Neighbourhoods

More on behaviour in the public realm

I’ve been travelling more than usual recently, and I want to follow up on my recent post about behaviour on trains, referring also to an observation I made four years ago, when I had

'...half-watched a young woman perform a 20 minute phase of what may have been a marathon meticulous make-up, including fastidious uprooting of eyebrows, the full MOT…'

That was nothing. The other day a young woman sat down diagonally opposite me at the table, distributing luggage and clutter where she could, and within about ten minutes, after a trip to the toilet, she was surprisingly deshabillee and well into an intensive make-up routine. We shared this space for more than two hours, and she was still preening and powdering her image in her tiny mirror when I left the train before its journey was complete.

The routine included two bouts (at least two, I did not pay attention the whole time) of squeezing spots at close range with her head down studiously. There was one lengthy spell of creaming the face and neck, and several bouts of face-brushing with all the head-bobbing that goes with it.

After about an hour we had eyelash fixing – tricky on a fast-moving train, I would have thought. Do they have left-eye ones and right-eye ones? If so there’s a chance she might have put left on right unnoticed, and/or vice-versa, which might leave anyone looking a little inebriated. I did not inspect, although I suppose I might have done if invited to the cause. And then we had fingernails selected from a large box, apparently stuck on, then used to collect up all the scattered unused ones.

I think that for some people, some of this might just be too intimate for the public realm. I was hugely impressed with the contrast between her personal concern and public disconcern.

There was a sense of urgency, almost aggression, in her actions, in spite of the time it all took. Perhaps experience had taught her with this particular journey that there was no slack for the job in hand: two and a half hours to London and the task must be completed… You wouldn’t want to be pulling in to the terminus with more to do and not feeling able to leave the train perhaps, then being whisked back up the line as the return journey started, still touching up round the temples...

At one point I wondered if this was an unavoidable occupational necessity – was she going to get off the train in London and get tipped out of a taxi straight onto the stage in the west end? Had I unknowingly been privileged to witness the meticulous preparation of a new operatic star? OK, perhaps serving in a night club bar or similar? My conclusion was not, because she kept pouring herself slugs of vodka and sticky-sweet. I could be wrong.

As it happened, someone was taken seriously ill on the train during the journey. Medical expertise from among the passengers had to be called for, and then paramedics summoned to an intermediate station. Which felt to me, non-judgementally, like a little reminder: let her paint an inch thick, to this end she must come.

Do you like your neighbours?

Liverpool is a remarkable city which I regret never having had the chance to get to know. I was there today and for once had time for a little wander, taking in this delight on the eye-feast that is Duke Street.

‘This is a private conversation!’ When we need an official to intervene

I'm enchanted to discover that there is such a thing as the National Campaign for Courtesy. I bet they get some spam. Their chair has been praising the actions of a train driver who made an announcement rebuking a noisy mobile phone user.

The assumption is that ‘the announcement was made because another passenger complained to a guard’. This was a commuter train, and the first class carriage, so perhaps it was neither the first nor predictably the last occasion when the complainant encountered this individual behaving in this way.

Let's pass over the widely-held expectations that people who travel first class either (a) tend to be more civil towards one another than mere plebs, and/or (b) tend to be more assertive about their own importance and rights… It’s more instructive to think about how the story raises a central question in social relations: what is the point at which behaviour perceived as anti-social or uncivil, requires an intermediary?

Should the complainant have spoken first to the phone user? (And in the circumstances, would non-verbal communication, ironically, have done the job?) Some people would say they should have done so. I might have tried that myself, with a smile and gestures towards the ears or a finger to pursed lips.

In the neighbourhood context, where a comparable disagreement arises over noise, the advice is generally to try to speak to and reason with the offender first. Central and local authority websites, housing association guidance, consumer advice materials (e.g.), they all usually recommend that initially a personal, conciliatory approach should be tried.

The story raises a few issues about appropriate behaviour in the public realm and between neighbours. For a start, one-off instances of discourteous behaviour in the public realm are not the same as repeated cases. If you know your journey will soon be over and you are not likely to see the individual again, you may just choose to sit it out.

And community space is not the same as public space. If you live next door to someone whose behaviour you find uncivil or antisocial, your response might not be the same as it would be in a public venue, a park or square, or on public transport, or a non-local online forum, from which you can usually escape - whether or not you feel you have a strong sense of co-ownership of that space.

What’s more, you can’t always count on your fellow citizens to back you up if you do complain. People may not sympathise with your sense of injustice; or if they do, there may be other reasons why they feel unwilling to express any kind of support, which might leave you, finally, heavily dependent on whatever official intervention society has on offer. At its worst, this diminution of social capital can be exaggerated to the point that it puts enormous pressure on those official roles, until they in turn become defensive and cannot cope: think Northern Ireland, for instance, or even the Amsterdam of Anne Frank.

So I have sympathy for the train passenger who chose to refer to the train ‘guard’ (the term used in the report) or ‘steward’ (as we might call them now); as I do for the victims of neighbours from hell who cannot bring themselves to communicate with their tormentors but reach directly for some official intervention. A civil society recognises that humans can still be pretty rugged and occasionally we need officials, accountable to democratic bodies, to keep us from reverting to savagery.

And on the subject of train phone conversations, this seems like a good moment to share one of my favourite anecdotes from the literature, reported ten years ago:

‘A young woman is talking on the cell phone, apparently to her boyfriend, with whom she is in something of a crisis. Her voice projects in far-from dulcet tones. Most of the passengers take up a physical and postural stance of busying themselves with other foci of attention… busy doing “not overhearing this conversation”… Except for one passenger. And when the protagonist of this tale has her eyes intersect this fellow-passenger’s gaze, she calls out in outraged protest, ‘Do you mind?! This is a private conversation!’

Schegloff, E.A., 'Beginnings in the telephone', in Perpetual contact, Cambridge, 2002, p285-286.

 

 

Lost clothing

This morning I had a little part to play in taking an elderly lady from a home to her dentist. As we left the car park, I spotted a baby’s white boot on the wet ground. I know from experience how frequently those things get sprung off by recalcitrant sprogs, how annoying it can be to have to retrace your tired steps to recover them, and the expense that is sometimes involved if you are unsuccessful.

I snatched the shoe up and stuck it like a traitor’s head on the spiked railing alongside - but gently. The railings are black so it was highly visible. (I would proudly have taken a picture but my phone has snuffed).

This gave me the chance to explain to my companion that I recently began writing a long-pondered text about lost clothing, reflecting on the social tradition of picking things up and placing them prominently for a stranger one is never likely to meet.

About 40 minutes later we came back the same way and to our delight, the shoe had gone, presumably recovered with relief by parent or carer. I really like the anonymity of the sequence, when it works. And it happens all the time – especially in winter – all over the place, and proves quite nicely that people don’t have to receive thanks in order to repeat simple low-cost gestures of consideration.

As for the text, I'm working with photographer Martin Dudley and we hope to come up with a curious little illustrated booklet, which you can be sure I will mention here, in due course.

Picnic featured

My good friends at Proboscis have said some generous things on the Bookleteer blog about my essay Picnic, which featured artwork by Gemma Orton. (Yes, you can still get hold of this 'joyous and incisive piece of writing with elegant and witty illustrations', here).

Equalities matter: not later, now

In October 2011, Colin Brewer, an independent councillor in Cornwall, told a disability services worker at an equalities event at County Hall that he thought disabled children ‘should be put down.’ The man has apologised but, mystifyingly, says

‘I don't think I have done anything wrong.’

