Neighbourhoods

On the fear of interfering

Sunday morning, here’s a tap at the door and one of my neighbours says

‘I hope you don’t think I’m being terribly nosy, but, is everything OK?’

The previous evening we’d had a couple of ambulances outside because the baby we’re caring for at the moment needed specialist attention urgently. I don’t have any problem with neighbours noticing that sort of thing. I’d hate to live in the sort of place where it went unnoticed, and I’m perfectly capable of politely giving no more information than is appropriate when talking about children looked after.

Comparable situations probably arise in our neighbourhoods all the time, and I can well imagine people tentatively discussing with members of their family, or maybe on the phone to a friend, should they pop round and check if everything’s ok, or not? Deciding no, then yes, then hesitantly setting out, perhaps half-hoping that their knock will not be answered… Something a bit like that happened to me a few years ago.

But I’ve known this woman for about 25 years and get on well with the whole family. We exchange at least a cheery wave in passing several times a week. A few weeks ago I borrowed a tool from her husband and had a long chat about this and that. So why would she think that I might think that she was being 'terribly nosy'? Because in our culture it seems like an interfering thing to ask, even in those circumstances. I knew she was genuinely concerned about the baby.

It shows how deeply embedded is this cultural privacy thing, this fear of interfering.

Architecture or affluence - which has had more impact on neighbour relations?

Monday’s episode of Thinking Allowed on R4 was packed with up-to-date thinking about the ancient issues of community and neighbouring.

It’s good to hear Paul Barker expressing scepticism about over-use of the C word. (So it’s not just me). And Laurie Taylor speaks to Emily Cockayne about some of the insights from her history of neighbours (which I wrote about here). Emily reminds us how central is the issue of privacy:

‘Once anybody gets a sense of privacy from their neighbours they want to hold onto it’.

And she does not miss the chance to question efforts to reproduce the kinds of neighbouring of the past:

‘We don’t need to do the things for neighbours that people in the past used to do’.

The discussion at the end of the programme points to but doesn’t quite get to grips with the comparison between architecturally-led change in neighbour relations over time, and relative affluence as a driver of such change. Paul Barker hints that he sees the economic force as the more dominant (and adds important reference to the distorting effect of childhood memories).

Just now I can’t think of any research that has tried to explore and answer this question; but I’d just want to make the point that (a) affluence and architecturally-led privacy go together, but (b) they can impact on neighbour relations in different ways.

History tends to present poverty as something collectively experienced. But increasingly when I visit neighbourhoods I feel that stark poverty is scattered almost invisibly around estates where some people are doing quite well. In a few houses you see signs that there are a couple of incomes, a couple of smart cars outside and the place is looked after. A few doors along, papered windows or broken gutters may betray a sudden deprivation or collapse. Our local practitioners know it’s there.

The neighbourly and community connections may not be in place to respond to this fractured geography of poverty.

As I write I’ve just been finalising arrangements for a public discussion on changing perceptions of neighbouring, that Emily and I are running at The Forum in Norwich on 21 June (more detail soon). And I’m also conscious that if time had allowed I would be at the University of Bath right now, sitting in on a fascinating conference about ‘The Experience of Neighbourliness in Europe, 1000-1600’.

See also: Emily Cockayne's OU article on The decline of neighbourliness.

How does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past?

Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours, Cheek by jowl, which I’ve already referred to a couple of times, is packed with little anecdotes of neighbour relations in England since the late medieval period. I’m left in awe of her achievement in accumulating so much absorbing evidence. The pace is sometimes a bit breathless as story follows story; and the author is never in a hurry to offer a theory or generalised conclusion from what she’s shared. But the style is very readable, laced with occasional dashes of light humour.

So come on Emily, we all want to know: how does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past? In spite of her general coyness as far as conclusions are concerned, this bit sounds pretty confident:

‘Active neighbouring has declined, but latent neighbouring has remained. Most neighbours still trust each other and will help out in an emergency. Who would want to return to traditional neighbouring, if that came with the hardship and lack of privacy that fostered it? Modern neighbouring has a different character because the context is different. We rely on neighbours less; we can be passive neighbours.’

Sounds about right to me, and it pretty much fits with other conclusions such as those of Mary Godfrey and her colleagues. My take on it would be something like this:

One form of neighbouring that has almost certainly declined is what we might call ‘negative neighbouring’ – a moral governing culture typically referred to now under the label ‘curtain-twitching,’ which had evolved to establish and reinforce norms, and those norms extended into gender, racial and other stereotypes.

Of course there are plenty of contemporary anecdotes about this form of neighbouring but I don’t think anyone is putting forward the argument that it is more prevalent and influential today than it was 60 years ago.

If we think of some forms of neighbourliness in more neutral terms – just knowing and recognising people whose help could be mobilised in time of need – it’s probably fair to say that the numbers of local people we know in this way have decreased. But that may not be at all critical if, as for most of us, the number of people we know whose help we can summon readily has not decreased. Even if some or many of our contacts are not going to be physically within reach in a home-based emergency, their power to engage appropriate neighbourly support may still be strong.

Finally, what about what I have called ‘supportive’ neighbouring, the sort of behaviour between co-residents in which people go just a fraction out of their way to be supportive and imply readiness to help in time of need, without transgressing the norms of privacy? I really have my doubts that this has declined to any great extent if at all.

Where Emily and I probably differ though is in the weight given to the welfare state as having ‘crowded out’ people’s readiness to offer support. It’s obvious that to some extent, formal services have taken over occasions such as childbirth when in the past neighbours were more or less forced to depend on each other. We’d expect that the nature of neighbouring would change as a consequence; but it wouldn’t necessarily have declined significantly.

My sense is that if neighbourliness really did decline over the past generation, then of all the contributory factors, the crowding out by the welfare state was not one of the most important. The availability of organised social care for those who needed it not only made life more liveable for millions, it probably had far less of an impact on positive neighbouring than did the availability and use of cars; television; new forms of housing; comparative wealth; population diversity; and a cohort of women in the labour market.

And so, as I wrote here:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

I do believe that when residents connect through neighbourhood online networks, where those are collectively-oriented, the potential to resolve this challenge is significant.

Against that, as I’ve said before, investing in formal initiatives in order to generate local social connections may be of limited value, being back-to-front. Emily's pretty emphatic on this:

‘Good Neighbour societies are founded on a notion that organisation will bring about a return to traditional neighbourliness. It will not.’

So with all this in mind, I’m proposing a meeting about the past, present and future of neighbouring, in London in about a month’s time – just before the jubilee street party brouhaha swamps us all with romantic representations of community and soppy insistence on formal mechanisms as the key to revisiting a past golden age of neighbouring… More on that very soon.

The messages of front doors

I’ve been out helping to deliver leaflets this weekend, as the local elections are coming up, and been really surprised at the proportion of homes near me that send stern messages to anyone approaching.

Many are open from the pavement and I could wheel the baby buggy up to the door, but others stack up the barriers and disincentives.

I reckon around 50 per cent of front doors near me carry a message about not wanting cold callers, pizza leaflets or free newspapers, or insisting on seeing verifiable identification if I were to be so impertinent as to knock or ring.

At one house the letter box was deliberately secured shut, for fear of bombs, presumably; so anything, including post (and bombs, conceivably) had to be left in a box at the doorstep.

Of course there are also those that courteously, but not quite invitingly, advise you that you are subject to 24 hour CCTV recording. Most memorably, one with a silent dog behind the letter-flap who snapped the leaflet from my grasp and narrowly left me my fingers.

And all the time one is conscious that while some people regard political campaign material as a form of dirty litter, others will complain if they have not received theirs.

It’s dispiriting to face the messages of many fortress mentalities, but maybe I should do this more often, to improve my reading of neighbourhoods.

Reality checks

A few days ago I went back to listen to a BBC Woman’s Hour programme from before Christmas which had an article about neighbourliness. It included a conversation with Helen Hibberd, Co-ordinator of Chorlton Good Neighbours (which I’ve mentioned recently) and Liz Richardson, from Manchester University, who I think I can get away with calling the doyenne of community action research.  

One of the points that Liz was making was that people seem to want to be more friendly with their neighbours but feel shy and say there are things that inhibit them from ‘making the first move’ – echoing Lilian Linders’ research finding about ‘the request scruple’: the problem is on the demand side, not the supply side.

As it happens I bumped into Liz at a meeting in London on Friday, and she told me that when she got home from the recording studio on the day the programme was made, she found there was a serious brawl going on in the street outside her house. For all the soullessness of contemporary neighbouring in some contexts, to which she had referred in her broadcast comments, here was a violent and bloody fight going on in the street.

But, Liz assured me, the neighbours rallied round, saw off the attackers and cared for the wounded victim.

Which reminded me of my own reality check, when talking about neighbourliness to camera a few years ago and finding that local kids were throwing stones at us.

It would be better not to have such incidents, but at least they help stop some of us getting soppy about ‘community’ and neighbourly relations.

 

Who’s next door?

I’ve been passed a press release from FindaProperty.com announcing research which finds that 26 per cent of people in the UK don't know the name of their next door neighbour. The Scotsman has taken up the news here.

Just to offer a little perspective, a survey for Aviva Norwich Union in 2006 offered a whopping 55 per cent for this question (and no data to back it up there either). If you believe one, you may as well believe the other, and should therefore find the latest news heartily encouraging.

