Neighbourhoods

Don’t start blaming the neighbours

Now things have quietened down a bit, what can we say about the questioning of neighbourliness around 2207 Seymour Ave in Cleveland Ohio? Don’t blame the neighbours; avoid knee-jerk conjuring of halcyon historic community; and take mental health more seriously.

Exhibit A is the cliché of American ‘community’ life, half-heartedly examined by Rupert Cornwell in the Indy for instance:

‘Cleveland has somehow given the lie to all this. If communities are supposed to look after their own, this particular one failed.’

I think it must be a bewildering, deeply disturbing experience for the neighbours concerned and I don’t see that it helps to clobber them with a sense of having let the side down. As I wrote a year ago with reference to such contexts, the experience of local people may be complicated by a sense of guilt mixed with cruel deception:

‘Can we understand how it felt in retrospect to have been a neighbour of Josef Fritzl, and to have respected his privacy? I imagine people saying simply, We knew nothing, what should we have done? – and never really recovering. An anti-social or deranged individual determined to use privacy as a smokescreen will do so, unless as a society we were to dismantle the structures and culture of privacy…

‘How close could the best of good neighbourliness have got to an Anders Breivik or a Josef Fritzl? No closer than they’d let you, through a street rep scheme perhaps, and no closer. You cannot see what he brings home from the stores in boxes or the magazines going through the letterbox, or what he views online.’

So far I don’t see that the case of Ariel Castro is particularly different. And it doesn’t help to refer to more halcyon days or localities, mythical or not, unless we are also going to offer analyses which suggest how we can reduce the likelihood of deranged behaviour having brutal and lasting impact on the lives of others.

With that in mind, there’s one social imperative which seems to be missed every time: the need to create a culture in which the disorder of the individual in question is self-recognised as treatable by an available, confidential, caring system. Castro is said to have prepared a ‘suicide’ note in which he speaks of a sex addiction and said he needed help. What realistically were his chances of getting it, of taking it? Maybe we need to put more effort into pre-emptive services for all kinds of mental ill-health; and to normalise or de-stigmatise the idea of consulting them. Implementing the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Mental Health and Policing would be a start: ‘mental health is core business’ it says.

Today we tend to find the treatment of people with mental illness, in previous centuries, distasteful or even barbaric. Unless we learn how to learn from tragedies like Seymour Avenue, I think that future societies may reflect in the same way about our own primitive disinterest in mental health.

 

You probably don’t know your neighbours, it says here

Research reported by the Big Lunch claims that more than 50 per cent of respondents ‘don’t know their neighbours’, with one in four ‘having no idea what their names are’.

There’s no way of finding out what this means, as there is no press release on the website, and no indication of who carried out the research or how the questions were worded. Of course it’s part of the BL process of cranking up its publicity, which is fair enough; and it gives the Daily Mail something to put in its columns, which maybe can’t be helped.

All I can offer is a quick comparison with some previous ‘findings’, noting the three tentative conclusions I drew a few years ago that

• about 90% of us enjoy good relationships with our neighbours and speak to them often
• about 5% of us have no contact with our neighbours
• there's no consensus on whether neighbourliness is in decline.

I could point out once again that the phrase ‘to know your neighbours’ needs a bit of unpacking if it is to be helpful; and that knowing names is not the same as recognition, which is what underpins neighbourliness.

I can also promise to try and do another mini-analysis of collected ‘findings’ from sources like this, because they do have a fascination and possibly some lessons. But it remains the case that if organisations don’t feel able to reveal the source of such eccentric conclusions, their credibility will need rescuing.

Little tiny fridge

I don’t know when Sheffield City Council stopped being known as ‘the corporation’ but if you have any idea, you may be able to date this story about neighbours. I’ve no doubt it dates from those well-known halcyon days when men were real men, fridges were real fridges, and close-knit northern communities were real close-knit northern communities.

BBC Radio Sheffield covered the topic of neighbourliness this morning (thanks for the heads-up Martin) and a lady called Frieda called in (for the next few days you can catch her remarks here at about 2:20.40). At the mention of ‘neighbours from hell,’ Frieda said in a matter of fact way, ‘I’ve ‘ad ‘em luv’ –

‘When I first came in ‘ere. They tried to make my life hell but I stuck ‘em out and they’re dead now… Anonymous letters, threatening me, threatening me children…’

Why was that then?

‘We’d just moved into our house… and we bought a little fridge it were, one of them that you used to buy for a pound off the corporation, we’d just moved in, bought this little fridge, and all hell were let loose. I don’t know why, but when t’police came, they said it were jealousy... Little tiny fridge. But I stuck ‘em out… for about four year, if not more.’

 

From Muck Flick to Bad Sir Brian Botany: an ironical salute to posh neighbour disputes

In today’s Observer, Catherine Bennett picks up on a piece in the Telegraph about a planning dispute between super-rich neighbours in west London. The story is almost worthy of a Carry On movie, the villain being Jonny Foreigner (with a distasteful lineage) Gert-Rudolph "Muck" Flick. Herr Flick and his partner have a desperate need for extra space – swimming pool, gym, cinema, that sort of thing – requiring some disruptive excavations which the council has approved:

‘Kensington & Chelsea has ruled that the digging out of their planned, two-storey basement, forecast to cause two years of disruption in the Onslow Square area, along with the pointless destruction of the house's 1884 Red Room gallery, should have its blessing, since it would only end in "visually discreet additions" to his existing £30m house.’

