Neighbourhoods

No, the tech doesn't weaken local social ties

The results of Keith Hampton's latest study, on Social isolation and new technology, have just been released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The study surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,512 adults in summer 2008. It finds that Americans are not as isolated as has previously been reported. People’s use of mobile phones and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. Internet use in general and use of social networking services in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

The researchers claim that the number of Americans who are truly isolated is at most only slightly higher than it was 30 years ago. Few people have no one with whom they can discuss important matters, and even fewer have no one who is especially significant in their lives. But they do confirm a more pronounced change, over the past two decades, in the size and diversity of people's core networks.

These paragraphs, I feel, are important:

Compared to the relatively recent past, most Americans now have fewer people with whom they discuss important matters, and the diversity of people with whom they discuss these issues has declined. There is a wealth of scholarship to suggest that the implications of this trend for individuals and for American society are starkly negative. Smaller and less diverse core networks diminish personal well-being by limiting access to social support. There are simply fewer people we can rely on in a time of need – whether it is a shoulder to cry on, to borrow a cup of sugar, or to help during a crisis.

Small and narrow core networks also impede trust and social tolerance; they limit exposure to the diverse opinions, issues, and ideas of others. If we increasingly rely and trust only a small inner circle of likeminded others, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize, accept or understand opposing points of view. A great deal of research has shown that diversity within our closest relationships – even in the age of the internet – is vital for the flow of information, for informed deliberation, and to maintain the participatory ideals of a democracy.

As we would expect, Hampton and his colleagues clear up some of the thinking about the contribution of technologies to this trend:

What is the source of this change? We don’t know. But, we believe we have ruled out one likely source: new information and communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phone. Our survey finds the opposite trend amongst internet and mobile phone users; they have larger and more diverse core networks.

What about local social networks? The researchers conclude:

Our findings also suggest that there is little to the argument that new information and communication technologies decrease participation in traditional, local social settings associated with having a diverse social network. When we look beyond people’s core network, to their full network of relations, we find that most uses of the internet and mobile phone have a positive relationship to neighborhood networks, voluntary associations, and use of public spaces. There is some evidence that very specific internet activities, such as use of social networking services (e.g, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), substitutes for some neighborhood involvement – the internet allows people to obtain traditional forms of neighborhood support from a social circle that extends outside of their neighborhood. Yet, internet users continue to give support to their neighbors, and the level of face-to-face contact with neighbors is the same for internet users as it is for non-users.

As we know, many people use the internet to reinforce local connections. The research finds that people who belong to a neighborhood discussion forum are far more involved locally than are others. (Previously: Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?)

From the press release:

“There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs,” argued Prof. Keith Hampton, the lead author of the Pew Internet report, Social Isolation and New Technology. “This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite. It turns out that those who use the internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages. People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities.”

Summary. Full report.

Informal volunteering down five per cent

The latest Citizenship Survey headlines for the first quarter of 2009 cover empowerment and participation, community cohesion, and racial and religious harassment and labour market discrimination.

Julian Dobson has reviewed them and made some helpful points as always about the political context. I just have one point to add about some of the data that particularly intersts me, concerning 'informal volunteering':

In April-June 2009, 57 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the 12 months prior to interview.

The report doesn't mention trends here, so I went back to the figures for the whole of 2008-09, and found that in that year 62 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the previous 12 months.

A five per cent decline is sharp and significant. Can it be attributed just to the effects of the recession? If so, will levels recover after economic recovery? Sorry to keep bannging on about this, but there's a scary informal care crisis looming with an ageing population, and reduced public spending ain't gonna help. There will be a growing shortfall of family carers and an imperative to promote care and support at neighbourhood level - ask David Brindle. He wrote a year ago:

Difficult questions about family and community responsibilities are being ducked and the issues risk being overshadowed by a focus on personalisation of services.

This statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem.

Neighbours Day NZ

Saturday was Neighbours Day in New Zealand, a new initiative set up by general care charity LifeWise. I hope they evaluate it.

The publicity points to an undated magazine article by Sarah Lang in the Sunday-Star Times. She quotes Paul Perry of Massey University:

While neighbourliness might be a stress to maintain, it can be more of a stress to do without. Dr Perry observes: “Help, if needed, is harder to get. The old ‘eyes-on-the-street’ idea probably has some real value so security in the home, or at least the sense of it, may be diminished. The irony is that many people rue the decline of neighbourliness and seek a greater sense of community, yet take individual actions that work against these things.”

'Be more private with yourself'

On PassiveAggressive notes, two tales that tell of neighbours communicating when they'd rather not have to.

Searching for community

Searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate

by Jeremy Brent

Published by The Policy Press, 2009. ISBN: 978 1 84742 323 8. 304 pp.  £19.99 (paperback) (£14.99 online)

Review by Alison Gilchrist

I read Jeremy Brent’s thought-provoking and insightful book with growing regret that I had not taken the opportunity to have more conversations with him during the time when we were both living and working in Bristol, as well as studying part-time for our PhDs by pursuing very similar lines of inquiry. Jeremy uses his substantial experience as a youth worker on an estate in Bristol to reflect on the nature of community and the role of the practitioner as an ‘inside-outsider’ working to support community aspirations and deal with troubles as they arise. From our different perspectives we came to very similar conclusions: that communities are elusive, complex and riven with divisions and differences, which makes  the job of the practitioner difficult, rewarding and full of dilemmas. In Jeremy’s case, his role in running a youth centre focused on the energy, creativity and rebelliousness of young people, and he clearly responded with great empathy and awareness of the wider social and economic context.

He is critical of romantic, homogeneous notions of community, and talks knowledgeably about the complex dynamics of community politics and passions. Like me, he is interested in the networks of relationships that form the ecology of local life and at one point he writes: “the more connections, the more exciting the territory” (p145). Even at its most challenging, Jeremy clearly relished his long-term ‘inside-outsider’ role, illustrating this through a bricolage of anecdote and diary notes, that describe critical episodes and accounts of his work to support different community initiatives. 

The book is based on his PhD thesis and as such can be heavy-going in places, with a surfeit of academic terms and theory mainly drawn from post-modernist philosophers. Nevertheless he uses these ideas effectively to analyse his experience. He is thus able to contest and compare images of the estate, to explore the dispersed nature of power, and to consider his own mixed feelings and motivations.

The book makes a strong argument, backed up by powerful evidence, for ‘traditional’ community-based youth work, asserting quite rightly in my view, that “targets are not necessary for outcomes” (p266). I particularly valued his description of the youth and community worker as a ‘kink in the chain of command’ between those who fund and manage the work, and his explanation of the role of ‘coaxer’ in encouraging the young people to expand their horizons and overcome the derogatory reputations they gave grown up with. He writes convincingly about the strain of working in situations where divergent needs and values pull in different directions. Jeremy’s identity and accountability as a youth worker shifts subtly depending on circumstances, but his commitment to the young people and the people of Southmead is clear throughout. His untimely death in 2006 has been a loss to us all.

Searching for community is a valuable addition to the literature on ‘community’. It successfully combines grounded experience with academic, reflective analysis. I strongly recommend it to all students and practitioners of youth and community work.

 

Alison Gilchrist is the author of The well-connected community: a networking approach to community development.

Respect soundbite (updated)

The other day the Evening Standard asked me for some words on the subject of respect, in the light of the Pilkington case and the prime minister's reassertion of some kind of policy on anti-social behaviour.

I've no idea what was published but having put scarce brainpower into the exercise, I thought I'd leave the words here.

The government has done a great deal to improve the living environments of many people on low incomes, and that should be applauded. But the relentless association of anti-social behaviour with ‘problem estates’ is distasteful. It’s not hard to point to incivilities and ASB among the privileged and professional classes.

The Pilkington case seems to be about local enforcement of existing measures, so people are right to be suspicious that it is being used to prompt policy.