As I understand it, FindaProperty.com is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Associated Newspapers, a well-known source of fictionalised news with staff who are permanently alarmed. The UK version of the news that The Scotsman picked up claims that

‘According to the stats 3.5 million people in the UK have never seen the person who lives next door.’

Well that comes out at about 5-6 per cent, so I find it difficult to get alarmed about that either. I’d like to see the wording for the question though.

 

Community Harm Statements

The Chartered Institute of Housing has published a template and toolkit to help social landlords and their residents prepare court statements about the impact of anti-social neighbours.

'The Community Harm Statement introduces a new tool designed to make it easier for social landlords to demonstrate the impact of anti-social behaviour (ASB). Developed by CIH and a range of partners, it provides a recognised template to present evidence to court in a consistent way that properly captures the impact of harm on the community. It gives a stronger voice to communities by helping ensure that the damage inflicted by ASB is properly voiced and listened to when landlords take legal action. It can also be used to support non-judicial actions, casework and partnership working.'

According to the government press release, it

'has been piloted by 11 landlords across the country, and has already proved successful in 21 court cases where it has been vital in assessing the harmful impact of anti-social behaviour.'

 

The curious phenomenon of littering by waste bins

Does it seem odd to you that some fellow-citizens are sufficiently conscientious about their recyclable waste to take it all off to the neighbourhood recycling containers; but then they just dump it on the pavement? There was an example recorded in some detail over on the Kings Cross site recently (thanks Will):

‘Once in the morning I caught one man who also had just dumped his waste in spite of an empty container, and when I showed him that the container was in fact empty, he shrug his shoulders and walked apologetically off (leaving his waste though put). On this and on other occasions I have just taken other people’s rubbish and put it inside the container. It seems a task impossible to some.’

This contrasts nicely with a similar case that I reported in chapter 4 of Respect in the neighbourhood a few years ago, thanks to a picture sent to me by my Belgian friend Jan Steyaert. It shows a standard bottle-recycling facility in Antwerp, with the ubiquitous blue plastic bag on the ground alongside. At the front of the container someone has placed a board with a message painted on it, which reads in Dutch ‘vetzak verboden te storten.’ The English translation is: ‘Don’t leave litter you slimebag.’ (Subsequently I have thought that a better translation would be ‘you fat slob’). The language chosen by our Kings Cross correspondent is quite different. His note read

‘please insert the waste into the container out of neighbourly respect.’

In the book, considering alternative communication options for the person who painted the vetzak message on the board, at the end of a short list I added:

‘In a connected, networked neighbourhood, a comment posted online might have broadened awareness of the problem and produced a collective response.’

I suspect there may be other examples beyond Kings Cross and I’d be pleased to be told about them.

So this phenomenon of almost but not quite properly disposing of litter, what’s it about? Perhaps if you’re carrying stuff in the other hand, you might not easily be able to open the container. Perhaps you dread the stench on opening; or you don’t want to risk getting dirty hands from touching the handle or lid, if you’re off somewhere posh. Maybe you're confused about the separation of different kinds of waste so you'd rather it stays hidden in a single bag. Or you can't quite bring yourself to conform completely. Or you might think it’s easier for the operatives, as I believe they are called, to pick your stuff up from the floor rather than use the technology designed for the purpose. I’m struggling to think of any convincing explanations here.

Ok let’s suppose that some people are less comfortably acquainted with the idea of a public realm and public norms of behaviour, than others are. They have a relatively low level of Public Realm Awareness (PRA) – not close to zero, like the dickhead financier I mentioned recently, but low enough to appear a bit inconsiderate at times.

They know they have to take out their waste, but they don’t know how the system works, the system of behaviour in public. There’s stuff on the ground, and alongside it, theirs looks inconspicuous, and that’s simpler, so down it goes. It becomes part of an apparent routine process. I suppose one could argue that this behaviour, as far as it goes, is consistent with the public realm, not working against it.

The inconvenience can be absorbed, if such behaviour does not become too common. This might matter more than you think, given that we currently have a government which is keen to see a reduction in general PRA, being ideologically opposed to the notion of anything being ‘public’ in the first place. By reducing the public realm as much as it can, the government very seriously risks increasing the proportion of the population with low PRA. The technical term for this set of policies is 'stupid'.

 

Keeping ourselves to ourselves

So much of contemporary neighbouring is about noisiness, but this is about nosyness.

A survey reported as part of the Digital Switchover Help Scheme has found that for 27 per cent of the 2,000 respondents from across London, ‘fear of appearing nosey’ was the reason for keeping themselves to themselves. Disparaging terms like ‘curtain twitcher,’ ‘nosy parker,’ or 'sticky beak' have damaging cultural ramifications.

Fear of appearing nosey might be seen as a consequence of the way we emphasise privacy. We are not allowed to build or extend our houses if they allow us to see each other within. My house was built before such legal insistence, and fortunately a healthy relationship with our neighbours is reinforced by being able informally to keep an eye out for each other.

In the Netherlands, a curious culture of window dressing evolved through the late twentieth century, whereby it was frowned upon to use curtains or shutters, so homeowners would restrict what was visible internally through elaborate decoration (see 1989 article by Hernan Vera).

I’m reading Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours and finding various examples of intimate details shared unintentionally in previous ages, due to ‘the thinness of pre-modern walls’ – complicated no doubt by lower expectations of privacy.

The determination to avoid accusations of nosyness obviously reduces people’s availability to respond in time of need; and as soon as a critical mass of people with the same attitude has built up, it’s likely to have an impact on the other side of the equation, readiness to ask for help. This is one of the explanations for what Lilian Linders terms the 'request scruple'. As I noted a year ago, her research shows that this reluctance is more problematic than the assumed shortage in the supply of neighbourliness.

Dilemmas of interference in neighbouring are persistent unless you choose not to occupy your neighbourhood. Here’s my own example, after which I started to wonder if my neighbour thinks I'm nosy for having advised him that his downstairs window was open overnight in the rain.

 

The golden age of neighbouring is now

Monocle 24 had a feature about urban neighbours last week. It included an interview with Lucy Musgrave talking about the public realm – so refreshing to hear someone just use that term these days, in the public realm, let alone speak about it with such refreshing assurance.

There was also a lengthy piece about the garage sale trail, a booming initiative that sees social benefits (including informal local trade as well as environmental advantages) from the systematising of local markets based around household surplus.

And there was an interview with Emily Cockayne about the history of neighbours, heralding her forthcoming book, Cheek by jowl. I’m fortunate to have a review copy on the desk beside me, and will be offering some comments here in due course. For now, a few thoughts prompted by Emily’s remarks.

She put particular emphasis on the way that relationships between neighbours had changed by midway through the twentieth century, with opportunities for less and less contact, which changed expectations. Urban neighbours in previous ages often struggled for the segregation of living space, so the history of neighbouring depends heavily on a consideration of the architectural and design constraints. My take on that is that the notion privacy had to be invented and may not be a given feature of human social relations. (Why isn't there ever an anthropologist here when I need one?)

By 1950, says Emily, if you were a good neighbour it meant you kept yourself to yourself. The point – well-made already in much of the literature but here with a wider historical perspective than, say, scholars like Barry Wellman have adopted – is that since then a shrinking proportion of our friends are now neighbours.

But where does the assumption come from that all or some or any neighbours should be friends? In early modern England, people moved around a lot more than is sometimes assumed, so I’m not too sure about the assumption that one might have known few others beyond the locality, and therefore if you had friends, they’d be neighbours. Allies, certainly, you probably needed as many as you could accumulate within hearing distance. Are we faced with historically fluid meanings of ‘friend’ I wonder? Anyway, contemporary neighbouring to me seems clearer if we accept the distinction between friendship and friendliness (a chance to declare indebtedness to Philip Abrams).

Asked by the interviewer if she favoured any particular age for neighbouring, Emily replied ‘It’s now!’ The golden age of neighbouring is now she says, because we can choose the degree of relationship we want to have. Tell that to the Daily Moan.

I’ve long been curious about the comparison of our age with the late medieval and early modern periods, and I crammed some of that fascination into my reflections about changing attitudes to ‘community’ in Picnic last year. So since I started reading Cheek by jowl I’m finding Emily’s range of sources stimulating, and her highly-readable style is a delight. More soon.

 

Neighbours for half a century

Here’s a story from the Sheffield Telegraph about a group of residents who are celebrating 50 years in common on the same street, having moved in at the time the estate was built.

It raises an interesting question about the notion that neighbourhoods should have a variety of housing to accommodate changing personal and family needs over the life cycle. Presumably the houses have been more-or-less suitable throughout the residents’ lifetimes; and the tight local network of support is likely to help them overcome some of the difficulties that in other circumstances cause people to move elsewhere.

 

Neighbouring and mental health

Being a neighbour is not necessarily straightforward: managing the relationships can be tricky and stressful. Those of us who have positive, easy-going relationships with our neighbours have much to be thankful for, the value of which is easily overlooked.

One of the problems in engaging with any neighbour at a mutually-acceptable level on the spectrum between provocatively negative and intrusive, is to assess the other’s communication impulse and readiness. Somehow you have to find out where they are on the scale between ‘gab about everything endlessly’ to stubborn dull silence about most aspects of life as it passes by; and they have to do the same for you.

