Neighbourhoods

No, the tech doesn't weaken local social ties

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

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

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

These paragraphs, I feel, are important:

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

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

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

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

What about local social networks? The researchers conclude:

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

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

From the press release:

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

Summary. Full report.

Searching for community

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

by Jeremy Brent

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

Review by Alison Gilchrist

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Neighbouring in inner-city apartments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- not exactly propitious.

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

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

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

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

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

 

It takes a village

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Make your neighbourhood nicer

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

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

As Esme Peach says on the back cover:

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

Social interaction and traffic: essential evidence

This is the new essential graphic detailing the impact of traffic on social relations.

Nearly forty years ago Appleyard's Livable streets research was published, including the now famous illustration of the impact implied of light, medium and heavy traffic on social interaction.

Working in San Francisco, Appleyard found that on 'light' street (2,000 vehicles a day) inhabitants had three times as many local friends and twice as many acquaintances as those on 'heavy' street (16,000 vehicles a day).

Quite often in recent years I've referred to his material in presentations and provocatively suggested that we don't really need research like this because we all know it, it's obvious. All we need is the graphic.

No-one ever mentions that the research was methodologically scimpy (only 12 residents in each block were interviewed) and there are nuances (eg to do with the location of corner-shops and the age of residents on the different streets) that tend to be overlooked. But hey, basically we know it, and all we really needed was the illustration.

Not true of course, because there's a difference between something being self-evidently true, and people taking any notice of it. So we should all be thankful that Josh Hart came over from San Francisco to Bristol to replicate and develop similar work. Judging from some of the coverage today (Guardian, BBC, Daily Mail even) it looks like the message is immaculately timed and could have the impact it deserves.

Hart's study looked at three streets in north Bristol with light, medium and heavy traffic. He found that motor traffic has a 'considerable negative impact on quality of life, particularly for residents living beside heavy motor traffic flows'.

Hart selected streets measured at 140, 8420, and 21,130 vehicles per day. He considered vegetation, parking, reported crashes, noise levels, pavement width, building setback and various other factors; and he interviewed ten households on either side of each street.

And guess what, traffic makes a huge difference. We all knew it, now we can point to it and quote from it. The report is full of detail that sparks insight, like this graphic for instance, showing the variation in social connections by street. Nice job Josh.

What we need next: two or three replications of this study, plus a couple of before-and-after social network analyses of home zones. As I've said before, it's a disgrace that we're not evaluating home zones properly. And it will be revealing to see if this material is referred to during the main political party conferences in the next couple of weeks.

You can get hold of Hart's full report, Driven to excess, via the news page at the University of West of England.

Mean streets

I just caught up with this excellent article by Catherine Mayer in last month's Time magazine. 'Britons are frightened of their own young,' she notes - we have a propensity 'to recoil in horror' from our children.

On any given Saturday night, in any town center across Britain, it's easy to see why. "It usually starts outside McDonald's — that's the hot spot," explains one London youth. "You might go with one mate, then you get a phone call. Give it an hour, there'll be 10 people there, with nothing to do. Intimidating people is something to do, a way of getting kicks. Like, 'Oh my God, did you see how they ran?'"

As Mayer points out, for a 'significant minority' of British children, unhappiness — and the criminality, excessive drinking and drug-taking and promiscuity that is its expression — really have created a crisis.

Previously:
The street context for youth violence
Collective responsibility for children and young people
Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

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.

Social network gap?

Three and a half years ago I wrote: 'We're all going to have to wait a while for Keith Hampton's definitive report on the e-neighbors project in Boston.' Well yer tiz and worth the wait of course.  It's published in a UK journal, Information, communication and society, in a special issue on 'e-Relationships'.

The three-year e-Neighbors study involved detailed social network surveys in four localities, in three of which residents were provided with a neighbourhood email discussion list and a website. The paper focuses mostly on the take-up and use in a suburban neighbourhood. The great majority of ties formed as a result of people being given access to the list, were weak ties. Hampton claims that the internet does not isolate people from the parochial realm of the neighborhood:

'Internet use over extended periods appears to be an antidote to privatism – it affords the formation of local social networks.'

Of interest in this write-up is the consideration of a 'social network gap'. I've always disliked the notion of a 'digital divide' (why digital? why divide?) and Keith wisely skirts this, raising questions which get us a little closer to the issues. We know that social inclusion is not just about access to stuff but also about social connections, especially weak ties. And some kinds of neighbourhood offer greater potential for establishing ties than do others.

So here's the problem as he puts it to us:

'Those without the technology, and those in neighborhoods without an existing propensity towards local tie formation, are structurally disadvantaged twice over; they are unlikely to build local community with or without the use of information and communication technologies.'

I've always admired the measured clarity of Keith's thought and writing, and it was a privilege to have the chance to contribute some thoughts to the project at an early stage. As it happens, this paper fits nicely onto stuff I've been babbling lately about weak ties and local networks. It's time to get some decent work done on this in the UK: where, for instance, is the housing association that's building or encouraging simple email lists on estates?

Keith Hampton's site.

Previously: On Keith Hampton's 2004 London presentation.

'Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres.'

'We're most gregarious'

Some time ago I expressed a concern about the tendency to theorise and problematise social capital away from local everyday life. It's important to take account of shallow conversations and brief interactions that take place in the public realm. And now I've just been reading about some research into ephemeral relationships on the trams of Antwerp, carried out by Ruth Soenen.

Over eight months Soenen observed the kinds of brief relationships that spring up and disappear in this kind of public context - she notes for example how people start talking if they have to help one another avoid falling when there's a sudden stop, or if they see something unusual through the window. She records the catalytic effect of a colourful and talkative person stepping on board.

She tries to link this to notions of 'community', arguing that in-depth relationships 'don't have a priviliged status' in this respect:

'Duration doesn’t seem to be the essential marker for the experience of community... Ephemeral relationships can be a social base for the experience of community.'

Soenen goes on to argue that there are limitations in the measurement of social capital when we ignore the potential of ephemeral relationships. Her book about this study is published in Dutch only.

Thanks Jan. My title, showing my age, is from Flanders and Swan.

Previously: Segregation in public space (with reference to buses in Jerusalem).

'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 great neighborhood book

This book is a delight. (It was published a couple months ago and a well-known online book company rushed it to me in, er, less than seven weeks. As my friend Tim Owen once wrote; it's no wonder carrier pigeons went out of business).

Jay Walljasper presents a wide range of positive aspects of neighbourhood life in short, digestible, well-illustrated chapters. His range of examples is broad - one of the strengths of PPS that I've always liked is that they recognise that there is life outside the USA, and they make an effort to find out about it. And the book sparkles with enthusiastic tips and suggestions for actions, little and large, that can be taken by residents. Chapters are rounded-off with a convenient short resource list.

If you're one of those who get put off by the relentlessly upbeat cheeriness of american neighbourhood involvement, it's true this one may not be for you. But it makes a good complement to the seminal Shaping neighbourhoods guide published in 2003.

The great neighborhood book: a do-it-yourself guide to placemaking, by Jay Walljasper, published by New Society for the Project for Public Spaces.