I suspect that the neighbours of the Pilkingtons may feel they might have provided support and perhaps intervened, if they were more connected to one another and believed that official support was there to call on. So why do so many people not feel that they can call on their neighbours in time of need?

We hear all the assertions about parenting contracts and Drinking Banning Orders and interventions at the family level, but in many neighbourhoods there is very little interaction among residents. We occupy our cars more and our neighbourhoods less. Children can’t play in the street within site of neighbours who know them and know their parents. We are losing our local shops and our pavements are covered in cars.

The Respect agenda was based on shaming, but we know that doesn’t work. Residents need to feel empowered to take action collectively, confident that official powers will back them up. Schemes are needed – seeded at local level - that promote informal contact and interaction between all residents in an area.

Footnote - catching up with yesterday's Thought for the day on R4 (Presenter: Rhidian Brook, Subject: 'We have a responsibility to our neighbours') reminded me that about a year ago I wrote to the programme suggesting that neighbourliness might be an important theme and would they like an offering? I didn't mention religion, and I didn't get a reply.

Knowledge, local

Two young women and a buggy. As I passed I overheard, 'I didn't know. It's the first baby I've had.' Thinks, that's an unusual way of putting it.

As a foster carer I find myself reflecting more than I might otherwise on the access that young parents have to knowledge about parenting. We tend to assume that in the murky mythical past of close-knit local communities, packed with chirpy extended families, the concentrated wisdom of handling babies and rearing children was constantly available. Indeed, it may have been unavoidable, young mothers were bombarded with it. What to do if this or that happens - someone would tell you, and you'd be ostracised if you didn't take the advice.

Now here's the modern mum saying, 'I didn't know'. What should she know, how should she know it? Has the geographical distribution of families and the perceived decline of neighbourhood networks stifled the flow of information for new parents?

Is it right in any case to think of the neighbourhood as a source of knowledge about child-rearing? Surely yes, we should be depending less on formal services shouldn't we, and more on the self-regenerating social capital of local informal networks? So we want to be able to take advice from those around us with experience to share.

Well, just to say, in recent weeks, in various conversations with local matrons with a bairn at hand, on four occasions I've been given advice or told things that were simply wrong, things that I as a fifty-something bloke knew to be wrong. Like, no, this one is not teething (at three months?? Stroll on). I must admit, my confidence in the quality of informal local information has taken a battering.

Meet the EMBYs

Over on Planning blog, Michael Donnelly offers the remarkable tale of a few residents in the village of Highworth, near Swindon, who attempted to capture some public land, annexing part of the village green for their gardens. There's neighbourhood action for you.

The seven homeowners on Barra Close then, unbelievably, applied for retrospective planning permission to change the land use from open space to domestic gardens.

It would be fascinating to know quite what they thought they could get away with. I can just about visualise their covert evening meetings around a couple of bottles of Chardonnay, encouraging one another in their pioneering role as EMBYs (Extending My Back Yard), the settler mentality determined to protect themselves from the possibility that, er, young people might climb trees near their homes.

It would also be interesting to understand what they thought relations with others in the village would be like after the planning committee's decision, whichever way that went. And it would be interesting to know what other residents in Barra Close think about their neighbours' attitudes.

The committee report says that several letters were received by way of protest, along with a petition signed by 167 residents - which is probably not a bad tally.

The report is enlightening, with several quoted comments suggesting that some bare-faced misrepresentation was indulged in. For example:

'There are contradictions in the support information from the applicants, they state that children are continually climbing in the trees and bushes and then state that "apart from a few children playing on the land in summer months, it is rarely used".'

The application was rejected on the grounds that

'Substantial evidence has been put forward to demonstrate that the area is well used as recreational open space and makes a significant and valuable contribution to the recreational needs of the local population.'

33% believe people would not pull together to improve neighbourhood

The Citizenship Survey generates a lot of useful data that is helpfully repackaged by CLG. A topic report on community cohesion and social networks, from the 2007-08 survey, has been published today. It covers views of the immediate neighbourhood, views of the local area, and fear of crime and anti-social behaviour. The main headline is that 82 per cent agreed that their local area was a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together.

Another finding claims that

'Most people (68%) agreed that people in their neighbourhood would pull together to improve it.'

That doesn't sound too high to me, so I checked the tables, which confirm that 33% 'tend to disagree' or 'definitely disagree'. There's an interesting 14 per cent discrepency with the headline cohesion figure, presumably mostly comprising people who think that those from different backgrounds get on well together in their neighbourhood as things are, but wouldn't be bothered to act collectively to bring about change.

Other findings -

• Pakistani (85%), Indian (80%) and Black Caribbean (79%) people were more likely than White (75%) people to feel a strong sense of belonging to the neighbourhood.

• Meanwhile, Chinese (50%) people were less likely than White (75%) people to strongly belong.

• Meaningful interaction with people from different backgrounds was highest among those aged 16 to 24 years (93%) and lowest amongst those aged 75 or over (52%).

• People with no religion (86%) were more likely than those with a religion (78%) to have regular meaningful interactions with people from different backgrounds.

In the section about 'social networks', as far as I can see all the questions are about friends, which suggests a rather limited interpretation of social networks. I know you gotta start somewhere, but the risk with these kinds of authoritative statistics is that people start quoting them all over the place as gospel. 'Friendship networks' might have been a better heading.

Good legislation makes good neighbours?

Planning Resource announces a Scottish government consultation about hedge disputes, in an article by Matt Scotland (who else?).

The consultation follows the efforts of a campaign group called Scothedge, which offers this report on a recent (July 2009) survey of its members.

Question 1. Approach to the Hedge Owner.
All respondents have asked the hedge owner to sort the problem.

Question 2. Response from the Hedge Owner

• Helpful            5%

• Unhelpful        55%

• Hostile            38%

Comment. The helpful responses came from cases where the problem was overcome by the arrival of new neighbours. 55% of respondents could take their cases no further because the hedge/tree owner would not do anything. A serious 38% were hostile to any approach, resorting to verbal and even physical abuse sometimes requiring police intervention. This is the Antisocial Behaviour dimension and it occurs because it can.

Question 9.  Do you still speak to your neighbour?
40% of respondents remain able to speak to their neighbours whilst in dispute. 60% find speaking to their neighbours both unproductive and unpleasant. Understandably they withdraw from making any further attempt.

The report blames the absence of appropriate legislation in Scotland, claiming that 'there is no vehicle for “arms length” resolution which would dilute the personality and vested interests of the protagonists.'

The expectation is that if there is legislation, it will have a fairly direct impact on neighbourly relations, in that a hostile response by a neighbour to a representation about a tree or hedge could quickly be referred to a council with all parties aware of the available powers. Would legislation eradicate much of the hostility and contribute to improved neighbourly relations?

The classic source here is a book called Order without law, by Robert Ellickson. Ellickson explored the preference among rural neighbours for informal procedures and customs rather than legal measures to govern minor irritations such as cattle-trespass or boundary-fence disputes. I suspect this points to subtle differences in urban areas where local norms and informal interactions are not well-established but other compensating social relations are readily available.

Neighbourliness: decline and constraints

To a community centre in north London, as the guest of West Euston Time Bank Intergenerational Poetry Project, no less, for a talk about neighbourliness. Everybody has something to say about the subject and there was plenty of discussion.

People thought there has been a decline in neighbourliness, but when we talked about possible causes no-one mentioned cars. One explanation offered was that in an inner-city neighbourhood not so many people have them. For apartment-dwellers, factors like building design, local trade and parks were felt to be more influential in promoting or constraining sociability. Nobody mentioned television as a possible cause of decline either.

There was plenty of talk about being reluctant to open the door to people. For instance someone said when she's home all day, there would be at least ten commercial callers, with or without leaflets, trying to sell or con her something. There's no point in her neighbours just knocking to see how she is or to borrow something, cos she ain't gonna answer. Such levels of pressure are invasive and cause people to adjust their conditons of privacy, thereby impacting on neighbourliness.