At any point on this range, but especially at the extremes, your neighbour could be someone with mental health problems. And as Clare Allan suggests in a Guardian article today that I encourage you to read,

‘in the age of the "big society", professional support is being cut dramatically. Situations such as this are going to become ever more common.’

So are we ready for it, as a moderately-sized society? How good are we at connecting at the right level – not too close, not too easily drawn-in, but close enough to react fast in case of real need - with neighbours whose mental health is not what it might be? It’s hard to think of anything more important to get right, at local level; but I fear there will be many tales of avoidance, misapprehension, ignorance and recoil.

 

 

'I want to recreate that sense of community'

I’m not doing this to be mischievous, honestly. I read the following paragraph, the sort of statement that reaches me about once a week on average:

“I grew up in [N], in a neighborhood where my family knew everyone on the block and we all looked out for each other. All the kids played together, and if we did anything wrong our parents would hear about it from one of the neighbors. I wanted to recreate that sense of community.”

And for some reason, you know how it is, this is what I interpreted:

“I grew up in Placetown, in a neighbourhood where my family knew everyone and truly nasty rumours abounded and there was a lot of obvious domestic violence that no-one talked about and if you were gay you just had to suppress it, and if you were disabled you were patronised if you were lucky but doomed anyway. All the kids played together (except of course that little disabled girl, can't even remember her name) so there was no end of bullying that you had to put up with and if we did anything wrong our parents would hear about it from one of the neighbours, who made it their business to exert control because they’d missed out on promotion in the army during the war, and my god they could be vindictive and brutal. I want to recreate that sense of community, cos I’m like that.”

Yes maybe I'm being a little unfair.. But the rosetinting of community really is unhelpful, because it stifles serious policymaking about neighbourhoods. I know that many neighbourhoods in the past were much better in some respects and much worse in others. Now, can we move on?

 

Home consumption

This is the worst case of junk accumulation I have seen documented (except perhaps in Dickens's novels), although I've heard a few tales. A house in San Jose, California, is apparently disappearing under 'a 10-foot-tall tidal wave of rusty chains, oily mattress springs, filthy animal cages and garbage bags...'

Never mind the possibility of it being tidal, the house is being consumed by its junk. And apparently the stench, when something is burned within, is worthy of note.

Three points are striking about this story.

First, we are told that a neighbour trapped 23 cats and six kittens living on the property and took them to a shelter. Another neighbor then said the place is now overrun with rats, which the feral cats had at least helped keep in check. You can't win - but should neighbours be put in that no-win situation in the first place?

Secondly, it seems that the fire service has declared the house an 'official fire hazard.' But nothing has been done. As a neighbour, what value would you place on the words 'official fire hazard' as a trigger for 'official' action on a problem that has festered for a decade or more?

And thirdly, consider these remarks from the county code enforcement manager:

'I certainly appreciate and understand the neighborhood's sense of frustration. We have a certain toolset at our disposal, and it works for most people. When you deal with someone who just doesn't respond, you're faced with a last-resort scenario.'

We can understand this in the fading light of 'big society' thinking, which implies quite reasonably that citizens have a responsibility to handle the local problems that they can, before turning to agencies - which should be seen as a last resort. Here we have an agency which is confounded by the discovery that it is the last resort, and seems to be startled and paralysed and cannot take action.

Mysteriously, the article reports not a single word of complaint against the local authority. This could be explained by (a) poor journalism; (b) uncritically pro-council journalism (which is a variant of (a)); or (c) a cultural over-emphasis on individual responsibility at the expense of reference to the state. I have no idea which it might be.

 

 

Over the garden wall

Here's an example of an informal but sanctioned short-cut for the kids to play with the kids next door. From a section of the BBC's feature on neighbouring which I mentioned yesterday.

 

 

97 per cent of neighbouring surveys say neighbouring ain’t what it used to be

The chorus of popular survey reports lamenting the decline of neighbouring continues to swell and boom. I don’t scour for them systematically, but I have at least half a dozen per year from the last few years. What I most long for is the moment when one of my neighbours rushes in to tell me about new survey results they've just found, showing that X per cent of neighbours share information with each other.

Today’s survey results come from the Ordnance Survey, although since there’s nothing about it on their website thus far, I can’t tell you what they think it shows, nor why they had it carried out.

Here are the headlines:

• 35% of those surveyed do not know their neighbours’ names
• 29% said lack of community spirit and anti-behaviour (sic) were the two biggest problems in their neighbourhood
• 17% of parents in the study stated they never let their children play outside
• 11% said they rarely or never visit their high street
• 25% said a community forum where they could air their concerns would help tackle community issues, whilst 29% claimed that a source of local information would help tackle community issues.

As always, it’s hard to comment without seeing the questions, especially on the first two of these points (all neighbours’ names? Any neighbours’ names? Some neighbours’ names?). Perhaps they will be made available in due course.

I promise to do an extended update of my previous review of popular surveys, because I do think there are things we might learn from them.

A related but separate phenomenon to examine is the media-political obsession with telling us how we are no longer neighbourly, and we all were, unfailingly, in the past of course. They chant the mantras, hoping to light upon some magic combination that will cure all social ills.

My thanks to the dependable Chris Gittins of Streets Alive who offered some commonsense observations when interviewed about the issues on BBC Breakfast this morning.

 

New data on neighbourliness

Rightmove’s ‘Happy at Home Index’ for UK towns has received quite a bit of publicity, mostly pointing gleefully or disparagingly at towns regarded among the ‘happiest’ or ‘unhappiest’. It illustrates how competition between localities for contented residents has become a theme of policy and media attention.

The company has generated an index using 12 measures to assess how people feel about where they live, covering aspects of their property, subjective feelings about their home, and sense of community.

The four questions used for the ‘community’ category seem pretty good to me and are worth reproducing here.

Apparently Dorchester scored highest for neighbourliness and Ilford scored lowest, but I’m not sure it’s helpful to dwell on these rankings.

One might have wanted to see something in there about the local economy and transport: and there’s nothing anywhere in the index to allow for people’s feelings about the value of their council tax and services.

But the survey had a whopping 25,340 respondents and a ten-point scale for each question, so there could be some interesting work to be done on the relations between some of the measures, if the data can be made available.

Pubs and taverns

According to the Lost Pubs Project, in the UK pubs are currently closing at an accelerating rate of 50 each week. While there's been a fair amount of froth around parliament (eg), acknowledging the implications and condemning the tied pub model, there doesn't seem to have been much to challenge the trend.

Apparently something similar has been happening in Chicago. This article suggests the problem is mainly down to the sheer bureaucratic awkwardness of getting a license. One commentator complains:

"Getting a new tavern license issued in a residential neighborhood is brutal. It's virtually impossible."

The problem sweetly illustrates the extent to which social value, publicness and local economies are intertwined. Perhaps policy makers everywhere could appreciate and value the role of pubs in stimulating local social capital, as well as their role in the local economy. Here's a start: Scott Martin who owns Simon's Tavern in Andersonville, Chicago, says that when he bought the place 17 years ago, he found a shoebox containing $80,000 in IOUs.

Previously:
More on local pubs
Why pubs need the CIA

Neighbourhood care groups

Neighbourhood care groups and organisations provide an astonishing social resource which seldom penetrates the policy-media consciousness. Some I know a little about, such as Brighton and Hove Neighbourhood Care Scheme, and Tower Hamlets Friends and Neighbours (where I was a trustee for a while). Now, thanks to Bernard Leach, erstwhile head of sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, I’ve been learning a little about a group which has been active in Chorlton, Manchester for 44 years.

Chorlton Good Neighbours (CGN) was established in 1967 by local people and has evolved to become a well-established charity offering a range of services to local older people. It currently has over 250 users and 70 volunteers. The group offers a range of practical support including transport and odd jobs for example; and various activities such as exercise classes, cooking sessions, and trips out.

CGN recently carried out their own research with a view to capturing the benefits that are generated by organising care collectively and providing a context for volunteers. The research was based on a survey which asked about levels of confidence to meet and socialise; health, well-being, independence and self-worth; sources of information and advice; sense of safety; and feelings of involvement. This exercise illustrates the great value in having high quality informal local arrangements for people in need of help and support. Take this quote for instance:

‘there is also a policy of ringing up people if for example, they don’t turn up for sessions they normally come to, or if a volunteer notices when delivering a newsletter that there is a lot of mail uncollected... We go the extra step, not just because it is the correct professional thing to do, but because volunteers and users know each other and care for each other.’

Or consider the chart below, which hints at the benefits felt from the range of activities run by the group:

The report suggests that:

‘Overall, the evidence base points to the conclusion that CGN’s activities do change users’ attitudes, lifestyles and their mental and physical wellbeing. It is reasonable to go on to conclude that such care services can lead to significant savings for both the NHS and the Local Authority’s Social Services…

Core activities such as home visits, wheelchair support, coffee morning, Sunday teas and day trips will remain at the heart of what we deliver as they provide a haven of friendship and support – neighbourliness – which enrich the lives of all those involved with Chorlton Good Neighbours.’

 For more details about the report, contact Bernard Leach – btleach { at } gmail.com.