Julian Lloyd Webber, president of the Onslow Neighbourhood Association, has said previously that

‘If we can’t preserve this area, nothing is safe’

- and for all I know he could be right. Nothing may now be safe, there’s a thought.

Bennett’s article reviews other posh people’s tiffs and suggests that culturally we expect neighbourhood disputes to be

‘almost exclusively the province of the disadvantaged, strongly linked to poverty and poor education, limited social skills and a propensity to spit.’

It’s reasonable to suppose that people who live in dense proximity, who have fewer opportunities either to escape or to protect their own territory, would be more likely to experience tension in relationships with neighbours. But where there’s a chance for the muscles of power and egotism to be rippled, the wealthy often like to express themselves to excess. The pointless epic tangle between Boythorn and Dedlock over rights of way to a trivial stretch of land in Bleak House comes to mind.

My favourite example is probably still the reported problem faced by King Abdullah of Jordan a few years ago (Smell thy neighbour). But while it makes good entertainment when the Haves are subject to disruption in their protected enclaves, I wonder how far it really is from historic examples of dynastic rulers, religious zealots, and megalomaniac industrialists, who can turn disputes with the neighbourhood equivalent of national, ethnic or faith groups into devastating wars if they don’t happen to get on very well, or if their egos need something.

Disputes between the powerful and the oppressed, manifested at neighbourhood level, are different, and rather more common than publicised spats among the Haves. Sometimes these get mediated by a little neighbourhood vigilantism. So let’s take the chance to celebrate the poetic come-uppance of Bad Sir Brian Botany:

Sir Brian had a pair of boots with great big spurs on,
A fighting pair of which he was particularly fond.
On Tuesday and Friday, just to make the street look tidy,
He’d collect the passing villagers and kick them in the pond.

“I am Sir Brian!” (sper-lash!)
“I am Sir Brian!” (sper-losh!)
“I am Sir Brian, as bold as a lion -
Is anyone else for a wash?”

Sir Brian woke one morning, and he couldn’t find his battleaxe;
He walked into the village in his second pair of boots.
He had gone a hundred paces, when the street was full of faces,
And the villagers were round him with ironical salutes...

 

Low level interaction

Hello, what’s this? Someone else who thinks that sense of community doesn’t necessarily require strong or dense local social ties? A year ago I mentioned the initial thoughts of Queensland sociologist Lynda Cheshire on community resilience in the 2011 floods. Now here she calls for more participants for her study and offers early reflections:

‘Even outside of emergencies, a good relation with neighbours has been shown to increase individuals' sense of community and attachment to place, and to improve health and well-being.

‘This doesn't necessarily mean we have to become close friends with neighbours or organise street barbecues. Low levels of interaction - such as friendly greetings when you see them, keeping an eye on each other's properties while away, and exchanging telephone numbers for emergencies is all that's really needed.’

The point being, I think, that these low level connections require much less effort to establish and maintain than do close ties, and we all have more of them, so our chances of mobilising help in time of need are going to be more efficiently increased through recognition than through close relationship.

Cheshire has been interviewing residents from flood affected streets and I’m looking forward to reading papers from the study in due course.

Privacy and the 'neighbor across the hall'

Even doing what she regards as nothing, Debbie seems to have a neighbour who invades her privacy:

'Did it ever occur to you that I didn't turn on the TV or stereo because I know you're spying on me and I'd like to be able to just be AWAKE without you knowing about it?'

 

Neighbourliness and social networks: a little welcome attention?

In a new RSA paper Nicola Bacon argues that

‘we need to find fresh approaches that can be delivered in an age of low public spending and a shrinking state... we need to find new ways to put the lived experience of residents at the centre of regeneration policy and practice. We need to build on local assets and boost resilience in a way that both supports mobility for those who wish to leave, and stability for people who choose to stay in the areas that they call home.’

Plenty of ‘we needs’ – this is think-tank language - but not much to disagree with there. I have an open mind about whether or not ‘new ways’ or ‘fresh approaches’ are required. This is an essay about community development and I’d say there is nothing much wrong with the values, principles and processes of CD - maybe it’s the political context in which it is expected to perform magic, and the forces working in the opposite direction, that need attention.

Having said that, new tools – for local digital spaces for example, or tools like the Young Foundation’s well being and resilience measure which exploit the power of statistics - can surely help to bring a compelling persuasiveness to the local case.

So what we have is the RSA keen to keep building its presence and credibility around the practice of local social development; together with a welcome determination that the importance of local social networks should be recognised in policy, especially in times of severe financial constraint.

Emphasising the value of local social networks is here packaged as ‘turning strangers into neighbours’ - translating from the language of sociology into that of local newspapers without shaking off the questions of the kind of neighbouring and the kind of privacy that is assumed to be desirable, in policy or by 'strangers'.

