Neighbourhoods

What Robin Hood did for the poor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Platform 2: VSO meets community action

I think this looks like a really good scheme. It's partly about community cohesion, partly social inclusion, partly good old-fashioned volunteering:

A new Government-backed global volunteering scheme is being launched for 18 to 25 year-olds. 'Platform2' will offer young adults from less advantaged backgrounds the opportunity to live, work and learn about life in poorer countries while making a real difference to peoples lives.

Volunteers will spend 10 weeks overseas. On return to UK they will go on weekends away to prepare personal activity plans of how they want to raise awareness in the UK.

This scheme aims to give young British adults who wouldn't normally have an opportunity the chance to make a valuable contribution to the lives of people overseas who are blighted by poverty.

By living and working with people from very different backgrounds, facing very different challenges, they will learn new skills and help unlock the potential within them to become better global citizens. And on return they'll be applying what they've learned to activities in their own local communities.

BBC coverage.

DFID news page.

What makes a good childhood?

The Children's Society has set up an inquiry into what makes a good childhood and is collecting 'cherished early memories' in order to build a picture of what a good childhood should look like.

We are gathering hundreds and thousands of childhood memories... This will help us understand how to make childhood better today.

The memories exercise is likely to capture lots of mini narratives of decline, but perhaps there'll be a useful research resource, and some interesting questions of how the material gets analysed.

The inquiry seems like a useful idea, and it will do us good to examine what we mean by 'good' and 'better' and so on. If childhood was somehow 'better' in the recalled past, the value of the inquiry will be in the way it distils the truths and examines them in the wholly different social, economic and technological context. This is certainly the sense in which I think it's valuable to consider older people's descriptions of neighbourliness in their childhoods - not in terms of the accuracy of the reminiscence but in terms of the values (in this case collective values) described.

And maybe we should have an equivalent exercise for old age, based on Age Concern's 'ageing well' campaign - instead of 'cherished early memories,' how about 'cherished late anticipations'? Or should there be a site where the recently bereaved put forward views on whether their older relative or friend had a 'good' old age, and what was good about it?

Previously:

Children's contentedness as a social indicator.

Disrespecting childhoods.

Rule of thumb about word of mouth

I was talking to a group of community workers today, getting their views on the use of community centres and ways of getting people through the door. Most of the way through a 12 month funded programme, they told of an influx of new people coming in. This is in an area of low expectations and high needs.

The explanation is that 'word-of-mouth takes 8-9 months...'

'It's about people having the courage to act on what they're hearing. It can take you a year to get confidence in the community, that there's something new for them to try and to trust it. It takes time for the confidence to work through.'

Having spoken to quite a few of the residents about their levels of confidence before and after contact with the centres, this makes sense to me. Funders please note.

Families in cities

I'll come straight out and express a sense of mild jealousy here. Anne Power and colleagues at LSE ran a well-funded programme of work to generate seven years of interview data with parents in cities. That's a lot of material reflecting what it's like bringing up children in contemporary urban neighbourhoods. One result is City survivors, just published by Policy Press and launched last week.

I'll also readily admit to not being a fan of Anne's previous Jigsaw cities, which I found a real slog to read, with all the evidence of being hurriedly slopped together and crying out for an editor's attention. City survivors however looks much more significant, if only because the connection between the expressed experience of local people and the policy assertions is clear.

The edited material is interwoven with analysis and generalised reflections on the policy context. The book is packed, and punches are not pulled: a key message for regeneration is that 'neglect ends in disorder.' At the launch Anne said that regeneration needs to be brokered and 'any withdrawal of effort immediately results in a deterioration of conditions.' How do we explain, for example, how this sort of thing comes about:

'They've pulled all the swings down. The kids have nowhere to play. We tried to fight the council to stop them taking our play area away but they sold it to private buyers.'

(I don't know. Previously, eg, A crisis of community presence).

Here are some of the points I got from Anne's wide-ranging presentation:

• Community involvement really makes a difference: 'families are much happier if they're involved. Those who are involved, loosely or seriously, feel different to those who aren't.' (So why is there still so little investment in community development?)
• Keeping extended families together on estates or in the neighbourhood can make a huge difference to parents' ability to cope: this means housing allocation policies that prioritise relatives.
• People do notice when agencies attempt outreach.
• Establishing friendly rapport with neighbours is a significant factor in helping families survive. The usual constraints are apparent - precarious, unstable community relations with too many strangers.

And I noted Lynsey Hanley's striking observation in her comments, referring to the experience of neighbourhoods where there is constant building, constant traffic, and no sense of place:

'You have to be massively adaptable in order to get beyond just existing, in marginalised places.'