Neighbouring, older people and those who live alone: statistically they don’t stand out

Thank you to ICM Research, who have published questions and data from a recent survey of neighbouring and concerns about winter (the Home Alone survey), carried out for AA Home Emergency Response. In spite of attempts in the press release to put an alarmist spin on the findings, I think they’re largely reassuring.

The claim is made that

‘Overall more than one in eight people (13%) say they don't know any of their neighbours.’

Among those who live alone, the figure rises unsurprisingly, but only to 16 per cent. For those who live with friends, it’s a whopping 30 per cent, but this goes unremarked. It may be worth pointing out that quite a lot of people prefer to have nothing to do with their neighbours; and quite a lot of people will have been in their current place of residence for only a short time (length of residence is not included as a variable).

What the data show is a little more nuanced than the quote above, with a decent attempt to get beyond the blurring caused by the word ‘know’. The results include the following questions and overall percentages:

I would recognise my neighbours but I don't know them to speak to: 7%

I wouldn't recognise most of my neighbours: 5%

I wouldn't recognise any of my neighbours: 1%

I think I preferred the question that was used in the 2008 Full of Life survey, which asked people to indicate if they knew their neighbours well enough to say 'hello'. (With the change of government, the Full of Life study has now disappeared from the DWP website, but at the time I noted that 93 per cent said that they did).

The Home Alone survey shows very little variation between social grades. There’s a remarkable consistency in these two sets of responses, for instance:

	All	AB	C1	C2	DE
I know most of my neighbours	38%	38%	39%	38%	37%
I wouldn't recognise any of my neighbours	5%	4%	6%	5%	4%

The 2010 YouGov survey for the Co-Op used two social grade categories (ABC1 and C2DE) and similarly showed negligible difference in responses to the question ‘Approximately how many of your current neighbours would you say you know by name?’

The Home Alone survey was designed to probe for the need for help or support ‘if you had a problem at home’. According to the results, older people are as likely as the rest of us to know someone within range and certainly on their street, who they can call for help. Overall, 51 per cent of respondents said the nearest was within a quarter of a mile (14 per cent said ‘on my street’); 59 per cent of the over-65s claimed this, with 17 per cent saying ‘on my street’. Again, that's reassuring.

The question is slightly spoiled by the wording, which refers to ‘the nearest friend or family member’: it would have helped to be clear as to whether or not neighbours are assumed to be included, since on the whole they are neither friend nor kin.

But it’s still an interesting question with some unexpected results. For instance, among those who say they ‘know all’ their neighbours, almost a quarter (24 per cent) would go beyond a quarter of a mile to get help if they had a problem at home; and 37 per cent of those who say they ‘know most’ of their neighbours would do so. That’s quite a lot of people who we’d expect to be on good terms with their neighbours but who would go beyond the immediate neighbourhood in case of need.

Previously:

Five per cent have no contact with neighbours

Older and young people relate differently to neighbours: shock news

OK, how well do you know your 'immediate' neighbours?

Shock news: neighbourliness might or might not be in decline

Six per cent would prefer no contact with neighbours

 

Neighbourliness and the natural disaster effect

Here’s an article by Queensland sociologist Lynda Cheshire, reflecting on the contrast between neighbourly behaviour during the floods in that state last year, and a reported ‘rise in neighbourly tensions’ that apparently characterises contemporary Australian life. Why are neighbours still there when needed, she asks, 'even if their noise, smells and habits are cause for complaint the rest of the time?'

Cheshire notes that the contrast might partly be explained by an increased ability to avoid confrontation by referring difficulties to official intermediaries (like this example I blogged not long ago) and points out that this is ‘a costly habit’:

‘There is a possibility that the wave of goodwill exhibited during the floods will minimise neighbourly conflicts, or at least reduce registered complaints. But it may also create new sets of expectations about neighbours and new forms of conflict if these normative codes are breached.’

I’m reminded that some months ago I wrote about the way supportive neighbourly responses in time of large-scale disasters throw up somewhat nostalgic reflections about how our societies have 'lost' the values that are warmly evidenced in time of adversity. Cheshire’s article does not come into that category, although she does appear at least in this case to reproduce uncritically the received narrative of decline. I'd like to know more about whether neighbourliness in Australia really has declined and in what ways, and how that compares with the UK where similar claims are so often made.

 

Just trying to be sociable

"Previous research suggests that U.S. residents may use holiday decorations on their home's exterior to communicate friendliness and cohesiveness with neighbors. In the present research, we examine whether strangers (naive raters) can accurately identify the more friendly residents, and what aspects of the homes' exteriors contribute to their impressions. We also examine the possibility that residents who decorate for Christmas but who have few friends on the block may be using the decorations and other cues as a way of communicating their accessibility to neighbors. Participants rated residents based only on photographs of their home and front yard. Stimulus homes had been preselected to represent the four cells of a two by two factorial design crossing the presence/absence of Christmas decorations with the resident's self-rated social contact with neighbors (low/high). As expected, a main effect for the decorated factor indicated that raters used Christmas decorations as a cue that the residents were friendly and cohesive. Decoration interacted with sociability in a complex but interpretable way. In the absence of Christmas decorations, raters accurately distinguished between the homes of sociable and nonsociable residents; in open ended comments, they attributed their impressions to the relatively more 'open' and 'lived in' look of the sociable residents' homes. When Christmas decorations were present, raters actually attributed greater sociability to the nonsociable residents, citing a more open appearance as the basis for their judgments. The results support the idea that residents can use their home's exterior to communicate attachment and possibly to integrate themselves into a neighborhood's social activities."

Werner, C et al (1989), Inferences about homeowners' sociability: impact of Christmas decorations and other cues. Journal of environmental psychology, 9, 279-296.

 

Lifetime neighbourhoods

Four years ago I posted a note about an excellent CLG discussion paper on lifetime neighbourhoods prepared by the International Longevity Centre. CLG have now published a new report by Mark Bevan and Karen Croucher from the Centre for Housing Policy in York. It’s an important document which brings together a wide range of material to give this theme some welcome momentum.

The main components of lifetime neighbourhoods are given as

• supporting residents to develop lifetime neighbourhoods – especially resident empowerment
• access
• services and amenities
• built and natural environments
• social networks/well-being
• housing.

There are several valuable strengths in this report. I would highlight the appropriate breadth of research and practice material, the significant number of practice examples, and the emphasis on resident empowerment. It’s also very readable.

Against that, there are two weaknesses that struck me very quickly. The main one is that there is no recognition of the damaging over-emphasis on cars in our local environments, of the way design has too often privileged the driver, and the knock on effect on local social quality of life.

A few years ago the designer Wayne Hemingway told me a story about trying to get residents in a new tower building to accept an underground car park in the design. They wouldn’t, because they wanted to be able to see their cars from their windows – hence using up vastly more land to accommodate them, than was necessary. People treat cars as extensions of their homes, and as a way of marking territory, probing out into the world. It’s hard to see how we can develop lifetime neighbourhoods without confronting this peculiar obsession, but it doesn't help to overlook it. As a society we seem to be in denial.

The other unexpected weakness is a lack of insight into the potential of digital media to strengthen social networks. We can anticipate a future in which residents will expect to be connected and to enjoy and exploit the benefits of their networks, online and face-to-face. And as the Online Neighbourhood Networks study suggested, there are benefits to service providers.

 

Neighbour relations can reinforce boundaries - or break them down

We have builders working on the house, this time it’s Dave from just five doors away, and his mate. Yesterday was pretty cold up on the scaffolding, so I heated up some of the apple crumble that my next door neighbour had brought round a little earlier, and took two portions up the ladder for them. They had the chance subsequently to thank her from above as she popped out.

A slightly unusual triangle of service and support then - perhaps an exception to theories of standard neighbour behaviour. Theory tends to inspect some wider social problems - class tensions, ethnic relations - in neighbour relations and then to generalise back out from there. There are symbolic boundaries that we use to differentiate ourselves, and according to this recent paper in Sociological research online, neighbouring reinforces those boundaries rather than breaking them down.

It seems to me that people do both in the neighbouring setting. I can learn a bit about Nigerian culture from a family a few doors along, crossing cultural boundaries with ease for example just by asking for a recipe; or I could shut out all contact from the Irish Catholics next door if I was minded to, just by limiting interaction to a grunt.

 

 

Online, local social capital, and network diversity

Some years ago there was interest in the possibility of what was known as ‘cyber-balkanisation’ – the expectation that online activity would create silos of communities of interest at the expense of diversity of networks; and perhaps that local communities based on face-to-face contact might atrophy as a direct consequence. I even wrote an article for the New Statesman about it, it must have been at least ten years ago.

Now here’s research to confirm that social networks are not less diverse when mediated online, and that online use makes a ‘positive and substantive total contribution’ to network diversity and hence to the social capital that is accessible through personal networks.

This is the most recent output from Keith Hampton and his colleagues based on the data collected for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

I've just posted a summary review of the paper over on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog. The journal article linked above is subscription only, but Keith offers a draft here.

 

Connected neighbours-to-be

Here's a little story (with more behind a paywall) from Singapore, reporting online interaction between neighbours-to-be. A handful of the future occupants of a 680-unit development have already met up through a community Facebook group. And they don't move in until 2014.