Anyway, the opportunity as presented is to ‘explore the viable ways of “turning strangers into neighbours”’. The point is made strongly that

‘neighbourliness and social networks are a critical protective factors against many neighbourhood problems’

(the unedited grammar being symptomatic of the paper as a whole, I’m afraid) - but we scarcely get beyond that assertion, and I couldn’t see any ‘new ways’ of encouraging the wholesale conversion of strangers into local network connections. Just when you think something special might be coming up, the paper ends, quite abruptly.

So as with the Res Publica paper, that I reviewed six months ago, I’ve approached with a sense of optimistic anticipation and been disappointed, the redeeming factor being that important topics are being aired by influential agencies.

Maybe we’re not supposed to be bothered too much about papers like these? Are they just territory markers? It’s like we’ve got think tanks going round the policy townscape cocking their legs and spraying the conceptual lamp-posts. Guaranteed to make me go sniffy.

In this case, most people are going to find the relentless reference to the Young Foundation at best tiresome, particularly given the extensive overlooked literature on most of this stuff. Other authors like Chris Phillipson might get a mention (albeit miss-cited) if they happen to have published in a TYF publication. Lazy reference to someone called ‘Puttnam’ serves to further dissipate any confidence that had been built up in the first pages of the report. It's just a thought, but, maybe don’t publish; or treat the reader with a little more respect?

 

 

Looking out for neighbours: resilience, recognition and responsibilities

The Atlantic has a piece by Sarah Goodyear on the contribution of social connections to community resilience in time of crisis, picking up on a New Yorker article (£) by Eric Klinenberg. Hurricane Sandy came close enough for some policy makers to have their suits splashed with a little nasty reality, in turn legitimating (for a short while at least) some public discussion of these issues:

‘As cities prepare for climate change in earnest, they’re going to need to harden infrastructure, change building patterns, and overhaul government emergency procedures. But they’re also going to have to put a greater value on the human connections that can be found in walkable neighborhoods where people know each other and support local businesses.’

The assumption that walkability might be a key criterion is an interesting one, and one of the comments to the article expresses scepticism about it. I’m aware of one study (Du Toit et al 2007) which found that 'walkable neighbourhoods are not necessarily more sociable places in which to live'.

However the researchers in that, south Australian, study were looking for 'strong' social ties between neighbours - a mistake in my view (and a very common one) because you don't necessarily need strong connections, or to feel you belong to a close-knit community, to have someone look out for you in time of crisis (although they help of course).

We can’t all be, and some of us definitely do not want to be, part of a close-knit community, as I’ve suggested often enough. What might help all round would be higher levels of neighbourly recognition – meaning, having been seen around the neighbourhood from time to time, perhaps with a smile or a few words: being accessible in time of need without invading others’ privacy. It's reasonable to assume that walkable environments are more likely to give rise to what I call sequences of informal recognition, which accrue to provide a form of social capital that has largely been overlooked in study and policy.

The point also needs to be made that when crisis strikes, and there are residents who happen to lack social connections, they are going to stand a better chance of being picked up and supported if there is an active local online network that people use to communicate openly and fast. If authorities anywhere in the world really are looking to invest in community resilience, they should be looking to facilitate the development of independent, citizen-led online networks.

Meanwhile back in the UK, not dissimilar themes have been raised following a claim by Care Minister Norman Lamb in the Telegraph that:

‘We have lost the extended family because families have become dispersed. We need to rebuild that neighbourly resilience that helps people stay independent. If someone is living on their own never seeing anyone, that is a dismal existence, and it often ends up with it all collapsing and them going into a care home.’

This is followed of course by the urging of us all to do more neighbouring; and a possible new slogan – this is not ‘big society’ but (tada!) the ‘decent society.’ Capitalisation and branding to follow, presumably.

The minister said that councils should lead the way in encouraging people to help their neighbours stay out of care. ‘I want local authorities to be giving people guidance about how they can maintain their own resilience, using their friends, their neighbours, their community and in that way build resilience and reduce the burden on the state.’

Lamb’s remarks aroused some contemptuous counter-argument from Sarah Ditum on Comment is Free. And to the extent that this is about caring, she has a point – the amount of unpaid care that is being carried out for people with an illness or disability has increased and is likely to keep increasing. Her riposte resonates perfectly reasonably:

‘It's not the populace that's resigning from its responsibilities to the vulnerable; it's the government.’

The minister has generalised unhelpfully and not taken the time needed to catch up with any thinking that anyone else has been doing, or to find out what is the current state of play. And we need not dwell on the trite assumptions about 'the neighbour support that used to be there'. But still, there is a worthwhile message here if it weren't so badly packaged. It would be responsible for local authorities to issue guidance which takes account of what is already going on – if they have the time or funds to get this done.

What seems to me problematic in the language Lamb uses is his hard-wired political compulsion to individualise the response, rather than acknowledge an obvious role for community development. This is typified in referring to 'independence' without entertaining the possibility of interdependence.

This is routine political contortionism I suppose. The government would like the beneficial consequences of community development without having to accept either that some people experience disadvantage or misfortune that is not their fault, or that they can address those disadvantages by themselves (without the disempowering arbitrariness of philanthropy) if supported in doing so.

