, school travel, public health, traffic and transport. It will explore links between the twin imperatives of creating a public realm that is enjoyable, healthy and accessible to children; and environmentally sustainable.

The conference takes place in London, 20 May 2008. Flier.

Memories of childhood and street parties

With the Children's Society's project on 'cherished early memories' we're sure to hear plenty about how the childhoods of many older people were happier and their neighbourhoods blessed with a more 'enfolding community.'

I don't dispute the validity of many such accounts, any more than I'd dispute the reported unhappiness of much contemporary childhood. But in trying to write about intergenerational aspects of contemporary street parties, in work I'm doing with Streets Alive, I'm struck by the feeling that childhood happiness was so often constructed in a way which no longer applies.

Some of the photographic evidence (eg) from the mid-century street parties (VE day, the coronation, the jubilee etc) suggests insights into the differences in older people’s perceptions of community and public occasions.

Typical images (eg) show children sat at a row of tables along a street or in a playground. Bunting and flags distinguish the occasion. Adults, mostly if not exclusively women, stand round, usually at the children’s backs, policing the territory. The menfolk, we’re sometimes reminded in reminiscences, had performed their roles in securing the bunting, sorting the wiring for loudspeakers, and setting up the tables, and were most likely down the pub by tea-time.

Scanning these images, it’s often difficult to discern many smiles on the children’s faces. This adds to the niggling impression that they have been corralled into this arena, been told that they will enjoy themselves, are prohibited from escaping or improvising their own entertainment, and afterwards, will be told that they enjoyed themselves.

And surely, for many, that’s how the world was. There were hierarchies of authority which knew what was best for you (not just government, council, church, teachers, extended family, parents etc, but other institutions such as the BBC and the police as well) and it was culturally eccentric to question them. The world had an order to it and street parties, like so much else, conformed to that order, that sense of solidity.

What we have here are some of 'the solids' whose turn has come, according to Zygmunt Bauman, 'to be thrown into the melting pot and which are in the process of being melted at the present time, the time of fluid modernity.' These are

'the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions - the patterns of communication and co-ordination between individually conducted life policies on the one hand and political actions of human collectivities on the other.' (Liquid modernity p6)

If studying street parties and childhood memories (and responses to climate change, come to that) show us nothing else, they should help us understand how individual action in relation to collective initiative is changing at local level.

Commuting and local acquaintances

The other day I posted a comment over on Front Porch Forum in a discussion about the effect of commuting on local social networks. It was sparked by a post by Facebook's Cameron Marlow, picking up some Putnam material which noted that:

The car and the commute... are demonstrably bad for community life.

I was just adding a point that, if people have to travel for economic reasons, some forms of commuting are not totally detrimental to local social relations.

That same day I was at a meeting in London, after which I met up with my brother and we took the tube for a few stops. When we got out he said, wow, talking on the train, I don't usually do that, that doesn't happen on the trains I use.

Later that evening I took the overground train to my home in the sticks, and as I left the station chanced to meet an acquaintance I've got to know over the years from our local gym. He lives about half a mile from me, so I'd certainly not classify him as a neighbour. We walked up the hill together chatting. 'Tell you who I haven't seen for a while' says he - 'Irene.' (Another long-time fellow gym-user). Nor I, says I. Hope she's ok. I know whereabouts she lives, but not where exactly. We may have just missed her. We could ask the staff at the gym.

Which sort-of illustrates not just the way local connections can get reinforced in the commuting context, but also the limits of this kind of relationship. Maybe it's not my role to check on Irene, although she's getting on a bit and always on her own. But the missing component is the communication channel which would legitimate such a role - the local online network of course.

Hans Monderman, 1945-2008

The death has been announced of Hans Monderman, pioneer of shared space. Have we learned enough to cope without his wisdom?

From the Times obituary:

Hans Monderman pioneered the concept of the 'naked street' by removing all the things that were supposed to make it safe for the pedestrian - traffic lights, railings, kerbs and road markings. He thereby created a completely open and even surface on which motorists and pedestrians “negotiated” with each other by eye contact.