Keeping an eye on surveillance

"CCTV usually achieves very little on its own, it needs to be part of more comprehensive security planning; it works much better in access-managed areas along with a guardianship presence, community support and a response capacity.

Policing, security and crime prevention are social relationships and if these are characterised mainly by division, mistrust and inequality, CCTV surveillance technologies are likely to exacerbate social problems and tensions."

Peter Squires, University of Brighton, in a European Urban Knowledge Network interview.

20 per cent of us don't want neighbours to handle our post

Here's a dilemma for the postal services which policy makers need to acknowledge. According to recent research carried out by Consumer Focus, one in five people are unhappy for any of their neighbours to receive any of their post.

Royal Mail have proposals to leave undeliverable items with neighbours as a matter of policy (it happens already but is not standard practice, it seems).

'For non-signature items, if the neighbour is at home and accepts the item the postman will deliver a notification card to the addressee. This will detail the address of the neighbour.'

Taking in deliveries for a neighbour is widespread practice and has obvious advantages, being more efficient and lubricating local interaction. Where I live it happens a lot. I've pointed out before that it's one of relatively few ways in which older people, often at home when others are out, can play a simple, valued, trusted neighbourly role.

But if you don't get on with or even recognise your neighbours, or are particularly sensitive about the content of some of your post, you might at least want to have a choice about whether the Royal Mail takes this course. Eighty per cent of respondents thought they should be able to opt in or opt out of having a neighbour receive their post.

If Royal Mail go ahead with their proposals, it will go against the sensitivities of a sizeable minority. Note the lack of specificity in the research finding - 20% don't want any neighbour to handle any of their post. But if they pander to that minority, they contribute further to the undermining of the role of the neighbour and the aspirations of modern governments to increase local social capital.

So how hard would it be to systematise the preference for receipt of undeliverable post by a neighbour? Not something that should be beyond our uses of technology, I think. And if that happens, and we all start to register one way or the other on a database evidencing trust in our neighbours, what a fascinating dataset we'll have.

There is a little discussion about this issue following an apparently pseudonymous Guardian Comment is Free article (written by someone with inside knowledge - a postal worker perhaps? - who has yet to discover that some neighbours are female - ah so it can't be a postal worker then).

Talking over the palings

I was in a community centre the other day chatting with residents about some of the images they had brought for the local website they are developing. As soon as this one came up they all said: 'talking over the palings'.

The picture seems to have encapsulated a historically intense neighbourliness, and the phrase was its widely-accepted shorthand.

One of the residents said: the man in the background, that's Mr Bernard, he was from London, such a nice man.

The picture dates from about 1950. I was born a few years later and grew up in the sixties, and I remember a lot of fences like this and, later, chain link fences. In many cases these would have replaced iron fences and gates, where the iron had been taken and used for armaments during the war.

 

'Don't knock my door. Call the council'

It's new year's eve, past midnight, a neighbour's music is blasting on way beyond reasonable levels. You step down to tap at the door and have a word, as our culture and present government policies would expect you to do.

There's a chance you might get stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors, as happened in this very sad case reported in a case in Watford recently.

"He was very aggressive. He said: 'New Year.' I said 'I know this is New Year. This is a residential area. You have to show respect.'

"He replied: 'Don't knock my door. Call the police. Call the council.'"

Meaning, you are my neighbour, I only expect to have to deal with you through an official intermediary.

In mitigation, the defendent's barrister said 'He was not the one who left the flat to confront his neighbour.'

 

On holiday with the neighbours

Apparently 49 people from a single street, Coronation Avenue in Haverfordwest, all went on holiday together to Ibiza recently. Rob Greenland reported a similar story a few years ago about an entire street in Liverpool doing something similar.

Bryony Gordon in yesterday's Telegraph offers a light-hearted reality check on spending downtime with people you may depend on, if you don't already get on with them really well.

When we got to the hotel last night, the family at No 10 complained that their room was smaller than the one allocated to the family at No 12, “which is just what we need after they got planning permission to build that monstrous extension that blocks out all the light in our garden”.

I think it's great if people get on so well with their neighbours that they do not regard going away together as a risk to their relationships. It makes me think of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century annual migration of east London residents to the hop fields of Kent for temporary rural employment. As Gordon's piece suggests, there might be a fascinating sociological study to be done of the extent to which established behaviours were reproduced, or not, in the different temporary environment.

I hope there wasn't undue pressure put on any of the hesitant or reluctant to sign up. I hope they rewarded those who stayed behind to feed the cats and water the gardens. And I hope there weren't too many burglaries while they were away. I have no comment to offer on the choice of Ibiza as a holiday destination, but the people I'd be most curious to hear about are the ones, if there were any, who went away at the same time but chose somewhere else.

 

Occupying the neighbourhood: 'everybody knows who you are'

Yesterday I was working with my colleague Hugh Flouch with some residents on an estate in Wolverhampton. They're all tenants of Wolverhampton Homes, and like many local people have been there for a long time.

Coincidentally, when I got home, BBC4 were re-broadcasting Michael Collins's sensitive and insightful programme about council housing, The great estate, which you can see here (well worth the time, I'd only seen glimpses before). Collins records the sense of worth, permanence and belonging that characterised council housing at a time when it was considered 'a step up, not a step down'.

The residents Hugh and I have been working with articulate a sense of pride in the history of their (low rise) estate, and some bewilderment at the way in which this form of housing tenure and its associated culture has become socially discredited.

I'm not intending to offer an analysis of the programme here - check Dave Hill's article and links for that. Instead I want to draw on some remarks (at about 24 mins into the film) offered by one of the contributors, who grew up on an estate in Liverpool:

'All our friends lived there. All the people you went to school with lived there. But I think, because you knew all the kids, you also knew the parents and there was a lot of respect at that time. You always called the parents, 'Hello Mrs Burchall' - you always called them by their surname. You knew them but, more importantly, they knew you. And that's a powerful commodity when you're a kid, the fact that everybody knows who you are. I think that's maybe what separated the gangs of kids from the squares where we lived with the pockets of kids which hang around on street corners now who are totally anonymous.'

It's ok, I'm not suddenly about to go all soppy about some golden age of neighbouring. But I do want to try and get a sharper focus on the connection between localness (by which I mean, day-to-day occupation of the neighbourhood) and housing, as mediated by families. This is by no means entirely concerned with 'public parenting', but the forces which stimulate connection between children and their peers' parents can be exploited for other connections in the neighbourhood, contributing for example to neighbourly concern for isolated older people. Why were these kinds of social relationships seen as the default in many places but they are not now?

Here are some contributory factors that come to mind:

• routinised lifestyles and a high proportion of mothers as housewives
• lower car ownership, with playable streets
• more local employment and local schools, to which people walked or cycled
• availability of local trade, ditto
• ties that overlapped in the spheres of leisure and workplace as well as home environment
• a heritage of deference to authority (which depended often on unhealthy, disempowering relationships)
• housing that people valued.

I do not overlook the disadvantages of close-knit neighbourhoods, but for once I am not going to bang that particular drum.

Some of the subsequent social changes are desirable, some perhaps not. Some are subject to tweaking through policy influence; others, like the transition from an authority-based organisation society to an initiative-based network society, have too much momentum and are long-since out of reach of significant policy influence.

What strikes me, reflecting on the remarks quoted and the little list above (additional suggestions welcome), is that policy makers might sensibly reduce the rhetoric about greed and responsibilities, and focus more on the circumstances of life in neighbourhoods which help to establish and reinforce local social connections - like promoting local schools to which most of the pupils are expected to walk; genuinely discouraging large supermarkets, and supporting local trade; moving far more quickly to help the beleaguered local pub trade; actively and purposefully promoting local clubs and associations, and so on. It would be good to see schemes for playable streets and some serious efforts to reduce car use. And given the wretched plight of the housebuilding 'industry', let's give airtime to some ideas for reinventing social housing.

Cohesion and disturbance

Could this just be coincidence? Research carried out for Regeneration & renewal by Experian, reported here, shows that '71 per cent of riots occurred in local authority districts ranked in the bottom 10 per cent for social cohesion.'

In most of the areas people who have been trying to make a difference will be disheartened by conclusions like this, although my recollection of the Experian Mosaic system is that it is surprisingly specific.

According to the article, we're talking about

'some of the most disconnected communities in the country'.

That's 'disconnected' in terms of local social relations; maybe not in terms of the reportedly heavy use of Blackberry Messenger by a small proportion. And probably not at all connected in terms of the kinds of social capital we know can be generated by online neighbourhood networks.

Say, here's an idea. Why don't we invent some shared ways of bringing people together at local level to stimulate cohesion and involvement, and help people to influence the decision-making processes that affect them? We could call it, oh I don't know, something like 'community development', how does that sound?

It could be exactly the sort of thing the government would be interested in supporting, especially since it's a lot less expensive than having disconnected communities.

Call me old fashioned, but maybe nostalgia isn't the only problem

Here's a curiosity. Ryan Shorthouse in Prospect magazine has a go at both Philip Blond (Red Toryism) and Maurice Glasman (Blue Labour - you still with me?) for their 'nostalgia for a "golden age" of British communities'. Quite right too. 