Personally I don’t think people with such views should themselves be put down, but I’m willing to discuss the question in a civilised manner if you like.

When the dust has settled, policy makers need to look at the dates here. It’s now February 2013, so it has taken our society 16 months to bring this man just this close to the necessary public retribution.

Beyond the individual disgrace, there is a wider public disgrace: why do we have public institutions that do not treat such issues with sufficient seriousness to disinfect themselves with a more rigorous urgency? Do equalities somehow not matter?

 

Bashing ordinary people who are making their civic contribution

It’s been a triumphant few days for those who like bashing ordinary people who happen to be making a civic contribution. Last week we had a rash of unfortunate remarks about a group of citizens who, as jurors, asked for clarification on their role. True, it sounds as if there may have been some difficult characters among them, but the questions were presumably part of the (legitimate) way other jurors dealt with that difficulty. There’s not much justification for some of the snobbish sneering (e.g. about 'intelligence' - wait, make that 'cognitive abilities') from some commentators.

Thankfully, the Independent kept perspective and published an article by Trevor Grove, clarifying things for His Lordship the Judge Bod:

‘as someone who has been on several juries and also written a book about the jury system, I must tell Andrew Edis, QC, that jurors often do struggle to understand their basic tasks. After all, they are ordinary members of the public drawn from widely different backgrounds, most of whom have not been inside a courtroom in their lives. Some may not have been born in this country. Others may never have passed an exam. Yet amazingly enough these unpaid, untrained, randomly picked, involuntary volunteers, who are suddenly required to pass judgment on a fellow citizen in sometimes very disturbing cases, nearly always rise to the occasion. A large majority of judges, lawyers and police agree that most jury verdicts are just, or at any rate reasonable, in light of the evidence. And only in about 1 per cent of trials do juries fail to reach a verdict.’ (Emphasis added)

To continue the theme, today (on WATO and elsewhere) we have had a moralising, ideology-loaded hectoring of school governors from Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted’s chief inspector. With all the sensitivity of a drunk rhinoceros, the man plunged straight into likening ‘the worst governors’ to jurors who were ‘incapable of understanding their responsibilities in a court case'.

Well done there Mike. So if there's a problem, it’s not the system, far less a conflict about the purposes of the education system, it’s just that ordinary people are dull-witted peasants. Sadly, that’s still really the problem for the elite – how to get the plebs to do what is expected of them. And you thought it was only a question of ordinary people doing their duty, or in many cases, far beyond their duty, in the interests of fellow citizens. It might be worth pointing out to people like Wilshaw that many school governors invest their time, energy and expertise in their roles in order to give young people chances despite the heavy forces, ahem, working to deny them such chances.

For example, judging by his preoccupation with them, it still hasn’t occurred to Wilshaw that performance targets are damaging. What explains this determined denial by the governing class? Even the police are getting the message, with the Independent Police Complaints Commission making it clear yesterday in the depressing example of Southwark Sapphire Unit, that

‘The pressure to meet targets as a measure of success, rather than focussing on the outcome for the victim, resulted in the police losing sight of what policing is about – protecting the public and deterring and detecting crime.’

Well there's a surprise.

Wilshaw wants ordinary people either to adhere to the culture of target obsession disorder, or get out of the way. But people get involved in civic participation often because they can see a service needs re-directing or rescuing from misguided policy meddling. It's not going to help if there is also a growing culture of clobbering the volunteers.

Art, ownership and irony: graffiti in the neighbourhood

Lots of interesting comment from local people about the disappearance of that Banksy from their neighbourhood, raising ironic questions of ownership and value – Harringay Online; Bowes and Bounds Connected.

Food banks and inequality

‘Food banks are the safety net of safety nets. It is only when government fails that food banks have to step in… They are not a substitute for social policies that protect people’ - Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaking in London recently, cited by Patrick Butler.

De Schutter said that widening economic and geographic inequalities in western countries such as the UK were reinforcing the existence in deprived neighbourhoods of ‘food deserts’ – places with few shops and where cheap, healthy produce was hard to come by.

The question arises in this context, is it morally defensible for a government to adopt policies that demonstrably increase economic inequalities to exacerbate the situation? I find it hard to think of anything more offensive right now.

As far as I can tell, the Guardian is the only major news broadcaster to cover this story – presumably the other sources do not regard it as important.

Meanwhile, I find it curious that this government – usually so determinedly disinterested in evidence of any kind – has initiated research which ‘will examine the extent and effectiveness of emergency food aid, amid concern that increasing numbers of low-paid and benefit-dependent households are forced to use charity food sources’. So they’ve spotted that there is ‘concern’, well done there. I can find no reference to the inquiry on the Defra site so far. I suspect they’re cautiously checking the morality of applying the ‘big society’ brand in this case (seriously: see the first 30 secs here).

Child poverty and family stability

Last week I designed and helped to run a day long consultation event with about 40 children and young people in poverty. Once we've processed the mass of content, I'll try to blog in more detail, but here I thought I'd comment on a couple of the more striking issues that emerged.  

The event was designed to feed in to the government’s consultation on child poverty (now closed) around which, as the Guardian highlighted last week, there has been a degree of tension. The idea that Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, should be credited with a ‘theory that other factors aside from money caused poverty’ is odd. Apparently he is challenging ‘the tired arguments that poverty was about income alone,’ but no-one I have spoken to knows where to find those arguments.

Obviously the question is not whether there are other factors, but how they are emphasised. You’d only ask ‘is child poverty about money or not?’ if you had a pitifully weak grasp of what it is. Of course it’s about money. It's also about of lot of other things – like access to transport, health inequalities, network poverty, lack of cultural capital, environmental poverty, poverty of opportunity and so on - which are exacerbated by lack of money. Perhaps also it still needs to be pointed out that wide wealth inequalities are wasteful and have all sorts of negative human and social consequences, which are expensive.

Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of evidenced support in our event for the government’s idea that family stability is a key factor.

Except, wait. There was one feature of the lives of participants in the event which could strongly affect family stability, and which kept coming up: death. It was surprising how frequently death was mentioned - of someone known to the participant or in the fictionalised scenarios they developed collectively. It may be that we helped to create an environment which allowed this theme to emerge more easily than it does in other contexts, I don’t know, but it was striking. Death in poor families can be particularly devastating in both emotional and economic terms, the more so if young people are dealing with unusual frequencies of death among relatives and family friends.

Ah yes wait, I’m forgetting, there was something else that impacts on family stability, which kept coming up: imprisonment. The realities of someone they knew being imprisoned were clearly not too far away from the day to day lives of these young people to be dismissed. And some were acutely aware of the obstacles to rebuilding their lives that anyone could expect to be presented after a sentence has been served. There seemed to be genuine fear of the very idea of prison as a dead end to be avoided.

Less obvious as a factor having an indirect impact on family stability were the numerous remarks about transition stages – especially the moment of leaving care, which can be far too abrupt for many young people, due simply to inadequate levels of support (this is an example, one among several that we heard, of service poverty). One young man described how, at the age of 18, he felt ‘like a ball being kicked off the park’.

So I’m starting to come round to the view that family stability does offer a way of gaining closer understanding of child poverty, although not so much as a causal factor. It may be that it is a sub-theme which usefully helps us focus on a number of influential poverties; like health inequalities, service poverty, low cultural capital and poverty of opportunity.