Comment from Ben Hamilton-Baillie on wikipedia:

What is so remarkable about the man is that he has achieved such a transformation in thinking from the basis of a traffic engineer (not a profession famed for its profound thinking and original analysis). Through remarkable persistence, patience and professional commitment he has managed to put in place well over 100 'shared space' schemes, transforming the urban and rural landscape of his native Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe. I have never met a man so generous with his time, so modest and unassuming about his achievements, and so humane in his application of technology to the benefit of everyday human society.

Previously:

Cross with caution

Psychological traffic calming

Formal and informal in public space

The revenge of the public realm.

Eat local stuff and meet people

The beeb covers an experiment with eating locally-produced food in Scotland, including a week's worth of the Fife Diet.

The most difficult thing has been preparation time when cooking from raw ingredients. The most rewarding has been meeting people, and discovering what's available from your region.

One implication that I particularly like, when this becomes more commonplace, is that we'll all recover a stronger sense of the changing seasons. For people whose only experience of the outdoors is the few metres between front door and car, and whose diet comes out of supermarket bags, that could be a shock worth watching.

Sense of place: designing-in neighbourliness?

With all this housebuilding going on and planned, questions are raised more often about the quality of residential design and layout. Even getting that right isn't going to guarantee the promotion of neighbourly relations, but you'd have thought it was an important start.

CABE is on the case, and has just published research into the views of residents of new homes completed within the last three years. The study blends two surveys, one involving 643 residents living in 33 new developments; the other covering 704 residents at six case study developments.

A key point is that being highly satisfied with the home itself does not necessarily imply a high degree of satisfaction with the wider development, or vice versa. People may express satisfaction with their new home (and often are reluctant to acknowledge problems with it), but very significant numbers of respondents expressed negative views about their neighbourhoods.

For example, although 82% of residents thought that their development was attractive and 69%found it had a pleasant road layout:

• 40% thought that there was not enough public open space in the development
• 48% thought there was not enough play space
• 34% thought the layout of their development was unsafe for children to walk, cycle or play in the streets, and
• 45% say that they live in the kind of neighbourhood where people mostly go their own way rather than doing things together and trying to help each other.

Well, the sense of belonging on new estates is unpredictable. The received wisdom is that you usually get an initial high level of interaction because people move in at around the same time, have similar issues, and may be at a similar stage in the life-cycle (especially parents of young children). Car-based lifestyles make a massive difference of course; and after a few years anyway this sense of community often dissipates or settles back down.

But in a recent conversation at a fast-expanding housing association I was told that lack of social integration on several new developments was giving rise to a lot of problems.  I suspect social landlords are generally well aware that it won't do to lay all the blame on the designers or the developers.

Meanwhile, CABE says:

This is not about a failure of national government policy: there is a perfectly good policy framework in place, which puts a strong emphasis on the quality of residential design and layout. It is housebuilders and planners who need to take more responsibility for creating a sense of place within new housing developments.

But how? I think there is some confusion about expectations of neighbouring. First, a general disinterest among people looking for housing (and I have only contempt for the stream of television programmes encouraging people to buy, make profit and move on without a moment's reflection on the social context of the home). Cultural expectations of local social interaction tend to be low: for the prospective resident they're a matter of chance not choice. Neighbourly relations are an afterthought.

And secondly, perhaps there is sometimes a naive assumption among developers and planners that people are motivated to be neighbourly, as if it just needs an appropriately-designed environment and we all live happily ever after. There's a whole stack of sociological issues waiting to tease us for this approach.

I've always said that since it seems possible to design-out neighbourliness, it ought to be possible to design it in. But that is certainly simplistic. Perhaps we need a study of evident neighbourliness in a poorly-designed environment, and of low levels of interaction in a development described as well-designed, in order to understand a bit more.

Lifetime neighbourhoods

Many neighbourhoods fail their residents because important opportunities for development and regeneration go ahead with little consideration of age in their planning. The International Longevity Centre has published a paper arguing the case for lifetime neighbourhoods which 'involve the creation of multi-generational space where the needs of all ages are catered for with a considered, negotiated balance.'

Lifetime neighbourhoods should also constitute a preventative investment in good health for future generations... They provide both a built environment and an attitudinal environment in which people of all ages feel both comfortable and informed when taking part.

Towards lifetime neighbourhoods: designing sustainable communities for all.

Regeneration damages community. Discuss.

A community activist and local shop-owner, who is also chair of the local Neighbourhood Action Group in Sefton, Liverpool, is challenging a compulsory purchase order that is part of a regeneration scheme.