[Start of short Kev rant, partly lifted from a forthcoming paper] The contemporary media-political rhetoric is partly problematic because it finds 'community' historically still within reach, through the living-memory images from the nostalgia industry. (I often think we would gain greater insight discussing the assumed decline of neighbourliness in early modern England). Our politicians and journalists invite us to do penance before the curling monochrome prints of streets where doors were always left open and everyone knew everyone. The problem is not that this mythology is entirely misleading – it isn’t, not entirely - but that it is packaged as universally flawless, implicitly recoverable, and key to the resolution of expensive problems of social policy. For politicians and political commentators to peddle this rhetoric uncritically is either ignorant or disingenuous. [Rant ends].

Perversely, Shorthouse ends his article by claiming that market forces and private capital

'could sustain and improve public services that people rely on. Revitalised community life will only really come from improving the skills of individuals: boosting education levels and improving employability, for instance.'

Well, and one or two other things we can all think of. A reliable economy would help, one that is not held to ransom by the Tories' dear friends in the financial sector and rescued at the cost of public services that are used by people who happen to be below their lofty field of vision. Meanwhile we all have to be patient while the current experiment in 'progressive conservatism' demonstrates quite how education levels and employability will be boosted by cutting education funding and closing libraries.

Call me old fashioned, but I too think that it's in society's interests for people to associate more, and more pro-socially, at local level. But we're not likely to achieve that with the current vicious assault on the public realm or by decimating services that people need just to give them the strength to reflect on their own circumstances.

 

What did you call me?

I spend quite a bit of time every day talking gibberish to a baby.

I do this because I'm aware that children in care have a high likelihood of delayed development and consequent disadvantage; and because early gains in speech and language can be of critical importance in later development. I'm helping to care for a baby who could easily get left behind if he doesn't get plenty of face-to-face communication right now. This kind of effort to compensate for disadvantage is routine in foster care.

But through a compelling piece on R4's Today programme this morning we learn that a noticeable proportion of children are starting school without knowing their own names, or in some cases not knowing that they have a name. How excluded can you get?

Once I ponder the implications of that in terms of sense of identity - let alone the development of communication skills - I find it scary, and feel ashamed of our society. One example given in the article referred to a parent who simply didn't know that you can talk to a child before they can talk back to you:

'he don't talk to me, so I don't talk to him'.

Some attempt was made lamely to blame contemporary media for this state of affairs. But Jean Gross, who has the great job title of 'the government's communication champion for children,' referred to young parents lacking contact with other adults of different generations.

And I think it might be worth asking about the sometimes-missing contribution of the extended family, intergenerational relations at neighbourhood level, and the impact of poor housing design. Where someone's immediate environment seriously discourages them from stepping out with their baby or toddler, and diminishes the likelihood of conversational encounters with others in the nieghbourhood if they do so, the reduction to silence and hence namelessness may be understandable.

Neighbourhood natter about parenting may not always be packed with wisdom, but at least there's a good chance that names will be exchanged.

Blaming the media and blaming the parents is way too easy. We need also to think about how parenthood is affected by the social and environmental character of our neighbourhoods, and what can be done about that.

It also strikes me that we bring a legitimate urgency to our calls for people to check on their elderly neighbours, especially in winter: surely a similar urgency should apply to connecting with parents of children who are in the fragile early spring of life.

 

17% would not help a neighbour

Here are some new data on neighbourliness, from a large US survey conducted for StateFarm, an insurance company. The sample was 17,000 and the project has been overseen by Keith Hampton, so is definitely worthy of attention.

To their credit, StateFarm provide more than the usual upbeat press release. Here are some of the things that I noticed on a read-through of the findings.

I was most struck by negative responses to the question: 'What would you do to help a neighbor in need?' Seventeen per cent would not help a neighbour in need, and this figure is pretty much consistent across age, gender and urbanicity. So if you thought, say, that older people in rural areas would be nearly universally neighbourly, think again.

  The survey asked about the channels used where people 'interact with their neighbours on a monthly basis'. It seems to me there's plenty of online contact going on, but the 10 per cent of text interaction is higher than I'd have expected.

Almost 40 per cent lend to neighbours and 24 per cent borrow 'at least several times a year' (don't ask me to explain the discrepency, although I note that 7 per cent are disgruntled about neighbours who don't return borrowed items).

One other thing. The data suggest that 17 per cent of 18-34 year olds know 'most of their neighbours' by name. I think that's pretty high, at least for under-25s. The graphic seems designed to imply that it isn't. What are our expectations?

And here's Keith's take on it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on neighbouring and recession

Here's more tentative support for the argument that economic hardship is stimulating neighbourliness. The Co-op has published a press release (but as yet no report or data) on another survey of neighbourliness following their 2010 report which I blogged a year ago.

They suggest that people are helping their neighbours more,

with increasing numbers looking after pets or plants (32% up from 23%), fetching shopping (15% up from 6%) and accepting mail or parcels (73% up fro 63%).

At the same time, they note an increase in the number of people reporting problems with their neighbours.

To me it seems a bit too simplistic to associate slight reported changes in neighbouring with the recession - especially when we don't know what the questions were - without also taking account of other forces and changes like localism, the decline of trust in large institutions, and networked support.

 

Chat about neighbours on t'wireless

The Beeb seems to be doing more of those programmes in which articulate knowledgable people speak about issues in which they're not expert, I suppose because it's cheaper than the programme-makers having to do any research. This is an example of the kind (30 mins, available for seven days), an underwhelming programme about neighbours in which the thinking was done on the hoof.

Laurie Penny rescued it in part by pointing out that we can all live near to people and 'know' them and still be shocked or surprised to find out something fundamental about them; and that the same can apply in the online world. That was about the only insight on offer I'm afraid.

But I don't like to appear too negative, so here's an instance of where it might have got interesting, with a bit of thought. Guy Browning suggested that people would be more neighbourly if they were forced together more. The unstated and unexplored implication being that neighbourliness is an objective sufficiently desirable for other benefits (like comfort and privacy, say) to be sacrificed. Next time, they could start the debate there.

Thanks Martin for the heads-up.

 

Does austerity cause increase in knowing neighbours' names?

Between 2008 and 2010 the proportion of American adults who say they ‘know all or most of their neighbours by name’ increased by some 11 per cent, to 51%. In 2008, 31 per cent said they did not know any of their neighbours by name: two years later, this had dropped to just 18 per cent.

This comes from the latest output from the collaboration of Keith Hampton and his colleagues with Pew Internet Research - a study of the impact of social networking sites on levels of trust, personal relationships and civic and political involvement in the USA. (I’ll be posting some thoughts on the main findings of that study, over on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog shortly). The authors note that:

It might be that the persistence of the poor economic conditions of the American economy has prompted – or necessitated - that people to turn to their neighbors for informal support. It would be premature to suggest that this current trend is part of a gradual increase in social capital in America.

I’ll make my customary point here briefly about the assumption behind the question – knowing someone’s name implies a level of relationship not necessarily consistent with people’s understanding of neighbouring (certainly not mine). Knowing someone by name implies a stronger relationship than is necessarily needed or wanted. So as I’ve noted before, this emphasis perpetuates the unfortunate habit of over-privileging strong ties in the understanding of local social relations. The basis of neighbouring is recognition, which does not depend on knowing names, as nicely illustrated in this quotation from last year’s Gumtree research:

'It's true I don't know many neighbours by name, but we recognise each other, know who lives where and are aware of each other's routines. If something is out of place, we notice. We also pick up the litter in the street and close each other's gates when the postman leaves them open.'

The closest comparable recent UK data I have found offers responses to the statement ‘I know my immediate neighbours’ names’ with a return of 83 per cent (Circle Anglia Community Census carried out by ComRes 2009). Maybe this can be compared with the 81 per cent in the Pew survey who know some, most, or all by name.

A final point from the Pew report, which is mainly about the impact on social relations of the use of technologies: the authors found

'no indication that different types of technology use predict neighboring. Internet and non-internet users are equally as likely as others to know at least some of their neighbors.'

The main point of this post though is to suggest that the positive effect of austerity on local social relations is probably not fanciful and is certainly worthy of closer scrutiny. Any self-respecting community development worker knows that nothing succeeds like adversity.

And if an economic decline does have a positive effect on local social relaitons, does the reverse apply?

 

 

Would you choose neighbourhood or housing?

So at yesterday's Compass conf I was on a panel about neighbourhoods and 'the good society', and there was an interesting question from the floor: can you have a 'good neighbourhood' with poor housing? It didn't fall to me to try and answer, but the consensus seemed to be 'no'.

Our mythology of course says 'yes'. But that could be because it confuses collective resilience with what it might be reasonable to call 'good neighbourhood'. I think for example of the experience of women from the tenements of Edinburgh and Glasgow retold in a super book called She was aye workin' - challenging

the idea that 'We may have been poor, but we were very comfortable and cosy' - it's just not true. Their life was hell. It was a constant daily grind against dirt and disease.

That reminds us is that a functioning neighbourhood is not just a set of cohesive relations where people support one another out of necessity against the odds. That kind of 'community' may seem laudable to those who know no better but it should not be wished or imposed on anyone, and it's a brutish society that is prepared to do so.