The overall message is that families are abandoning cities in large numbers, because they are such unsympathetic environments for young children, and this is bad news all round. The a rgument is made that families can regenerate cities if conditions are right:

• Neighbourhood conditions have a direct impact on family survival.
• Families can counter wider problems by creating support networks.
• Cities can help families by creating more locally based structures to deliver sensitive local services.

One further thought, provoked by various comments made by academics at the launch: why is the idea of talking to local people about their experiences seen as such an eccentric way of finding things out? You'd have thought, by the way people were talking, that some kind of methodological breakthrough had been achieved. More interest among funders to support this kind of work would be welcomed (he pleaded naively)...

I'd link to the publication page, but Policy Press haven't got their act together yet.* Get hold of it anyway.

* Update: it's here.

Consulting older people

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

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

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

Radical stuff eh? There's more.

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

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

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

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

Online game about being a refugee

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

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

Press release. Via Welcome to Your Library digest.

Out in the open

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

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

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

Older people and isolation from neighbours

Help the Aged has launched a new fundraising campaign which aims to help end isolation and loneliness among older people. This follows a survey which claims that 1.4 million older people in the UK feel 'socially isolated' and nearly 300,000 have gone a full month in the last year 'without speaking to any family or neighbours.'

Had they spoken to any friends, in that time, you want to ask. Unfortunately Help the Aged don't seem to offer a link to a report of the research, although I suppose it must be somewhere. [While I'm at it, and without wishing to seem to be picking on this organisation, why is this contemptuous attitude towards readers so widespread?]

Press release.

Neighbouring, parenting and poverty

This is the kind of stuff that gives income inequalities a bad name. A new report from the Family and Parenting Institute confirms that 'Income is a strong factor in families’ experience of their neighbourhood.' The poorer a family is, the more likely they are to feel unsafe after dark, the less likely they are to feel that their neighbours would help out in a crisis, and the less likely they are to have well-maintained green spaces nearby.

The report is based on an online survey of over 2,000 parents in England with a child or children under the age of 16.

While 70% say that their neighbours would help them out in a crisis (eg look after their children if they had to go to hospital for a few hours), the researchers suggest that this masks significant differences in terms of wealth. Only half of those with incomes below £10,000 think that their neighbours would help them out in a crisis.

On the other hand, there's not a great deal of expressed concern about informal social control. Most parents would not worry about talking to their neighbours’ children if they were being unruly. Some 77% said that they would speak to their neighbours’ children if they were misbehaving in the neighbourhood, or would consider doing so, with only 18 per cent saying they would definitely not do so.

Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

Yesterday to the Oxford Internet Institute for a session on 'digital disengagement' and social exclusion, where I learned the following from one reported study: 11% of those whose experience of exclusion is most entrenched (ie identified on several measures, not just one or two) are 'internet users.'

Without the source I can't unpack this stat, but I'd like to see more case studies to find out more about what people in this category are doing when they are connected, and what difference it makes to their lives. It happens that I'm involved in the evaluation of a 'social impact demonstrator' at a couple of UK online centres, so may be able to contribute in due course. And Citizens Online's Everybody Online projects should provide some insights.

As it turned out, the need for more qualitative research, to get at some subtleties that were not emerging from survey material, was a lesson for the OII from the seminar. One of the nuances that concerns me is the point that, irrespective of communication technologies, we don't know enough about the extent to which people who experience exclusion are strategic in their approach to weak ties.

People of all ages and classes and backgrounds can be strategic about their need for and approach to connections and friendships, without necessarily being cynically so. Is such behaviour as likely to be found among those whose experience of exclusion is most profound? Whether it tends to be or not will influence people's attitudes to the communication technologies, for example in recognising that mobiles are brilliant for strong ties but maybe not so good for establishing weak ties.

If your personal social network is sparse, then strong ties might be the ones you crave or seem to have most need for. Perhaps also you lack opportunities or skills (or both) to establish weak ties - these tend to require some basic cultural, social or economic capital to start with. But from the early work with UK online centres in low-income areas that I was involved in years ago, it was apparent that some people were establishing weak ties with remote others online, and gaining confidence and skills from that experience.

And right on cue, here's a paper by Sara Ferlander and Duncan Timms, which contrasts users' experience of a 'local net' in a low-income area, and in an 'IT-café'.

The paper examines the extent to which use of the Internet is associated with an enhancement of social participation, social trust and local identity in the area. The Local Net appears to have had limited success in meeting its goals; the IT-Café was more successful...