In a witness statement before the court, Mr Powell says the Klondyke community was once a friendly and viable one, with many generations of family living together in a close-knit neighbourhood.

He says it was a popular neighbourhood which was in demand for people looking for homes.

However, since the start of regeneration in 2004 and resulting compulsory acquisition of properties, he says the area has suffered from increasing anti-social behaviour, including vandalism and joyriding, and he says the trade in his shops has begun to decline. He says he has had to reduce staff as a result, costing jobs to the local area.'

Source: Planning resource.

Neighbourhood branding

What's the significance of an area's 'image' when it comes to regeneration? We don't hear so much about labelling these days, but with the enormous power and influence of local broadcast media, the stench of stigma can be hard to rinse off.

A recent European project called IMAGE has just reported on the testing, use and evaluation of an 'integrated regeneration process,' including tools for branding neighbourhoods. It's argued that 'successful neighbourhoods are usually those with a definite identity,' so it makes sense to raise the notion of identity up the regeneration agenda - but from local people's perspective, not necessarily that of a developer, landlord or local authority.

The report begins with a short essay on the history of high-rise housing in Europe which is worth knowing about. The project concentrated on five neighbourhoods:

• Europark in Antwerp (Belgium)
• Barton Hill in Bristol (UK)
• Poptahof in Delft (the Netherlands)
• Ballymun in Dublin (Ireland)
• Schwamendingen in Zurich (Switzerland).

'All the partner neighbourhoods are characterised by multiple deprivation, often combined with cultural diversity. Of the physical factors, the anonymous open spaces and isolation from the rest of the city (perceived or actual) are mentioned as the most important key issues.'

In exploring these characteristics, the IMAGE project used this two-by-two typology of neighbourhood:

1. A good neighbourhood is a place of trust. People communicate well with each other. The atmosphere is relaxed. New people integrate naturally into the neighbourhood.
2. In a place of hope the problems are not that big. Residents are motivated to work together to improve the neighbourhood.
3. In a place of loss residents are frustrated by the problems. If they had the chance, they would move to another neighbourhood. Groups of residents are in conflict and are looking out for their own interests (such as young people versus old or ethnic minorities that do not integrate into the wider community).
4. In a place of crisis the problems are so big that everybody is only interested in his or her own position. People feel they need to defend themselves against the outside world.

Toolkits were developed for the overall regeneration process, branding, and self-evaluation (yes, another self-evaluation toolkit). The second of these stands out as easily the most significant to me.

'We can describe the identity of a neighbourhood through its key values, an interrelated framework of norms and beliefs relating to the specific area and the community. Well defined key values can inspire the direction the regeneration process takes over a long period. They can answer the questions: what will we have when it is finished and who is it for?'

One way of thinking about its significance is to reflect on the number of occasions when there has been a bit of community development or community activity take place in a neighbourhood, but not enough to force meaningful change: wouldn't articulated consensus around the identity of the neighbourhood have made a difference? I can certainly think of examples, and I can see the value of bringing 'key values' to the surface. Here (to coin a phrase) are the results from Rotterdam (not part of the IMAGE project):

The report says the term neighbourhood branding is used to mean “the search for the character of an area, its identity and its community.”

And this image seems to be the brand statement for Poptahof: 

Everyone's welcome

From a cracking new resource on migration just launched by our excellent National Archives.

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

It may be that the story about the delinquent Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker could be trumped in England. According to this BBC report yesterday, children in this country have been arrested (unh, arrested?) for:

• drawing hopscotch on a pavement
• taking a slice of cucumber from a sandwich and throwing it at another child, and
• damaging a tree while building a den.

Not perhaps in the same league, but we've also had the heinous disgrace of flip-flopped feet on seats.

Meanwhile, the risk aversion debate has received significant renewed momentum from publicity following Tim Gill's No fear, published recently. (Various links currently on the Gulbenkian home page). And some energy is being coordinated in the US with Playborhood.

Questioning risk aversion was a rumbling cross-departmental sub-theme in Whitehall in the early years of the Labour administration at the end of the nineties, but it didn't stick. Maybe the urge to control took over, and anyway the culture is highly resilient, resisting some passionate challenging, eg What are we scared of? And yes I do accept the importance of recognising, as the Health and Safety Executive put it, that the term is shorthand for 'excessive risk aversion.'