 

 

All to himself

‘He never waves when he goes by… He’s all to himself… I think I know why.’

(Tom Waits, ‘What’s he building?’ Mule variations, 1999)

In a recent tragic accident, Mark van den Boogaard, a Dutch skydiver, appears to have plunged from the firmament and his body lay undiscovered in a field for over a week. One reason he was not missed was that, according to the manager of the skydiving club, he was

"a friendly and happy man, but a loner, someone who did not really talk to anyone and was always on his own".

Van den Boogaard was self-employed and ‘was not close to any of his relatives’. In one sense then his demise sadly reflects the apparently severe accountancy of personal relations: if you invest in relationships and take an interest in others, they’ll come looking for you if you go missing; if you don’t, they won’t.

When people describe someone as ‘a loner,’ what does it tell us about local social relations?

Adam Lanza, the 20 year old who carried out the Sandy Hook School killings in Newtown, Connecticut, was described as such, someone who was ‘very shy and didn't make an effort to interact with anybody.’ And it seems that some people were aware that he was unwell. (Others must have been aware also that his mother was ‘a gun enthusiast’. A WHAT??? A ‘gun enthusiast.’ Apparently, in that frighteningly uncivilised country, there’s nothing exceptional in that).

I think the word ‘loner’ is being used here in a sinister way, albeit with hindsight, to imply someone who was not just passively disinclined to socialise; not even someone just actively resistant to engagement with their peers; but one who was pathologically resistant. And in the neighbourhood or, say, the high school context, other people can draw vague conclusions without anything further being justified by way of implication or action. Up to a point, wherever that is, it is not in the group interest to interfere: 'community' has a degree of tolerance built-in for its own defence.

‘He has no dog and he has no friends and his lawn is dying’ croaks Waits.

We lament to ourselves the impact that dysfunctional co-residents have, the state of their garden, the impoliteness of disregard, the impact they have on our sense of community. But the community that seizes upon and rejects the harmless dysfunctional is itself dysfunctional.

The social democracy of neighbourhood relations, with its contrasting forces of shared interest and rights to privacy, means you can’t simply report someone to authorities for being weird and uncommunicative. (Unh, that doesn’t mean it’s a great idea to leave guns and ammunition around the house).

If someone in your neighbourhood is a loner it’s not your responsibility to be any more than a neighbour – which under most conventions means being open to encounter and conversation while respecting their privacy.

But still, shouldn’t we expect families to take some responsibility for their members’ mental health? And shouldn’t we make properly-resourced support easily available to them in a stigma-free context?

 

Never mind ‘birds of a feather’ – for some people, local social interaction ain’t worth the aggro

Are you and your neighbours all similar? And does it matter?

An anonymised Economist blog post takes a reported increase in neighbourhood heterogeneity from recent US General Social Survey data, and links it to an apparent increase in ideological polarisation. Wait, I can explain.

The recent data suggest that ‘Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbours than before’ (yes I agree we should expect a modest level of competence in sentence construction from an Economist journo).

‘In 1974, 44% of respondents said that they had spent a social evening with neighbours more than once a month. By 2008, that number had dropped to a tick over 30%. Over the course of the study’s existence, the number has been dropping consistently.’

OK, so neighbours are less likely 'than before' to be friends. I don’t think it necessarily means they won’t interact in a socially supportive way: but let’s suppose it matters. The author suggests that

‘Reduced interaction with fellow citizens probably only reinforces a person’s own beliefs. However like-minded a neighbourhood is the odds of friends and relatives sharing similar political views seems much higher.’

Hmm, speculative, you might think, but the idea is that (a) neighbours interact less, so (b) people’s political views are more likely to get reinforced, principally by friends and relatives who are likely to have similar views. And there could be something in it, but there’s the usual stack of issues with the first bit, such as –

• neighbourliness isn’t the same as friendship, not even in the US;
• whether it’s adequate to explain neighbourliness over time in terms of spending ‘a social evening’ on a regular basis;
• whether this decline correlates with other alarm-ringing social change;
• whether online interaction detracts from face-to-face local interaction or augments it while changing it, and so on.

Oh, and the almost but not quite obvious question - if strong ties between neighbours are weakening over time, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I’m not going to rehearse that stuff here, but I do want to follow one interesting lead. The article concludes forcefully:

‘The primary culprit here is suburbanisation.’

One of the comments to the article refers to a study of social interaction and urban sprawl (Brueckner & Largey, J urban econ, 2008) which tested the hypothesis that urban density has a positive effect on social interaction. The authors preface their results like this:

‘To understand the argument, suppose that people value social interaction, and that the extent of interaction in a neighborhood is an increasing function of the area’s average population density. By putting people in close proximity, high average density could plausibly spur interaction among them.’

The paper makes an important contribution to challenging negative assumptions about suburbs. It concludes:

‘The results are unfavorable: whether the focus is friendship oriented social interaction or measures of group involvement, the empirical results show a negative, rather than positive, effect of density on interaction.’