The IT-Café provided a physical meeting place which facilitated social networking, especially the development of weak ties bridging different local groups, and led to decreased tensions between them. The physical aspect of the IT-Café had positive impacts upon local ties and bonding social capital. Nonetheless, visitors to the Café, in common with the users of the Local Net, mainly used the Internet for non-local networking (bridging and linking social capital) including the creation and/or maintenance of both weak and strong, and interest-specific (bonding) ties. The Internet was used for the maintenance of non-local strong bonding social capital, with many visitors using the Internet to keep in touch with family and friends outside the local community.

It's not an either/or issue of course. And as I understand it (although this is only quietly mentioned) the two resources were sequential, the café established as the Local Net failed, and the latter seems to have been on far too large a scale, so there are all sorts of reasons why the comparison is speculative. It's highly likely that many of those who used the café were already blessed with sufficient confidence and social capital to take advantage of what was on offer. Indeed the authors accept that causal priorities are hard to establish, but 'the evidence suggests that an IT-Café, combining physical with virtual and the local with the global, may be especially well suited to build social capital and a sense of local community in a disadvantaged area.'

In my view this in no way discredits neighbourhood networks, but it does put a nice big tick in the Third Place box. And it sweetly reinforces what some of us were saying 10 years ago (The net result) about the need for local resource centres; or a few years later for example in a paper to government which I co-wrote in 2002:

• Access centres function best as part of wider generic community resources that attract local people for a range of activities. It is not realistic to expect them to become financially self-sustaining without distorting their roles, although they do tend to add value to whatever funding they receive;
• Where they are part of generic community resources, access centres fulfil fundamental social roles that contribute to government objectives on community cohesion, social capital, and community capacity building. They reach parts that other agencies cannot reach, and seen in this context they justify public funding. Such funding would need to reflect recognition of their role as community sector resources rather than as centres of formal learning.

Regrettably, government lost its nerve at about that time, and funding for the centres came with badly-misconceived requirements for formal learning, wholly inappropriate for the policy objective. Now they're wondering where the social inclusion results are going to come from.

'Wrong turning, dead end'

I see the Howard League has published a work by a police officer which is critical of ASBOs. The book, by Chief Superintendent Neil Wain, argues that:

• ASBOs fail to prevent further crime and anti-social behaviour among offenders
• Leaflets naming and shaming those who receive ASBOs could endanger vulnerable children by publishing their contact details, while also risking vigilante attacks, cases of mistaken identity and turning offenders into the resident scapegoat
• Many ASBO conditions actually encourage crime by preventing offenders from getting help from their families or going to work in a normal day job
• Offenders receiving ASBOs are given little or no support to get back on the straight and narrow.

As I wrote about a year ago, it's very questionable whether the government's anti-social behaviour policy, central to the Respect Agenda, is contributing to the promotion of respect.

It's interesting that the author works under the aegis of Greater Manchester Police Force, famous for its ASBO appetite. A year or two ago I heard a presentation about 'respect' from a representative of that city's coordinated response to anti-social behaviour and it gave me the creeps.

The washing of hair

Here's something told me by a community worker recently. She went with some local women from a low-income neighbourhood on a residential trip, where some of them encountered shampoo for the first time and didn't know what it was, or what to do with it. They always use washing-up liquid.

I've never before considered shampoo in terms of cultural capital, although I've reflected often enough on the role of hairdressers in social capital. It did strike me that there may be many 'heavy-users' of shampoo who don't know what washing up liquid is.

Defiance

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

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

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

A youth centre in every neighbourhood?

If like me you found the Respect agenda and its media coverage uncomfortably closely associated with young people, it's time for a rethink. That agenda is now being subsumed under the responsibilities of the Department for children, schools and families, the 'children's ministry'.

But Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian urges us not to be sceptical, regarding this as 'one of the best changes' in the brief for Ed Balls, the minister in question.

As the emphasis shifts from punishment to prevention, expect a breath of fresh air. Balls says: "Respect goes both ways - respect by young people for others goes together with respect for them by the wider community." He talks enthusiastically about plans for a good youth centre in every neighbourhood, started up with £150m taken from defunct bank accounts.

I don't know anything about these defunct bank accounts, although I can think of another budget, a small matter of £20bn, from which a fraction might have been handy.

But I do think that a youth facility in every neighbourhood - and a 'good' one at that - is far closer to common sense than a single nuclear submarine farting around somewhere in the ocean.

Curiously enough, I was in a workshop about neighbourhood care for older people the other day, where there was discussion about funding for quality neighbourhood schemes like the one in Brighton and Hove. Asked why there seemed to be no government funding, one of the members of the scheme said with quiet irony, 'I think it's all gone to Trident.'

