Friday, 23 January 2004

Traffic calming

“Regularly motorists mount the pavement to get past one another. And with no front gardens to act as a buffer it means residents have traffic literally just a few feet from their living rooms. It’s not safe to walk down the pavement at the moment. I really hope that the residents will receive help to resolve this problem.”

This is from a recent Transport 2000 press release. Residents from what has been labelled the ‘worst rat-run in Britain’ have been on a pilgrimage to Hull, described as ‘the traffic calming capital’ of Britain.

“The residents of Wykeham Street in Scarborough, voted Britain’s worst rat-run in a competition run by Transport 2000 and Sustrans last summer, are travelling to Hull to see first hand how effective traffic calming can be at alleviating traffic problems. The trip, organised by Sustrans and Kingston-upon-Hull City Council road safety officers, will give the residents an opportunity to meet local people and talk to them about how traffic calming has improved their street and how they feel about it now it is in place. Hull has implemented over 100 20mph zones and the total number of road crashes in the zones has been reduced by 56 per cent. Crashes involving child pedestrians have been cut by 70 per cent.”

23 Jan 2004 17:52:34 | Space and place

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The well-connected community This week sees the publication by the Policy Press of Alison Gilchrist's book, The well-connected community. Alison's sensitive understanding of the nature of community development work at neighbourhood level, her experience and insights into networking, and her profound appreciation of the principles and values of equality and social justice, all make this a must-read. But don't just take my word for it: here's the publisher's blurb and order form. And below is what Alison says in her preface... The well-connected community Alison Gilchrist PREFACE The naturalist John Muir once wrote “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” and this has certainly been my experience of thinking, researching and writing about networking. My initial interest in networking emerged from my experience as a neighbourhood community worker and political activist. I became aware of how useful it is to have a range of connections in terms of getting things done without many resources and without much obvious power or status. I also noticed that keeping this web of contacts and relationships required quite a lot of time and some ingenuity, and that the women I knew were particularly adept and committed to this way of working. I began to realise that networking was not only an efficient approach to developing collective action, but represented an aspect of work that was insufficiently rewarded. I was motivated by a desire to find out why and how networking enabled people to work together achieve their common goals. What makes a good networker? Why are networks so useful? These were the key questions that led me into an investigation of the skills and strategies that under pin both effective and ethical networking. The findings described in the book are based on research undertaken to discover how networking is used by community workers and others to develop collective action among communities and to underpin multi-agency working. I was particularly interested in the tactics and traits that good networkers demonstrated, and wanted to make more visible the skilled and strategic nature of good networking, by which I meant networking that was both effective and ethical. The research programme consisted of two parts. The first was a case study of my own involvement in co-ordinating the first Bristol Festival Against Racism in 1994. The second phase of the research involved working with a panel of community practitioners over twelve months. They were asked to identify key networks in their professional practice and describe what they were used for, as well as any limitations. The community workers then spent a few weeks making notes of ‘critical incidents’ that had occurred in their professional or private lives that they felt had contributed in some way to community development. The evidence collected from these two stages was used to construct the questions for one-to-one interviews and the whole process culminated in a focus group discussion in which panelists considered the research findings and debated implications for community development policies and...
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The e-neighbors project "We're often not at home, or if we're at home, we're inside our houses... We often have garden services. We don't mow our lawns. We don't have that familiarity with our neighbors. This is our over-the-fence." I quite liked this quote referring to neighbourhood online message systems, from a Boston Globe article about Keith Hampton's e-neighborhoods project. The project has been looking at how email technologies can stimulate and support neighbourhood relations, in four local areas around Boston Massachusetts. Keith presented at a conference a couple of years ago which I organised in Oxford and a policy seminar in London. The news I'm waiting to have confirmed is that he'll be in England again some time this spring, for an event on neighbourhoods, and I'll announce that here as soon as I have the date. (No pressure Keith!)

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