People, place and policy

Sheffield Hallam University has begun publication of a new free access online journal People, place and policy. What a good idea.

'This major new journal provides a forum for debate between academics, policy-makers and practitioners thinking about major societal challenges and concerned with identifying problems and suggesting solutions.'

Issue 1 includes:

• What future for social housing: Ian Cole
• Continuing dilemmas for area based urban regeneration: evidence from the New Deal for Communities Programme in England: Paul Lawless
• New Labour and evidence based policy making: 1997-2007: Peter Wells
• Understanding the idea of 'grant dependency' in the voluntary and community sector: Rob Macmillan
• The margins of public space - Muslims and social housing in England: David Cheesman.

Residential segregation and community cohesion

The recent report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion was important partly in giving new policy emphasis to what's known as the 'isolation thesis' - the notion that residential segregation restricts social ties between minority ethnic groupings and the host population, and that these ties are important.

I've just been reading some research based on survey analysis in the Netherlands which appears to confirm the first part of the argument:

spatial segregation hampers the social inclusion of ethnic minorities, as it stands in the way of contacts between ethnic minorities and native Dutch.

Perhaps surprisingly, this conclusion was found to apply more clearly to 'non-deprived ethnic minorities' than to deprived.

van der Laan Bouma-Doff, W. Confined contact: residential segregation and ethnic bridges in the Netherlands. Urban studies, 44(5-6), May 2007, 997-1017.

_________

Update

Meanwhile, guidance published today sets out what schools in England will have to do under a new duty to promote community cohesion. The press release includes a broad definition of community cohesion which I haven't seen before.

Integration and Cohesion: the report

The report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is published today, with a strong emphasis on improving cohesion through local action. If you work in or around community development in the UK, you won't be able to escape the significance of this document and I hope you wouldn't want to. If you are outside the UK but interested in cohesion issues, I think this could still be an important document for you.

'Some of the key influences on poor cohesion are low satisfaction with an area as a place to live, high perceptions of levels of anti-social behaviour and a high level of deprivation – all issues which can be addressed locally, or be tackled by local institutions. Our analysis also found that there was no simple link between poor cohesion and any of these factors; or good cohesion and the reverse. Local history, trends or events are also important... Improving cohesion in the long term is about local action: local areas have the expert knowledge about particular local circumstances; and local actions are what will result in integration and cohesion.'

Here's my first, undeniably positive reaction from a quick skim, as I won't have much time to deal with this in the next few days.

The report is structured around four principles:

• shared futures - this is about 'an emphasis on articulating what binds communities together – rather than the differences that might divide them – and is about prioritising a shared future over divided legacies';
• strengthened rights and responsibilities;
• mutual respect and civility, also referred to as 'an ethics of hospitality';
• visible social justice.

The chapter on respect and civility is of particular interest to me and I may post about it separately in due course. I picked out the following:

There is a call for government to take integration and cohesion seriously in relation to youth services provision, but I get the impression that the role of intergenerational work in promoting community cohesion is not given nearly enough momentum in this report.

The Commission proposes a nationally sponsored Community Week (I suppose continued abuse of the C word is inevitable) 'with a focus on celebrating all communities and inter-community engagement'.

The Commission has also acknowledged the dearth of evidence on the most effective ways of stimulating meaningful interaction and building cross-cultural friendships, and it calls for a programme of research, hurrah, 'to explore more closely what works' (in this respect) 'in different neighbourhoods and why.'

There's a healthy emphasis on education and citizenship and the promised and needed support for ESOL classes (English for Speakers of Other Languages) is there, plus an interesting recommendation that authorities should reduce the amount of language translation they do: 'translation should be reduced except where it builds integration and cohesion.' There also seems to be a sensible detachment from media over-excitement about notions of 'Britishness'.

Annex B looks like a very useful categorisation of what seems to work well and less well in five types of area (unhelpfully called 'family groups'). They are: changing, less affluent rural areas; stable less affluent urban areas with manufacturing decline; stable less affluent urban areas without manufacturing decline; changing, less affluent urban areas; and areas with tensions arising from a single issue.

Article by Madeleine Bunting in yesterday's Guardian. More in today's Guardian including comments by Ed Cox on the point that cohesion needs to be considered everywhere, not just in urban areas with a visible ethnic mix: 'cohesion tensions in the future are more likely to be experienced in unexpected places where 'diversity' is new.'

'As local diversity becomes more complex, we think mutual respect and civility should underpin the way we as communities navigate a shared course through different understandings of what is acceptable or normal.'

The next big thing will be lots of little things: us

From time to time I offer mumbled thoughts about informality and collaboration and take a snipe at formality, hierarchy, managerialism, and linear thinking. I take this stance partly because I think there is a profound and under-appreciated connection between the quality of neighbourhood life and the importance attached to informal social relations.

One angle on this is to see how we can minimise the eagerness of authorities to determine what we do and where we do it - Hans Monderman's removal of traffic lights and restoration of ambiguity is a perfect illustration of this potential. And in societies where the 'responsibilisation' of citizens through community engagement (or by any other principle) seems to be becoming irreversibly programmed, we can expect to see the movement gather pace and influence.

And so a belated welcome for Charlie Leadbeater's current text, We think: the power of mass creativity, in which he explores the phenomenon of creative collaboration.

Charlie released the text on a wiki inviting contributions and thereby ensuring a nice blending of medium, message and principle. The intention is to publish hard copy in the next couple of months. It's important stuff because of the recognition given to social enterprise, the human impulse to share, and the transformations implied in the public realm.

"In field after field we are witnessing the same phenomenon: large groups of committed and knowledgeable amateurs, working without pay, are creating highly collaborative forms of organisation, which operate with little hierarchy and bureaucracy and yet mobilise resources of a scale to match the biggest corporations in the world..."

"We are told that to be organised we need an organisation. Yet all these are complex and highly organised activities without a single organisation being in charge of everything that goes on. We are told that to make sure order is maintained someone has to be in control. Yet these activities seem ordered precisely because no one seeks to be in control and so people have to exercise their sense of responsibility, adjusting to one another, sorting out disputes as they go. The order comes from within these communities not from the top. To get complex tasks done reliably we have assumed we need a clear division of labour, so everyone knows in advance what they are supposed to do, whose job it is to do what. Yet in these non-organisations people seem to voluntarily distribute themselves to work, as and when it needs to be done."

And from chapter three:

"The new forms of structured self-organisation – We-think - witnessed now across fields from software and computer games, to music and basic information sharing – could bring our societies very large benefits in terms of competition, efficiency and innovation, freedom, democracy and social justice. But they also pose a significant challenge to all institutions – not just media organisations – that have relied on high barriers to entry and professional control of knowledge and information."

Meanwhile, the Open Innovation Exchange bid to the Office of the Third Sector, in which my good friends Simon Berry and David Wilcox, along with several others, coordinated an open source bid for a £1.2m government contract, is another example of this phenomenon. (See David's latest update here).

The binary us-and-them mentality of organisational decision-making, political point-scoring and regulation is beginning to erode, and I anticipate a flowering of ways in which non-hierarchical approaches contribute to the quality of life at local level.