 

Kids these days: juxtaprose 8

‘They have no fear of their teachers, they get into fights in their presence and talk back to them in the most offensive manner. They wear their rapiers not only on the street, but also in the school. They play ball during the church services and instruction periods, and even run wild in unseemly places.’ (Arnstadt City Council, 1706, quoted in).   (Previously juxtaprosed)

'An inspector said a 'core' of pupils had no boundaries, with some being ‘rude, aggressive and threatening violence’. One pupil was seen to tell the headteacher to ‘f’ off while others would just wander around the classroom. Parents complain about kids smoking on school property, bullying, fighting and rudeness to teachers.' (Daily Mail, 2012).

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...

 

More evidence that driving kids to school isn’t helpful

Quick heads-up for another Sarah Goodyear article in the Atlantic, discussing research showing an association between exercise on the way to school with ability to concentrate. She refers to a survey of nearly 20,000 Danish children and young people aged between five and 19. That’s quite a handy sample:

‘It found that kids who cycled or walked to school, rather than traveling by car or public transportation, performed measurably better on tasks demanding concentration, such as solving puzzles, and that the effects lasted for up to four hours after they got to school.’

I do like to see research that demonstrates what is surely pretty much commonsense, but in a way that most of us hadn't thought about.

All the same, I don’t want to spoil the story, but I should note that for most of my secondary school career I either cycled or walked between 2.5 and 3 miles each way, and was never any good at concentrating on anything other than my lunch or sport. Nor have been since.

Goodyear concludes:

‘Many parents pay for test prep and after-school enrichment programs to make their kids more academically competitive, and go to great lengths to schedule time for those activities. Imagine if they invested those resources instead in something as simple as helping their children to travel safely from home to school on foot or by bike, arriving ready to learn.’

Starting to get serious: how we treat asylum seekers

It’s fairly routine to come across a report of a working party or an official inquiry that laments certain conditions that were found. Of course, if an investigation or inquiry is set up with busy (and sometimes expensive) people deliberating, we’re not going to be surprised if there proves to be a good reason for it.

But occasionally the reality that an inquiry discovers is so disturbing that it deserves wider attention, and should command that attention.

Today saw the publication of one example, from the cross-party parliamentary inquiry into asylum support for children and young people. Former children’s minister Sarah Teather, who chaired the inquiry, said

‘The evidence we have heard is shocking and appalling. It is an affront to this country’s proud tradition of giving sanctuary to those fleeing danger and violence.’

For the Children’s Society, Matthew Reed said:

‘Children and their families are being forced to live in appalling conditions that are unacceptable by anybody’s standards. No child, no matter who they are or where they’re from, should be treated with such a complete lack of human dignity.’

It sounds pretty serious to me. I don’t want to live in a society in which vulnerable families are separated routinely and people are treated like this:

‘The inquiry received evidence documenting reports of eggs thrown at houses, stones thrown at babies and children hounded from school. Evidence details how flats where asylum seekers lived were targeted in arson attacks; in one case a man begged to leave the area after a petrol bomb was thrown through the window of his home. The most extreme form of this violence has been the murder of asylum seekers in cities across the UK.’

Fortunately, the system is not always the end of the line:

‘One woman started to go into labour, did not have a midwife, did not know where the hospital was, and it was only the kindness of strangers in the street that got her to hospital.’

Is that what’s known as big society? It’s hardly contentious to point out that the Tory rhetoric of ‘benefit scroungers’ is at best unhelpful and in practice likely to be a consistent contributory factor here. The report notes that

‘Some segments of the population, including some frontline professionals and statutory agencies, have vastly inaccurate ideas about asylum seekers and the reality of their lives. This has fuelled a hostile reception for many thousands of children and young people, desperate to live in peace and safety.’ (Emphasis added)

And as if the evidence were not bad enough, its publication surfaces another distasteful feature of contemporary life – the inevitable trolls who see no reason, hear no reason, and speak no reason; for whom it is easier to dismiss this systematic inhumanity as ‘self-inflicted destitution’ (you can find examples in the comments section here). It’s scary when people are insistently wrong about these issues; when they also seem to take pride in being devoid of any kind of compassion it’s close to terrifying.

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?'

 

Family stability is not a measure of child poverty

As I’m working on two poverty-related projects at the moment, one of which is aimed directly at the government’s consultation on measuring child poverty, I was intrigued to read the Poverty and Social Exclusion research team’s paper slamming the consultation document (deadline 15 February), which it describes as being ‘of very poor quality’.

The paper includes the PSE team's responses to the consultation. Given the tendency in some policy circles to try to associate poverty with certain kinds of family, and to distance it from the structural effects of policy decisions, I particularly appreciated this note:

Q21: Which experiences associated with family stability should be captured in a measure?

None. Again family stability is not a measure of child poverty. Neither is family structure. Most poor children live in two-parent families. There is a higher risk of child poverty in lone parent and cohabiting families but this is a function of our social policy in the UK…

 

Towers or not, could we please have decent housing? (And get on with it)

There doesn’t seem to be much chance of the economy being stimulated to get the badly needed house-building underway (most cabinet ministers have got enough for the time being), so it’s a good time to give the housing industry something to do. The Policy Exchange calls for the widespread demolition of tower blocks.

I’ve spoken to quite a few people who love living the high life, but if the PX findings from their recent study are accurate, then there are clearly too many children and young people cooped up in box flats too far from the outdoors. They claim that:

• 52,000 households with children who are social renters live on the third floor or above (40,000 of which are in London)
• 20,000 households with children who are social renters live on the fifth floor or above (16,000 of which are in London).

The argument may need a little more nuanced understanding. The press release says that:

‘Studies have shown that residents of high-rise blocks or large estates suffer from more stress, mental health difficulties, neurosis and marriage breakdowns’

- and it’s worth asking about the extent to which these dysfunctions might be caused by, exacerbated by, or coincidental to, the housing conditions. Do they occur to a statistically significant extent in well-designed, well-built, well-maintained towers?

Meanwhile, we seem to be witnessing an increase in the construction of highly secure high-rise buildings for the wealthy. Is a pattern going to emerge, the posh with their heads in the clouds and the plebs brought down to earth? 

Perhaps we need to emphasise that design and build quality really must be part of the argument. It’s all very well calling for low rise, but maybe this image can serve as a reminder that bad low rise can be problematic.

It would help to breathe life back into the archived CABE (decommissioned by the present government in 2011), because this was their business. It seems to me to be hard for the present government to escape the charge that they have squandered previous progress on decent homes standards.

 

Where did all the vandals go?

Brian Wheeler discusses several theories about why vandalism rates are falling, among them:

• People have stopped reporting vandalism
• Stuff is harder to vandalise
• Anti-social behaviour crackdowns are working
• Vandalism prevention is more sophisticated
• Smartphones have killed boredom
• Social media is the new graffiti, and
• Young people are drinking less.

Of these, I certainly think the second and fourth have merit as arguments. But if you’re thinking ‘none of the above’, OK, how about the last, which could carry off the prize -

• Lead has been removed from petrol.

 

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?

 

 

Above you!

It's some years since I went on about the huge collective local endeavour that is community panto round here, and tonight's involvement was quite unexpected. I got a call with half an hour to get to the hall for dress rehearsal - could I stand in for someone pulling the drops in the fly? - the gallery above the stage.

I was given a script and, literally, shown the ropes.  

It might not seem much to some people but it felt like a great privilege to me, witnessing from a different angle the coming together of all that creative effort (sometimes laborious, grudging and half-hearted, but often inspired and always driven by teamwork and a commitment to fun).

Talk about co-production. Let's hear it for community drama.