And if I'm sceptical about anything at the moment, it's the government's ability to include older people in its agenda. In the meantime, with regard to the future of the Respect agenda and policy for young people, I'll trust Polly's optimism.

Home improvement: women on housing estates

Yesterday I was at a really cracking event organised by the London Women and Planning Forum, on 'Home improvement: women on housing estates.' There were presentations by Lynsey Hanley, Rebecca Tunstall and Jess Steele - which frankly ought to have been a good enough line-up to attract many more than the 30 or so of us who took part in an informative and absorbing discussion. (Where was everyone?)

Lynsey Hanley offered a presentation on 'estates and women's mental health' based on her book, Estates. She talked in passing about 'the wall in the head' - the idea that once you're there, on an estate such as that where she grew up, you’re not expected to leave. With sensitive reference to family and social history she talked about how, after the war, the class system was reinforced through housing policy.

Lynsey also spoke about how the estate on the edge of Birmingham had no clear identity. It wasn't a town, it was described by planners as a township, but people who live there describe it as an ‘estate', a term which has a lot of negative connotations. She talked about the 'siege mentality,' the negative sense of community, and the lack of available 'talking therapies' for women, describing their experience with the sense of being cast away and cut off.

Becky Tunstall reported on her research into 25 years on twenty estates (which I also covered previously). There's a huge amount of detail in the research to which I can't do justice, but her conclusions seemed to be that improvements in the conditions of our least popular estates were more down to basic housing (allocations) policy than to regeneration policy, and to the national context of an upbeat economy, rather than to estate-based factors.

I was struck by Becky's identification of a 'dilution of decentralisation' on these estates, from estate offices to area offices - ie previously there was a move to provide highly localised services in a selection of estates, whereas now the trend is to provide such services area-wide but more comprehensively.

Jess Steele, now Head of Consultancy at the Development Trusts Association, made some big points about community action and community development on housing estates, stressing how the relationship of poor women with the state is particular, very intense and often fraught.

Her main point was about the need to recognise that estates house concentrations of claimaints, and she called for their needs to be linked to the creation of work in the 'phantom economy' of everyday local tasks ('mini-jobs' like low-level care and support, shopping, cleaning, school crossings, basic warden roles and so on) which are not part of the standard labour market. (Some of this of course is estate management with added social care, as practised very succesfully for example at Pembroke Street in Devonport). Jess wants a system of ‘community allowance’ which would allow people to do these jobs under contract to community organisations without losing their benefit entitlement.

Each of the speakers referred to the importance of community action on estates and women’s dominant role in that. Becky for instance, reviewing the twenty estates covered in her research with Alice Coulter, said that ‘community activity has been extremely important in the way these estates have developed’. While we touched on the question of whether or not practitioners have learned from the mistakes of the past, it was striking that there is a huge gap between the significance of community action and its influence on policy. Will that really change, in our looming age of localism?

Another major theme to emerge was a widely-shared scepticism about planned mixed tenure as a policy. Becky Tunstall, who is currently researching this theme, confirmed that there is no evidence to suggest that it ‘works’. (Hopefully, her research will clarify what we mean when we say it works or doesn’t). (LSE have a lunchtime seminar on this theme coming up, London 6 July 2007, with Susan Popkin from the Urban Institute, Washington DC: for details 020 7955 6562, a.tamas(at)lse.ac.uk).

This is essentially about living with difference, and I note that the theme is touched on, without a great sense of authority, in the recent report of the Integration and Cohesion Commission:

Cohesive and integrated communities are more easily achieved where there is a mix of housing types and tenures, and where people are able to move between tenure types and between sizes of home as they move through life and face different personal demands. (para 8.30)

I keep returning to this question of living with difference because it feels like an iceberg social problem and we’re on a collision course. That doesn't mean I'm into rearranging deckchairs when I say I look forward to future events organised by the forum: I'm told current plans include seminars on art in public places; and gardens.

Demographic mix matters more than income or tenure mix

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

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

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

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

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

The analysis also shows that:

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

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

Cohesion, immigration, and policy

Immigration minister Liam Byrne got headlines yesterday for his proposed new "managed migration" points system, and says that when one junior school in his constituency saw its population of children with English as a second language rise from 5% to 20% within a year, 'the task of boosting standards in some of the poorest communities gets harder.'

And so the practicalities of promoting cohesion, when diversity implies low social capital and instability, bring a keen focus to immigration policy. Byrne points to the speed of population change in some localities and notes:

'Here are a set of changes that have made Britain richer but which have deeply unsettled the country.'