Neighbourhoods, parenting and children

I first heard Jacqueline Barnes talking about her research into families, parenting and neighbourhoods about three years ago and I couldn't understand why the whole world didn't know about it. I've referred to it a few times here (eg) and now it's time to welcome the book -
Down our way: the relevance of neighbourhoods for parenting and child development. It's published by Wiley and also available via Amazon.

The study threw up findings about informal social control which I've discussed in the past, but I maybe wasn't expecting the interesting focus in chapter six on the importance of local friends:

Many newcomers found that it was not easy to develop local friendships and without those it was a challenge to become involved with local campaigns or local schools.

I'm also fascinated by the question raised in chapter 9 - 'Is it better to belong to the neighbourhood?' about the tensions affecting involvement, withdrawal indoors, or moving away.

The challenge is to include in local activism those parents who feel particularly alienated from their community... Neighbourhoods that offer safe streets allow parents to walk around and chat to other local residents in informal ways could facilitate network development, which in turn is likely to strengthen their sense of belonging, and neighbourhood cohesion. Local authorities will need to develop coordinated strategies that offer more chances for local neighbourhood engagement from the most disenfranchised (no easy task) in conjunction with improving the physical environment.

If your pocket money won't stretch to buying a copy and you can't wait til Christmas, make sure your library gets it for you.

Manual for Streets published

Highways engineers and planners already know that the Manual for streets was published the other day. But a key feature of the cultural change that it implies is that street design is pertinent to a wider range of people than just technical experts, it's also significant for community activists and neighbourhood managers. MfS seeks to promote 'greater collaboration between all those involved in the design, approval and adoption processes.'

During the draft stages I said that I thought it would be a historic document. Scanning the final version, I get the sense that some of the ambitious attempts to make it 'community-centred' may have been diluted (including community involvement, curiously, but this may be because there's perceived to be too much woolly and insubstantial rhetoric emanating in government documents on the topic already); but they're not lost. Just take the first few identified changes in approach that distinguish it from the guidance which it replaces:

• applying a user hierarchy to the design process with pedestrians at the top;
• emphasising a collaborative approach to the delivery of streets;
• recognising the importance of the community function of streets as spaces for social interaction;
• promoting an inclusive environment that recognises the needs of people of all ages and abilities...

I welcome the numerous references to the public realm, and the insistence that residential streets should be places where people can move about. MfS applies in England and Wales. The prelims tell us that it 'does not set out any new policy or legal requirements': but I think it will come to be seen as a key marker of cultural change which begins the end of car-domination of neighbourhoods.

Living Streets response is here.

CABE response.

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.

The practice of neighbouring

A week ago at a seminar I was lamenting the inadequacies of research on neighbouring, largely because we only have data from a few case studies (I think there may be many more undiscovered), from specific surveys with questions of dubious worth such as 'how many of your neighbours do you know by name?' and from large national datasets which lack, er, granularity shall we say.

Since when, my attention has been drawn to a paper by Margarethe Kusenbach published in Symbolic interaction last year (29(3)), on 'Patterns of neighboring: practicing neighboring in the public realm'.

Thanks to Keith Hampton for the nod on this: Keith warned me that it is 'one of the best neighborhood articles I have seen of late' and I'm not going to argue with that. Kusenbach does two key things: she provides us with valuable insights from scarce material from ethnographic observations in two Los Angeles neighbourhoods, and she puts this in a framework of 'four normative principles of neighboring' - friendly recognition, parochial helpfulness, proactive intervention, and embracing and contesting diversity.

The paper is important because at last we have an academic placing emphasis on neighbourly greetings which 'tend to be superficial and do not take much effort'. I no longer feel like quite such a lone obsessive. At the same time, Kusenbach places stress on the notion of 'rules' of neighbouring, for example to do with reciprocity. Personally I suspect it might be better to talk in terms of 'codes' rather than 'rules', at least until we've got a bit further in appreciating the voluntary and essentially informal nature of contemporary neighbouring.

(Incidentally, there's one particular curiosity about the paper, in that the literature review almost completely overlooks European sources (the Dutch, Scandinavian and UK traditions in this field, especially Philip Abrams, do not feature: my information-work background makes me wonder impishly if the research team forgot that we spell some words differently...)

Some of these niceties - especially the notion of neighbouring 'rules' - were floating around in my head yesterday because I was running a workshop for Age Concern England, based on a background paper I had circulated. I woke up this morning realising that we'd had fifteen of us discussing neighbourliness for four hours, which itself deserves mention.

Before I get to grips with the flipchart sheets, two things were particularly striking. The first was how easily our discussion kept slipping into issues of care, family networks, and the nuances of friendship and acquaintance. I'd like to think that this reflects my decision to take an ecological approach to neighbourliness within the context of social support generally, but maybe it's just reality poking through all the time.

The second was that the issue of local social relations, with its baggage of respect, civility, care, consideration, participation, responsibilisation and so forth, is clearly of swelling social policy significance. Agencies like Age Concern are right to try and get in front of the issues as governments are increasingly turning their attention to influencing the ways in which people behave.

As for the notion of 'rules', the group was emphatic about seeing neighbouring as a code of informal voluntary behaviours, so I wonder if this highlights another cultural difference between the UK and the US. And we hardly discussed notions of respect for privacy because it's undoubtedly taken for granted as one of the central pillars of neighbouring.

My thanks go to the enthusiastic group representing various Age Concerns who shared their ideas and experience yesterday. It's not yet clear what products will result from the project, but there's likely to be some form of guidance for local Age Concerns and perhaps a more general document reviewing the theme.

Neighbourliness book launch

Thanks to the efforts of Ben Lee and Claire Grant at Shared Intelligence, we launched the Respect in the neighbourhood book at NCVO yesterday, with a few words from myself and Liz Richardson chaired by Carol Hudson, followed by plenty of discussion. Most of the folk there were neighbourhood management practitioners and it was great to get their take on the importance of neighbourliness. I think people really valued Liz's thorough and highly pertinent research findings about residents' views on promoting informal social control.

And for me it was a buzz to have all the authors there: from left, Jacqueline Barnes, meself, Aydin Mehmet Ali, Philip Connolly, Liz Richardson, and Jan Steyaert. Thanks to Martin Dudley for the pic. Thanks also to Russell House Publishing for their contribution to the event and ongoing support.

I used the opportunity to blurt out some thoughts on what I may yet call 'thin neighbouring' - the need to assert an understanding of neighbourliness which stresses low-level, very informal, non-committal repeated interactions; emphasising recognition and uncomplicated acknowledgement rather than knowing other residents; identifying the nod, the wave, grunt or half-smile without there necessarily having to be meaningful conversation or visiting in people's houses. Not that the latter aren't important; but if we're looking to understand the connections between the quality of local social relations and the quality of civil relations in the wider society, we have to get closer and look at the basic ingredients.