Several people mentioned falling over in the street, and someone always comes and helps you, although it was suggested that a man who fell without a stick might be treated circumspectly. It does depend on there being pedestrians around though: people in cars don't tend to stop.

By this time our discussion had broadened naturally into general local sociability and civility - 'neighbouring plus', you might call it. The group felt that use of mobile phones had a definite negative effect, and that cultural diversity presented problems, particularly around use of English.

But someone referred with delight to the practice of spending time gardening out front (though it doesn't apply to most apartment-dwellers), because people stop and talk to you as they pass. Which reminded me of this mention of growing potatoes in the front garden.

Whatever you do, I’ll know about it

Proboscis have done some lovely stuff in their Sutton Grapevine project, capturing stories and giving people the opportunity to explore and illuminate issues for themselves.

I liked this one - you live in a village, so watch what you do... I'll know about it.

Juxtaprose 4

'Lack of social networks among people with intellectual disabilities is perhaps a form of exclusion far more important than scattered cases of direct community opposition.' (1).

'Children played with their brothers, sisters, cousins and friends and with other children in their neighbourhood. The majority of children in the group with learning difficulties stated that they played with their parents or siblings. Only a small number of these children claimed that they played with friends or neighbours. This may suggest that children with learning difficulties encounter some social barriers in their play experiences, as the group we spoke to seemed to spend less of their time playing with peers...' (2).

Clubs and informal play

Kids go to organised sessions, kids play out together or hang out, kids stay home. What kind of mix works best? It's not easy trying to understand the social impact of perceived imbalances in a risk-averse, car-oriented, achievement-driven society, but given the power of those forces you'd expect the emphasis to be more on structure and less on informality.

Every year the National Children's Bureau publishes research for Playday (which is tomorrow) and the latest looks at 'making time'. Their survey found that nearly half of adults (47%), think children should go to fewer extra-curricular activities. The focus groups with children and young people offer insights into the recognised value of organised activities, and the extent to which they absorb time from informal play.

'It seemed that some of these children perceived clubs as something they ‘ought to do’, regardless of what they felt like doing with their spare time. Informal play alone or with peers was viewed as having less of a purpose than these organised activities, other than for their own enjoyment.'

'A significant number of children in the study lacked any control over which activities they attended and when they went to them, sometimes eliminating the sense of fun. All of the children favoured a mixture of informal play and organised activities, but for many children there seemed to be an imbalance and children’s time for play was often taken over with structured events.'

The report also contains observations on the reactions of adults to the informal presence of young people outdoors:

'Meeting together, for example on the streets, near shops or in parks, often led to complaints and harassment from adults, including neighbours and local community members. Amongst all of the older children interviewed, those from Sudan were the only group to discuss their experiences of being reported to the police when they met with their friends on the streets and in the parks. Most of the older children thought this was because of their age rather than their ethnicity, although one child reported encountering racism.'

'If we are going on the street, going to the park, sitting there, a lot of people, they will ring the police for no reason and the police would come up to us and say, “Go away” when we haven’t done anything. That happens all the time.’

Playday research page.

Because it’s freedom: children’s views on their time to play.
Haki Kapasi and Josie Gleave, London: NCB, 2009.

Friends and screens

Just in case there's a quiet period newswise, journalists know how to get religious leaders to say provocative things to kick off debates. So the catholic archbishop of Westminster makes comments about friendship and about social networking sites, risking a martyrdom of jokes from atheists about having imaginary friends, and from the connected about confessions and screens.

Zapping via Google (mum, look at me) I find some of his words joyfully misinterpreted, and various commentators following the problematic tendency to generalise very broadly about young people when the issues are quite subtle, fluid and important. But still, it's not too impressive if a prominent religious figure has only just detected a 'rise in individualism'. Does news not travel quickly in Westminster?

Nonetheless I'm interested in, and I welcome, the way the archbish touched upon some themes that have bothered me lately in talking to young people: the idea of loyalty, the question of 'transient' relationships (not sure about his phrase 'impoverished friendships'), and the part played in this by the dominance of consumption as a way of life.

Not all young people struggle with notions of loyalty - to brands, media, friends, football teams or whatever - but I wouldn't be surprised if there is an issue here that we should be exploring. Many youngsters don't see much loyalty around them - their families change, their teachers change, their environments change, their expectations get changed for them. Society doesn't seem to expect any of us to stick with anything.

I too have wondered out loud recently about shallow relationships - I'm not really qualified to call this one either, and I certainly wouldn't pin it to social media; but I don't want to be ignoring the issue when I've found that it resonated with teachers I've spoken to.

And if we look back at a few decades of hyper-consumption, spectacularisation of culture and systematic deconstruction of what is 'public', would we really be surprised to find a thread running through and connecting these trends?

It's not right to dump the blame or responsibility for any of these on young people. It would have been helpful if the archbeak had recognised the contribution of his and my generation, and of politicians and the media, to the erosion of loyalty, the cheapening of relationships and the wretched diminution of the public realm.

More importantly perhaps, instead of pontificating (is that the right word?) about bullying uses of Bebo he might better have used his ability to get an audience, by calling for a forum in which young people themselves reflect upon the extent to which the communications media they use is related to the fact that some feel excluded, become depressed, and commit suicide.

I think it would also help more if we spend some time understanding whether there is some kind of widening divide between those young people who have had the chance to explore their own potential and social relations, and those who haven't. And it may be worth referring back to a piece JRF published a while ago which rightly stressed both how local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour; and the need for young people to be aware of and access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood. This does not justify continued investment in either a 'backseat generation,' screen-dominated upbringings or school catchment policies that work against the value of local connections.

Oh and finally could people please stop talking about online systems as if they exist in a vacuum?

Previously: Kids these days

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect.

 

Local events and community cohesion

I've been sifting the material I gathered from participants at the Wellcome community picnic last month. Report to follow. With the Big Lunch taking place this weekend, here's one remark which impressed me:

"For whatever reason, people don’t tend to be very engaged. There are very few activities that bring people together from different backgrounds and you’ll find people from similar backgrounds tend to stay within those social groupings. So this kind of event is fantastic because what it does, it brings people out into a very safe place where they can engage with other people who they wouldn’t necessarily normally associate with or have much connection to, and I think today’s been really, really successful. I was surprised, there’s a lot more people than I thought would come."

Do we need people asking if we need community?

At the time of its construction in the 1960s the chief architect of Milton Keynes described Melvin Webber, proponent of the notion of 'community without propinquity', as the father of the city. Hurrah, they cried.

Subsequent experience there and in similar places suggests that community without propinquity is quite different to, and does not compensate for local community. It's also apparent that many people really struggle without local support to the point where they may need help reinventing 'community' because policies imposed on them have stifled it.

The RSA has an event in London next Tuesday (fully booked) asking 'Do people need community anymore?' I'm wondering if Liam Byrne might offer some insights into whether or not government policy will finally pick up on the importance of informal care. Byrne is Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and presumably has some awareness of the economic implications of not recognising the importance of local informal support.

Over on the Connected Communities blog, Steve Broome invites questions for the speakers, so this is what I sent:

Supportive neighbourliness is still widely practised. Recent work in the UK and Netherlands suggests that the practice of local community support is still strong but more individualised than in the past. Fewer people are doing more of society’s local social work.

Unfortunately informal care is crassly overlooked in policy. In a post-welfare society we can’t afford for this to continue. The reluctance to ask for support appears to be critical. So what policies would the speakers put forward that would stimulate informal support and care at neighbourhood level?

Promoting neighbourliness: communi-tea time in Knowsley

We've no way of knowing if neighbourliness has declined, although I think it's what we'd expect when we consider changes in the conditions under which it appears to thrive. But the essence of neighbouring is informality: and how do you promote that and nurture it in a bureaucratised public sector?