Well good, at least we have some acknowledgement that diversity brings richness. But the notion of diversity in neighbourhoods seems to be readily equated with 'problem'. How can that be? Apparently 'laissez-faire migration' runs the risk of damaging communities. (Not half as much as laissez faire consumerism, I'm thinking).

Being surrounded with a mix of people from different backgrounds creates tensions at local level apparently. (Er, excuse me, not necessarily it doesn't). So we must only admit to our country the people who will make an identifiable economic contribution. (Er, there may be a bit missing from the sequence of this argument). If they say it often enough, to some people it will begin to sound true. To many it probably already does.

It's just possible that there could be other causes of tensions in neighbourhoods. Byrne's approach suggests another clash of government policies, with CLG in various ways (including through the Commission) rightly and consistently stimulating ways in which 'people from different backgrounds can get on well together,' through community cohesion measures, 'liveability' policies, civil renewal, community engagement, local governance and so on. Why would immigration policy makers claim to have the answer without reference to other measures where people are working collectively on these issues? Unless there's an election coming up and some right-wing votes to be lost.

Meanwhile, in what looks like a premeditated subversion of Byrne's theme, from last friday's Guardian comes Robina Qureshi's tale of how 'the arrival of asylum seekers in Glasgow's most deprived areas has given back a sense of community in a way no government initiative has ever done.' How so? Well, as most community workers know, nothing succeeds like adversity:

'Immigration snatch squads, escorted by police, have conducted a series of dawn raids on Scottish asylum families over the past few years. Finally, last October, local people gathered alongside asylum seekers early one morning in Kingsway in peaceful protest at the raids. At around 6.30am an immigration snatch squad turned up to take another family. Over 150 members of the community linked arms and demanded the squad cease immediately. After a 40-minute standoff, the chief of police announced there would be no raid. To this day, the community has been on constant vigil in the hours before dawn.'

And finally, on this theme, a huge round of applause for the Welcome to Your Library project, which 'connects public libraries with refugee communities,' and has won this year's 'Libraries Change Lives' Award. I've been a fan from the start and as a former judge for this award I know how well deserved it is.

"You can come back mate" - workshops with street reps

Running exploratory workshops with local residents tends to be less predictable than it usually is working with professionals, and it can be risky. But it's what I enjoy most and find most rewarding. I've just been in Shipley with my colleague Sarah Clow (pic, R) running one focus group on neighbourliness with older people, and two workshops for a new 'Street Reps' initiative. In a few hours of listening you can get a pretty thorough immersion in local issues in a low income area, and we did.

The basic idea of street reps (sometimes called street champions) is usually to give services keen and willing pairs of eyes and ears in the neighbourhoods, to alert them to issues that need attention. Much of the language is classically top-down (as in 'we will appoint you; you will do this' - one example begins talking almost straight away about 'professional standards') and suggests that some authorities have not done much thinking about it and start from their own preoccupations rather than the residents'.

It fascinates me, because the task is really to work out, for each individual and more generally for each network of reps, a role definition which is sufficiently formal for the authorities but sufficiently informal and flexible to make sense in the everyday life of the neighbourhood. (Since it's essential that the reps are volunteers, we can expect that some authorities will have to give weight on this particular see-saw. And in the grander scheme of things, this is exactly the kind of initiative which, in forcing the responsibilisation of citizens, will in turn, necessarily, reduce the public services obsession with performance measurement and thus could presage the demise of New Labour Managerialism. So that's a pretty good reason for getting on with it).

Our work is being funded by a grant from Bradford's Neighbourhood Management Team. To their great credit, they are not necessarily happy just waiting for local people to volunteer for a pre-defined role which saves them money while helping to meet service delivery targets. They've asked us to work with residents to define the role in their own terms (not as easy as it sounds). Additionally, without denying the role of street reps as 'Disorder Alarms', we're looking to emphasise the development and support of local social networks through neighbourliness; and for reps to promote positive initiatives like street parties or planting, not just passing on complaints or bad news. We'll also be looking, softly softly, for opportunities to introduce and exploit mobile online technologies.

Having served a modest, intermittent apprenticeship with games maestro Drew Mackie and participation guvnor David Wilcox over the years (see Useful Games) I know enough to know I needed to fictionalise things in order to get discussion away from the immediate gripes. What we came up with was more of a workshop exercise than a game - working in groups to invent and explore issues requiring attention for spring, summer, autumn and winter, identifying immediate and longer term actions, working out responsibilities, resource and support needs and so on - but for several people the experience seems to have been totally novel and refreshing.