Somewhat half-heartedly, they add a rider, which I have raised myself from time to time: it's possible that people who are less inclined to sociability could be more inclined to inhabit certain kinds of housing or areas of greater density. That’s assuming they have much choice in the first place.

But I want to go back to the initial assumption that ‘people value interaction’. Allowing for a small percentage of humankind who maybe don’t, I don’t think anyone’s disputing that basic generalisation; but there needs to be acknowledgment of the differential extent to which that value is attainable.

If you live in an attractive, peaceful, relatively affluent area where the stress levels are generally low, then the cost of investing in social interaction is low. But in some neighbourhoods there are serious real or perceived risks in establishing social contact with a view to interaction. If you try to start talking to someone at the bus stop or in the lift and they mug you, or you justifiably fear that they might, you will be less inclined to seek out social interaction. And if other factors are negative (eg a disordered local environment, poor services, badly maintained housing, child ill-health, domestic violence, do I need to go on?) the risk is too high for the perceived benefit. If the risk is too high, people don't try to connect. And they keep themselves to themselves.

So at no extra cost (tada!) here’s a very special reward for readers of this post who have got this far… a unique never-to-be-repeated offer of an exquisitely-wrought principle: ‘birds of feather’ is a red herring. Indeed it could also prove to be a wild goose; more research is needed. The homophily principle - or come to that, the heterophily principle, if there is one - is neither here nor there: what matters for social policy is to address residents’ differential cost-benefit assessment of the value of social interaction. You do that by improving the quality of life for those who most need it. Unh, that should put the cat among the pigeons.

 

Miss Manners thinks not

As a cultural exhibit, this is a little gem. Having declined invitations for several years, a reader writes to ‘Miss Manners’, c/o the local newspaper, regretting not having been invited to a neighbour’s party. Do spare a moment and read it. Here’s part of Miss Manners’ response:

GENTLE READER: Just a minute, please. You have been declining these people's invitations since 2006, and now you are sulking because they finally stopped issuing them? And you think it would help if you sat down with them, and explained all the more important things you've had to do for the last six years?

 

 

Older people and informal neighbourhood care: an issue that won’t go away

JRF are starting to crank up their thinking about informal neighbourhood care and older people, and I’m starting to sit forward in the expectation that something really useful will emerge from their work over the next couple of years.

I was reminded just yesterday that we’re well behind the Dutch in our thinking and action on this theme (although they have a general election coming up with plenty of potential to go backwards fast).

Nearly three years ago I remember offering a somewhat disillusioned post after running out of steam and failing to get anyone interested in the issue of neighbourly support. Even Age Concern, who had supported my research and publication, could muster no interest. At the time the problem seemed to be that the ageing agencies were all preoccupied with what they saw as the ‘countable’ issues of pensions and benefits. Crisis, what crisis?

The crunch may be not so much whether high quality research and policy advice emerges – it surely will – but whether JRF manage to get any purchase on policy itself. High stakes, in an ageing society with its formal support systems being rapidly dismantled.

 

Our letterboxes aren’t fit for purpose: so involve neighbours

Royal Mail today announced that it will be rolling out its ‘Delivery to Neighbour’ initiative which I’ve mentioned a few times. With Ofcom’s approval, they’re pre-empting the consultation, for which the deadline is a week today.

I’ve just been talking to Nikki Bedi on Radio London about some of the neighbourliness issues. I made the point that some people will have genuine good reason not to be taking-in a neighbour’s packages, and we need to avoid their being stigmatised by the opt-out sticker (‘Neighbours not trusted here’) on their doorway. Technology, as I’ve suggested before, can surely be used to advantage, for instance through QR-coded digital instructions on the package.

The scheme obviously implies a potential increase in neighbour interaction. The Ofcom consultation document reminds us that ‘in the trial areas there was a reduction of approximately 40% in the numbers of undeliverable items that were returned to delivery offices’ (emphasis added). That might be interpreted as a non-trivial increase in the number of neighbourly conversations that might not have happened before.

Hopefully we’ll hear of more neighbourhoods with an informally ‘designated’ older person who is at home most of the time and known to the postal worker – and in return for the neighbourly service the recipients readily stop for a chat and catch up when they go round to collect their package.

Online technology has helped to reduce the number of letters we get, but contributed to an increase in the number of packages being transported. We live in smaller households and there is less likely to be someone at home during the day, so there’s an increase in the proportion of packages not being delivered.

Our letterboxes aren’t fit for purpose. The market solution is the external security box or parcel pod, with the deliverer placing the package into the unlocked container and usually being expected to ensure it is locked afterwards. This is part of the ongoing not-entirely-tasteful extension of secured privacy beyond the home, and Kev's Automatic Door Principle (which I referred to here) applies - another example of technology confiscating tiny social interactions.

I’m sure the market for such boxes is set to expand, although our house-builders and architects might yet come up with alternative solutions. I much prefer the simple social alternative of the ‘Delivery to Neighbour’ scheme.

