Neighbourhoods: Nuisance vehicles

Monday, 22 November 2004

Nuisance vehicles

More on the significance of cars in neighbourhood life. The government crack-down on the owners of abandoned cars, according to one radio interview this morning, includes new powers to remove them from housing estates and car parks. It's surprising that these powers were not previously held. I'm fascinated by this government's ability to get closer to people's home lives, in terms of its influence, than perhaps any of its predecessors: so what chance that the regulators can get to the front door and exert an influence over the appearance of people's property?

This particular initiative is endorsed by Encams and leaves me wondering if we will ever see formalised powers to remove irrecoverably exhausted cars from in front of houses.

22 Nov 2004 08:22:30 | Space and place

1 Comment

Someone somewhere does influence the appearance of people's property. I'm thinking of Dublin, where all the front doors in the street have clearly matching colours. Not sure it's (local) government though, could well be part of contract when people buy their house, or just plain tradition or even result of social capital.

Posted by: Steyaert | Monday, 22 November 2004 at 20:11

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Building safer communities In April 2004 CDF ran a conference on safe communities in Bradford. Follow up work with the workshop facilitators from the event has resulted in a short report which focuses on three broad themes: racism and xenophobia, reality vs perception, and safe spaces. Lots of useful little insights - pdf here.

Police use hand held cameras I grew up in a generation that saw, it seemed fairly regularly, handheld moving images on the news of police brutality. Now from the Neighbours from Hell newsdesk - Teenage yobs in some of Norwich’s most troubled estates run the risk of being caught on film by police carrying hand-held cameras. Police have been kitted out with the video cameras and hope to catch young tearaways behaving in an anti-social way in places such as Mile Cross and Heartsease. The cameras were brought out across the city in the past two weeks and are gradually being distributed throughout the force to stamp out anti-social behaviour. I do wonder about the media portrayal of young people here. Young tearaways eh? I hope we're not overlooking older tearaways. The police spokesperson implies that the footage would act first as 'a deterrent to the hooligans' and prove to parents their children were misbehaving. (Again we have society feeling it has to insist that parents should know what their kids are doing and take responsibility for it.) Use of evidence in court, it seems, is not claimed to be the main intention.