Monday, 08 March 2004

Social capital book set to cause quarrels - shock horror

The Sunday Times has had its sneak preview of David Halpern's forthcoming book on social capital - thanks to Will Davies at i-society for the link. We get some challenging throw-away ideas like doctors introducing their patients to one another, or “national deliberation days;” alongside more established initiatives like school mentoring; the reintroduction of park keepers (ours was known as 'Grumpy-Guts' in the neighbourhood where I grew up); and more culs-de sac, hurrah. If the book resembles the flurried rush of this article, you can be sure that some of the ideas will get some flak, but maybe what matters is that they get aired and discussed. People will be saying some are silly and others have been around for a while, which may be true but it's not the point. We need to get at how some of these ideas and the principles behind them inter-relate. What's the real impact of having more park-keepers and more alleygating and more cafes and better parenting and business mentoring, and so on, all in one locality? In all localities?

What also needs to be thought about is the role of policy in all this. We're used to people pointing out that social capital is in itself neither good nor bad, it's value-free and it just is. Is there a risk of a government taking a moralistic stance in promoting 'good' social capital? And how far do we go with efforts to measure it? I've been thinking about neighbourhood relations, as a form of social capital, and the notion of developing indicators of neighbourliness raises interesting questions. It may seem extreme, but it is quite realistic to ask to what extent it would be socially acceptable, say, to publish ‘league tables’ of neighbourly behaviour across a city? Stopping short of that, could we promote neighbourliness without measuring it? It is as well to have thought-through what it is we are getting into here. As Jane Jacobs cautions, writing about public contact at local level – “Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.”
David Halpern is at the government Strategy Unit and his book is due from Polity Press in June.

8 Mar 2004 22:48:05 | Social capital

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Neighbourliness review, Manchester Community Development Foundation has been contracted to carry out a short review of neighbourliness and social capital in Manchester, and research at local level began this week. We will be working in three areas – Northmoor, Openshaw Village, and Whalley Range. Monday and Tuesday we were in Northmoor, talking to people in the street, launderette, corner shops and pub, and doing some interviews and group sessions in the community centre, the online learning centre, and the hair salon. Here’s researcher Toby Gale talking to a resident before we strapped him in under the drier for a quick frizz... I'll be posting more here on the study as it progresses.
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Head for the ethnoburb Here's a thoughtful note on Urban Photo by Christopher Dewolf about suburbs, based on the notion of the ethnoburb, “a hybrid of a traditional ethnic enclave and a typical suburb” suggested by Chinese geographer Wei Li. Dewolf suggests that “since ethnoburbs are such insular yet affluent places, ethnic minorities have far more freedom of choice when it comes to assimilation.” If new immigrants are increasingly heading straight for the suburbs, informed by traditional word-of-mouth networks, will this mean fewer poor urban enclaves? Does it imply that immigrant populations find it easier to assimilate because the forces of global media have made the culture into which they have moved less starkly contrasting? Presumably the key factor as usual is the degree of choice that relative wealth allows, and so perhaps the suburban sense of perceived safety and security is more valued by more people, than the sense of belonging associated with place and historically-developed norms. I’m reminded that one leading commentator on social capital has recently suggested that more diverse places are places in which people don’t talk to their neighbours much. More diversity means lower levels of co-operation within neighbourhoods, that’s the prediction, on a planet where over the next few decades all countries in the western world are likely to see increased levels of ethnic diversity.

Kevin Harris

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