In my few words to the seminar I had tried to suggest that the idea of 'community' - far from being the magic solution to a long list of social problems which governments would like to see resolved by someone else at no cost - is a minority interest. Most people are most concerned about house and family, with 'community' a distant third (Lyn Richards' excellent but seldom-cited study Nobody's home brings this out forcefully).

So my own reflection on the question - can you have a 'good neighbourhood' with poor housing? - is to ask, if you could only have one, which would you choose?

 

Rebuilding the Smurf Society

Here I sit trying to think what I might say at today’s Compass seminar on ‘building the good society’, only to get distracted by this BBC headline:

Do Smurfs provide a model for a good society?

I have never knowingly watched the Smurfs, but apparently they

lived without money, using their individual skills for the common good, without individual reward, to ensure their community thrives.

So that seems to answer the question in the headline, and suggests that today’s delegates might ask themselves if they’re inhabiting a fictional cartoon world. Ah, you know where this is going don’t you? -

You can even see echoes of the British government's Big Society idea, part of which encourages individuals to form community groups and engage in social action, particularly through volunteering, says Prof Ellis Cashmore, a sociologist from Staffordshire University.

"There are similarities between David Cameron's idea of the Big Society and what we see embodied in Smurf society.

"Cameron [is asking people to get] organised with their local community, have organic collectivity and work for each other, like we used to before industrialisation came along and fragmented society."

The last bit needs a bit of qualification of course. Historians do still argue that neighbourliness declined at the end of the middle ages, but it was a debt-based society with a great deal of mobility, and the home was a public, not a private place, which must have made a difference.

But it’s the phrase ‘Smurf Society’ that catches the eye. I’m floundering in a surfeit of universalised kinds of ‘Society,’ but if I have to choose one, this could be it.

Neighbouring in low income neighbourhoods

The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University has published the final report of their study of low income neighbourhoods.

It’s an important body of work, mainly qualitative and thus sitting most obviously alongside Anne Power’s City survivors as a source of stories and quotes.

At the same time, JRF have published a paper prepared by some of the researchers and based on the same study, which looks at current social policies and assesses their potential impact on residents living in the neighbourhoods studied. The paper explores some of the underlying assumptions in the new policy agenda. (Summary here).

It’s a smart move, let’s hope this latter paper has some impact. The key message seems to be this:

There was little evidence in the research of any fault line between ‘cohesive’ and ‘broken’ communities, of places somehow set apart from ‘the rest of us’. Place still matters and, as a rule, neighbourhood mattered most to people where both the economic legacy and future prospects for their community were least favourable.

The authors stress the role of social housing -

neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of social housing often provided households with an island of stability in an ocean of turbulence (not least in the jobs market).

They go on to ask,

what happens to those communities that are facing structural economic weakness but where countervailing systems of mutual support and resilience have also become attenuated over time – those at the end of the economic line – if the opportunities for economic growth lie elsewhere?

As far as neighbouring is concerned, two familiar points are re-confirmed: that neighbouring is not the same as friendship; and not everyone wants to invest in neighbourliness. But there is one pertinent point that is very well-made in the main research report, concerning the extent to which so many people on low-incomes are both time-poor and cash-poor.

This point needs making with research to back it up, because policy too often implies that people in poverty have time on their hands while worthier citizens are busy driving the economy and bringing up more worthy citizens. Lack of time and energy constrains people’s ability to get involved in co-production or civic action or in strengthening their social networks. Here’s one quote that illustrates the way in which this plays out in neighbourhood relations:

No I don’t want to be going round for cups of tea and that kind of thing... I think it’s important to say hello and recognise each other but… there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to socialise with the people I socialise with, family and friends as it is… and it’s just trying to find time to do the laundry and keep the house tidy as well as everything else.

And finally while I remember it, for the record, there’s one point in one of the research papers which doesn’t seem to have made it into the final report, concerning the negative effect of declined neighbourly overtures:

I tried to make friends with these neighbours but they won’t so I left it at that so basically. I don’t know anybody in this street unless somebody dies and ‘oh her name was Mary’ or something… it’s not like you would go out and knock on the neighbour’s door and say ‘hello can I borrow a cup of sugar’. I even started that when I first come over here, I cook and I would take plate of samosas or whatever to the neighbours and so I stopped and I just keep to myself….people keep to themselves, they don’t have the time… I think people are busy, they don’t want to get involved, they don’t want to bother, because I’ve got two neighbours here, they’re both the same, don’t want to know. So I gave up.

I’m reminded of a very similar sense that Toby Gale and I got from talking to refugees and asylum seekers (case study 3) for the Manchester neighbourliness review.

The silencing of the unanswered voice is probably quite prevalent, if we did but know it, and obviously damaging. How might it be countered? Thinking up lots of formal devices like street parties is only a partial solution at best, not just because not everyone is comfortable with them but also because they overplay expectations of neighbouring and try to coerce us into chumminess, whether false or not. So we have to fall back on all the old key drivers like design, occupation of streets, locality of services and amenities, limited churn, and so on. Oh, and neighbourhood online channels of course.

Let there be strong networks

Here’s another report calling for policy to bolster social networks – this one is from the International Longevity Centre UK, Can localism work for older people in urban environments? In this case the call is ‘to strengthen interpersonal, intergenerational, and multigenerational networks, particularly in urban areas.’

This accumulating acknowledgement that our dependence on institutions has left us vulnerable, as a society, is not misplaced in my view. The echo is familiar, as is the echo of the echo. Network poverty was worthy of more research attention than it got in recent wealthier times. Now that we really need some data on it, I suspect we’re going to be leaning heavily on the RSA study because I’m not sure there’s a great deal else to go on.

So what does it mean, to a policymaker, this call to help strengthen social networks? How should policy respond?

I’d start with a requirement that local policies should avoid doing damage to existing local social networks, a bit like the duty to involve. Vicki Nash suggested something similar, ‘community proofing,’ some years ago.

It would mean for instance that a new supermarket or road widening or library closure could not be approved without an intelligible analysis of its impact on local social networks, an analysis that in turn would inform public consultation. It wouldn’t take us long to develop the methodology, once we had to. I’ve suggested before, the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of local amenities that stimulate social networks is because no political value has been placed on human processes that are informal and organic.

Will that change, with all these calls to strengthen networks? Is there the political will to acknowledge that local social interactions have value which plays out in, and profoundly affects the costs of, other social provision?

The requirement to avoid network damage does not have to be accompanied by a given standard of social network strength, to which all neighbourhoods should be expected to aspire. Wrong approach, don’t go there.

But yes it should set us thinking about other ways of enhancing informal interaction, for example through the design of local spaces and dwellings; placing more than crudely economic value on local third places; support for local online networks; policies that discourage unnecessary car use and encourage walking; promotion of the principle of local (walkable) services and local (walkable) schools… All these will seem eminently sensible, if they don’t already, once there is government-level recognition of the essential value of informal interactions and the local social networks that they represent.

All this has drawn me back to a book chapter I wrote on policy and local social relations, here, in which I noted that

‘social relationships in neighbourhoods are organic, requiring a healthy ecology that reflects informality and also requiring that most of the time formality keeps its distance.’

And in which I quoted Robert Ellikson’s observation that

‘…lawmakers who are unappreciative of the social conditions that foster informal cooperation are likely to create a world in which there is both more law and less order.’

 

 

Student housing and neighbourhoods

Concentrations of students inevitably alter the natural ecology of neighbourhoods, because they contribute to a-typically high rates of churn. In some respects the effect is doubtless beneficial and in others it won't be.

Length of residence, on its own, can be misleading as an indicator of neighbourhood quality of life. But the usual assumption is that people who are not expecting to stay for long in a neighbourhood are generally least likely to invest in relations with their neighbours. The higher the proportion of these 'under-investors,' the more likely that there is a negative effect on neighbourhood quality of life.

If you're a student in this situation, you can over-compensate for the comparatively small capital investment you are making in the locality in all sorts of ways - helping with shopping, baby-sitting, odd-jobs etc for neighbours, and generally being considerate of course. But you have to do so proactively, or live with the perception that you are not 'pulling your weight'. Universities tend to take seriously their relations with their towns and cities, but I'm not aware that they do much to encourage students to consider neighbourhood social relations.

So is it best to let the market dictate, or should councils have policies to minimise the extent to which students in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) are concentrated in any given area?

Oxford City Council has announced a threshold of 20 per cent of houses in any 100 metre stretch of residential street, for all new houses for student tenants. (They do not have the power to reduce the existing percentage in a street if it's already higher than that). I can't see it catching on, but it will be interesting if it does.

For a theory of the neighbourhood based on economic principles of transaction costs and property rights, see a paper called 'The nature of the neighbourhood' by Chris Webster in Urban studies, December 2003 (subscription).

Webster notes in passing that:

'Owner-occupiers and long-term tenants have an economic incentive to deploy private resources in investments that yield collective neighbourhood benefits. Neighbourhoods characterised by short-term tenancies — such as student quarters, inner-urban high-density rental areas and some types of social housing — require institutional structures that provide incentives to act with restraint in the use of common resources and that encourage investment.'

 

National schemes to promote neighbourliness: what impact?

Some early results have been released from the evaluation of Neighbours Day Aotearoa 2011, which took place at the end of March. The survey is still open.