Previously:

Further footnote on taking in neighbours’ post

Footnote on taking in your neighbour’s post

Neighbours not trusted here

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

Anti-social behaviour and ‘the true nature of privilege’

Last week the RSA got some publicity for their idea that people should be ‘trained in basic community safety skills,’ meaning dealing with ‘antisocial behaviour and low-level public disorder’. Ben Rogers floated the idea a couple of years ago. It builds on the history of first aid lessons, and would fit into the tradition of adult education. The paper doesn’t acknowledge the fact that community centres have been running self-defence classes for women for as long as I can remember.

As so often with the RSA there’s that uncomfortable sense of appearing to say ‘we could try doing this to people’. Suggestions need to be based firmly on what people are already trying to do for themselves, in their own neighbourhoods. And if policy is to be influenced, it might be reasonable to acknowledge the value of, and strengthen opportunities for, informal and semi-formal interaction in local spaces.

Recalling the ‘respect’ agenda (lots more here, although of course the Blair government's respect website site has disappeared) I’d note that well-meaning ideas of this kind tend to lack appreciation of what it’s actually like to live in an area where the tensions of uncivil behaviour are consistently high; or that people are and always have been working to confront disorder around them.

So we read that the proposed approach ‘relies on training and skilling people to meet social challenges, rather than always resorting to the law or police’.

‘Always’? People aren’t always resorting to the law or the police. False start, immediate disqualification.

Residents almost always are already investing in the co-production of safety, often in a context where the police and other agencies are unresponsive and the law is simply not an accessible option. What's it like living on an estate characterised by civic absence? Draining, disempowering.

Lynsey Hanley, meanwhile, has stepped forward and admonished the RSA gently in this Guardian article. She goes on to point directly at the problem of ‘the true nature of privilege’ which is that ‘it allows you to live an entirely stress-free existence, should you choose to do so.’

‘Having lived for a long time in a poor area and then, for a much shorter time, in a rich one, it strikes me that the main difference is the overwhelming sense of control and "rightness" the rich area had. Anti-social behaviour was much rarer for the simple reason that people generally had better things to do and had no wish or reason to debase themselves in public.’ 

This is what I think of as the 21st century version of 'two nations'. Lynsey goes on:

‘The point is that we cannot do the work of the state without the back-up of internal as well as external resources. A fragmented neighbourhood of stressed and transient people is not going to be able to police itself as well as a settled area of contented and confident people.’

I'm sure there is scope for Ben Rogers' idea to be grafted on to existing community initiatives. As a movement of its own, I think not.

 

‘Do you have any space in your freezer?’

Here’s the NDN at the fence, ‘do you have any space in your freezer?’

She’s defrosting hers today and just needs a little space for a few things. Happily I can oblige and a few hours later she’s back to pick them up again.

This has happened a few times over the years and although more efficient refrigeration technologies make it a less likely scenario than it was, I don’t recall mention of this particular neighbourly request in the literature.

I wonder how common it is? Yes, we do the cat-feeding and garden-watering and parcel-taking-in and snow-clearing, and maybe getting washing in off the line if they're out when unexpected rain falls - but does anyone have any other instances like this which actually penetrate the home?

Paint your street

Here’s one way to ‘make drivers move more slowly and expect pedestrians.’ From City Repair in Portland, Oregon. Brilliant. Take a few minutes to watch the video, which includes this quote:

‘One lady said she’s lived in the neighborhood for forty years, I had never even seen her before… I’ve lived here about 20 years.’

Via (of course).

 

Neighbourhoods are both physical and social environments

This is helpful, from Rob Wheway on the Guardian’s public leader’s network this morning:

‘Neighbourliness happens without payment and would be categorised as voluntary. Politicians and staff assume this means the voluntary sector, which leads them to focus on the services that local and national charities provide, rather than considering what factors in the social and physical environment make people more likely to be neighbourly...’

‘It is not fear of stranger danger that makes the difference; it is the dominance of the car which limits neighbourliness...’

And especially his last para:

‘We need to understand more of how we create both the physical and social environment in which people feel sufficiently secure, empowered and valued to be more neighbourly and more active citizens.’

Neighbourhoods are both physical and social environments and the more we live in a network society, the more neighbourly behaviour is likely to be distinguishable from other relations.

So please can we have a considered, informed, practice-oriented debate on Rob's last point, bringing together planners, architects, social care managers, youth workers, resident activists, resident non-activists, housing association officers, community development workers… And policy makers.

 

Are you connected to your neighbours?

Here’s a little bit of data from Burlington, Vermont, in a recent city wide community engagement survey. As far as I can discover, the results have not been analysed into a report. Respondents were asked how connected they feel to their neighbours.

Unfortunately a numbered scale was used, so it’s hard to turn it into a meaningful statement. But we can interpret the scale as:

Not at all connected

Not very connected

Neither connected nor disconnected

Fairly connected

Very connected

The survey’s authors can’t really claim this, but it suggests that 47 per cent of respondents feel connected to their neighbours, while 27 per cent don’t.

If we take the ‘indifferent’ 26 per cent in the middle, plus the 98 out of 588 overall respondents who skipped the question, then the proportion of people who responded to the questionnaire as a whole, who feel connected to their neighbours, is less than 40 per cent. Which seems a little underwhelming for a survey of this nature, in which the more civically and socially minded are more likely to respond.