It's a question that crops up here occasionally - echoing a chapter I wrote about 'formalising the informal' in policy here, in turn echoing a question posed most clearly by Philip Abrams writing about neighbourhood care some years ago:

'How does one organise to promote lack of organisation?'

Not impressed? Well maybe the use of the word 'central' in the following quote, from Barbara Misztal's book on informality, will persuade you:

'the fine-tuning of informality and formality is central to the creation of social trust.'

Good neighbour schemes of various kinds have been tried, tweaked and tested over the years. Generally, I suspect they've had more success than they've been credited with, especially among housing associations. Unlike Neighbourhood Watch, as far as I'm aware good neighbour schemes have no central resource, co-ordination or funding. Neighbourhood Watch works on the basis of distrust: perhaps that tells us something about the policy-orientation.

Now here's an approach that attempts the kind of light-touch nudging of behaviour that we can expect will characterise much social policy from now on: all smiles please for Knowsley Council's playful campaign to stimulate local social interaction, including a mock news broadcast about a tea shortage threatening community spirit across the borough.

The message, says Adam Patterson on the New Start blog, is

'get together with your neighbours, share a cup of tea, get to know each other and help create a friendlier community.'

 

Place survey: the headlines

Headline results from the 2008 Place Survey, which reflects and contributes to local priorities under local area agreements in England, have been published today.

• 59 per cent of the population felt they belong to their immediate neighbourhood

• 76 per cent felt that people from different backgrounds got on well together in their local area

• 29 per cent felt they could influence decisions in their local area

• 30 per cent feel that in their local area parents take enough responsibility for the behaviour of their children

• 31 per cent felt that there were problems with people in their local area not treating one another with respect and consideration (37.5% in London).

Links to various formats here.

How many religious people does it take to change a light sensor?

There are so many takes on this story I don't know which to go for.

'Gordon and Dena Coleman said they cannot leave or enter their Bournemouth flat on the Sabbath because the hallway sensors automatically switch on lights.'

These dear folk live elsewhere, this is their holiday flat we're talking about, but of course it's important to them. As is their religious code.

The light sensors were installed to save money and energy 'but the couple felt they breached their religious rules'.

The BBC report says that:

Other residents in the block of 35 flats, who could end up having to pay legal costs, are upset.

Some other reflections here.

[This post has been sligthtly edited following feedback. Enjoy].

Neighbouring in inner-city apartments

Take a relatively young, diverse and wealthy population of 'small-sized, non-familial households' in a new apartment development in a booming European capital: what level of neighbouring would you expect?

I don't think you'd be surprised if it was well below the kind of average I've been referring to lately.

Peter Howley has just published a study of neighbouring in apartment units in inner-city Dublin, with a very welcome article in Irish geography (subscription required). He found that only 13 per cent felt that neighbours 'look out for' each other. Well, 77 per cent feel that it is likely or very likely they will move residence in the next five years, so maybe they won't invest much and it's not surprising that 22 per cent 'never' speak to their neighbours.

Howley rightly asks questions about the social impact of promoting high-density housing. But there are a few other things to take into consideration. First, previous research (Churchman and Ginsberg in Israel for instance) has shown that some people regard it as an advantage of certain kinds of high-density housing that they can avoid contact with others. Churchman and Ginsberg looked at moderately 'high-rise' blocks and found that those who wished to were able to develop active social ties with fellow-residents.

Secondly, there is an established reputation (although I'm not aware of any research) for the balance of sociability and privacy in city centre apartments in central European cities. A long-standing cultural tradition with less sense of transience can make a lot of difference.

Thirdly, neighbouring does not always take off in new developments - presumably it depends mostly on household structure, levels of employment, and housing type. Howley reports that in his sample,

29, 31 and 29% respectively of households surveyed consist of either a single person living alone, a couple without children or non-family households

- not exactly propitious.

There's one curiosity among Howley's findings, which might justify further attention:

residents who are from an ethnic or cultural background other than Irish are much more likely to interact with their neighbours than their Irish counterparts.

The usual explanations for higher levels of prosocial behaviour and participation among minority groups are about compensating for having more complex social and economic problems, and being less likely to have informal connections to power and influence.

But it doesn't sound like that's the explanation here, and in light of the national stereotype of Irish garrulousness the finding stands out.

My last point is that the housing developments described by Howley are probably crying out for an experiment in neighbourhood online networks. If a network had been in place at the outset, when people were getting the teething problems with their properties sorted, it might have created the platform for some consistent and supportive neighbouring. Sounds like a job for folk like Neighbo.

 

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

BBC R4's iPM blog has published survey results for the question:

Do you know any of your immediate neighbours, in the sense of something more than exchanging 'Good morning' or 'Good afternoon' for example?

Seventy-seven per cent of respondents say they do, which is low compared with similar questions in other surveys. Not clear how people interpret 'immediate'.

Last year a survey for BBC Breakfast asked:

How many people, if any, have you said hello to in the street where you live, in the past 7 days?

Just 11 per cent responded 'none' with 3 per cent 'don't knows'.

The key statistic in this new data is probably the fact that just 57% of those who live in a flat or apartment answered yes. Of those who live in a flat or apartment in a city centre, 47% said they did not know their immediate neighbours.

Women are slightly more likely to know their neighbours; those in socio-economic classes DE slightly less. (Forty-five per cent of DEs in this sample are over 65). Also those in south east England are slightly less likely to know their neighbours. As we might expect, familiarity with neighbours peaks at around age 60.

More comparative thoughts yer. Quite a few comments yer.

It takes a village

I've always been suspicious of bald calls for heavy cash investment in areas as the solution to social problems, and I've seen enough of some heavily-funded local projects to know how money can generate new unwanted difficulties and tensions. We need to know more, in particular, about low-income neighbourhoods that function well because levels of interaction are relatively high.

The other day my attention was drawn to some research on prosocial behaviour, reported by David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, in Evolution and human behavior (subscription required).

The article describes a study of students in a small city in New York state, and finds that prosocial (or 'altruistic') behaviour correlates strongly with the level of self-reported social support at local level. That support is evidenced in terms of family, school, neighbourhood, religion, and extra-curricular activities. Further, the researchers note that

'it appears to require social support from multiple sources... It really does take a village to raise a highly prosocial child.'

The untrained and untamed anthropologist in me is revelling in the way the authors combine evolutionary, economic and social capital theories to seek to explain why social co-operation can succeed as an evolutionary strategy and not be subverted from within by individual selfishness.

It's interesting that the neighbourhood level of income does not seem to predict prosocial behaviour and indeed may be a negative indicator:

'the most prosocial students live in neighborhoods that are high in quality and low in median income - perhaps because, in the absence of financial capital, they need to rely more on social capital in their everyday lives.'

This could be a seminal research finding. Does it mean that policy should be focusing more on local social relations rather than financial investment and the generation of wealth?

The study is part of the Binghamton Neighborhood Project. More here.

 

Do you know your neighbours?

The Radio 4 PM Blog asks: "do you know any of your immediate neighbours in the sense of something more than exchanging good morning or good afternoon for example?"

Some of the numerous comments are quite entertaining. My own take has long been that recognition is more important than 'knowing well'.

Previously:

Five per cent have no contact with neighbours.

On superficial neighbourhood relations.

Busyness

Yesterday to a really buzzy conference on community development organised by Age Concern Oxfordshire, where I had the privilege of speaking alongside CDX's Amanda Greenwood. I talked about neighbouring and older people, and different understandings of 'enfolding community'.

One of the issues I've been pondering but didn't have time to cover is people's varied relative 'busyness', simply having or not having time to interact informally in the neighbourhood. It's an issue that scalds my conscience from time to time when I'm rushing to the station and can only burble a greeting to a neighbour because I've not been sufficiently organised to leave home a little earlier.