Manual for Streets

The Manual for Streets will be launched at the following events:

• London, Thursday 29 March 2007
• Newcastle, Wednesday 9 May 2007
• Taunton, Wednesday 20 June 2007
• Cardiff, Thursday 21 June 2007
• Coventry, Thursday 5 July 2007
• Bolton, Wednesday 18 July 2007

Blurb. But it will cost you over £200 to get in, how's that for inclusion.

The draft MfS can still be seen here.

The image is from the CABE/IHT/English Heritage Designing streets for people report.

You thought this blog was hard to read...

The Local Community Sector Task Force, set up in 2004, has reported. Here's a sample (from the exec summary, no less - ie the most heavily-perused section) of what they came up with after two and a half years:

8. Government Offices, which are responsible for negotiating LAAs on behalf of central Government: should, a) as part of the negotiation of the LAAs, always make sure that they assess and build an understanding of the role and challenges faced by the community sector and wider VCS in the design and delivery of local priorities and services, especially in areas benefiting from NRF, and the associated capacity needs and policy responses required at local level to ensure that the sector can play a full and effective role in the design and delivery of local priorities; and b) ensure that LAAs reflect the direction of travel to be followed locally around the role of the VCS in commissioning and delivering public services as well as a coordinated and cross partnership approach to supporting community capacity building.

Sigh. A shame because there's some interesting stuff in the report, but as so often when it gets near policy, the sector risks disappearing up its own backside. Back to thinking about how to invent the drawing board folks.

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.

Supporting safer communities

The Chartered Institute of Housing have just published Supporting safer communities: housing, crime and neighbourhoods:

Argues that a balanced and proportionate response is needed to anti-social behaviour and crime - one that offers strategies for prevention, intervention, support and enforcement. Fifteen thought-provoking chapters address the themes of ‘disorder and regeneration’, the ‘policing of crime and disorder’, ‘service provider approaches to safe communities’ and ‘social inclusion and community safety.’

Neighbourliness, informality, and informal social control

The past few weeks have seen the publication of three documents which together, in my view, contribute significantly to the arguments around neighbourliness, informality, and informal social control:

• a pamphlet by Samuel Jones on conversation, Talk us into it, published by Demos
• a JRF report on Neighbourhood security and urban change by Martin Innes and Vanessa Jones (Findings. Report)
• Respect_in_the_neighbourhood , edited by meself and published by Russell House.

Samuel Jones's argument resonates on a drum that various people (like Alison Gilchrist, Susie Hay, David Wilcox, Geoff Mulgan, me in my small corner, and others) have been banging for a while now - there ain't enough of the right kind of conversations happening in the public realm.

His main point is not that people are talking about public affairs less, but that they are engaging less frequently in the means by which their conversation can become public.

The resources that drive the public realm have been channelled to more personal interests, 'draining social capital and bankrupting the public sphere.' So we've hit a crisis which requires us to 'refresh our public realm in ways acclimatised to the new means by which we pursue our personalised preference and our more particular ways of seeking information.'

Compare this from the introduction to the Respect book:

'The challenge is to replenish society’s depleted stock of skills in engaging and recognising the legitimate interests of others, of learning to challenge behaviour within a shared understanding; to hone our readiness to show consideration to others, whether we know them or not. It’s not that we don’t do this: it’s just that we tend to avoid doing it with those with whom we have little in common. It’s as if - conditioned to the taciturnity of the supermarket checkout rather than the inevitable greetings of the corner shop - we have abandoned the practice of conducting trivial interactions, because they don’t matter to us. But they do matter, and we need somehow to rediscover the vernacular of mundane encounters.'

The Respect book emphasises the importance of informality in terms of neighbourly relations, social capital, and the occupation of public space. There are numerous resonances with the Demos pamphlet: for example in our exploration and explanation of the tensions between local social relations and personal social networks, or in the way we probe the effects of the privatisation of social life. The book has two quite striking research chapters, two practitioners' chapters, a discussion of the notion of respect, an analysis of contemporary neighbouring, a comparative review of UK, Dutch and Flemish policy, and a discussion of the role of policy in local social relations. It argues that there is a profound and enduring connection between neighbouring, civility and a broader understanding of democratic participation.

As you would expect, much of the book is concerned with informal social control, which is a key theme in the study by Innes and Jones. Their research looked at how crime, physical disorder and antisocial behaviour shape the ways that places change over time.

The researchers consider how residents' perceptions of safety and security are affected by crime and disorder, fear of crime, and attempts to control unsocial behaviour. They stress that the connections between formal and informal social control at the neighbourhood level are 'crucial'. Among the arguments put forward, here's one that chimes clearly with views expressed on this blog and in the final chapter of Respect in the neighbourhood:

'In most neighbourhoods interventions that foster resilience and stimulate recovery at the neighbourhood level are more likely to improve quality of life than efforts that target "problem" individuals.'

I'm not sure precisely what these commonalities represent, but they do seem to confirm that there's a growing movement which, in opposition to the widespread over-emphasis on things formal and countable, is calling for greater recognition to be paid to the importance of informal engagement, to 'the vernacular of mundane encounters' - before it's too late.

Respect in the neighbourhood

I've uploaded a flier for the Respect in the neighbourhood book, here . It's due on 22 November.

Compassion and anger: that'll be the community workers then

Early life experiences help community regeneration professionals develop the commitment and resilience to balance complex ethical and emotional work challenges, according to a recent ESRC study, Negotiating ethical dilemmas in contested communities.

The study explores how community development professionals negotiate the conflicting interests and attitudes of local residents and institutional actors such as management and local politicians, whilst dealing with problems raised by the short-term targets, competition for funding and the bureaucratic burdens of managerialism.

Findings confirmed the challenging nature of such work in multiply disadvantaged communities, but found that workers' extraordinary levels of commitment and resilience - often deeply rooted in early life experiences and identifications - informed a strong sense of personal authority and a capacity for emotional and ethical complexity.

One of the authors, Paul Hoggett, explained:

"The fact that many of the sample group were themselves 'survivors' meant that they were able to cope with levels of conflict, tension and distress that others might find daunting."

Researchers were also struck by the mixture of compassion and anger that underlay the respondents' belief in democracy, community and social justice.  These values were consistent and strong in the group, and contributed to significant overlap between people's 'personal' and 'professional' selves.

Press release. Report.

Catching up : link dump

Sometimes it's hard to get the important documents blogged to my satisfaction, sometimes I miss them. For the record:

Public spaces, social relations and well-being in East London
Nicholas Dines and Vicky Cattell, JRF, September 2006
Based on qualitative research in east London, looking at both green spaces and everyday spaces such as a market, the report assesses the value and significance of social encounters. It also considers the contribution of public spaces to community cohesion and inter-ethnic understanding.

New localism and community: what it means for public space quality
CABE, June 2006
This briefing sets out CABE’s thinking on the implications of new localism and increased public engagement for public space quality. It considers how the trend towards decentralised decision-making and control over public space should be reconciled with the need for public spaces to be designed and maintained to the highest standards.

The importance of the neighbourhood: tackling the implementation gap
Marilyn Taylor and Mandy Wilson, JRF, May 2006
This paper pulls out the main messages from JRF and other research findings to suggest what central government policy can do to make the neighbourhoods agenda work on the ground.