Maybe it’s not surprising though. I can’t recall seeing the phrase ‘connected to your neighbours’ in a survey before, but it’s likely to be interpreted (certainly in the UK) as implying a closer degree of relationship to co-residents than most people are bothered about. It suggests a form of direct access that is different to just recognising who they are and which door you’d have to approach to find them.

Via Front Porch Forum.

Further footnote on taking in neighbours’ post

Someone has kindly sent me this version of the Royal Mail’s ‘neighbours not trusted here’ sticker. It can be displayed brazenly by those unwilling to take in post on behalf of a temporarily absent neighbour, or to have their own post held by a neighbour. The sticker measures about 5 inches by 2 inches.

I’m curious to know whether post workers will carry spare copies with them, so that if they disturb someone who declines to take in post, but has not displayed, they can encourage them either to change their mind or to apply the sticker.

I'm also wondering if estate agents, perhaps offering a valuation to a prospective seller, might subtly suggest they remove the sticker before prospective purchasers come round?

And as a neighbour, supposing you needed to pop round and ask or tell them something - say, 'sorry just to let you know we're having builders round the back the next few days, sorry if there's a bit of noise and dust' or whatever... Would you just happen to notice and remark, oh what's the sticker you have, I didn't get one of those, what does it do?

Meanwhile, at the door this morning was a rep from a private delivery company, asking would I take in a package for two doors along. I asked him if many people decline, in his experience, and he told me that when one refuses, ‘you find quite a lot are the same and it’s hard to get anyone to take it.’

He also claimed that in some streets, where there are well-kept houses and front gardens but one stands out as unkempt, no-one will take a parcel for that house. I would treat that story with caution.

Previously:

Footnote on taking in your neighbour’s post

Neighbours not trusted here

 

Pavement chalking anarchy again

Oh dear, three year old Emerson has been chalking on the sidewalk (pavement to UK readers). Usually her drawings are of hearts and flowers, deemed by some neighbours to be 'distracting and offensive blights on their community'. It sounds like deliberate provocation.

Welcome to the neighbourhood of Stapleton in Denver. The homeowner's association says that

'anything that offends, disturbs or interferes with the peaceful enjoyment isn’t allowed on shared spaces... Neighbors have been complaining about chalk drawings like Emerson's.'

They sound a pleasant bunch don't they? Perhaps the sort of folk of whom Richard Sennett wrote, possibly before some of them were born, that they have

'so little tolerance for disorder in their own lives, and hav[e] shut themselves off so that they have little experience of disorder as well...'

Via Atlantic Cities.

Previously:

Pavement chalking: this time seen in a positive light

'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'

Pavement chalking epidemic?

Footnote on pavement chalking

 

 

Footnote on taking in your neighbour’s post

So yesterday a postman knocked with a parcel for next door, would I sign for it and take it in?

Given recent discussion on this intriguing test of neighbourliness, I took the opportunity to ask him whether it was common for people to refuse?

‘Always one or two, every day’ he said. ‘People say things like, “Oh no I don’t know them.”’

Neighbours not trusted here

Last October I wrote a post around a research finding that one in five people are unhappy for any of their neighbours to receive any of their post. Royal Mail have followed up on the research by applying for all its postmen and women to be able to leave large items of mail with a neighbour if the addressee is not at home. R4’s PM programme covered it last night and I even got a few words in meself, on Radio London’s drivetime.

There has been a trial in six parts of the country (results here), in which a little over six per cent of items were delivered to neighbours after first time failure, and most people seem happy with it.

It seems wholly sensible so long as there is an opt-out. Back in the autumn I had naively wondered about digital technology - QR codes perhaps - being used in this situation, so that a postman or woman could quickly and discreetly check when unable to deliver a parcel, whether the recipient had agreed that a neighbour might be asked to take it in. The social as well as the economic benefits are fairly obvious.

What’s more, I can envisage a degree of sophistication coming into the system after a while. You could have parcel-specific options:

‘YES for that bunting you ordered for the street party’; ‘NO for the bomb-making chemicals or the illustrated magazine of sexual contortions’.

Wait, you could even have neighbour-specific options – and not just particular houses but particular residents: ‘YES to number 16 if young Eleanor answers, but not the old man if he’s been drinking’. Oh, and watch out for the dog.

But no, the trial just used boring old stickers, perhaps with good reason: you don’t want to be developing some fancy software platform if the idea’s going to flop or be thrown out by the regulator:

‘Customers who wished to opt out contacted Royal Mail online or by telephone to request a sticker to place on their door. This allowed Royal Mail to record the number of requests. There is no guarantee that all stickers were used…’

There’s nothing in the report to say what happened if you weren’t in when your sticker was delivered. I’d be livid, wouldn’t you?

So anyway what’s interesting is that participants in the trial could choose to place a sticker on their door which in effect declares that they don’t trust their neighbours. What fun: bring back ethnography, if there’s a job walking round neighbourhoods counting the stickers, I’ll take it. During the thirteen week trial, we are told, Royal Mail received 4,425 opt-out requests. This amounted to 0.59% of households in the trial areas. (You can almost hear them muttering ‘And we know where you live’).