 

It's free

Snow across the country the past few days. And here's a text from a young muslim mother in poverty, with whom I've been corresponding - 'I was hoping to have a lie in today (wishful thinking!). We've been out in the snow every day since friday, [the children] were up @7am asking what time we could head out!'

And I thought, rather weakly, that's it - the snow is a delight in its own terms and it's free. For once, something pleasurable in this country that is not reserved for the Haves (although it helps to have decent clothes and a way to dry off, to warm up afterwards, and replenish with quality calories...)

 

Anti-locality: the tube map

Publicity about the 150^th anniversary of the London underground has drawn me back to Harry Beck’s famous 1933 map (1931 draft here) which abandoned the insistence on geographical accuracy in favour of ease of interpretation and use. This Atlantic article shows the evolution of the map over the century and a half, clearly confirming the paradigm shift that he accomplished (more here).

It’s refreshing to talk about 150 years of urban history without being drawn into talking about ‘how everything’s changed’. The tube map has changed little in the 80 years since Beck’s was adopted, but we can use the previous maps to try to imagine the current level of complexity if it had not been.

The fact that his contribution was unsolicited and took two years to be accepted is a wee lesson on sources of creativity for managers everywhere, although largely wasted on most of them of course.

More useful perhaps is the opportunity it gives us to reflect on how universally-applied maps relate to the physical reality perceived around us. Beck’s reconfiguration of this reality is not always helpful. For instance, people unfamiliar with London might well get on at Charing Cross to travel to Embankment; and emerging into the light discover themselves within one or two hundred metres of the point at which they went underground, having travelled three sides of a buried vertical square.

The point Beck’s map highlights for me is that underground there are few landmarks, and our bearings are vulnerable at best. Here we are extraordinarily dependent on the information supplied to us by signage and which we cannot confirm or augment except by correspondence with our fellow human beings, all strangers.

As an environment it is thus an exquisite anti-locality (I won’t say non-place). The first sense in which you are here, by which you locate yourself, is because of a huge layered construct of information. You are not at Holland Park or Parsons Green or Chalk Farm, you are somewhere unrecognisable way below the surface, or believe yourself to be.

Having good reason to trust the information that you may or may not have absorbed, you let yourself be guided through tunnels and up moving stairways where you sense light and cross into the world you can confirm as Holland Park or Parsons Green or Chalk Farm. There you re-adopt your sense of being-in-place, intact and in perfect working order. What a marvel.

Safety and the militarisation of schools

A couple of months ago I had to deliver something to a primary school during the day in term time. It wasn't as much of a security challenge as I had feared, which may reflect a degree of comparative enlightenment at the school in question; or perhaps it was in a low-risk area; or that my expectations have been affected negatively by the 'Secured by Design' movement. I certainly dislike the tendency to militarise our schools and see it as consistent with a culture of private car use and the development of gated communities.

Fences are a bog standard example of the human inclination to outsource social responsibilities to technology. If you can minimise the supervision of children by constraining their movement, it allows you to get on with other things. But then, wait, other people might be able to reach them: so you have to add a camera or two. And then what? According to the National Rifle Association, that respected forum of balanced humanitarian reflection, in every school you'd need 'a good guy with a gun.'

Today there's a new set of papers from those excellent folk at the new economics foundation (nef) on the need to revisit what we mean by 'prevention' with a view to coming up with a positive sense of prevention across social policy. One of the papers, by Anna Minton and Jody Aked, takes aim at the effect of Secured by Design principles on schools. They make the point that there is a significant impact in low income neighbourhoods:

'Schools, in particular, have become high security environments, emphasizing gating, high fences and CCTV. Because Secured by Design requirements for schools and public buildings are based on an audit of local crime risk, higher crime areas, which correlate with higher deprivation scores, are now characterised by public buildings... with a militarised feel to them.'

The papers are welcome but I fear too conceptual and theoretical to ensure the sort of debate that is needed. And the time may not be ideal for the encouragement of more open thinking about the Other. I hope I'm wrong about that.

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?

 

Dig this

Steve Wheen does pothole gardening, sending a message about creativity, style and scale in harsh and impersonal townscapes. The BBC have this video of his seasonal offering. Enjoy.

 

This could be the start of something sensible (updated)

In Scotland, proposals for a law banning parking on pavements.

Future generations will wonder why it took us so long.

Footnote: I just came across this recent letter to a Canadian newspaper which notes un-neighbourly complaints concerning residents who park their cars facing in the wrong direction. It seems that by having a bye-law which accommodates such complaints,some residents are using an intermediary (the city council) to get at their neighbours.

Pic Martin Dudley).

No home-like place (updated)

Do some reflecting. Spend a little time with the poignant work of Climbing the Wall, especially ‘Some kind of life’, a series of patient, dignified film records made with people who do not have their own homes:

‘Stories challenging assumptions about what constitutes home and how people understand their own sense of belonging.’

Footnote 12 Dec - Teresa Cairns (from Climbing the Wall) has written to me:

'Our most recent film production, 'No Place Like Home', deals with the difficult transitions people face when they come off 'the street'. It is featured by the Community Channel as part of their week of films exploring homelessness in Britain today, until Sunday 16th Dec:

http://www.communitychannel.org/featured/no-place-like-home/

We would love feedback if you manage to catch it - broadcast tomorrow evening at 21.30, then Sunday at 22.30.'

 

Poverty: curtains or blinkers?

Yesterday morning I had a meeting at home, concerning one of the poverty projects I’m involved in. Unconsciously as we talked, gazing out of the window I happened to notice curtains being drawn in a house across the back.

Come lunchtime and at last some high profile criticism of Tory ministers’ mythology of ‘scroungers’ who laze at home ‘with the curtains drawn’ while ‘decent hard working people’ strive to get the economy back on track.

No matter that more and more of those working people face grinding hardship; as Polly Toynbee notes, this is mendacious, disreputable dishonesty. And some people, like my neighbour, have the curtains drawn during the day because they work nights.

How have we got to this wretched level, as a society, with this smirking politicisation of the misery of millions? It’s offensive to pretend that ‘we’re all in this together’. As I wrote a couple of years ago,

Some are poncing about with Pimms on the upper deck while some are clinging desperately to the sides, and many detached are screaming from the rising waters. Responsible politicians would acknowledge that, then do something about it.

Even Demos are a little concerned about how policy makers will interpret and exploit their recent analysis of poverty. They point to the ways in which multiple deprivation gets associated with anti-social behaviour or criminality:

it is not impossible that the Government or media might brand one or other of the groups associated with a type of poverty (perhaps those with the most entrenched poverty or negative features such as poor education and material deprivation) ‘neighbours from hell’.

Demos have set up a website for the project, Poverty in perspective. I’ve been really impressed with the report, with it's practical, meaningful breakdown of 15 categories of poverty. It’s timely in the way it shows how

The most prevalent types of poverty are among the working poor and the recently redundant (as a sign of the current economic climate), who have sophisticated financial coping strategies and lack the social disadvantages all too commonly conflated with low income.

It also helps show something that my colleagues and I will be ‘striving’ (can I use that word?) to do, which is to emphasise how levels of income and outgoings are only one aspect of that experience.

It's winter, the country's in a mess, the news is dire...

...so here's something to cheer us all up. From Heath Robinson's marvellous How to run a communal home. Enjoy.

Via. And a special mention to the William Heath Robinson Memorial Trust.

