Neighbourhoods

Neighbouring and older people

My text about older people and neighbouring will be published shortly by Community Development Foundation.

There will be a launch, or to put it more technically, an excuse to gather and guzzle, at Shared Intelligence in London on Tuesday 27 May 2008, which happens to be National (wait, make that European) Neighbours Day. (Thanks to Ben Lee from the National Neighbourhood Management Network for providing the venue).

Speakers include David Sillito from BBC News, Chris Gittins from Streets Alive, and Ryan Campbell from Age Concern England. If you'd like to come along, please register as places are limited. Further information is here.

Cohesion and inequalities

'I do not think you can get community cohesion unless you tackle the basic inequalities at the same time... I do not think it is possible to have cohesion where you have got such a stark set of differences between people competing in the same area. Part of cohesion and part of the original definition of cohesion was to tackle inequalities at the same time... I do not see them as being two different things. Of course, if you do tackle some of the inequalities, then the chances are that people are going to end up in the same workplace and are going to interact with each other. They are going to end up at universities and in schools in order to interact. The process of measuring inequalities means that you are also maximising the opportunities for people to relate to each other as well on an equal footing.'

Ted Cantle, Institute of Community Cohesion, speaking to the communities and local government committee on community cohesion and migration, 25 February 2008, uncorrected transcript.

Death to the springy chicken!

To the RSA last night for a debate on 'home is where we start from' organised with the Family and Parenting Institute and chaired by Polly Toynbee.

And thank you Sarah Gaventa of CabeSpace, for a clear and passionate articulation of the arguments some of us have been trying to make about children and play in the neighbourhood: 'kids have to get out of playgrounds' she said, adding a well-aimed swipe at the obsession with safe play equipment - 'death to the springy chicken!'

Because there are some confusions over what is being argued here - see for instance some of the comments posted in response to this BBC piece - it's maybe worth making the point that children's imaginations are not the problem.

What I see as the problem is the government-led, adult-endorsed preoccupation with ordering and controlling childhood. Of course kids can have fun on a springy chicken/parrot/hippo/whale/dolphin; but designed, controlled environments to the exclusion of genuine adventure and the discovery of risk, are not desirable in the long term.

(In theory, you can hear the RSA debate here, but I couldn't get any life out of it).

Play in the street: a straw poll and a doodle

Society Guardian tomorrow is running some comments on the government's play strategy which has been published for consultation. (My two euros-worth on JoePublic. More here). Trying to get a handle on the issues, I did two things.

First, I ran a straw poll among contacts to see what they thought was the single biggest obstacle stopping children from playing in the streets. I got 22 responses, not all easily categorised but with eleven people saying cars or traffic and seven referring to parental concerns or perceptions. Some people made the reasonable point that in their areas, children and young people do occupy the streets.

While the responses were coming in, I tried roughly to flowchart the parental decision-making process to see if doing so would bring any clarity to the issues.

I don't pretend to be any good at logical or sequential thinking, and I've no experience at doing flowcharts in theory or in practice. I do have experience, albeit some years since, of taking decisions to do with my children's play.

My doodle proceeds through questions about the weather (issues around screen-based entertainment if the children stay in); do they have friends to play out with? In view? Safe spaces? If there are safe spaces, are they in the street or segregated?

At the bottom I scribbled 'Too much traffic?' and a subsidiary question, too seldom raised: 'Too many cars?'

I noted John Adams, in a letter in yesterday's Guardian, claiming that:

'Since Labour came to power the country's motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh - 90 lanes wide.'

Nope, can't get me head round that. I scribbled on:

'Invent fold-away car.'
'Stomp all over them.'
'Wait for policy to confront car lobby.'

Further suggestions welcome.

Green homes, the N word, and local alliances

I've moaned often enough over the years about the uncritical and unreflective use of the C word, but I've hardly mentioned the trend in using the N word (The C word has a companion). (Although, naming no names, I've been quietly admiring the effortless way one well-known academic writer switched as if it were just a question of Find and Replace).

So here's an interesting example - the government's £100m 'Green Neighbourhoods Initiative' launched yesterday which we're told

'will give a green makeover to up to 100 neighbourhoods in England with an aim to reduce their carbon footprints by more than 60 per cent.'

At first sight it's not about neighbourhoods, it's about homes and their owners' use of energy. But it's a laudable aim, and it has a neat contortion that seems to have been missed by commentators. The initiative will call for local alliances -

'between householders, community groups, local authorities, energy suppliers, private companies, and banks to bid for funding. To receive funding, bidders will need to join together and commit substantial levels of funding from their own resources to help transform the environmental performance of a street or local area.'

I'd say that was a gamble, which I applaud. Will people be bothered or motivated to get together and act collectively? Will it just be the ones with the social and cultural capital ('their own resources'?) in the wealthy areas, who get their large but inefficient Victorian terraced houses made over to be worth more when it comes to resale? The press release refers to 'poorly insulated tower blocks' so perhaps the work of the Sustainable Tower Blocks Initiative will finally be followed up after all these years.

It will be interesting to see how well the fund gets taken up. And I hope someone's going to evaluate it from a community development perspective: how do the alliances get formed, and what else springs from their coming together?

Citizen participation is not community engagement

I've been advising a few public library authorities on their community engagement plans under the Community Libraries Programme, and been struck in one example by the way citizen participation can come to disguise a lack of community engagement.

The proposal involves engaging a number of volunteers who will serve, with officers, on 'community management groups' (note the term) and in other activities; and the groups will take decisions throughout the life of the project. Because it's possible to point to the participation of local residents in decision-making processes, it seems to be legitimate under the conditions of the scheme for the authority to describe this as community engagement.