At the end one of the participants said that if she'd been told beforehand that she'd be doing this - meaning, having to think things up herself and writing ideas down on a flip-chart - she would never have come. But she'd had a good time and enthused: "You can come back mate." Which, in the understated vernacular of community action, I think constitutes emphatic endorsement. And that gives us a buzz, cos there's plenty still to do.

Designing-out aspiration: the history of council estates

At last a moment to put in a plug for Lynsey Hanley's Estates, an engagingly personal exploration of the history and experience of council housing. Hanley comes across as a lot more patient than I would be in explaining the politics and decision-making that gave rise to what have been called 'social concentration camps' and the succession of estates where desolation was designed-in.

We learn that the author herself 'escaped' from such an estate to accumulate otherwise-inconceivable sacksfull of intellectual and social capital by going to university, but there's no sense of confused guilt or pride. She writes with great clarity about the tangled issue of social class and the 'wall in the head' that characterises the experience of growing up on a council estate:

The wall in the head is just that - a state of mind - but it would not be so strong, or so seemingly insurmountable, were it not for the real walls that serve to strengthen it. Coexisting with the state of mind is a state of economics, a state of health and a state of education, a state of government policy and a state of segregation by class.

She's maybe a little harsh on tower blocks - when they work, with proper maintenance and sensible allocations policies, there are many people who greatly appreciate living in towers; and I suspect she could be harsher on the current 'sustainable communities' building plans, where some of the classic errors like forgetting to provide local amenities seem to be being replicated. But this is a strikingly real book illuminated throughout, refreshingly, by personal experience.

As it happens, sometime after I started reading Estates I found out that I'll be sharing a platform with Lynsey at this year's Swindon Festival of Literature, on the evening of Thursday 10 May - it should be fun.

Make Space youth review

I missed this, and can't tell by how much, but the interim report of the Make Space Youth Review has been published.

They get nul points for issuing a press release with no date and a report in an unmanipulable pdf format. I would have liked to quote some of it here. In particular, a well-made point about how young people feel isolated and alienated in their own neighbourhoods, with little say over what goes on. The consistent sense of lack of belonging of young people to their own neighbourhood, reported in this review, is deeply worrying.

The review also passes on criticism of 'an overwhelming orientation towards adults - from use of public space and buildings to leisure and recreational services.' Nine key features are proposed for a new government commitment and vision for young people.

The pic is of a made-over Tony Blair.

Social capital, ethnicity, and cohesion

I sometimes think we're a society that snacks voraciously on weak ties, and when it comes to strong ties, the appetite has gone. But (to hold the analogy for as long as I dare) the nutritional benefits of each may not be comparable.

OK, forget that. I've just been scanning some papers dated December and announced today by the Family and Parenting Institute, on social capital and transnational families. There are three research papers described in this summary, and they seem to clarify the significance of, and continued need for, bonding capital among ethnic groupings:

The research found that the minority ethnic communities studied utilised bonding strategies within their families and communities which then provided them with the support and resources to participate more fully in the wider spheres of education, employment and building intimate relationships and friendships.

Although the research acknowledges that being part of a close-knit community can sometimes have negative implications for individuals, the social capital afforded by the solidarity and reciprocity of those communities provided a secure base from which to bridge into the wider community. So far from encouraging increasing social segregation, the adherence to socially accepted norms of their ethnic communities created a resilience that allowed greater involvement in societal life in general. [Emphasis added]

The research also highlighted that the reciprocity within the ethnic groupings studied 'encourages a greater sense of caring for members of the community that need more support.'

The bonding contexts include family events, cultural rituals and community groups. The bonding networks represent a ‘survival strategy’ as a response to issues arising from social exclusion and marginality, providing support for participation in education, employment and forming intimate friendships in other groups and communities.

All the papers are available from the FPI site here.

Kids these days

Last night, not late, in a restaurant I observed a boy of about three or four sat at a dinner table with his parents. The moment the child was sat down, a laptop was placed in front of him with some animated feature for instant distraction. Next time I looked round, the scene that I had anticipated was being enacted: dad was on the mobile phone, a call that lasted at least ten minutes, the toddler had a dummy stuck in his mouth, just in case he was so rash as to want to try and communicate, and mum studied the wallpaper.

Oh look, here's Libby Brooks in today's Guardian:

New Labour has pandered to popular prejudice with its antisocial behaviour agenda, as well as legitimising adult avoidance of collective involvement in the socialisation of children. Additionally, over recent decades this country has become infected with a culture of individualism and materialism that has proved disastrous for children and parents. The values of parenting are in direct opposition to those that currently dominate society - the modern absolutes of autonomy, freedom and selfhood. [Emphasis added]

This is à propos of that Unicef report - which apparently demonstrates how cruddy British people are at relating to and looking after their children.