 

 

The right to shelter: some positive words about squatting

I don’t need much reminding that I live in a brutal, primitive society, one which has imprisoned a young man for sheltering in an empty house. I'm also now keenly aware that the influential Centre for Social Justice does not see unequal access to housing as one of ‘the root causes of poverty and social breakdown in the UK’.

Yesterday The Guardian published a broad ranging article by Steve Rose, on squatters. Here are three quick points:

(i) Rose notes that

‘What the squatting dispute boils down to is a split between those who consider private property to be sacred, and those who would prioritise the right to shelter.’

Indeed, and it’s a no-brainer if ever I saw one.

(ii) I suspect there might have been more about the constructive role of squatters in patching up buildings and thereby saving resources:

‘In Dutch there is a word krakers – literally "crackers" – to describe the type of constructive squatter who fixes up damaged buildings. "Squatters quietly restore house" is a story that rarely makes the papers, although in the 70s in Amsterdam, hundreds of squatters moved into and repaired dilapidated buildings in the historic Nieuwmarkt area, and fought to save the neighbourhood from large-scale demolition and redevelopment. It was the beginning of a successful conservation movement in the city.’

(iii) It’s not a great reflection on our society that people have to squat, but perhaps we should celebrate what they do as an example of collective resilience (this of course is partly why squatters are anathema to the Haves):

‘In the broader sense, what ties together these disparate instances of squatting is human beings' capacity to organise and provide for themselves.’ Rose quotes Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow cities: a billion squatters:

"Wherever you go in the developing world, and, I would argue with most of the squatters in the UK and the US, you're talking about a notable act of self reliance by people facing a system that does not provide housing they can afford," says Neuwirth. "This is something we should be saluting, rather than looking at it as some kind of horrific, criminal approach."

Previously: 'Your logic is a dog.' Systematically increasing exclusion

 

Social exclusion and social policy: what has equality got to do with it?

Browsing in a bookshop yesterday I noticed this simple introductory remark on the dust jacket of Joseph Stiglitz’s The price of inequality:

‘The impact of inequality on societies is now increasingly well understood - higher crime, health problems and mental illness, lower educational achievements, social cohesion and life expectancy.’

Inequalities reinforce social exclusion: it's hardly a contentious assertion, it's been around for a while, the data seem to support it, but is it really ‘well understood’? Understood as well as, for instance, the principle that people who are in positions of privilege, wealth and power will distort whatever they have to, in order to protect those positions?

No it probably isn’t, not in the context of Westminster and the outlook of the influential Centre for Social Justice. This was made clear to me at the launch of the CSJ’s second ‘Breakthrough Britain’ programme the other day. The new programme addresses the same six themes as the first: family breakdown; economic dependency and worklessness; educational failure; drug and alcohol addiction; serious personal debt; and the role of the voluntary sector.

The reports of the first programme, published in 2007, were sub-titled ‘policy recommendations to the Conservative Party’. So has no progress been made on these themes in the interim? Are social conditions worse, or better, in the CSJ’s eyes? Perhaps they are comparable. We know that inequalities have widened; but perhaps that doesn’t matter?

The six themes strikingly avoid any reference to disadvantage experienced collectively, or to collective responses, thus reinforcing the notion that poverty and social exclusion are just experienced at the individual or household level and have to be addressed by the individual or household. I’m not sure why another bash at them is needed (I mean at the themes, not the people) nor why other forces that contribute to or might help reduce exclusion are not being considered.

So when, after the introductory speeches, Titus Alexander asked, from the floor, where the principles of equalities might feature in the process, it seemed a wholly reasonable question and an opportunity for the chair to say something like ‘yes of course, it’s fundamental, obviously we didn’t have time to cover everything in our introduction, but…’

Not a bit of it. The idea that inequalities have anything to do with the problems of disadvantage and poverty in this country – or that addressing them might have anything to do with the solutions – was abruptly dismissed, on the grounds that the data do not necessarily explain why some countries have relatively high income inequality but fewer negative social indicators. (It might depend on which indicators you choose to look at I suppose).

(Re-reading my post from a previous CSJ thematic launch, I note there was a pertinent question dismissed on that occasion too).

A short while later, another voice from the floor challenged the chairs running the six inquiries to think long term about the potential to reduce the roles of the state to zero and encourage the voluntary sector to take on all – he repeated ‘all’ – those roles. With CSJ's claimed political independence looking more threadbare than ever, those assembled took this in their stride, without any kind of reflection on the implications of this manifestly nonsensical ideological folly. (This man told us all that his wife is an MP, so presumably her role would in due course have to become voluntary. The irony went unobserved. I can't be sure, but I think I was the only one smiling at this point. But the idea of a voluntary parliament is refreshing, is it not?)

Those two moments in an otherwise dull event have scared me rather more than they might have done at another time, I suppose because of the crystallising polarisation in this country: we face a division of increasing starkness between the Haves and the have nots, which these attitudes only serve to sharpen. Since the viewpoint on the community and voluntary sector seems to be a Cameronian stance that interprets it in terms of charitable philanthropy (no sign of mutual aid or community action) the disempowerment of people in poverty will be very much part of the tight framework being devised to keep them closed in. Those few who are lucky enough to break out, earn lots of money and not trouble the elite, will be welcomed into the ranks of the Haves (bless you kind sir). The rest will be left to fester.

On leaving, I tried to charitable as I thought about the man who stood up to call for the progressive and complete eradication of the state. I hope he did not trip on a publicly-paid-for kerb into the path of any passing public transport, was helped to his feet by a passing peasant and had to be comforted by a publicly-resourced pleb police officer while he waited under a publicly-funded street light for a national health service ambulance, was taken to a hospital to be cared for by public servants using technology that had been developed in publicly-funded universities by people educated in state schools. But given the level of intelligence exhibited, I doubt he’d have had the capacity to reflect on what that might have meant.

Let’s acknowledge that in influential policy arenas in Westminster it is deemed reasonable to plot the maintenance and regulation by the voluntary sector of, for example, our governance, water, public health and safety services and so on - obviously including all those which the private sector has shown itself incompetent to run.

That doesn’t just reflect a shameful ignorance of the fact that most voluntary action carried out in this country has nothing whatsoever to do with philanthropy or formal voluntary organisations: it also illustrates the desperate inability of those on the political right to grasp the concept of collective social value.

 

Urban density and the green environment

At the end of this article about urban density and NIMBYism, Kaid Benfield suddenly strikes right at an issue that has long bothered me. When developers win their ways with the density card, the local green environment usually doesn’t stand much chance. I think that has knock-on effects in terms of sociability and health which remain largely unrecognised.

Benfield writes:

‘if we designed density so that it brought more, not less, nature into communities, density could become far more appealing and popular. And I would particularly urge that the nature we integrate into development – plantings, water, trees, open space, green roofs, living walls, and so forth – be designed to serve multiple purposes simultaneously. A menu of choices for multitasking might include, for example, green infrastructure to catch and filter stormwater, places of play for kids and respite for adults, plantings that maximize the absorption of carbon dioxide while releasing oxygen for cleaner and fresher air, green spaces that reduce the heat island effect, and/or signature public spaces to create a sense of place.’ 

I’d add that I think we need to be sharper at getting quickly from having a few examples of good practice to ensuring the dominance of such an approach as standard practice.

The pic above I took in Luton, England, about three years ago, from a rolling bus.

 

 

Anti-localism disease in social policy - from the Dieback Administration

Civic Voice have cranked up their campaign against the government’s proposals to change the planning system. As with the creeping phenomenon of academies, the government’s attitude to planning seems to be peculiarly anti-localist, contradicting all the rhetoric about localism we’ve been hearing.