It seems as if there are two trends in tension here, with two related themes - risk and respect - but I'm not clear how they are related. On the one hand we have attempts to program most risk out of children's lives (which is profoundly disempowering, and means that many seem to grow up expecting and accepting disempowerment as what society does to them). But measured exploration of risk can be stimulating and creates bonds: games and sport, still occasionally practised in some quarters (although very much subject to risk averse policies) offer semi-formal arenas in which such exploration can be played out.

And on the other hand, we have created neighbourhood contexts in which learning the give-and-take and cheek-by-jowl rubbing-along of socialising, getting along with people you might not necessarily choose as friends, is structurally minimised. And we have overseen a degree of family disintegration so that many young people can avoid having more than the most minimal contact with older people, and the separated generations are often bewildered by each other. Result, a crisis of respect. On its own, transforming the design of neighbourhoods won't cure this combination, it seems to be a deep cultural problem.

I was having a conversation the other day with a teacher who was telling me how depressing it is to have to try and deal with young people when they relentlessly swear and spit (in the classroom or corridor, this is, when in conversation with a teacher). It's unambiguously disrespectful behaviour, which must have some basis in the sense of not being cared about or valued.

How does that square with a society which appears obsessed with protecting its children from risk? I think it's partly because systematised risk aversion is in conflict with notions of genuine caring, it reflects self-interested detachment that says - children are too much trouble to be bothered about, we must constrain what they do. Bollocks.

The teacher and I reflected on the fact that we both know plenty of remarkable young people - far more mature and socially-supportive than most of us were in my day, inspiring young people who are a privilege to be with. And we were left wondering whether there is some kind of divide developing, between those who have had the chance to explore their own potential and responsible social relations, and those who haven't. I suspect I'll be revisiting this theme.

Consulting older people

On the question of consultation with older people, to paraphrase Gandhi, I think it would be a good idea. I've just found out about some interesting work that Urban Buzz funded in the London Borough of Lewisham as part of the Thames gateway development, which resulted in the publication of a toolkit and guidelines for consultation with older people, prepared by The Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths.

It's a thorough and welcome document and appears to try and cover everything about the process they went through, which included field trips and mental maps of the neighbourhoods. It's important because the sense that many older people remain inexcusably excluded from consultative processes is widespread. But some of the tone leaves me a wee bit bothered. Like this:

'It is important that you present your project in a way that makes it relevant to them.'

Radical stuff eh? There's more.

'Incorporate older people’s knowledge in the planning process, by consulting them if an area is going to be changed. Make use of their old photos, listen to them talk about the history about the spaces.'

'Free lunches and refreshments should be provided to offer something for their time and effort.'

So long as the points get made, what am I bothered about? Well, I'm uncomfortable thinking that I live in a society where it's really necessary to make such points. It implies that there are people charged with 'consultation' for whom such things are not fundamentally obvious. But maybe the authors are right, maybe it does have to be pointed out. Many people are emerging from an embedded non-consultative authoritative culture and this is strange stuff for them. <Shudder>

If I were being picky, and it's not unheard-of, I'd have added a section suggesting that people doing consultation didn't feel the need constantly to refer to one another as Dr, Professor, 'professional' or 'expert.' The entire document is suffused with a sense of the implied superior status of such people, and of councillors, over older residents. It reinforces my desire to keep pushing for a neighbourhood-mapping process designed by older people themselves.

Online game about being a refugee

UNHCR has just launched the English language version of an online game created to increase students' awareness and knowledge about refugee situations, by putting them in the position of a refugee.

In Against all odds, the player is interrogated, hears the sound of guards' footsteps approaching, and senses the urgency in finding safety while racing against the clock.

Press release. Via Welcome to Your Library digest.

Out in the open

Many neighbourhoods in England experience occasional or persistent tensions due to the lack of adequate and appropriate sites for Romany gypsies and Irish travellers.

This year's Building and Social Housing Foundation consultation report is on the theme of providing accommodation, promoting understanding and recognising the rights of gypsies and travellers. In 2006, it says here, 21 per cent of gypsies and travellers had no legal place to park their caravan. (Although we're also told that estimates of the numbers of gypsies and travellers in Britain vary widely, with nothing like a definitive answer; so take that as 21% of roughly 100%).