What strikes me is that, while we've had commentators who have challenged the report's methodology and currency of  data, there are few voices if any to deny the overall message for the UK, which seems to be this: the way we regard, refer to, treat and support children in this country is a disgrace and has been for a long time.

I too might find minor fault with the report (indeed the authors make various caveats as they go along). I'm not sure for instance about the way the index for children's relationships has been constructed to include such a strong emphasis on percentage of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies. But the study uses children’s own answers to survey questions and the findings on 11, 13 and 15 year-olds who report finding their peers ‘kind and helpful’ are, in the case of the UK (less than 45%), devastating.

This is not to say that there are not many super young people growing up who are a pleasure to meet and talk to, with strong supportive networks and a confident outlook: they're the fortunate ones who've escaped the relentless, systematised dumbing and drubbing and confidence erosion, through policy, media, education system and culture.

This is an issue of exclusion. Too many young people in this country are excluded from any kind of sustained supportive context - which is not just the responsibility of parents (the key target of the JKG, the Jerked Knee of Government) but of what I call the 'four sources' of support: family, friends, neighbours, and formal services. For any individual in our society of whatever age, where one of those four sources is insufficient, it ought to be relatively easy for the vacuum to be filled by one of the others: but what happens too often now I suspect, with young people and older people especially, is that there are serious shortfalls in the first three sources, and formal services are over-stretched (and not always appropriate anyway).

So, to return to my vignette and to suggest that it is not entirely an isolated instance - what contribution can social policy really make here? The way parents behave towards their children is largely out of the direct reach of government, but not at all out of the reach of its influence. Government can and should contribute to the shaping of the culture of everyday life. I think respect for others (obviously including children, it shouldn't be necessary to say that) is a fundamental issue, and it's ironic that the government has identified it as such, but gone about addressing it in such a perverse way. After their initial flapping away of this report as methodologically flawed, it will be interesting to see what kind of sincere governmental response, after ten years in power, is forthcoming.

Refugee inclusion

The Welsh Assembly Government has published a Refugee Inclusion Strategy, for which the consultation ends 3 February 2007. There is also a literature review.

(Via John Vincent's invaluable Welcome to Your Library newsletter).

The respectable and the rough in low-income neighbourhoods

I came across an article by Paul Watt in the December issue of the International journal of urban and regional research, which is well-worth tracking down if you're interested in research that genuinely tries to make sense of what housing estate residents are saying about their environments and everyday lives.

Watt interviewd 29 residents in the London Borough of Camden and sifted out interesting insights into how people make social distinctions under constraining economic conditions, and explores how those distinctions relate to images of place. His account illustrates sensitively how people tend to place others around them on a scale of respectability and roughness.

The low-status others and problem tenants constituted an amorphous group who were condemned both for their sheer presence as well as for their behaviour. The latter included a widespread array of activities ranging from violence, drinking and drug taking, to noise, vandalism, graffiti and playing football, as well as failing to maintain the appearance of the dwellings.

The research also seems to suggest that racism is often subordinate to the respectable/rough distinction: racist discourse is not denied, but contextualised in this framework. What's enormously valuable in this article is the way in which the author scrapes away some of the structural grime that has clogged up the ethos and processes of neighbouring.

He shows how maintaining 'respectability' has become more and more difficult in unstable economic conditions and in neighbourhoods where 'knowing exactly who is respectable, or rough, is increasingly problematic.'

The paradoxical result is that expressing a social distinction between themselves and the low-status others around them, via emphasizing their own respectability, has become increasingly ‘necessary’ within the contemporary working-class habitus at the same time that the material basis for such a distinction has markedly narrowed.

I started to wonder if this has implications for the greater formalisation of cultural capital. It certainly points to the need for more effort to appreciate diverse forms thereof, which is perhaps what the community cohesion agenda amounts to. The residents who see themselves as struggling to maintain respectability in such a context, as Watt points out, lack any dominant form of cultural capital such as educational qualifications by which to legitimate their self-avowed status.

But there are more urgent indicators here for practitioners, to do with housing allocation and estate management in particular. The fact that the research was carried out before 2000 serves in my mind to emphasise that neighbourhood management in this country was disgracefully overdue and has been not so much a glorious policy success as blazingly obvious.