‘These proposals will mean neighbours will not be able to object to unsightly developments and big business will be able to install broadband boxes and other infrastructure without notifying the local council. Effectively removing the community voice…’

The effect could well be to erode rapidly the character of neighbourhoods that have taken shape over time in a considered, fundamentally democratic way.

And it’s the erosion of the context for and everyday evidence of local democracy that most concerns me. Policies that treat schools and libraries as if they were challenges in a demolition ball arcade game are part of the same disdainful, destructive attitude towards the places where people live.

Similarly, today we had the local government secretary reinforcing the creed that locally elected councils might not be trusted to take decisions on local services, so that central government might have to confiscate their right to do so. (Note his ludicrous use of the phrase 'hard-working residents').

And I can’t even begin to contemplate the impact of the widely-derided universal credit system on social support. I was in a meeting of local community and voluntary agencies this morning where there was a sense of desperation at the trauma and havoc to come. No doubt some official would call such forebodings ‘hysterical’, in very much the same way that, with reference to the latest Children’s Commissioner’s report on child sexual abuse,

‘a Government source said it was “difficult to overstate the contempt” with which ministers viewed the report’s conclusions.’ (Mail)

The prime minister seems to have disagreed, but hey, that’s ministers for you, they're a jolly lot, never the kind of folk to take such an issue too seriously.

I believe W. H. Auden kept a rotten apple on his mantlepiece at Oxford in the late nineteen thirties (no, a fruit, not a computer, dummy), to remind him of the condition of Europe. Today we have our own comparable living-dying image to remind us of the state of this country. The telegraph reported recently that ash dieback is ‘now beyond containment’. There are some kinds of devastation from which the potential for any kind of recovery is hard to identify, and the loss too hard to contemplate.

Don’t be surprised if the present government, or what passes for a government, goes down in history as the Dieback Administration. Now I think of it, that might make a decent title for a film. Ken Loach, you’re needed.

 

Social justice, child care, and a tale of a Christmas carol

It seems we care a lot about our lack of care for children these days. The phrase ‘child abuse’ appears routinely in almost every news bulletin in some connection or other; child neglect has been an issue of expressed concern for the House of Commons Education Select Committee and more recently for the education secretary; and the government has just launched its consultation on the measurement of child poverty, informed in a timely way by this chid poverty map on the Guardian’s data blog.

When issues of social justice and children coincide, it’s just the sort of context in which someone says, ‘what we need is another Dickens!’ Indeed. The other day I was told of a family where two children go to school on alternate days, because there is only one uniform to share. An issue like this would have incensed Dickens, particularly because of his own personal experience of disrupted education.

As it happens, I was asked to give a short talk about Dickens the other day, to introduce some readings from A Christmas carol as part of an open air ‘Victorian’ high street festival. Groping around for some reminders, I chanced upon a phrase used by one of Dickens’s biographers, Edgar Johnson, who refers to his ‘uncompromising humanitarian radicalism’: fifteen syllables in three words may be OTT, but what an encapsulation!

Sadly, we can’t have another Charles Dickens. Not because there are not talented, persuasive writers and passionate social commentators in our own time – there are. But because no commentator today could expect to sustain the level of attention that Dickens managed to command for several decades in the nineteenth century. The media channels were fewer and the hall of fame far less crowded then; and Dickens had the skills, energy and temperament to maximise his impact in the interests of social justice.

He wasn’t ‘just’ a novelist, he was a communicator adept in the dominant media of his time. Lord Northcliffe described him as the greatest magazine editor of his or any age – how was that possible? It’s scary to be reminded that Dickens died at about the age I am now – he achieved so much that we might mistakenly think of him as long-lived.

All of which leaves me wondering quite why we are in such a mess now, and what is needed to signal positive social change. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to start interpreting the above-mentioned child poverty map as representing many thousands of family crises, weeks of hunger, months of debilitating stress, sickness, sense of abandonment, fear and maltreatment and loss and ruined lives. What kind of influence over our power-mongers is needed to restore a respectable insistence on social justice?

In 1843, Dickens was just 31 years old and a huge celebrity. He was at the height of his powers, full of ideas and overflowing with creativity. And he was besieged on all sides by people seeking to persuade him to use his influence in one cause or another. We should not overlook his skill in dealing with persistent lobbyists. He did not shy away from difficult issues and frequently took up a cause about which he felt passionate, and would take it further than anyone else ever could.

And so it happens that around March 1843, one of the representatives of the Children’s Employment Commission, no less, Dr Southwood Smith, sent or lent to Dickens a copy of the Commission’s second report. Sounds like a gripping read doesn't it? Nowadays we can well imagine the kinds of nasties that were depicted. On 6 March Dickens writes to Smith:

‘I am so perfectly stricken down by the blue book you have sent me, that I think… of writing, and bringing out, a very cheap pamphlet, called ‘An appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’…

This is Dickens the journalist, moved by what he has read or heard or seen, and ready to use his formdiable reporting skills to bring social injustices to public attention. But a few days later he writes again to Dr Smith:

‘…since I wrote to you last, reasons have presented themselves for deferring the production of that pamphlet, until the end of the year. I am not at liberty to explain them further just now; but rest assured that when you know them, and see what I do, and where, and how, you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force - twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following my first idea…’

The phrase ‘until the end of the year’ is a clue. We are witnessing the germ of an idea in the author’s mind and he has perhaps already glimpsed the opportunity to shift his commitment from a short piece of journalism to a hugely influential work of – let’s face it – very fanciful fiction. This letter is part of the genesis of A Christmas carol.

We may not see the ghosts that Dickens conjures in the way that his contemporaries did as they read, nor feel engrossed by the polarised moralities he delineates. We don’t do sentimental any more. To me, it’s a mediocre fable, a rather laboured parable. But Dickens seems saturated with his own power, he is saying, I can do anything with words, I can persuade you of the virtue of compassion and generosity of spirit through imaginary beings, you will believe it. It would be hard not to be in awe of the prose, its forceful confidence based so solidly on ‘uncompromising humanitarian radicalism’.

Perhaps ignition was inevitable when the spark of Dickens’s genius was brought so close to a necessarily dry report from an official commission. And it’s generated plenty of warmth and light over the decades. How do we replicate that sense of compassion, now that we need it so badly?

The unruly element (it's just a shot away)

If you ever feel you need reminding, against the general steady flow of filtered public opinion, that maybe the past wasn’t entirely devoid of anti-social behaviour – or that when anyone got a little boisterous it might not just have been high spirits – try this short interview extract (at about 17:20) with a not quite obscure popular music combo from a bygone age. (Six days left to listen).

The band in question had their kit trashed at a gig. Note the diffident, cultured accents, non-judgemental mild fascination at the episode, the interviewers' phrases like ‘an unruly element,’ and the question which begins ‘You must have been in some wild scenes before…?’

Wait, there's more. An account (at about 40:33) of some chap in 'bright purple velvet trousers... gaily embroidered collar and cuffs' - think Malvolio - reflecting that 'one perhaps doesn't ask for responsibilities... Perhaps one is given responsibilities when one is pushed into the limelight...' Thank you beeb.

 

Power points

I’m a bit late catching up with this, but it’s too good to pass over. Atlantic cities ran a piece by Will Doig about how New Yorkers got access to electricity to power their portable devices in the wake of hurricane Sandy:

‘In Midtown Manhattan, where the lights are still on, residents have strung extension cords out to their stoops.’

I’m surprised there weren’t more examples of civic mutual aid and self-help; perhaps they just remain undiscovered.