Empowering neighbourhoods: going beyond the double devolution deal
Ed Cox, LGIU, May 2006
This pamphlet argues that the Government must reinvigorate forms of community governance by promoting a new ‘neighbourhood council’ scheme and the introduction of participatory budgeting pathfinders.

In our community

Got your summer reading? Here's In our community, by Sally Featherstone -

"Whether your child attends a nursery school or playgroup this book is for you. It will give you and your child hours of fun in your local area while ensuring that they learn through play with a caring adult. This book provides an excellent preparation for when they start school."

What will this suggest to future socio-historical analysts about our culture? That it must have been impoverished, to need such guidance? That it reacted sensitively in recognising that age-old assumptions about community suddenly needed asserting at an early age? Perhaps that our age was characterised by mediated experience of neighbourhood and community ?

Time to 'deconcentrate poverty'

I've just made the time to read this excellent paper for the TCPA by housing and policy consultant Julie Cowans, on new strategies for 'sustainable communities.' She argues cogently that we need a new paradigm for decision-making on housing and regeneration, which moves us away from damaging concentrations of poverty.

Increasingly, Cowans suggests, the rationale for policy and practice interventions "is tied up with strategies which place creating and maintaining neighbourhood value as their principle objective."

Her comments are based on the familiar observation that 'worst-first' regeneration policies don't appear to be working because they're too exclusively focussed. The relation between declining localities and adjacent neighbourhoods is crucial and under-appreciated; we need "to concentrate efforts where the market is strong and build out into areas of weakness."

There's a New start article on the paper here and a short item in the Times here.

Someone to talk to: the weakening of strong ties

I was in a discussion the other day when someone calculated the amount of time his partner and one particular group of confidantes had spent chatting over the years (he came up with a figure of 762 hours, in case you're interested). To some of us, this ability to talk freely about things, and to weave in and out of personally important and trivial topics almost seamlessly, is either enviable or puzzling or both. Who do you talk to about important stuff? Who are your confidants? Probably not your neighbours, more likely kin and friends outside your neighbourhood.

Now here's a sound paper by the US researchers who brought us a key paper on homophily ('birds of a feather') a few years ago - this time they've looked at core discussion networks in the USA comparing 1985 with 2004. They find surprising and disconcerting decline. The typical American discussion network has slightly less than one fewer confidant in it than it did in 1985; and an adult non-institutionalised American is much more likely to be completely isolated from people with whom he or she could discuss important matters than in 1985. The researchers suggest that

'the social environment of core confidants surrounding the typical American has become smaller, more densely interconnected, and more centred on the close ties of spouse/partner. The types of bridging ties that connect us to community and neighborhood have withered as confidant networks have closed in on a smaller core group.'

I'm not sure to what extent this contradicts what we would expect. Don't we assume that most of us now have discretionary personal social networks on which to draw in case of need for informal counselling and support? We would expect there to be increasing educational homogeneity in these networks and the research appears to confirm that. Indeed the key explanatory factor seems to be educational attainment, not race or gender or age. There are all sorts of insights and questions thrown up by the research, and hopefully the debate will result in a little policy attention being paid to informal local social relations.

Incidentally, before people rush to blame the internet for increasing social isolation, I'd urge caution in considering what constitutes 'internet use.' Keith Hampton when he was at MIT showed elegantly how web use is quite different from email use. The former is comparable to high tv use and is comparably bad for your social network. Email use is similar to telephone use and is comparably good for your social network. Probably for various reasons people who are not highly localised within their neighbourhoods will use the technologies of remote communication to strengthen existing contacts, not to diversify their networks through serendipitous face-to-face encounters.

McPherson, M et al. Social isolation in America: changes in core discussion networks over two decades. American sociological review, 71, June 2006: 353-375.

Local food supplies

In 1997, Suffolk Coastal District Council had the nerve to refuse planning permission to a major supermarket chain. There were at the time 81 food shops in seven market towns and 19 villages in the area that would have been affected. A survey was carried out at the time and a follow up study recently completed.

The second study, just published by CPRE, shows that not only have all the 81 retailers survived, but the number of local producers and suppliers has increased and in many cases businesses have expanded. Bear in mind that almost 90% of money spent in supermarkets disappears from the area immediately (NEF 2005), whereas money spent in local independent shops is much more likely to circulate locally.

I remember my old mum anticipating these issues many years ago. An important little piece of research. Press release is here.

Neighbouring: it must matter, we're all on about it

Having just finished an 11,000 word chapter about neighbouring I wasn't really ready for the publication of the Young Foundation's 'think-piece' for JRF on neighbouring, published today. Of course it covers much of what I've been writing about, and surely in a more lucid and concise, and less idiosyncratic style I daresay.

As you'd expect it's a tidy pulling together of a lot of strands, with some pointers for future research. Here are some immediate thoughts sparked by a quick skim through -

• We need more emphasis to be placed on available space. Swiss educationalist Marco Huttenmoser argues that neighbourhood space is the crucial paradigm for child-raising and gives it an emphasis comparable to parenting. What we haven't done is work on the link between neighbourhood space and parenting (although Jacqueline Barnes's work gives us a good start - make an effort to get hold of her latest edited book, Children and families in communities, and lobby Wiley to publish an affordable paperback edition).
• How do we disentangle sense of community, attachment, stability and geographical mobility - and put them all in the context of mixed tenure and a sustainable communities industry that doesn't seem to know its park from its corner shop? Some careful assessment of available research, taking account of my next point, is needed.
• It's time we had a decent analysis and comparative critique of the kinds of question used in research into neighbouring. Groping around on my desk at the moment an example comes to hand of the kind of thing I mean: a survey used by Wikstrom and Dolmen (2001) included the question 'How often do you socialise with people in your neighbourhood?' Unh? My unsystematic point is that unsystematic bricks like this in the wall will give us unsteady foundations. I've occasionally made the point that US studies which include some weighted questions about socialising in neighbours' houses would be inappropriate in the European context. Another point is that urban neighbourhoods in the US tend to be less racially diverse than many in the UK. It seems reasonable to suggest that some of the research implications are not perfectly transferable. Unfortunately we no longer have the Centre for Neighbourhood Research to do this for us, and although they catalogued a lot of survey questions (which you can still get at here) I'm not aware that they got to grips with this issue.
• Oh, and we still need that before and after social network analysis of home zones that I'm always going on about. Sigh.

Sorry, none of the above constitutes a critique of the publication, just thoughts that came to me as I blurred through. But I suppose the other thing I'm wondering is that JRF already know a lot about neighbourhoods and neighbouring so their objective in commissioning this piece of work is unclear. Handy though it is, it's neither a comprehensive review nor a piece of creative future-thinking. We could do with either, or indeed both.

Common knowledge

I've written here occasionally about everyday life and conditions on the Havelock estate in Southall, where I've been working with Giles Lane of Proboscis, and Bev Carter from Partners in change, over the last 10 months.