But I got plenty of insights yesterday into how older people can experience the contrast between (for many) their own sense of becalmed marginalisation and the relentless purposefulness of others' mobility, and how this affects their occupation of neighbourhood.

With this in mind, I sat on the train on the way home flicking through a marvellous report into a participative research project called Get the picture: older people's day to day lives in rural west Oxfordshire 2004-2007, written by Margaret Godel of Oxford Brookes University. And I came across this quote from one of the participants:

'One issue that stood out for me is how many hours in the day there are to fill if you are alone. One remark that came up a few times was how much time people spend looking out of the window. It's good to be able to do this but sad too that this is all there is.'

Another nuance to be taken into account in the consideration of 'curtain-twitching' or 'eyes on the street'.

Love where you live

Don't knock it. BBC Radio 2 offers Love Where You Live all next week, including Jeremy Vine exploring local social themes as follows:

On Monday, BBC Home Editor Mark Easton reveals the UK's friendliest town, while on Tuesday Jeremy talks to listeners about neighbourhood disputes.

On Wednesday, we ask; Do blocks of flats have a sense of community? While on Thursday, Jeremy wonders if every community should have a youth club.

And on Friday, Jeremy asks whether you should be personally responsible for the pavement outside your house.

There's even a quiz, and promotion of street parties on Monday 25 May:

Radio 2 is going to be the soundtrack to accompany your party so make sure you’ve thought about a radio and speakers. But on the day, make sure the volume is not up too loud.

Meanwhile the Big Lunch national street party day (19 July) is promoted here ("turning our streets into neighbourhoods - priceless") and immediately generated such classic responses as this:

There are some prostitutes living on my street. I dont want to meet them.

one word: Vomit

Who likes there neighbors - no-one that's who.

I'm not spending my bloody birthday having lunch with my pikey neighbours.

Thanks to Chris Gittins of Streets Alive for the headsup.

Mixed neighbourhoods: mixed views

Here's a pensive post from Diane Dyson about segregation and gentrification, in which she finds herself 'awfulizing' about three problems - 'the economic, the racial, the homogenization', concluding that the answer is to plan purposefully for mixed neighbourhoods:

Left to wider economic forces, the poor (and, by corollary, people of colour), are continually displaced.

Which reminds me, last week I was working with some long-time residents of Milton Keynes, famously fascinating as a new town, and picked up these remarks:

‘They tried to force people into getting on together and of course it didn’t work.’

‘You had neighbours who you wouldn’t mix with if you were dying. It was theory-led, they had this theory that everyone had to mix together and it wasn’t going to work.’

Previously:
Social mix and attachment
Mixed tenure and mixed income neighbourhoods

Lifetime neighbourhoods in recession: what about people?

A couple weeks ago I was at a debate organised by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) on the lifetime neighbourhoods agenda in the current economic climate. ILC have published a collection of essays to reassert the importance of this agenda, which is based on what in my view was one of the best government policy papers of recent years, written by Ed Harding.

The debate covered all the hardware stuff thoroughly - all the issues around building, planning, mixed use, transport connections and so on. Discussants understandably put a lot of effort into emphasising the need to keep a focus on quality environments. The mantra of 'the flight to quality' was served up for the converted to repeat, to strengthen our determination not to let present underfunding give rise to shoddy construction and uninhabitable townscapes in the future. Quite right too.

But we badly needed a perspective on local social relations to make these prospects of lifetime neighbourhoods seem worth realising. Understanding how to make mixed use neighbourhoods function in an ageing and diversifying society is already challenging us desperately. We don't invest properly in intergenerational work or community development, while continuing to plan new settlements apparently without thought for local amenities Will lifetime neighbourhoods be another agenda which gets stripped down simply to those things the accountants know how to measure? - bricks, heating, journeys...?

Well, maybe not. Absent on the day but present in the published volume, up pops JRF's John Low with a solid essay which I strongly recommend. He reminds us that there are good reasons to expect that deprived neighbourhoods will decline faster than more affluent ones and that 'housing solutions alone will not solve the multiple problems that beset our worst neighbourhoods'.

Of course financial cuts are threatened all over the public, voluntary and community sectors. But here, with my emphasis added, are three 'rays of hope' offered by John Low:

• Community empowerment has risen steadily up the agenda of all political parties, including a plethora of initiatives from the current administration in England. Especially in local authorities that have taken this seriously, good practice is reasonably well embedded and may prove harder to cut. Also, as suggested above, localised and affordable neighbourhood management approaches seem very much the best bet for ‘recession proofing’ deprived areas; and such initiatives need underpinning with good community work.

• Over the last 10-15 years independent voluntary and community sector bodies have increased their national profile and collective voice. This too may help to act as a brake on cuts. We should also not forget that many development trusts, churches, other faith groups, councils for voluntary service and schools are playing key roles in supporting neighbourhoods. Everything possible should be done in the present climate to sustain their work.

• Finally, although institutions are often criticised as having poor memories, the serious social disorders that broke out in the 80’s and 90’s in a number of very deprived areas will not have been forgotten. Nobody will want a repeat of these, and his fear could act as a strong disincentive to paring down services and funds, in such neighbourhoods, to the very bone: and as an encouragement, on the contrary, to retaining a range of low level but effective services in these areas.

Coming round

This blog was in a coma for five days - medical report from Typepad still awaited - so for once I will succumb to the temptation just to offer quick links to some good stuff going on.

What works in enabling cross-community interactions? Perspectives on good policy and practice. This is a paper by Andrew Orton for CLG as part of their work on meaningful interaction. It matters because it's about small-scale community activity and informal connections gradually getting some of the policy attention that is needed.

Dancing with Down syndrome - Hildy Gottlieb links to a striking video to remind us to keep pushing back at the Culture of Can’t.

The Eden Project has launched (more quietly than expected; one suspects there is some tense politics in the background) The Big Lunch - street parties everywhere on 19 July.

'The day after the Big Lunch, people will walk down their street and know someone in most windows.'

Paul Evans shows there's even benefit in a human being of the right calibre travelling to Miami, by coming back with knowledge about Mixed ink, which looks like a sweet way of stimulating civic involvement.

Helen Milner and colleagues have set up a blog on digital engagement (which I applaud) with an invitation to write yet another manifesto (which I don't). Manifestos (manifesti?) have a role, but it's usually to do with the process of structuring action around pricniples and surely we've come further than that. Maybe we should (a) dig out the three or four previous manifesto attempts in this country and be familiar with them, together with the recommendations of the shelf-and-a-half or reports that got generated (unh, mea culpa); and (b) assess what impact they had.

Julian Dobson quite rightly calls for more thought about the over-excited bashing of public sector language ('jargon'). The Local Government Association have got all lathered on this; or rather, I suspect, in New Labour style they are following some assumptions of popular media fancy. Reminded me of my wee challenge to the Plain English Mafia.

DIY and the future of care

This morning the BBC offered us the future of car care - a garage in Norfolk where space can be hired out so that car owners can modify or service their own vehicles.

"They will save money, but they can also come and learn. The more you get into it, the more adventurous you'll become," said entrepreneur Nathan Devlin. "If you need me to help out, I charge £20 per hour."

(I'm old enough to remember, if my dad pulled into a garage to fill up with petrol, a bloke in overalls came out and served him. The man would unscrew the chrome cap from the tank using a clean cloth, then reach across purposefully for the pump nozzle. 'Service stations' they were called. It even happened to me in my early motorcycling days).

This afternoon I heard about a system in Kuwait where patients in long-term care are encouraged to become ‘expert’ in their own conditions and to support other sufferers with the same condition. Certain sources of established expertise, whch may or may not include the internet, are presumably there if needed.

Nothing surprising here really - it's the natural trajectory for the outsourcing, co-production and responsibilisation of us citizens, for too long deskilled in servicing our own bodies and societies. And no more than we deserve, I'm sure.