The article goes on to ask whether city councils might not do more, hurricane or no, to facilitate access to power sources – crediting New York, in passing, with having installed ‘42 electrical outlets throughout Bryant Park, making it the first fully-wired public park in America’.

So let’s turn to the comments, one or two of which reveal the tortuous brainlessness of the anti-public-service, Don’t-Tax-Me mentality. Some respondents feel the idea that a city’s authorities might help citizens to help themselves, by sorting access to electricity in a crisis, as unacceptable. No doubt they will reach for their guns in defence of the freedom not to help or share. These are real human beings, it seems, and probably have been educated:

‘Free fuel for our cars next?? Hell, let's be BOLD and just make EVERYTHING free, and available to everyone, all the time, without limits of any sort. Yeah, that's the ticket. Utopia, baby!’

According to one link provided in the comments section, it costs just 38 cents per year to charge an iPhone. Their convenience as devices for people to support one another in time of crisis is obvious. America’s real crisis is the proportion of people who do not understand collective value, being quite possibly in denial about state provision from which they have benefited.

I witnessed this quite graphically in New York once with friends, when we saw a fire engine jammed in traffic, siren blaring: no one made the slightest effort to move out of the way, presumably determined that a publicly funded service meant for someone who was just unlucky wasn't going to delay them in their individual progress.

First international convention of neighbourhoods bloggers

Well, two of us anyway, sometimes you gotta start small. Canadian Diane Dyson, who blogs at Belonging Community, was passing through London and it was a great pleasure to meet up for a coffee and a conversational wander round parts of the City of London.

I’ve long admired Diane’s thoroughness in her blogging and the determined linking of community development practice to policy options. I’m also a fan of the way she combines informed insights into a range of different themes – education, crime, health, housing, planning and so on. What chance the residents and practitioners of Toronto value what she offers?

We talked about settlements and housing and private-public space; the attitudes of media and politicians to poverty, about philanthropy and the need to reassert poverty issues in the income inequalities agenda. We talked about the notion of ‘social claustrophobia’ – apparently a new and ill-chosen term for social detachment, which I’ve commented on often enough; and the need for policy to appreciate the importance of recognition as much as engagement at neighbourhood level.

At one point we came round a corner to discover this scene: a London bus draped with the banner of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, which as I’m sure you already know has been serving the City churches since 1274. Don’t call it a beadle-bus – there is honour in a civic group that can trace its history to the fraternities and guilds of late medieval England.

For my overseas guest, this was a wonderful, coincidental example of civic tradition, mutual support and collective enterprise, and eccentricity in the English establishment. We had stumbled on back markers during the last preparations for the parade of the Lord Mayor’s show. As if our conversation needed any prompting.

Looking out for a neighbour called Hitler

Here’s a BBC article offering a slightly different take on looking out for a neighbour. Edgar Feuchtwanger was a young Jewish boy who lived opposite Adolf Hitler's home in Munich in the 1930s. As it turned out, Edgar and his family were relatively lucky.

‘On Hitler's orders, other Jewish families had been moved out of the neighbourhood to make way for his servants and bodyguards. But no-one had come knocking on the Feuchtwangers' door.’

The writer in me half-imagines a short story in which the boy drops a ball on the pavement, and it bounces towards the infamous chancellor who is striding from the apartment door to his waiting, gleaming car. The man instinctively picks up the ball and hands it to the boy, only then taking notice of him. What might he have said? Does he bend slightly and offer it good-humouredly? Most humans in history would have raised a smile at least, at the momentary easygoing connection with a child from their neighbourhood. But I can’t see it, and shudder.

Then I recall a moment on the London underground yesterday, when I heard a platform announcer encouraging passengers, in a buoyant, frankly irresistible Jamaican accent, to take care and make sure we buy and wear a poppy, to remember those who fought in the war. Humanity has to be unrelentingly assertive: don't take your eye off the ball.

 

Political stereotyping of poverty

"Language is balls coming at you from every angle" - Alan Bennett, Talking heads 2

Resonating with my recent post about the language of povertyism, here’s Tony Stoller in a JRF blog post the other day:

‘The language of 'benefits' and the 'welfare state' have become 'dog-whistle' words of implicit abuse. Politicians assert that housing benefit is designed for ‘those who lie in bed with the curtains drawn’. Those on benefits are ‘scroungers’, ‘benefits cheats’. 

‘The data shows that 61 per cent of children in poverty actually have working parents. Yet what we hear is the stigmatising of what the Victorians used to call the 'undeserving poor...'’

‘Public discourse is manipulated so that policy measures which penalise rather than help those in poverty are seen to be going with the grain of that public opinion...’

Stoller sums this up in terms of ‘political stereotyping’, which

‘blames poverty either on the individual or structural inequality, confuses welfare with poverty and fails to make the basic connections which underpin a true appreciation of the common good.’

It would be interesting to develop a wider critique of the persistent rhetoric of this government, including the use of the phrase 'hard-working families' which I mentioned previously; 'integration' as a replacement for 'cohesion'; 'doing the right thing’ as a moral justification for evidence-free whim; and the word 'heroes' used to help manage a delicately balanced political approach to the funding of defence.

 

Juxtapolicy

Here's a curious combination of headlines in today’s government info4local email alert:

• Researchers to debate the call for sexual abstinence education in schools

• Deputy Prime Minister: Bold deals to set more cities free for growth

I didn’t know there was a call for sexual abstinence education, but it would seem to fit with a policy determination to control the behaviour of young people while continuing to condone rampant unfettered profligacy in urban economic development and consumption.

 

Online networks in low income neighbourhoods

A report into the viability of local online channels in low income areas, which I wrote with Hugh Flouch for Networked Neighbourhoods, has now been published. It describes and reflects on four experimental projects we carried out during 2011-2012 in separate localities in England.

The basic rationale was to test whether resident-run online neighbourhood networks could be established in low income neighbourhoods and if they could be shown to bring social benefits.

One of the sites, in Low Hill, Wolverhampton, has lost momentum but the work has given rise to other promising online activity on the estate. Two other sites – at Littlemoor near Weymouth, and the area around Lings Wood on the outskirts of Northampton - are stable although they struggle to sustain active participation. The fourth, based in three villages in north Shropshire, is recognised as a very successful initiative which quickly achieved stability.

The report adds weight to claims that local online channels can be established inexpensively in low income areas, that they can be made sustainable, and that they contribute to the quality of local social life.

The report is here. There is also a two page summary, and a post on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog.

 

 

Against gentrification: the Siege of the Elephant

Southwark Notes Archive Group are currently inviting folks to contribute to ‘The Siege of the Elephant,’ a one-day convergence against the gentrification of Elephant and Castle and surrounding area in London. The event aims to bring together local communities, activists, campaign and amenity group members and traders, as well as academics, students, researchers and members of campaign groups involved in similar regeneration/gentrification struggles in other areas of London.

London, Saturday 17 November 2012

Further information

Proposed themes for the day:

• How does gentrification work and what are its causes and effects in
  Elephant and Castle?

• How can we resist or alter the dynamics of gentrification?

Southwark Notes Archive Group ‘have also been organising regular anti-gentrification walks, printing postcards, posters, maps and comics, and keeping active on within various groups and campaigns in the ongoing struggle whilst keeping an eye on the history (the mistakes and successes) and the big picture (globalisation, financialisation and all that!)’