• Those who thought their neighbours would be "highly likely" to ask them for help increased by over 25% after Neighbours Day Aotearoa 2011.
• 57% felt more positive about their neighbours/neighbourhood.
• 74% said that they would be likely to participate with their neighbours in 2012, and a further 22.1% said they might.

Influence and local social networks

About ten years ago in community development and policy circles there were lots of conversations about using social network analysis to get at understandings of 'community' and thereby contribute to policy. To their credit, folk at the RSA just got on and did it, and have now published the second report of their Connected communities project.

This one is called Power lines and looks at social exclusion in terms of isolation from networks of influence and power. The report suggests that

'people feel a greater sense of empowerment if they have a larger and more varied number of local connections and relationships.'

Social networks reflect the ways power plays out, so that influence accumulates from influential connections, and exclusion accumulates from weakness of social ties.

Hence the authors' recommendation that local public bodies should assess their funding for community groups on the contribution that groups make 'to building stronger, more diverse social networks.'

'In particular, initiatives should seek to connect those who are currently isolated or at risk, with others.'

The hard bit is working out how. There's plenty to build on, and firm justification. Asif Afridi, in a review for JRF published in March, suggests three main ways in which social networks can address poverty:

• They can enable the sharing of resources (time, expertise, support) and information (job opportunities, benefits advice, influence).
• They can provide mutual support and opportunities to learn or develop skills (support to start a business, for example).
• They can create strength in numbers and enable collective action or voluntary effort (improving a local area, for example, or social campaigning, or ensuring a voice in local affairs).

Understandably, the report does not dwell on what it means to have or not have a sense of influence and empowerment. But it provokes questions for me, which I'm not sure have been answered in previous work either in this project or for instance by MORI (Searching for the impact of empowerment) or in the important National Empowerment Partnership paper (which I discussed about a year ago)...

To begin with, who wants to have influence? What do we know about the sort of people for whom it does or doesn't matter to be able to influence policy?

And then I suppose I'd like to know, is wanting to have influence associated with believing you have influence? Are there survey data that tell us who says they want to have influence; and a comparable data set that tells us who thinks they have influence? Looking at that would be a start, after which we should maybe see if we can find out who actually exerts influence.

Finally, two quick reminders. Using social network analysis to help understand meanings of 'community' is not new. For instance, it's been used in the debate about the idealisation of late medieval English villages as harmonious close-knit communities. People were found to have manifold external connections, which tells us a little about our assumptions of levels of cohesion in the past - and maybe hints at unrealistic expectations in the present.

And it's worth remembering that Geoff Mulgan was writing about network poverty in relation to digital technologies as long ago as 1990, possibly earlier. Notwithstanding the pioneering work of people like Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, and the important contribution that the Connected communities project is making, we maybe should have got further by now.

 

Neighbourliness, street parties, and apartments

With street parties taking place around the country today, there will be plenty of fodder for those who fancy the contemporary political line on local community: this rhetoric continues a long tradition calling for local social relations to be close and supportive in the way that friendships are, echoing chocolate box close-knit neighbourhoods of the interpreted past.

And indeed, I've no doubt that many new connections will be made today, and many established relationships will develop from recognition to conviviality and perhaps to friendship.

Of course I don't have any problem with that, but I do wonder about the insistence that it is 'what we need' as a society, the implication that this need is self-evident, and the expectation that we should all be looking for mechanisms that help to bring it about.

As I sat uncertain in my own neighbourhood get-together this afternoon, watching the conversations, I was thinking about the temporary sense of beleagueredness of the least clubbable. Those for whom this kind of nationally-decreed sociability is at best awkward may well resent the social forces that try to make them feel guilty.

Also happening a lot during today's street parties, I'd guess, will be plenty of qualification of the assumption that we choose to live near people who are like us. You might wonder about this received wisdom if you have republican views and suddenly find out you've been living among flag-waving monarchists all these years. Or vice versa.

Perhaps the point is that, to the extent that we are able to choose, we choose to live among people whose values and behaviour we can get along with, so long as we don't have to find out too much about them. That's why we don't tend to talk about politics with people we don't know very well. Certainly the popular political ideal of a country full of strongly-bonded, unified local communities that readily achieve consensus and exploit it for the nation's greater glory just seems plain daft. No amount of royal weddings or associated street parties is going to change that.

Would the anthopologists tell us that living among people without knowing or wanting to know too much about them is normal? Normal for advanced urban societies? Or peculiarly British? Well, while you're thinking about that, here's Hugh Schofield offering the beeb's 'From our own correspondent' view on the code of neighbourliness in Parisian apartments (thanks to Paul Evans at Local democracy for pointing to this):

'I am certain that the fact French and other European societies are more socially-minded, both less free and less individualistic, is linked to the habits of apartment living.'

I've come across this view before in architectural discussions about the potential for neighbourliness in tower block living, referring to mainland European cities to suggest cultural differences based on urban housing forms. But I'm not aware of any comparative studies. Schofield claims that:

'In apartments you get to know your neighbours much more intimately than perhaps they or you would like. So you learn to keep your relationship one of formal distance, respectful but not friendly. You learn not to express your independence too readily by playing music late or having parties, or running a bath at midnight.'

If you go to the Neighbours from Hell website it's likely you'll find plenty of people who would welcome widespread adoption of this accommodating culture in the UK, because their experience is painfully different.

So how do we get our politicians to recognise that you don't invest in a sense of neighbourliness that is 'respectful without being friendly' by repeatedly asserting the romantic gospel of earnest, committed, close-knit community? It's rather like the government's over-insistence a few years ago, on meaningful social interaction, as if apparently superficial neighbourhood relations were not important. They are.

 

Loneliness, isolation and social media

JRF have published a useful and clear literature and practice review for the Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme.

It's worth reiterating a few points. As I've noted before -

• loneliness is not the same as isolation - it's an unwelcome form of isolation which has social (and by extension economic) consequences;
• loneliness is not age-related (the Gulbenkian Campaign to End Loneliness is focused on people in old age, and I fear this serves to perpetuate the social dismissal of the issue among other age groups);
• loneliness is quite separate to the sense of belonging or not belonging to a place; and
• the way we address it could be influenced by the power of social media in strengthening and sustaining local connections.

There seems to be a widespread assumption that loneliness is increasing. The Mental Health Foundation's excellent report last year suggested as much but does not seem to confirm it. I think we should be alert but sceptical.

As it happens, with a little time to do some catching up over the past few days, I've managed to read one of Keith Hampton's recent papers, on the relationship of internet and mobile phone use to network size and diversity. Among the points made with characteristic thoroughness are the following:

• reports that social isolation has increased significantly in the USA since 1985 seem to have been exaggerated and in fact isolation may have declined; and
• there is no evidence that the use of internet or mobile phones diminishes the size or diversity of people's core networks. Specific uses of social media were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity.

The Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme includes a question about new media, but JRF's approach to technology has always been tentative, not to say reluctant. It would be good if they would grab the initiative in this case, and really open up the potential here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the evidence on local online channels gives us plenty to go on.

Previously:

• Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?
• Loneliness and mental distress

 

Neighbourhood environment clearly affects neighbourliness

For a long time, I've been saying that neighbourliness can be 'designed-out', and asking why it cannot more deliberately be 'designed-in'. The literarure is gradually starting to accumulate and this question gets a little extra feeding from some interesting research recently published in Environment and behavior (subscription, online first).

The researchers used measures of the physical environment in ten neighbourhoods in Portland, Oregon, and found

'a greater probability of higher levels of neighborliness as the total number of positive physical-environment characteristics increased.'

Judiciously they used the neighbourliness index from the 2003 social capital report on the General Household Survey.

Strikingly, the results were unchanged

'after controlling for race, self-reported health, perception of safety, years of neighborhood residence, age of house, market value of house, and proportion of homeowners in neighborhood.'

The authors point out that causality is not demonstrated: conceivably, people who are disposed to be neighbourly give rise to neighbourly environments. But it seems more likely that it is the other way round, don't it?

The picture I took some years ago in an area called The Roger in Joao Pessoa, Brasil. I've chosen it because it reminds us that there are probably quite a lot of features not solely to do with the physical environment, that influence neighbourhood interactions. Like for example: low volume of cars, favourable weather, people having stuff to do outdoors, dogs, children, impromptu seating arrangements contrived in community spaces and so on.

Neighbours Day Aotearoa

I’m fascinated by the momentum for nationally coordinated, policy-sanctioned efforts to stimulate social capital. One day perhaps it will be possible to study and compare the expressed objectives and reported outcomes of some of these schemes.

Our kiwi friends had their inaugural national celebration of neighbourliness, 26-27 March. Hopefully there will be some useful evaluation material to emerge: at least they’re giving it some thought. One of the founders, Rebecca Harrington, is reported here on Scoop:

'Because the idea of Neighbours Day Aotearoa is focused on locally organised gatherings in homes, backyards, or footpaths across the country, gauging exact levels of participation was always going to be a challenge.

'The indicators we have are the visitors to the website, media coverage, participants in social media, and direct contact from individuals (which was hard to keep up with)' she says. 'A huge number of websites have helped spread the word, and we’ve discovered mentions published in all kinds of places we didn’t know about from kindergarten notices to businesses’ staff newsletters. So we think the real level of involvement is a lot higher than we can see or measure.'

The pic is from here.