I'd just like to note that servicing your car in Nathan's garage, or working with other sufferers to understand the details of your illness, is likely to provide rich opportunities for social interaction - further eroding the social separateness of expert and consumer, reasserting a connection between the practice of everyday life and its direction. Which reminds me: when Monty Don remarked that

"All politicians should have an allotment, and if they don't keep it up properly they should lose their jobs"

it's the same necessary nagging at the habits of the old order.

What bothers me is that although I'm starting to come across more examples of care initiatives that revive informal social relations as a natural spin-off, few make reference to this in their descriptions or write-ups. Because we've been conditioned to not even recognise it, far less value it. That's what the quiet revolution is about, that's beginning to stir.

Clean up your trash

Nice example of neighbour 'blackmail' posted by Kit Hodge over on the Neighbors Project blog. Even if they haven't thought about the misuse of capital letters, somebody's gone to a lot of trouble: that's a large poster, they don't want you to miss it.

The naming and shaming game

Back in January I reflected at some length on the government's plans to 'name and shame' offenders who have been convicted in local courts.

Patrick Wintour, in a measured article, reports in today's Guardian that Ministers are looking at 'controversial plans' to distribute leaflets in neighbourhoods as part of this inititiative. I'm afraid it does suggest a degree of political desperation.

We (and the government, how could I forget them) should note in particular the huge and staring-in-the-face-obvious potential for these measures to amplify local social divisions, rather than stimulate cohesion.

I'm not sure if I can put it more simply than this: they won't work. And apart from anything else, the plans are a wretchedly unthinking dismissal of the professionalism and commitment of probation workers who do so much to help offenders recover and re-establish themselves. 

Something else - Wintour notes:

'Ministers recognise that the demise of local court reporting, due to cuts in local media journalism, has ended one source of communicating the effectiveness of the courts.'

Uh, have they heard of neighbourhood online networks? Happily, communication in neighbourhoods does not necessarily stop just because the economics of one medium becomes prohibitive.

People still have ways of finding things out, and with systems like Harringay Online (I know, I've mentioned it before, but it continues to amaze me) residents communicate more and more. Perhaps 'communicating the effectiveness of the courts' could be one of several reasons why government should invest in local online nets. Please.

Community breaks out

Thanks to Ben Taylor of Sector Projects for these thoughts on the social impact of heavy weather (and the pic):

...as the buses were suspended; as well as panic-buying in the supermarket and lots of people working in the coffee shop on the corner of Queenstown Road and Lavender Hill, I thought you'd be pleased to hear reports that community was breaking out in my part of London yesterday alongside the breakdown of infrastructure.

I've seldom ever seen kids playing in our (dead-end, mostly pedestrian) estate, people were helping up little old ladies who slipped and buying them a cup of tea, and I spoke to three of my neighbours which was quite a shock for the system. OK, maybe it wasn't all street parties and sharing of resources, but it just underlines the fact that in extremis, we all tend to revert somewhat to community ideals!

Informal influences on local social capital

I love these little coincidences. This afternoon I was sitting in the final plenary at an international conference on community cohesion run by the British Council and iCoCo in Manchester. Just before Runnymede Trust director Rob Berkeley stood up to speak, an email from Communities and Local Government plopped into my mailbox offering figures released from the 2008-09 Citizenship Survey:

'76 per cent of people feel that they strongly belong to their neighbourhood with 81 per cent of people satisfied with their local area as a place to live.'

Presumably unaware of this news, although quite possibly already informed about some of the survey findings, Rob reflected quietly on the need to bring some refinement to the evaluation and measurement of cohesion and belonging:

'I live in south London. If my neighbours don't break down the door, I think we're getting on pretty well. In a rural village, if someone doesn't turn up to the fete, their neighbours might think relations have completely broken down. We do need to think about the different ways people think about belonging.'

This echoes a point I made in my own presentation yesterday, consolidating a strong sub-theme of the conference, which was best expressed in a comment by Haroon Saad, director of QeC-Eran (Quartiers en Crise). First, in his presentation, he observed that:

'Intercultural dialogue is taking place on Facebook' (I think he meant social media in general) 'and what's significant is that it's dissociated from institutions.'

Then in a discussion about how agencies were still trying to deal with tensions between local factions in Northern Ireland, Haroon said:

'What organisations are doing pales into insignificance compared with what's going on in the informal sector.'

And that's it: sooner or later policy makers and cohesion practitioners are going to have to get to grips with informal social relations, because everything else we do is not enough. Ciara Wells, deputy director of CLG's Communities and Faiths Division, spoke on Wednesday about the ongoing work on meaningful interaction. Substituting for one of her colleagues, I followed it up with some points about neighbourliness, home zones and neighbourhood online networks, contrasted with reflections on the slightly more organised, formal occasions of street parties and living library.

Devices like steet parties and living library justifiably generate a lot of interest, because they legitimise conversations that otherwise probably would not take place. But ultimately they're artificially constructed occasions, and however transformational the experiences they stimulate, it's hard to see how they can trump all the informal influences on local social capital.

I very much welcome CLG's commitment to further work on meaningful interaction, and I hope it will be seen as an opportunity to develop some more nuanced understandings of the sense of belonging, the importance of trivial encounters, and the value of social networks.

Previously:

On superficial neighbourhood relations

Enter the official local handyman

On superficial neighbourhood relations

From time to time I argue that 'shallow' informal interactions, such as simple gestures of recognition at neighbourhood level, are more significant in terms of social capital than is generally recognised.

I raised this recently in relation to the CLG guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' which argues that for social interaction to be 'meaningful' it needs to go beyond a superficial level and to be sustained. My view is that yes it makes a difference if it's sustained, but 'superficial' does not mean trivial. Superficial is good.

Now I'm just catching up with a paper in BMJ last month about happiness and social networks, which got quite a bit of publicity for its finding that happiness is 'contagious'. The researchers looked at 20 years of data from the Framingham heart study in Massachussetts and found that:

People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected.

This includes close neighbours, but apparently next door neighbours have a much stronger influence than neighbours who live a few doors down in the same neighbourhood. The researchers observe:

the strong influence of neighbours suggests that the spread of happiness might depend more on frequent social contact than deep social connections.

So let's take that as a tentative endorsement. More evidence needed of course.

And behind all this are the challenges of defining (without solidfying) what we're talking about. A few weeks ago I was questioning some of the assumptions about definitions of 'belonging' in the methodologically-creaky Changing UK research, and perhaps there are comparable dangers in assumptions about 'happiness'. One commentator on the BMJ paper observes:

Happiness research that attempts to find generalisations about happiness...  will not challenge inherent assumptions about what makes people happy, what is happiness, and who is happy in society or indeed, as Anthony Storr suggests, who is 'happy alone!'

Six per cent would prefer no contact with neighbours

A quick update to my note a few months ago about the evidence from popular surveys of neighbouring. I concluded that about 5% of us have no contact with our neighbours.

Last month HBOS released another in this entertaining series, finding that 6% of respondents thought that good relationships with new neighbours were 'not at all important' and would prefer not to have any contact with them.

Older people in rural areas

The Social Exclusion Task Force (SETF) in the Cabinet Office has put out a call for evidence for a short study on older people in rural areas. They seek evidence of good practice and innovation related to:

• Social inclusion and participation
• Improving health and well-being
• Supporting older people to live independently
• The provision of transport.

Neighbourly relations play an under-appreciated part in all four. Deadline for contributions 30 January 2009.

Regeneration and neighbourhood relations

All round the fringes of London in the south east counties of England, there is regeneration work going on around numerous huge solid Victorian public building complexes - hospitals and asylums which were testament to a characteristic approach to social and health issues of the time. I once had a guided tour round one of these - Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital - and was hugely impressed by the reassuring solidity and detail in the architecture and the sense of space that was created for people condemned to its confines.