Out in the open - full text download and summary available .

Young people and social networks

Recent JRF report shows both benefits and disbenefits in local social networks.

Place identity can be a source of strength, but it also appeals to the parochial.

Local connections can give some young people strong advantages in the labour market, with family and friends providing valuable support; while wider social and spatial horizons can expand the range of opportunities young people consider and improve their prospects. In more peripheral areas their choices may remain constrained because of limited employment opportunities.

The authors conclude that:

• policy needs to recognise that local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour;
• it is important that young people are aware of and can access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood.

'We're most gregarious'

Some time ago I expressed a concern about the tendency to theorise and problematise social capital away from local everyday life. It's important to take account of shallow conversations and brief interactions that take place in the public realm. And now I've just been reading about some research into ephemeral relationships on the trams of Antwerp, carried out by Ruth Soenen.

Over eight months Soenen observed the kinds of brief relationships that spring up and disappear in this kind of public context - she notes for example how people start talking if they have to help one another avoid falling when there's a sudden stop, or if they see something unusual through the window. She records the catalytic effect of a colourful and talkative person stepping on board.

She tries to link this to notions of 'community', arguing that in-depth relationships 'don't have a priviliged status' in this respect:

'Duration doesn’t seem to be the essential marker for the experience of community... Ephemeral relationships can be a social base for the experience of community.'

Soenen goes on to argue that there are limitations in the measurement of social capital when we ignore the potential of ephemeral relationships. Her book about this study is published in Dutch only.

Thanks Jan. My title, showing my age, is from Flanders and Swan.

Previously: Segregation in public space (with reference to buses in Jerusalem).

Social mobility

The Department for Work and Pensions has just published an extensive literature review carried out by the Policy Research Institute on Factors influencing social mobility.

Alright calm down, form an orderly queue. Emerging from the detail comes the conclusion that

Trends in social mobility are remarkably resistant to policy interventions. Those in higher social classes appear to have been able to take greater advantage of the opportunities created by policy interventions and more able to use a variety of additional social advantages to maintain their relative position.

The authors go on to point to the complex effects of a range of policy measures which require more prior impact assessment. Perhaps the most useful contribution the research makes is to clarify the need for a new hierarchy of social mobility, 'based upon both labour market participation and the quality and security of that participation.'

Oh, and I don't want to seem too picky but I do wish these things were done properly... Scanning through, I found myself wondering how come 'Murphy 2006' was cited so frequently. Must be special I thought, I should know about this. So it's a shame it doesn't get mentioned in the bibliography. Scanning the bibliography briefly revealed several other mistakes, so I decided it was time to look away. Hopefully they'll take advantage of online publishing to release a corrected version, because it looks like a valuable reference source.

Playing out

Adults were three times more likely to play out when they were young, than children are today. New figures released by Play England haven't made a big noise (wrong time of year, and I fear the world is tiring slightly of this thread), but they deserve reflection:

71 per cent of adults played outside in the street or area close to their homes every day when they were children, compared to only 21 per cent of children today.

It reminds me of a favourite quotation from She was aye workin, which documents women's experiences in early 20th-century tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh:

You were never in anyway. When you say you lived in a room-and-kitchen, your mum and dad lived in a room-and-kitchen, but you played out in the street, summer and winter, you didn't come in till bedtime.

And my own memories, if I may, are of cricket and football in the street and late kickabouts at the rec' until we couldn't see the ball any more or hunger drove us home. Before that it was 'chicken steps,' 'pom-pom one-two-three' and other street games. Lauren Lacey's lit review for NCB notes:

There has been a decrease over the past thirty years in children’s access to the streets and outdoor areas near their homes. Increasingly their independent mobility is restricted by traffic and fear, which in turn causes them to spend much of their time indoors or at organised activities. The combination of an increase in vehicles on the roads, increased parental anxiety, and restrictions on children’s mobility in the form of child curfews and anti-social behaviour orders has reduced children’s outdoor play opportunities.

The qualitative research reported included focus groups with young people aged between eight and 18. From which comes this scary piece of news:

Ten of the participants said that they never played outside on the streets and areas near their home.

That's ten out of 64 participants. And in the light of my recent note about the importance of unstructured time, this point is noteworthy:

In all the groups, children and young people said that having the freedom to choose what to do, and where to spend time, particularly in contrast to time spent in school, was very important. Even the youngest children talked about having this freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision.

