Saturday, 31 July 2004

Social tapestries

Giles Lane has published an essay on the new Urban Tapestries programme, Social Tapestries.
"The Social Tapestries experiments will offer a platform to devise and understand actual uses of public authoring by people going about their everyday lives. By designing and implementing a series of experiments in real world situations, Social Tapestries will aim to reveal the potential of public authoring to:

• create and support relationships that transcend existing social and cultural boundaries;
• enable the development of new social and creative practices based around place, identity and community;
• reveal the limits and potential costs (as well as benefits) that such technologies also imply.
Experiments are being devised for:
• education: looking at how local informal knowledges can be gathered, represented, understood and shared by schoolchildren.
• community arts and regeneration: working with artists and arts organisations as facilitators for local communities in regeneration contexts.
• social housing: exploring how new forms of neighbourliness could emerge where existing physical structures (such as tower blocks) create barriers.
• local government: assessing the impacts on communities of locally specific information gathered by municipal and police services and possibilities for interaction."
reading_giles_paperA couple of points in the essay struck me as I sat being distracted by the Here-Now of the birdloud garden reading it over an early coffee. (Tsssk, what a drag when the here and now is distracting you from thinking about Elsewhere-Then). First, an assertion that not only is the social and cultural construction of our environments more about place than about location - (of course, we might all say); but that it is "as much a group or commmunity activity as that of the individual." Secondly, some insights into the meaning of "presence" which, given the technologies of remote communication, include the "asynchronous inhabitation of place." This is about developments that imply meaningful presence in a remote elsewhere because of the possibility of remote sharing experience of that place. Bring it on.

31 Jul 2004 08:53:10 | Space and place

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Local area agreements The government has released several documents today under its 10 year 'Local Vision' debate on the developing relationship between central and local government. Ideas include the development of 'local area agreements' for which there will be nine pilots in the English regions. "Local Agreements will simplify funding streams, join up public services and give councils and other local delivery partners more flexibility. They will be structured around three key themes: children and young people; safer and stronger communities; and health and older people. Authorities and their partners will negotiate clear targets and outcomes for these areas with central government, but then will have the freedom to decide locally how best to achieve them." Also published today is "A summary of research evidence on new council constitutions in local government."
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Families and Neighbourhoods Study Among the rewards of attending the recent ‘A place to call home' conference was to learn about the work being carried out by Jacqueline Barnes and colleagues on the Families and Neighbourhoods Study (FANS). The study is designed to examine how parenting is influenced by features of the local community (including neighbours). The work took place in four neighbourhoods in England and is partly modelled on Robert Sampson’s famous Chicago studies which explored the notion of collective efficacy. It has been funded by the NSPCC and included interviews with about 780 parents, focus groups with young people, and observations. The reason I hadn’t heard of it before is that nothing has been published and it’s barely mentioned anywhere. The data have been gathered but much analysis remains to be done. Various angles in the work sound pretty exciting but here I’ll highlight just two. First, some insights into informal social control – for example, to do with the extent to which the expectation of retaliation influences the likelihood of intervention in the case of perceived abuse, misbehaviour or delinquency. The finding is that this is not related to the age of the child but is significantly related to the characteristics of the locality. In the least affluent area there was a significantly lower perception that neighbours should exert informal social control, and fear of retaliation was a key factor. 'Neighbour clout' is under threat. Secondly, I have since learned that the research process included gathering something like 700 maps of people’s perceptions of their neighbourhood (from the four areas studied), and these have been digitized. A qualitative report can be expected in a couple of months’ time and more to follow that. Any further developments that I learn about, I’ll post here.

Kevin Harris

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