Confusion in the dark

A note from my daughter:

The other night at the top of the lane on my way home I walked past a lady who was looking confused and wandering about. I thought she was lost, so I asked if she was ok - I thought she was looking for a road name or house number. She said ‘Yes I'm fine, just trying to work out which colour bin I need to put out - it's too dark to work out.’

 

The one reason not to bother with lists about ‘community’

Kaid Benfield has written some good stuff, but this latest Atlantic piece – ‘What Are the 7 Keys to a Strong Community?’ - is perplexing. It’s based on this previous article by Scott Doyon.

Not long ago I had a little dig at the ritual of offering lists, so no more on that theme now. But there’s something more serious I want to get at here, which Kaid’s piece has helped me think about.

Without wanting to seem harsh, it comes across as naïve to start talking about ‘strong communities’ without acknowledging that the concept has, shall we say, negative aspects. You don’t have to spend time in Northern Ireland to appreciate that, I believe there are plenty of places in north America where the ‘communities’ are quite strong enough thank you. That has to be accommodated.

And when we talk about ‘community,’ strong or otherwise, we have to recognise that some people don’t want it, whether they are deemed to need it or not. And many more don’t want it thrust down their throats by policy makers or practitioners or neighbours. That too has to be accommodated.

The list offered in the article is curious in that, with the exception of the first item, it does not appear to have much to do with people:

1. Good governance
2. Walkable, connected, mixed-use character
3. Parks and gardens
4. Partnerships
5. Programming
6. Neighborhood-responsive schools
7. Tree culture.

Nor does it include anything about communication and information channels. Or people’s homes. Or disorder. Or traffic levels. (The answer may be that this is a placemaking approach to ‘community’ qua neighbourhood).

The idea of coming up with ‘seven keys to a strong community’ – or three, or twelve, or whatever number takes your fancy – seems charmingly nostalgic, as if we could just ignore some of the fundamentals of living in a highly networked, car-dependent, dispersed mass consuming global economy.

But the trick for the 21^st century is to describe and buttress an appreciation of ‘community’ that takes account of networked individualism, ethnic diversity, class fissures, high rates of mobility and increasing proportions of older people. Which reminds me, I wrote something like that towards the end of Neighbouring and older people:

‘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.’

Over the years this blog has felt like a clumsy, perhaps unconvincing exercise in groping towards that understanding, based on an unsentimental belief in the importance and value of local social interaction and the informal communication that supports it.

So without resorting to off-putting journalistic devices, perhaps what I should be doing is working out how far that project’s got.

 

Hurry up please, it’s time for discourse

In any neighbourhood there are several kinds of time. In a delightful short paper for the ESRC ‘temporal belongings’ programme, Alison Gilchrist writes (perhaps I should say ‘wrote’):

‘time flows are rarely aligned between the different ‘players’, resulting in hidden tensions, impatience, token gestures, fragile decisions and fraught meetings. Calendar and clock time is used to co-ordinate the contributions of various stakeholders but this regulated time may not be a universal reflection of how community members perceive the way time flows through their lives, with its unpredictable eddies, pools and torrents.’

Alison’s paper prefaced the Temporal conflicts workshop in Manchester this week where we had a fascinating discussion of these and other issues. Referring to a neighbourhood where he’s worked with local people on a community garden, Ronnie Hughes highlighted the contrast between political (or developers’) time and residents’ ‘gardening’ time. And it doesn’t take long to pinpoint some of the other kinds of time, such as -

• children’s time
• car drivers’ or commuters' time
• older residents’ time
• environmental time
• internet time
• institutional time, and so on.

It would be hard to capture all the insights in the workshop around, for example –

acceleration, rhythms of everyday life (Marli Huijer), co-ordination, spontaneity, ‘the value of impatience’ (Jess Steele), routine, ‘meanwhile time’ (Katie Hill), the importance of incomers (Irene Evison), the analogy of dancing (Naimh Moore) as being required to keep the beat (ie consensus), chaos as a nuance of time (Jen Southern), the weakening of corporate memory in key agencies (Angus McCabe), animal and plant time (Chris Speed), letting things go and ‘moving on’ from the past (Alison Gilchrist), hegemonic time (Rob Trueblood), different kinds of ending (Graham Crow), how today’s stars in community action ‘can become tomorrow’s black holes’ (Mandy Wilson), and many more… (I hope my fellow participants will excuse any mis-attribution).

Accentuating the theme, all the presentations were tightly constrained five minute ‘lightning talks’. My own contribution, headed ‘Is internet time different?’ offered examples of the immediacy of online; the ways in which expectations in the timescales of agencies and residents are now sometimes reversed in the online world, with officials now sometimes struggling to keep up with local action; and the refreshed appeal of local history online.

I was the first speaker of the day, and got through breathlessly before the brutal buzzer sounded, by virtue of three double espressos, providing an experience of ‘caffeine time’. I could not resist misquoting the famous misquote of Pascal, 'I would have prepared a shorter talk, but I did not have the time'. My final slide showed a question from the 2010 Online neighbourhood networks study, in which we’d asked people if they agreed that in online forums ‘discussions sometimes move too quickly to allow proper reflection’. (For the record, only 30 per cent agreed or strongly agreed).

A key message from the workshop, for practitioners, is recognising these different experiences of time at the local level, and the ways in which their intersection sometimes causes conflict but sometimes creates benefits. The question arises, what are the options for social technologies in helping people deal with these multiple times?

I almost always enjoy sessions that bring academics and practitioners together. As I left hurriedly for another meeting, ha, I was reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘discourse’. Originally it meant running hither and thither, with an obsolete meaning (according to Merriam-Webster) of 'social familiarity'.

 

We own it

The tension between privatising policies and public need has been given a welcome tightening twist with the launch of We Own it, a campaign website to counter the irresponsible privatisation of the public sector.

A few months ago I was wondering how much further the tension could be built. While we have plenty of evidence to contradict the ideology that the private sector is by definition more efficient than the public, we have no evidence to show that this government takes much notice of evidence.

Through an article by Polly Toynbee in the summer, I learned about a few examples of ‘in-sourcing’ by which some local authorities seem to be demonstrating the logic of taking certain functions back in house in the interests of efficiency and value.

Meanwhile our rail privatisation started to creak and then fell over. At least we’re having some kind of debate now. All stirred up by the demise of A4E and the bizarre example of Atos, the company which sub-contracted disability assessments back to the NHS.

Public libraries are part of this mix. Not only are they symbolic of what remains of the public realm: as I wrote here,

‘Once they're gone, it's not just hard to get the library service back: it will be that much harder to reinstate the notion of publicness.’

The We Own It site notes that, through privatisation, costs go up, services get worse, they are run by people who are not accountable, staff are undermined, and the whole nonsense is difficult to reverse. We have been watching the large-scale, systematic, ideologically-justified, evidence-defying manufacture of widespread social exclusion. Time to bring it to an end.

We fail to socialise people, then we jail them

I have before (eg) expressed my bewilderment at our society's reluctance to explore the causes of anti-social behaviour - it's easy to condemn it: but then? - and argued that policies of shaming are disrespectful ('legitimised dissing').

If someone is insufficiently socialised to show respect to others, that's a social problem probably not helped by blunt punitive measures. This may seem too obvious to need stating, but recent sentencing practice (exhibit a; exhibit b) seems determined to confer policy status to the cut-off-their-goolies approach.

So thanks to Deborah Orr in The Guardian today for some much-needed clarity:

'The fact that people are now being jailed for being not criminal but simply inadequate is evidence of a systemic lack of confidence in this culture's ability to ascertain why they behave anti-socially.'