Proboscis has now published some of my idiosyncratic twittering about the estate, in their Cultural snapshots series. The essay is an unashamedly impressionistic assessment of the communication context for community development. Here's the abstract.

Common knowledge: community development and communication on a housing estate

Residents striving to improve conditions on a low-income estate face a range of problems, some of which severely constrain their ability to act collectively. This essay offers an impressionistic view of conditions on the Havelock estate in Southall, west London, based on an assessment of the communication and information ecology, with the aim of clarifying the role that Social Tapestries might play in stimulating information flow and the sharing of ideas and knowledge.

The essay offers a snapshot of the physical conditions, low levels of social interaction, and ‘civic absence’ that characterises the neighbourhood. It notes the sense of weakening community presence in the face of unresponsive environmental services and a looming drugs threat. It attempts to explain why participation in community initiatives is sometimes very difficult to establish or sustain, and it contrasts this reactive, fragmentary style of urban life with the contemporary image of lively urban consumption.

Community development and networking

My dear friend Alison Gilchrist was never afraid of a challenge, and that included writing about the slippery notion of networking. Now her handy booklet on Community development and networking has been revised in a new edition and republished by CDF in association with the Community Development Exchange (CDX). Find someone to give it to.

The balance of neighbourliness

"... as you can see, we're in a cul-de-sac and everybody keeps their own distance, it's quite an advantage I think that everybody watches everybody's house without being overly neighbourly so you've got that balance... I much prefer it as it is, I like to be friendly with people, I like people to speak and it's nice that we have got those people there if there's a problem, but I think it would be a nuisance having them constantly on the doorstep, and likewise if I was constantly on theirs."

From Globalization and belonging by Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall and Brian Longhurst. The book is based on a stack of interviews with people around Manchester a few years ago. Abosrbing and insightful stuff.

Fings ain't gonna be what they used to be

Dysfunctional neighbourhoods mess people up, and they can mess up older people comprehensively. The Social Exclusion Unit has just published a major report on ending inequalities for older people and it looks like a landmark policy document.

There is a section on social relations and participation:

"We want to see everyone - family, neighbours, pharmacists, GPs and shopkeepers, and older people themselves - acting to ensure that isolation amongst older people is reduced."

And there is a (albeit somewhat terse) section on 'The local area' (reassuring to see the authors eschew the C word. That's progress for you).

The main message in the report is the expressed intention to develop a Sure Start approach to policy for older people. This will be developed by the Department for Work and Pensions through the ‘Link-Age Plus’ programme in due course.

The full report is here. Alongside, SEU have published a detailed statistical analysis of exclusion among older people, available here.

Warm spikes

The Young Foundation have just launched their first publication under their new name. It's a collection of mini-studies and essays on 'the pleasures and pains of living together in modern Britain.' Note the word 'together' in the sub-title, because that's the theme of the collection and of course it is rightly and proudly conscientious about the foundation's intellectual inheritance from the Institute of Community Studies.

The book is called Porcupines in winter and you can find out why, and more, here. A quick skim-through hints at some real delights to come, when I get the time - tales and snapshots from local everyday life that help us accumulate a rich picture of how we live. There are contributions from Paul Barker, Kate Gavron, Stephen Marshall, Tom Steinberg, Ray Pahl, Malcolm Dean, Peter Hall, Paul Hilder and numerous others. It's a treasure (especially after the discomfort of the launch, in the shiny glamour of London's Guildhall, watching some of the rich and famous swigging wine and listening to speakers talk about 'the poor' in their absence. Yes, I know why).

Anti-social behaviour and civil renewal

Some time ago the Civil Renewal Unit set up half a dozen research projects, which have now reported.

For me, by far the most interesting is a local case study of how measures to address anti-social behaviour contribute to civil renewal objectives. The report is written by David Prior, Kathryn Farrow, Basia Spalek and Marian Barnes.

The researchers found a high degree of pessimism among residents about the prospects for achieving positive change.

"This pessimism stemmed both from a lack of confidence in their capacity to accomplish anything constructive that would not quickly be negated by those who engaged in anti-social behaviour, and from a perception of the danger of reprisals, whether physical or verbal, from such people. It was also fed by what they generally regarded as the failure of the public agencies to do anything effective about putting a stop to anti-social behaviour.

"Evidence of such attitudes was apparent at all levels of the study – frequent comment was made about people’s fears in going about their everyday lives, in using parks, shopping centres and other public spaces, and in having to make special arrangements to avoid potential dangers in very mundane activities (for instance, the resident who would phone a neighbour to keep a watch over her as she walked from her garage to her flat). Experiences such as these appeared to be widespread, suggesting a major challenge for national and local agencies in providing the kind of developmental support that will gradually build confidence and reduce fears."

Among the question it raises is, to what extent does the Respect action plan hold the promise to overcome this pessimism? It's clear that that is the intention, and I hope someone is given the chance (if the residents are ok about it) to go back to the study area in a couple of years' time and assess the impact of the new measures.

I note also that one of the recommendations is for more commitment to community development, especially with young people. Perhaps what needs to be stressed at this point is the difference between youth and community work on the one hand (not that there's enough of that going on) and community development work on the other: the latter is emphatically about empowering people to be able to maximise their own participation and contribution in the collective interest.

The report summary is here. Full report is here.

Government WILL manage behaviour

And here it is. The Respect Action Plan and the respect website now published. Tony Blair's speech is here.

A quick read-through of the plan suggests it's more thorough than I had been led to believe but seems to confirm the sense of almost unrelieved negativity that we got from the publicity trail. Enforcing respect is seen emphatically as an issue of democracy: 'what the majority wants.'

Various points of interest:

"Within the next year we will ensure that all Government funded regeneration schemes are accompanied by measures to manage behaviour." (Empahsis added).

OK, that's pretty clear. As for the scrutiny process:

"We will place a duty on district level ward councillors to consider issues, and respond within a prescribed timescale. The majority of problems should be resolved at this stage."

On Local Area Agreements:

"By 2007, all upper tier local authorities will have an LAA, including a mandatory outcome on Respect and anti-social behaviour." This provision will include a requirement for all authorities to ensure that intensive family support projects are in place where they are needed.

And yes, there are proposals for activities for children and young people (see chapter 2) - although they look pretty skinny from here.

Policy on parenting and neighbourhoods

In December HM Treasury published a paper called Support for parents: the best start for children.

It's mostly a review of government provision since 1997 but deceptively I think it may represent a key policy statement, worth noting if only because of the source and its signposting of policy in the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review next year.

There's a chapter called 'Stronger neighbourhoods and communities' - it doesn't say anything very significant but I was struck by one point in particular: as part of the 2007 CSR, it says, the government will consider how it

"can best support the development of community networks and local engagement alongside investment in improving the physical environment in deprived areas..."

It's great to have a government that acknowledges these themes as significant, but we shouldn't get too excited about such pronouncements just yet. My take on the government record, FWIW, is that hugely encouraging insights into various needs under the broad theme of social capital tend to have spawned cautious policy that is very much oriented to formal measures. Hence what I regard as a heavy over-emphasis on formal volunteering and on democratic participation, for instance, perhaps at the expense of putting effort into all sorts of possible ways of stimulating networks of informal connections among neighbours, that in themselves might provide such outcomes, along with many others.