In some cases the regeneration, which is largely about housing from a mix of refurbishment and new-build, seems to have been brought to a halt by the recession. Arguments about our 21st century notions of 'sustainable communities' characterise the contemporary use of this land. Here's Andrew Simpson, Regeneration Programme Director at Springfield Village in south west London, in a recent IDeA interview, talking about what they're trying to achieve:

We are working with Queen Mary’s Medical School on what constitutes a good environment for people’s mental and physical health. Their work to date shows that the stress associated with noise outside of your home that you have no control over – loud music, traffic and so on – is one of the biggest sources of potential health problems arising from your environment.

How you don’t manage this, as far as I can see, is through ASBOs and central government diktat. So we are trying to codify what it is that we need to build into the management of Springfield Garden Village to encourage people to respond to the needs and wishes of their neighbours, but within boundaries that people will see as acceptable.

My assessment is that this readiness to think about neighbouring is still quite rare, in spite of the inevitable rhetoric about 'community' in every masterplan for projects of this kind.

The image is from the Springfield Village vision and masterplan.

Zap thy neighbour

Volunteers in a Suffolk village have been trained to use laser monitoring equipment, which records the speed and registration of passing vehicles, information which can then be passed to the police.

Such community speed watch schemes are a logical development of citizen involvement in policing. Another parish council decided not to be involved in the scheme because they felt that the public should not be expected to do the police's job.

“It involves quite a bit of cost to set up, we would be doing the police's job for them, you get people to stand out there in the cold and possibly catch their friends and neighbours which could cause problems.”

So once again the technology helps us focus in on the extent to which we've outsourced responsibilities for the co-production of safety and security in our neighbourhoods, to external formal agencies - and got so accustomed to it that we think it's right.

People are justified in getting agitated about the disregard with which motorists are allowed to speed through the neighbourhoods, but I wonder about a couple of things.

First, there's something sinister (but not deceitful) about the power of this technology to monitor other people's behaviour. Have we really worked hard enough at more human persuasive processes to encourage civility on the part of the cocooned motorist to other members of the species?

Secondly, village life being what it is, there could be a concern about the extent to which volunteers are known and identifiable. Have there been inclusive engagement exercises within the village to explore consensus around the issue and the process, so that harmful and lasting social divisions don't begin to appear?

Try a little MSI

Communities and Local Government today published guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' reassuringly sub-titled 'How encouraging positive relationships between people can help build community cohesion'.

It needs to be seen in the context of the work and recommendations of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, and more broadly of the debate on how policy can influence behaviour.

I happen to think this is an under-appreciated topic and deserves more policy attention, and more media attention, than it gets. And to be fair, the document also deserved a bit of copy-editing: that might have helped avoid the feeling that this theme is given a relatively low priority in a tiny corner of a huge government department.

Here's my quick take on it for the Joe Public blog.

 

Enter the official local handyman: but at what cost?

When I go on about informal roles in neighbourhoods compared to formal services, I sometimes get the impression that people think I've invented some weird distinction that takes a bit of getting used to.

Well here's a nice example. The government is to make over £30m available to local authorities across England to help them develop or expand their local handyman services for older people - where a 'trusted handyman in a van' can be identified and will come round to do odd jobs for a set fee. Press release.

This is for things like fitting a grab rail, clearing a gutter, fixing a fence or a bit of stair carpet that catches a trailing foot. It's a lot of money, but it's very laudable to have such a scheme, don't you think?

But who was asking how such jobs got done in the past? By members of the family, neighbours, or neighbours' family - Mrs Whatsit's son visits her every other Sunday and he could find ten minutes to pop round and check the fuse on that lamp for you. 'And anything else you want doing while I'm here m'dear?'

One of the examples I cited in my book was of mixed gender friendships among lone older people, in which the female neighbour cooked a meal and the male neighbour reciprocated by doing gardening or odd jobs.

That was how things got done and how they still get done in many neighbourhoods of course. And it works partly because trust is built-in to the existing relationships, so it doesn't have to be pre-negotiated externally by an official agency, as with this scheme, at far greater cost.

There are at least three important elements at play here: reciprocity (including the relation between self-respect and being able to pay someone for a job), trust, and independence. When we introduce a formal service of this kind we might be supporting older people's ability to remain independent, but we shift the reciprocity relationship from a blurred informal arrangement based on an ongoing relationship to an unambiguous economic one; and we require trust to be pre-negotiated by an official agency on the citizen's behalf.

Of course, the family and neighbour contacts aren't always there, and there has to be a formal service to compensate where local social networks are inadequate. But before we extend such a compensating device uniformly across society, maybe we should be doing two things thoroughly.

First, exploring the ways in which informal support might be strengthened so that formal services are needed less. A good example would be for government to invest in older people's mutual support schemes - it doesn't, presumably because policy makers cannot get their heads round informal roles. £30m would go a long way.

Secondly, we should be thinking more deeply about the possible damage a formal scheme like the handyman service might do - eg by leaving neighbourhood roles to atrophy in a stifled ecology of local relations. If you want an example of how this happens, consider the way we outsource our responsibility for keeping an eye out for children, by having high fences and surveillance cameras around school premises.

Formal services have their place, but government can't complain that informal relationships are withering if they keep inventing schemes that systematically and predictably devalue them.

Make your neighbourhood nicer

There's a superb little booklet published by Refugee Action offering 11 easy steps to helping make newcomers feel welcome at neighbourhood level.

'There are lots of ways to make asylum seekers and refugees feel more at home and more valued in your neighbourhood. Everything from setting your nan straight about the asylum system to getting a bit bolder and braver by letting your MP know that us ordinary Brits really do care about how newcomers are treated.'

As Esme Peach says on the back cover:

If you read just one Make your neighbourhood nicer: how to welcome refugees and asylum seekers in 11 easy steps book this year, read this one.

Blinged-up houses

I think I may detect a reduction in the number of houses blinged-up with lights in my area this year, but there may be greater intensity of negative feeling about the habit generally.

Here's Graham Norwood in the Independent with a researched article including the tale of Vic Moszczynski from Berkshire. Following a court injunction in 2006, Moszczynski's routine festooning of his house with yuletide kitsch was restricted to '300 lights, four seven-foot-high inflatable cartoon characters, eight 30-foot-long strips of rope lights and two illuminations in the front garden.' Very subdued and sensitively modest I'm sure.

Meanwhile BBC Radio 4's PM Blog has recently been playfully tracking '"bad" Christmas decorations that we love'. And there's a book, Christmas houses, published last year.

Mostly this is harmless enough, although as Norwood points out there have been numerous cases requiring mediation and much unpleasantness experienced. One can only sympathise with our authorities when they are expected to deal with discrepencies in taste.

I also wonder how far the attitudes expressed for example at Houseblinger.com or Uglychristmaslights.com are from, say, the kind of comment you can read at Rotten neighbors (access to which should perhaps be restricted to authorised sociologists wearing protective theories).

So anyway, there are two sets of questions. The first is a familiar one about how online technologies facilitate expression of views that otherwise might not find a channel, and the moral ifs and buts of the visibility of contested taste.

The other, related questions are to do with privacy and the rights to individual self-expression around the boundary of the home, which I prodded at a few years back.

 

'It’s none of our business'

Following my note the other day about neighbours' alertness and responsibilities towards vulnerable young people, Oli de Botton writing in the Guardian bemoans the way we leave such reponsibilities to an isolated professional:

In the world of newspaper headlines that trumpet the rights of parents no matter what and at the same time castigate "do-gooding" social workers for not getting involved earlier, a slight fear by a classroom teacher just isn't enough to warrant intervening. But if a social worker, a teacher, the next door neighbour, the person in the local shop and fellow-students all think something is up and report it, then we really can do something about it... The only thing that will have a real impact in the long-term is informed professionals showing good judgment and supported with information from the community.