The quantitative research points to a complex range of interconnected factors such as intolerant adults, traffic, lack of facilities etc. Two things occur to me. First, I see no mention of the increasingly stifling competitive educational context in which many children are expected to complete ridiculous amounts of homework in order to try to fulfil their parents' ambitions for them, or die, emotionally, in the attempt. That's a social problem if ever I saw one.

Secondly, it's reassuring to note that in drawing attention to the combined effects of the decline in child-friendly public space, the increase in traffic, and the demonisation of children and young people, Play England don't seem to have slipped into the easy option of blaming screen-based entertainment directly. My suspicion is that for many children, screen-based entertainment is the non-preferred option often chosen for them by their parents, at least initially.

There's much more material here.

Defiance

I was being shown round a struggling estate in the midlands recently, with depressing amounts of the housing boarded-up, and came across these two examples of defiance.

In a bungalow designed for older people, someone struggles to keep up standards, with net curtains and a plant-pot outside. How does it feel to have heavy steel shutters right next door and a sign saying 'Danger - Live wires'?

Here's another, perhaps more masculine, approach: the fence, the gate (even the postman is excluded), the surveillance camera, the alarm system. Next door is boarded-up. There's a hanging basket but it seems to be empty. It all says, I live here and you're not gonna drag me down with you.

Rural rides

While the Carnegie Commission report on Rural Community Development, just published,
turns up the volume for local rural interests in relation to community assets, governance and empowerment, I've been pottering round parts of rural and coastal Dorset this past week. I took particular delight in a few bus rides, fascinated at the frequency of cheerful semi-routine encounters between people who knew one another, whether or not they were neighbours. Rural isolation leaves many people dependent on, and spending a lot of time on, this transport.

I also picked up some interesting insights into rural community politics - same as everywhere, ie those who have wealth and power will do all they can to keep it to themselves, including co-option of as much of the media as possible and ceaselessly shoring-up the structures that defend what they have - what the law exerts itself to protect.

That may or may not help explain comic oddities like this - a call by the traders of Lyme Regis for CCTV on their streets. I've visited many localities around the UK and beyond, some of them quite difficult places to inhabit or even to visit, and IMHO Lyme Regis is one of the very last places that needs CCTV. And (though it's not the same thing) I suggest that CCTV is one of the last things the town needs - after a modest list which glaringly includes more opportunities for young people, and some concerted economic development that should emerge from the latest community plan.

Meanwhile, I love the quirky anomalies you pick up sometimes in rural craft shops - like this bizarre figure which would possibly have stopped me in my tracks in London or in an airport gift store, let alone a quiet rural settlement.

Walking to school

Next week is Walk to School Week. It still spooks me a bit to think things are so bad that such a campaign is necessary, but as the site tells us,

Walking to school is an adventure for children and a great way to develop basic life skills.

And I learned something new as I read... It says here that 'contrary to popular belief, pedestrians generally experience the lowest levels of exposure of all road users.'

Demographic mix matters more than income or tenure mix

Recent research on population change at neighbourhood level suggests that the most important factor driving turnover is the demographic mix of an area, particularly the proportion of the population who are young adults or very young children.

Using neighbourhood level data covering England and Scotland from the 2001 census, the researchers show a tendency for young adults (aged 19-29) to move into deprived areas on balance and for other age groups to move away, especially households containing 30- to 44-year-olds and those under the age of 18.

Among other things, this suggests that deprived areas are home to more than their share of people making the transition from living with parents to living on their own.

They suggest that policies designed to achieve stable or ‘sustainable’ communities may need to pay greater attention to promoting demographic mix as much as income or tenure mix.

Indeed, policies to promote income or tenure mix could potentially undermine stability if they target single people and couples, perhaps through the development of starter homes.

The analysis also shows that:

• deprived areas do not have a general problem of instability; turnover levels are only slightly above average
• deprived areas do not generally see significant net out-migration of less deprived individuals; there are flows in both directions and these are nearly in balance
• an average of around 50% of migrants move to/from non-deprived areas each year.

The report, Population turnover and area deprivation by Nick Bailey and Mark Livingston, was published last month JRF and Policy Press.