Also, I'm helping in a very modest way to clarify the policy context for Jacqueline Barnes's Families and Neighbourhoods (FANS) Study, and it will be interesting to see how her findings, as they emerge, might contribute to this policy agenda. If you want to find out more about Jacqueline's insights into informal social control, check back to here and join us at LSE in London on 18 January.

Sustainable communities without community cohesion?

Researchers from ippr - which on tv last night was referred to as "the government's own think-tank" - have been asking existing and prospective residents in the Thames Gateway regeneration about the growth plans for the area.

Among the findings -

• Existing residents believed that only new residents would benefit from any improvements such as new facilities and services.

• And they expressed "very negative attitudes towards prospective new residents, with some people expressing racist opinions and an expectation that new and existing residents would not integrate."

The researchers' recommendations include:

"Give greater priority to community development and invest in increasing the capacity and skills of local authorities and the community and voluntary sector to address community cohesion issues,"

"Engage with and consult existing communities to ensure that the investment in the Growth Areas reflects their needs, as well as those of new residents,"

and a candidate for No-Brainer of the Year Award,

"Invest in infrastructure and community facilities that will make places attractive to people."

Surely they're all no-brainers, I can't really believe the implication that no involvement of local people has gone on or that upgrading of community facilities, amenities and transport has not been part of the plan from the outset? Perhaps things are far worse than I thought.

It seems the need to understand community cohesion issues is pretty urgent. The report notes:

"Perhaps the most troubling insight was into the ill-informed and suspicious attitudes of the existing residents we interviewed in the outer areas of the Gateway." People's concerns "were underwritten by a general sense of powerlessness and exclusion."

How do you transform such tensions into the WIMBY principle - Welcome Into My Backyard? Obviously it takes some skilled community development, lots of work on engagement and, I suggest, an early start.

The report is here.

Mixed tenure and mixed income neighbourhoods

A new report from JRF, published today, looks at patterns of segregation and policy issues for promoting mixed tenure and mixed income neighbourhoods.

Segregation is much more concentrated in terms of tenure than unemployment.

Patterns of segregation and deprivation depend on a complex set of inter-related forces, covering the operation of local housing markets, labour markets and how people move between different areas.

At the local level, areas expand or contract in the main according to the movement of households in or out the area. Movement is very responsive to local housing market conditions. These, in turn, are strongly related to local levels of deprivation and the state of the labour market.

The housing market does not respond in a straightforward manner to changes in the level of deprivation. There are powerful ‘thresholds’ operating which affect whether and how areas change. Deprivation has to fall to a certain point before the local housing market begins to take off and attract into the area the necessary high-skilled individuals and also the private sector capital for an area to thrive, which will in turn generate virtuous circles.

The findings summary is here.

The full report, Economic segregation in England: causes, consequences and policy, is here.

I'm reminded that the Chartered Institute for Housing recently published an interesting looking report on housing mix, called Mixed tenure twenty years on: nothing out of the ordinary. More details here.

Social housing and anti-social behaviour

Much of the work I've been doing over the past few months has clarified for me the role of social housing providers in promoting positive social relations. "Good housing management is a powerful antidote to anti-social behaviour," as this recent report on dealing with anti-social behaviour puts it.

The report is called Safe as houses and it offers insights from a range of European housing estates. Among the conclusions:

• Housing management works best when it is estate-based and accessible to local people. Local knowledge and good relationships with customers are essential, if estates are to be safe and secure.
• Adequate community facilities must be provided on all new housing estates and should be part of the regeneration of older schemes.
• Social housing providers should introduce and support intervention programmes designed to prevent anti-social behaviour.
• Agencies involved in making estates safe and secure should work from local estate-based offices with easy access for local people.

Impressive though it is, this report does little to get us away from the relentless negativity of the anti-social behaviour agenda. Yesterday I was told that a teenager with tourettes syndrome was given an ASBO for swearing, and other young people with autistic spectrum disorders have received comparably inappropriate ASBOs. Apart from a good deal of healthy and welcome attention being paid to the design of places - (CABE has taken a colourful swipe today at the design quality of new housing estates) - the clamour of the lockers and fencers and gaters still drowns out other voices.

So I'm not quite relaxed about seeing, almost at the end of this report, the suggestion that where highly visible neighbourhood policing is not provided, "social housing organisations should consider paying for private security or extra police cover." Quite apart from what the literature of gated communities tells us, I've witnessed the symbolic exclusion of such systems in South Africa, and I'm unlikely to be convinced until someone has demonstrated how the long term social costs of such a course of action can be taken into account in a meaningful and balanced way.

Safe as houses: EU Social housing organisations preventing and dealing with anti-social behaviour is written by Bill Randall and published by CECODHAS, the European Liaison Committee for Social Housing, together with the Building and Social Housing Foundation and JRF. Thanks to Jan Steyaert for drawing it to my attention.

Neighbourhood democracy: a non-partisan social movement

As part of the Transforming neighbourhoods project, Paul Hilder has produced an excellent detailed think-piece on neighbourhood governance, Seeing the wood for the trees.

On one level it just comes across as a combination of assertions, accumulated ideas, and unreferenced experience. But it's carefully framed and it takes us quite a bit closer to being able to build something functional, in terms of democratic structures, out of all the conceptual bayko that's lying around. I draw your attention to the hugely helpful matrix on page 9, a representation of the structures of neighbourhood governance on which it is well worth spending some time. It's a tribute to those involved in the project at the Young Foundation that a great deal of complexity is presented in such a digestible way.

One of several key passages is the section on the role of councillors, a role that is desperately in need of re-invention. It makes me think that what I'd like to see, in addition to the representative function, is a role that enables local people to get to grips themselves with democratic processes - a kind of governance facilitator, perhaps a blend of community development worker and traditional councillor.

And one of the key phrases comes right at the end of the paper: Paul asks, 'how can this non-partisan social movement best gather pace?' One way is to make sure that we balance all the attention to top-down structural tweaking with an attention to the ways in which people experience democracy in their everyday lives - an approach grotesquely absent from most of what has been written around the agenda thus far.

Miliband on the politics of community

David Miliband's speech today to the North West Improvement Network in Manchester again touched on powerlessness in localities. As usual he reassures with a historical grasp of the issues, although we'll maybe have to wait a little longer for the solutions. It's good to see a hint that we might be getting beyond the government's preoccupation with the formal community and voluntary sector, inching towards a recognition of local social capital that includes informal social interactions and relationships. (But the minister was speaking alongside Robert Putnam, so maybe he was just nudging for intellectual elbow-room ;-)

"People say they want to live in a place where you can trust others, and feel a sense of pride and belonging. But these are things that consumers cannot buy and for which MPs cannot legislate. They exist in a space between the state and the individual - a space that we often call civic society, [er, should that be civil society?] or community. It is a space defined by what we share in common - shared values, interests, activities, institutions and spaces. And the politics of community is about how we nurture those things we share." [Or, we might rather say, those things we have in common].

