Thursday, 19 October 2006

The C word has a companion

The Housing Corporation has just published its Neighbourhoods and communities strategy, which sets out various principles for housing associations in areas such as creating mixed communities, and supporting the Neighbourhoods and Respect agendas.

In scanning through it, it occurred to me that the abuse of the C word - roundly condemned by Will Davies in a recent Prospect article - may be blurring into combined abuse of the C&N words. OK, it's hard to make the word 'neighbourhood' seem quite as nebulous as 'community' but that won't stop people trying if they seem to sound good.

The real problem for me though in this unreflective mushing of language, is the relentless implication that 'community' somehow equals consensus. I suggest that residents in many localities seldom have any reason to be united and will often have diverse views which might cause conflict: important social progress is more likely to be made by working at ways of acknowledging and reconciling those tensions, rather than insisting that everyone's singing jolly songs together.

19 Oct 2006 21:08:31 | Neighbourhood relations

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How much mileage is gained from such 'essentially contested' concepts as class, power, social capital and now (well, they've been around and debated for a long time) neighbourhood and community?

And so, community doesn't always mean consensus. Even if 'we' were all singing the same songs, would it necessarily be from the same song sheet? And to stretch it just that little bit further...who wrote the songs in the first place?

From a policy perspective, the music does still appear to be kinda catchy...

Posted by: Simon Blake | Friday, 20 October 2006 at 00:16

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