But the decisions to be made are in this case part of the library service agenda, not an agenda decided by local people. There seems to have been no attempt to engage with the interests of community groups and explore how the library service can support and contribute to those. What's interesting here is that the funding system appears to allow this kind of blurring. (The library authority is aware of my misgivings and sought to reassure me that they will crack on with genuine CE once they've got the oppressive bureaucracy out of the way).

Beyond all this there is a troubling sense of flakiness around community engagement generally. With the track record of the regeneration industry on CE increasingly under question, it's unfair to pick on the library sector. If there is a little lack of clarity about what the community libraries programme is trying to achieve, I think it's definitely tweakable. Ben Taylor notes in a recent MLA baseline report for the programme:

'there is a lack of fully shared agreement about what community engagement entails – a critical part  of the vision. This includes a few respondents who still believe that community engagement is simply based on library use and issue numbers, rather than changing the relationship with libraries and empowering communities and individuals. While many have a more developed approach, the question remains unanswered: Are we trying to get people involved in libraries, or in their community?'

To put it another way: is this about local people being involved in library services; or about libraries playing a role, along with others, in promoting community cohesion and empowering people to get involved in local life on their own terms?

Things are not critical here, not least because one can envisage a progression: lots of libraries already work with local reps and volunteers to manage, deliver and perhaps develop their existing services. This gets them into a position where they play a supportive role in whatever local groups decide they want to do; and hopefully into being consistently a proactive, deliberate stimulus for local social interaction.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, we'll see) it comes at a time when the practice of community engagement is under critical examination.

A JRF report on Communities First in Wales notes that:

'There was little evidence of community influence over statutory members of Communities First partnerships and no evidence of significant mainstream 'programme bending' where statutory agencies prioritised actions and expenditure in the Communities First partnership area.'

Earlier this month Regen & renewal reported on Graham Gardner's (questionable) fault-finding over the government's community empowerment policies.

And here's New Start magazine reporting on a New Economics Foundation report which suggests that regeneration programmes are failing to reduce inequalities because they are good at measuring things that make no difference to the lives of local people, and poor at measuring things that do. (Covered here by Regen.net).

According to New Start, the report (which I haven't got to yet, sorry) shows how government measures focus on objectives that are either unrealistic or totally miss the point.

What I think we have here is the growing sense of a miserable mismatch where the fussing pedantic slob known as New Labour Managerialism (groan) somehow shacked up with naive and seductive young Principles of Community Governance (gasp). In the romantic history of social policy, were there ever two concepts so lamentably unsuited to one another?

Empowerment and civic participation

A long conversation this afternoon with my old buddy Gabriel Chanan in which we touched on the puzzle of whether policy on 'empowerment' is starting to get elided with job creation (see Unlocking the talent of our communities). If we're going to have disempowerment confused with worklessness, it will just serve to further marginalise older people, most of whom are outside the labour market and quite disempowered enough already thanks.

In the national indicator set, the key indicator for empowerment is NI4:

'The proportion of the adult population who agree that they feel able to influence decisions affecting their local area.'

More description and explanation here.

I think the indicators in themselves look very progressive. Of course, there's always concern about how they will be used, and we'll all take some convincing that they won't be turned into irritating and counter-productive league tables. And there are other questions.

The way the indicators will work, as I understand it, is that local authorities and their partners will establish a baseline and seek (be expected) to improve by 4 per cent subsequently.

Well let's see now, if you've got a given percentage of people in your area who have not said that they feel able to influence decisions, who do you target in order to increase the proportion by 4 per cent?

You're going to start with people who are indifferent but relatively empowered, and maybe persuade them so that they do feel they can influence things. You're less likely to start with people who are relatively disempowered and certainly not with the most profoundly disempowered. So what are we trying to do here - to equalise empowerment or just come up with an acceptable proportion of people who can influence processes?

Well, there's plenty in the empowerment action plan to bring about change, and hopefully a lot of that funding will be used for community development to promote lasting, collective empowerment where most needed. Meanwhile, in a post on the Guardian blog, Richard Wilson observes:

We have seen the emergence of an empowerment gap. Since 1997, the subjectively empowered have become yet more empowered and those with the least personal empowerment more disempowered.

Much to be done.

Shifting institutions

A few weeks ago I had an absorbing discussion with a friend who works at a college, about the systematic reduction of funding, and other obstacles introduced by government, to minimise the contribution of further education institutions to community education. My friend's college, with a distinguished tradition of socially-committed work at local level with people on low-incomes, is being forced to abandon it.

It's hardly contentious to record that the present government has presided over a shameful starvation of learning opportunities for people who lack chances, in spite of the originally earnest tone of social inclusion educational policies ten years ago.

Since that conversation, it happens I've started doing some work under the current lottery-funded programme for community libraries, and been surprised at how many of the bids I've seen include the provision of spaces and activities for various forms of stuctured and semi-structured learning. One legitimate response to many of these might be, how come the education sector is not already doing this?

And then I spotted a note in Monday's Guardian in which it is claimed that:

Schools are having to give moral guidance to pupils which should be given by their parents at home... For some children, schools have had to take the place of the institutions that used to set the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

This is from a report of a speech by the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, who says that:

For many children, school and its values, its clear boundaries and moral framework, are the only solid bedrock in their lives.'

Well, something's going on here - schools claiming they have to carry out a parental role, libraries expected to do the work of schools and colleges, colleges obstructed from providing community education... The roles of institutions are shifting, and I suspect that most of those within the institutions think they occupy terra firma.