But this doesn't quite address the questions, how do we deal with the privacy-fetish and how do we encourage greater readiness to intervene? I'm reminded of a neat example recorded by Graham Crow and colleagues a few years ago:

'We did actually have someone, you know, who used to beat his partner up quite violently, and you try and turn a blind eye, don’t you? You just listen to it because in this house you can’t help that, at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Then he started doing it early in the evening when the children were awake, so we had no choice but to call the police. It’s none of our business, but when the children are in, then that’s something else, isn’t it? … We assumed it was drink.'

[Sociology,36(1), 2002: 127-145]

Interesting juxtapositions no.13: neighbourly behaviour

Glancing at a copy of the Sunday Times in a cafe today I read a leader about the dismal misery of Zimbabwe -

'Zimbabweans are suffering and their problems are spilling over into neighbouring states.'

Adjacent on the page, a comment by Harriet Sergeant about Karen Matthews, convicted last week of kidnapping her daughter:

'Karen’s nine-year-old daughter Shannon was regularly drugged to keep her quiet, had feet encrusted with dirt, was infested with head lice and flinched at any sudden noise... Seven children were going hungry to bed, not because of social deprivation but because their mother could not be bothered to feed them.'

Ah, it's that question again... What are our responsibilities as neighbours: balancing rights to privacy with collective responsibility for the vulnerable?

In reflecting on the parallels I do not overlook the point that leaders in Zimbabwe's neighbouring states know far more about conditions in that country, than Karen Matthews' neighbours knew of life in her home, and have had far clearer responsibility to act.

This is not the place for my views on the role of African leaders in relation to Mugabe. Suffice to say I have rather more sympathy for the residents on Moorside Estate and their profound sense of betrayal. But couldn't these tragedies stimulate some debate in the media about what our expectations are of neighbourly behaviour?

Previously: Thoughts for tormented neighbours.

Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?

In the early seventies, I seem to recall, the hapless Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the increasing prevalence of dishwashers and similar labour-saving devices in households was likely to reduce family cohesion as people spent less time together doing what needed to be done.

A few more observations like that over the years - for instance about the use of cars, geographical mobility, smaller households, television viewing etc - and understandably we begin to assume that there has been a decline in neighbourhood relations. It's what we would expect. All we lack is some way of proving or disproving it with robust methods.

So along comes the Changing UK report from the Social And Spatial Inequalities group in Sheffield, commissioned by the BBC, which appears to illustrate how Brits are now more polarised and live more 'among our own kind,' than we used to do.

The report is a strange blend of stolid survey-based affirmation of some gloomy, familiar social trends, with constant reference to the BBC's tv and radio areas - a peculiar geography to many of us I suspect. Presumably the client wanted some local and regional social data (tick) and some kind of news story it could broadcast (tick).

Many of the considerations are straightforward:

These trends may be linked to higher likelihoods of fearfulness because we are less likely to see and therefore understand each others' lives... The polarisation and segregation processes may also lead to stronger feelings of isolation and weaker feelings of 'belonging'.

The report justifiably links these trends with evidence of political disaffection and economic polarisation, all pointing to a rather bleak future. To be fair, it's not as if our politicians have been ignoring it all. Although the finality with which social capital was dumped as a policy issue a few years ago remains puzzling, there is a healthy amount of energy being focussed on community cohesion. There is public attention paid to the questions raised, and the BBC is playing its part.

But the evidence does matter. Take this for example, from Mark Easton's piece on the BBC site:

'The study ranks places using a formula based on the proportion of people in an area who are single, those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and those who have lived there for less than a year. The higher the proportion of people in those categories, the less rooted the community.'

Unh? That amounts to a definition of 'rooted community' which I'd be reluctant to sign up to.

What bothers me a little about this research is the bundling of assumptions about loneliness, living alone, isolation, and not belonging. For a start, loneliness is not the same as isolation - the latter implies a dearth of social ties, which some people prefer, while some people can have an ample supply of ties but experience loneliness. And obviously, living alone does not necessarily imply loneliness or isolation at all.

Again, people claiming that they 'belong' somewhere (or don't) doesn't tell us anything reliable about the strength or extent of their social relations. You may have a weak sense of belonging without experiencing loneliness; or a strong sense of belonging (“been here forty years I ‘ave”) but experience profound loneliness.

I wanted the report to be clearer about these nuances, and more critical about its measures. It's hardly contentious to note that if local face-to-face ties are diminishing, network ties may have been increasing in strength or range - you only have to watch how people make non-business use of mobiles.

So I'm left unsure what the research offers. It tells us that local social relations have weakened, which is a message we're primed to hear anyway; but it does so with an unconvincing voice.

Breakfast in the community

Research suggests that children attending school breakfast clubs show improved social skills:

'Breakfast, rightly acknowledged as vital to health, offers enhanced benefits when served in a communal setting.'

The study included 112 children across seven schools in the north-east, and found that breakfast club attendees had more friends than those who did not attend.

Article in Children and Young People Now.

Benchioners' anti-social behaviour

They carry sticks, discuss the price of bleach, and reminisce about the blitz. Some are arthritic and drink lucozade. So when they congregate on the park benches you know to expect trouble. Sometimes they stay out til three in the afternoon. They can be noisy and very intimidating.

The Telegraph reports today on a gang of pensioners aged between 69 and 96 whose behaviour, gathering on four benches on an estate in south-east London, is a cause of local concern:

'Neighbours complained of noise and nuisance and the local housing association proposed to disperse the gang by removing the benches.'

Someone's being monumentally daft, but there's a serious point. It's only possible because of some too-familiar themes - a culture of blame and assertive intolerance, and the relentless marginalisation of older people. One wants to ask how come any authority can get itself into such a mess; but of course in this low-interaction, risk-averse contracted-responsibility culture, people can complain about anything and require an agency to take action.

Meaningful social interaction

We're still in the very early stages of 'measuring' meaningful social interaction with people from different backgrounds (that doesn't mean we don't already know a lot about it), and every little step is fascinating.

As in the early years of cohesion policy, it's a shame that this theme tends to get limited to 'people from different ethnic or religious backgrounds' - as if interaction between people from different social classes and different age groups was not hugely significant, especially in neighbourhoods. Lots more to be done, but meanwhile here's the latest snippet from this summer's Citizenship Survey data:

In April-June 2008, 82 per cent of people mixed socially at least once a month with people from different ethnic or religious backgrounds, either at work, at a place of education, through a leisure activity, at a place of worship, at the shops or through volunteering. This has increased since 2007-08 (80%) when it was first measured.

Second homes

The level of homelessness in the UK is said to be among the highest in Europe, with more than four people per 1,000 estimated to be homeless. Meanwhile, in England, there are close to a quarter of a million second homes.

Quite apart from the curious morality of having what you don't need so someone else can go without, I can't see how, on balance, the practice of having more than one home is likely to have other than a negative effect on neighbourhood life in either location. It was described by George Monbiot in the Guardian a while ago as a 'vampire trade'. I would describe it as yet another example of the antisocial behaviour of the advantaged.

The National Housing and Planning Advice Unit has published a study of the evidence on the purchase and use of second homes, which suggests that

second home owners are high income earners with heads of household between 45 and 64 years of age. The most common household type is a couple with no dependent children.

But there are a lot of gaps in the evidence, it seems. For instance:

The impact of second homes on house prices and affordability is assumed but not proven.

And:

There is a lack of good quality evidence on the impact of second homes on local housing markets and local communities.

The authors state that there is a case for examining the positive as well as the negative impacts of second homes on local economies, housing markets and communities. Fair enough, let's have some research - oh and could we also please hear a sensible moral defence of this practice, if there is one?

The research design will be of great interest in lots of ways. I would very much like to see the measures used to assess impact on local social relations, and how they are weighted against economic impact.

Until that can be organised and funded, the commonsense arguments that in most cases it is (a) immoral and (b) socially damaging, ought to hold sway. We shouldn't need an economic recession to force acceptable prosocial behaviour from the wealthy.