More please. NWIN is a local and regional government network set up in April. Conference blurb is here.

Local governance structures

In discussion about local governance structures, use of the word 'proliferation' has, well, multiplied. There is much to be celebrated about new initiatives that offer local involvement and accountability. But is the sometimes bewildering array of initiatives, partnerships and forums to be found below the local government level going to result in more responsive services, more meaningful involvement in decision-making, a greater sense of democratic validity? JRF have just published a collection of studies of local governance in the four nations, called Mapping governance at the local level, which assesses the range and type of initiatives for various policy sectors such as health, public safety, education, area regeneration, children’s services, local housing strategies, Agenda 21 and others. At the risk of seeming anglo-centric, I've so far only read the report for England (well, it's where I live and work) written by Kirsten Bound and Paul Skidmore of Demos, and it's very enlightening. As a case study, they tried to map local governance arrangements in Bradford, and the variety is daunting. They note that it can seem quite opaque to citizens trying to navigate their way around it.

"With public trust and legitimacy in governing institutions of most kinds at a low ebb at both national and local level ... there is a risk that the complexity of the new local governance landscape simply becomes a source of confusion, misunderstanding and distrust."

Stepping back from the Bradford case study, the authors go on to reflect on the wider policy context:

"What we are seeing at present seems to be something of a gamble about how public legitimacy can be restored. On the one hand, it is possible that new distributed structures will give people a growing range of opportunities to shape service delivery, clarify understanding of the issues and trade-offs involved, and result in decisions backed by a broader base of public support. On the other hand, there is a real danger that the gap between the simple mental models and heuristics that ordinary citizens use in thinking about local governance and the increasing complexity of the situation on the ground becomes ever wider."

I've wittered on before about what I think are some of the requirements: (a) some concerted work on bringing about a participative culture, stimulating citizens' lifelong expectations of participation in the decision-making processes that affect them; and (b), as I put it here, moving on from the present policy preoccupation with formal organisations as if they wholly represent community life.

Indicators of strong communities

The Neighbourhood Renewal Unit has published guidance on ‘Indicators of strong communities,’ as one side of the ‘safer and stronger communities’ agenda. The notion of strength of community is less clear and hence less immediately susceptible to measures perhaps, than the notion of safety. One can question even the desirability of talking about ‘strong’ communities, and believe me I have, but this is the language with which we are expected to work, and this attempt to pin things down conceptually and in relation to practice is very much to be welcomed.

There are five core indicators, which are presented as if carrying equal weight (although personally I favour the first two and am less concerned to see weight given to the last) –

§         Governance - percentage of residents who feel that they can influence decisions affecting their local area

§         Cohesion and inclusion - percentage of residents who feel that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds can get on well together

§         Volunteering - percentage of residents who affirm that they carried out voluntary work in an organisation once a month or more in the past year

§         Voluntary and community sector - percentage of VCS groups and organisations affirming growth in activity over the past year in terms of (i) financial turnover and (ii) volunteering

§         Services - Proportion of services in selected public service areas delivered by VCS organisations on behalf of the local authority.

Each has additional recommended indicators, an explanation, example, and actions associated with them. Quite a lot of work has also been done on methods and questions for collecting the data, with a case study included.

The section on cohesion and inclusion has an additional suggested indicator on ‘percentage of residents who feel involved in the local community.’ I’d like to see some re-wording along the lines of 'able to participate in local community life if they wish to.' This section highlights the need to cover both 'feeling involved in local community' and 'not feeling alienated'. A ‘strong’ community should not be just an active one, but one that is hospitable to incomers and visitors, and to all residents at different points in the lifecycle, so that for example when someone drops out of local activity for several years, perhaps in busy working life and parenthood, it ought to be easy to get back into it subsequently. And as we know, lots of folk live in 'strong communities' and suffer massive stress and mental disorder as a consequence.

And does it have to be 'volunteering' and 'voluntary work'? What about ‘community activity’ (or even community involvement)? Turning up on a cold wet evening and sitting in a committee meeting, maybe without saying anything to anyone, is probably community activity to most people but not voluntary work.

As for ‘growth of the sector,’ I think I’d be more concerned about its stability and sustainability. Increasingly I’m finding that the refreshment of community activity, the passing of the baton, is an important issue that many of us keep having to revisit with a feeling of dissatisfaction. The talk in this guidance about growth in activity, financial turnover, number of contracts secured, value of grants received etc is all a bit unnerving, it doesn’t feel to me as if that’s what’s needed at all. We're not trying to build commercial empires here, we should be trying to develop sustainable community life.

Maybe I'm being too picky - this is important stuff in policy terms because it moves us towards being able to answer the challenge, 'But how can you measure the strength of a community?' But we need to try to move on from the present preoccupation with formal organisations as if they wholly represent community life. What I’d like to see is progress towards measuring the strength of social networks associated with community activity.

Public experience as a basis for public places

Demos authors Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims bemoan 'the progressive privatisation of the communal spaces in our towns and cities wherein the space for shared experiences has got smaller and more fragmented.' And their JRF-funded report - the Findings summary is here - is just what we need to force some thinking about that. Someone's done a good job on the design, accepting the scrapbook mix of the research and giving the book precisely that feel, without losing the impact of some of the threaded themes. For instance, that successful spaces work when they stimulate interest and engagement between different groups of people, perhaps through opportunities for novelty and surprise, or for performance and display.

Maybe some of it isn't startlingly new. 'What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant,' they tell us, justifiably in case there are policymakers listening. And it's all neatly brought together with some individual case studies; case studies of places and events; a fun categorisation of place space users; and some forthright banging on one or two drums, especially the 'risk-averse policy' drum.

I couldn't get to the launch but David Wilcox has blogged a note about the discussion passing on the role of rules in public places. My take is that yes definitely we need fewer spaces that are designed for specific groups. We need more flexible spaces that encourage staying, that stimulate or at least do not discourage 'occasions' - informal opportunities to interact, from a conversation with a dog walker to a picnic or a game of touch-rugby with an empty drinks bottle. When I was a kid, if you hovered at the edge of a kickabout for a minute or two, it would be decidedly rude for the participants not to invite you to join in. Those kind of unwritten rules of behaviour make for a reassuring public realm that stimulates sociability.

A couple of minor issues occur to me, that I hope will be clarified on closer reading - sometimes the word 'space' seems to be used when the focus seems to be on places, implying spaces that have some kind of meaning imposed by repeated human experience. Indeed much of the work is about events and very purposeful, even photogenic, uses of place. And I haven't spotted a recognition that in addition to public, private and civic space, there is something distinct called community space, into which it is possible to wander even near city centres.

The authors stress the role of place in supporting a range of 'public experiences' such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning. To which we might add Ken Worpole's insight in Park life, that many people go to parks 'to be private in a public place.' We need also to keep in mind that many young people are out there because at certain times of day, they're not welcome at home, or anywhere else. And the breakthrough for me will be when we can measure increases in intergenerational and inter-ethnic encounters at local level, because of improvements in our public places brought about by documentation like this.

The pic above is from Amsterdam.