The erosion of public welfare services was routinely regarded as both signifying and causing deteriorating neighbourhood social relations. In addition to the widely criticized paucity of council housing provision, an emphasis was placed upon the communal areas of the estates, including their deteriorating physical appearance, the erosion of support services such as caretakers, as well as the limited facilities for children and young people.

At about the same time (I discover from some notes I found on my hard disk over christmas) a community development worker from another London borough was telling me:

Instability of communities is a problem... We’re not in control of much that happens in our borough because of the power of the private sector. We have 17,000 people on the housing list. On some estates, one third of people are on anti-depressants. One third of children are taking their lessons in their second language… Within the council, everyone is following different government departments’ requirements and from time to time there is conflict.

Watt, P. (2006). “Respectability, roughness and 'race': neighbourhood place images and the making of working-class social distinctions in London.” International journal of urban and regional research, 30(4), December: 776-796.

'Soft renewal' and transformative change

A few days ago I was muttering about the way that policy attention has begun to shift focus from physical regeneration to behaviour and relationships. Now here's a new JRF report, Respect and renewal, on the Partnership Initiative for Communities (PICs) programme written by David Page which says it upfront:

Professionals underestimated the importance of social issues and were more focused on physical regeneration. Residents perceived social factors – crime and fear of crime, poor life chances for their children, and the consequences of poverty – as the main ones affecting their quality of life, not physical degeneration.

The Findings summary doesn't mention community development, but it's clear from a scan of the report that CD along with various other professional interventions such as youth work (if you're lucky) and neighbourhood wardens can together make a significant difference when it comes to 'soft renewal techniques'.

Much of the rationale behind the renewal work studied here relates to the work of William Julius Wilson and to broken windows theory. The report doesn't really deal with the notion of respect, but it does relate the findings to the government's theme of that name. And it accords success to some initiatives such as neighbourhood wardens, reassurance policing, neighbourhood management and minor architectural adjustments.

Page argues that the projects demonstrated that all of the issues affecting residents on the estates could be tackled.

'The challenge lies in tackling them all at the same time, and in sustaining that effort for long enough to make a real difference to the life chances of residents and their children.'

So are we taking the wrong approach to transformation? Are our expectations based on the wrong model of 'fixing problems'?

Upgrading of the physical environment only needs to be done once in a while: once the roofs, or windows, are ‘fixed’ they stay fixed for a good many years. But social regeneration is a different kind of problem. A key concern of current regeneration policy is why, in social terms, some of the same estates and neighbourhoods that were supposed to have been fixed in previous rounds of regeneration projects, turn out to need fixing time and time again.

There is no sign of transformative change yet on any of the PICs estates. The evidence from the PICs research suggests instead that the relationship between effort and achievement is not geometric but linear: that larger changes require bigger inputs, and that estates in which there is a high concentration of workless households and households living on low incomes will need consistent, long lasting attention and higher levels of investment to make a real difference to the quality of life of their residents...

It may be more realistic to think of incremental, rather than transformative, change in our most deprived neighbourhoods, and to expect this to take place over a longer time.

Refugee integration and community cohesion

Community Development Foundation have just published a report by Alison Navarro on research into community development practice that contributes to community cohesion through the integration of asylum seekers and refugees.

'The research found that community development work was often undertaken in specialist organisations or by workers with specific responsibilities for working with asylum seekers and refugees. It found little evidence that mainstream community development practitioners worked with asylum seekers and refugees as part and parcel of their everyday working life. Attempts to explain this were related to the perceived lack of experience and expertise by generic workers and suggestions that the most appropriate way to integrate asylum seekers and refugees was to provide specialist services.'

'Nevertheless, the research also found that the range of interventions to assist with refugee integration and community cohesion were largely in tune with community development interventions in other settings including regeneration programmes, work with interest groups and area based work.'

The report is available here.

Barriers to social exclusion

In the days when I was scrapping around the fringes of government policy scrummages on social inclusion, I used to get worked up about events which discussed the plight of people who experience exclusion, in their absence. It was always an achievement just to cross the conceptual gain line before being tackled.

Now look at this: an organisation called Westminster Briefing has set up a one-day conference entitled Tackling Social Exclusion Through Partnership: Removing the Barriers. It will explore the government's next steps 'in its drive to tackle the root causes of deep–seated disadvantage.' So naturally one looks to see how much it will cost to be there, and one sees, £295.

I don't think the ref's on our side, never mind a level playing field. 'Delegates will be drawn from all those involved in tackling the social exclusion agenda,' it says. Have they no sense of irony, these people? (Pssst: it's not the agenda that needs tackling, it's widespread practices of exclusion).