From the conversations I have had and heard about today, what has struck me is the apparently high proportion of people who don’t like the idea of neighbours touching their mail. The practice is already widespread of course with other postal companies, but in those cases people weren’t asked. Royal Mail makes the point that they are currently the only major delivery company not allowed to deliver to a neighbour as part of standard practice. Now that they’re being asked, it seems, a lot of folk are throwing up their hands in horror.

For what it’s worth, I think many of them will have a case. For those of us who happen to be blessed to live in a neighbourhood, it’s not always easy to appreciate that for those who don’t - for those who by reason of design or circumstance don’t have agreeable trustworthy people around them (or do not believe that they have) – this would be just one more potentially inflammatory arrangement that they’d rather avoid.

The summary of the original research is here.

Royal Mail press release.

 

 

Neighbourliness research needs to take account of personality

Few people will pay much attention to a piece of master’s research on neighbourly interactions with just 22 survey respondents and nine interviews. You’re not going to get headline quantitative findings.

But what you sometimes get – as here in work by Connie Lussier on ‘factors affecting neighbourliness’ in a neighbourhood in Edmonton Alberta - is a little unassuming granularity, because the author has let people’s voices through. Like this for instance:

Irene says that she shovels half the neighbour’s walk if she is out first, and the neighbour does half hers if he is out first “and it’s such a nice thing… because I feel guilty if I haven’t done my sidewalk before I go to work.”

This is described as an urban neighbourhood and it doesn’t sound unusual. Most of the residents ‘tend to be acquainted with just one or two immediate neighbours’ and ‘do not appear to know the neighbours further down the street’. Nor do they seem worked up about that.

Lussier explores factors affecting frequency of neighbouring, and comes up with this diagram.

I don’t mind that it’s rather ungainly, what struck me was that she gives a degree of significance to ‘personality’ and ‘social skills’, which is very rare in my experience. The point is not developed in the thesis. But it reminds me that most of the literature on neighbouring (and all of the policy attempts to increase it) simply treats us as if we are all equally sociable and outgoing in our personalities. 

 

Neighbouring then and now: is it any different?

If you happen to be within striking distance of Norwich on 21 June, please come along to a free presentation and discussion about neighbouring. We’ve an interesting range of speakers, and the chance to see some of Gemma Orton’s illustrations for Picnic (about which I’ll be saying a few words, pointing to the fascinating overlap with Milly Cockayne’s historical material).

Neighbouring then and now – is it any different?

Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library

Thursday 21st June, 6.00-7.30

Free

Join us at the Millennium Library for a discussion about neighbouring – the Joneses are sure to be there so don’t miss it!

There will be a presentation by Norwich-based historian Emily Cockayne, author of the recently published Cheek by jowl: a history of neighbours.

We will also hear account of neighbouring past and present from Fran Ellington from the Grapes Hill Community Garden and from Frances Holmes who worked on The Courts and Yards of Norwich project.

The whole event will be chaired by Kevin Harris and there will also be a display of art work from Gemma Orton, who worked with Kevin on a recent book.

This is a free event and there will be soft drinks available. For more details please contact Sarah (sarah.salmon@norfolk.gov.uk, 01603 774707).

Signalling with flags

Hard to tell from the pic, but I thought this was a delightful example of bunting, which I came across in a relatively affluent secluded street. All of it appeared to be home-made from cloth, none of it plastic and not a national flag to be seen. It suggests the residents got together and agreed that there were certain messages they did or didn't want to send out.

What you can't see from the pic is that in the large window in the house at the very end, there is a very large and defiant union jack.

 

Jubilee street parties: a note for the reluctant

A few conversations just lately have confirmed that I’m not the only one to find the coming weekend of Jubilee street parties a distasteful prospect.

There are at least two kinds of diffidence, which get mingled easily: one caused by the rampant unreflective nationalism of the moment, the other by the familiar sense of enforced sociability.

People feel under pressure to conform on both counts but it’s legitimate to feel reluctant. Streets Alive estimates that two million people will be having a street party of some sort: that leaves about 60 million who won’t be.

Still, it’s a little scary how many apparently rational grown-up people turn into anthem-humming attention-standing serfs at the sight of those silly red white and blue flags. Even more scary to discover how many of them live around you.

Meanwhile, UK Uncut held an alternative jubilee street party in Manchester the other day, with ‘austerity bunting’, a ‘Clegg and spoon race’ and 'upper-class austerity twits'. That's the spirit.

Chris Gittins, the source of street party insight and experience, argues against the assumption that street parties are a 'celebration' of the Jubilee:

‘street parties are for life, not just for Jubilees. In any street there are a wide range of views about the Queen and the royals, but they still want a street party together.’

Which is fair enough, but for those who think that neutral unbranded street parties are a good idea, unless you’re governing the process with a few likemindeds, you’re unlikely to be able to stop the royalists dominating.

So what to do? Personally, I’ll shuffle out there for a short while as a courtesy to my neighbours, especially those who have put organising effort in. I get on well with them all but the artificiality of the occasion and any tatty, halfmast nationalism will finish me off quickly I think.

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.