Sustainable travel towns conference

In all likelihood, sustainable travel means sustainable neighbourhoods. The third annual sustainable travel towns conference takes place in Worcester, 23 and 24 May 2007. The Sustainable Travel Towns are Darlington, Peterborough and Worcester, part of a five-year programme part-funded by the Department for Transport.

Details. The programme warns, be prepared to cycle, walk or paddle.

Manual for Streets published

Highways engineers and planners already know that the Manual for streets was published the other day. But a key feature of the cultural change that it implies is that street design is pertinent to a wider range of people than just technical experts, it's also significant for community activists and neighbourhood managers. MfS seeks to promote 'greater collaboration between all those involved in the design, approval and adoption processes.'

During the draft stages I said that I thought it would be a historic document. Scanning the final version, I get the sense that some of the ambitious attempts to make it 'community-centred' may have been diluted (including community involvement, curiously, but this may be because there's perceived to be too much woolly and insubstantial rhetoric emanating in government documents on the topic already); but they're not lost. Just take the first few identified changes in approach that distinguish it from the guidance which it replaces:

• applying a user hierarchy to the design process with pedestrians at the top;
• emphasising a collaborative approach to the delivery of streets;
• recognising the importance of the community function of streets as spaces for social interaction;
• promoting an inclusive environment that recognises the needs of people of all ages and abilities...

I welcome the numerous references to the public realm, and the insistence that residential streets should be places where people can move about. MfS applies in England and Wales. The prelims tell us that it 'does not set out any new policy or legal requirements': but I think it will come to be seen as a key marker of cultural change which begins the end of car-domination of neighbourhoods.

Living Streets response is here.

CABE response.

The bus stops here

Government has confirmed grants to over 3,000 primary schools in England as part of the 'walking bus' scheme. The idea is to provide support to schools that have made a commitment to reducing car use and increasing walking for journeys to school.

Living Streets note on the initiative.

DfT guidance for schools.

Collective behaviour and climate change: why would anybody bother?

Twice recently at events, I've raised the possibility that responses to climate change represent a potential sea-change in collectively-oriented behaviour. More and more people, I suspect, are taking everyday life and lifestyle decisions less on the totally individualistic basis of our Thatcherite inheritance, and more in recognition that there are others around us and to follow, who might be affected by those decisions.

And now I'm just catching up with a recent study by CDX and the Centre for Sustainable Energy
on Mobilising individual behavioural change through community initiatives. The study investigated 'what kinds of local and community initiatives are most effective at influencing changes in behaviour and at what levels, and whether any lessons learned from these are transferable to the issue of climate change.'

The report provokes thinking about important issues. The key message seems to be that what is lacking is 'a realistic sense of agency,' and this is the problem to be solved. Part of the argument is that people are not motivated to take action (jointly or individually) on an issue which is not local, where their action has no immediate impact (or indeed any significant impact), and where the scale of any action taken is dwarfed by the impact of the inaction of others.

And yet, and yet. We know there is evidence of changes of attitude, and local councils have had relatively little difficulty imposing regimes of recycling which have transfomed attitudes. The media too have played a hugely significant role in the subtle shifting of attitudes.

I suspect that because this is an (apparently hurried) report to government, the assessment remains implacably hard-nosed (indeed, in an odd sentence towards the foot of p7 the authors suggest that, in the absence of evidence that community-based environmental initiatives influence behaviour, the challenge for policy-makers and funders is to justify supporting them - the report thereby seems to defy its own existence).

There have been numerous local projects over the years that have engaged people in reducing their negative impact on the environment and changed people's attitudes to the ways in which it is managed.

Surely it's time for better evaluation, not time to abandon evaluation and pass the buck back to policy-makers? I think this is an issue where the notion that there is no such thing as altruism has become a blinding presumption, to the extent that we do not recognise the possibility that people will change their behaviour for any reason other than immediate personal interest.

But some people will do, have done so, are doing so, and, crucially, are now living in a social context which encourages them more than it did in the past to engage with others and persuade others to do so. Perhaps the notion of a renaissance of collective behaviour is not so far-fetched.

Where my naive optimism springs from I'm afraid I cannot say, since earlier this evening I felt physically sick at the televised image from our House of Commons, where elected members had committed this act of inexplicable collective folly. Perhaps it's the lasting influence of Dickens and his famous declaration of political creed:

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable.