Sunday, 25 March 2007

Courage and cohesion

Nick Booth over on Podnosh has a little gem here - an 8-minute video featuring Linden Walcott-Burton's involvement in community cohesion and efforts to confront extremism in Dudley, West Midlands.

Linden is just right for delivering the messages: unpretentious, inquisitive, positive, engaging. Ballet changed his life, as a recent tv programme put it: now he's identified courage as the factor that changes other lives. Also on YouTube. (Thanks Nick).

25 Mar 2007 22:49:11 | Cohesion and diversity

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Urban conflict: living with difference I wouldn't expect to be particularly attracted to the pronouncements of The European Forum for Urban Safety, but this article by Mathilde Auvillain on 'Preventing urban conflict' in the Urbact newsletter caught my eye. Forum director Michel Marcus seems to be predicting that issues of urban violence will be high on the policy agenda in the coming years. While I can't help worrying about the place of agencies that are set up to understand negative social issues somehow contributing to them and themselves becoming more-or-less permanent, I do agree that issues of 'living with difference' are not going to diminish in significance. And if we are to learn from the explosions of unrest such as those in northern England a few years ago, in France in 2005 and in Copenhagen more recently, it makes sense to develop a Europe-wide understanding of the issues and to explore possible solutions. As Auvillain pus it: when the art and pleasure of living together in public and private spaces is conspicuous by its absence, it creates the perfect breeding ground for such conflicts. And within this kind of context, conflicts that would have previously been seen as trivial, such as disagreements between neighbours or conflicts between different age-groups, cultural groups or groups with different interests, are exacerbated. Well we could argue about whether this is really a new phenomenon or whether, as my sketchy knowledge of history suggests, there's been a lot of it about over the years. (The illustration above is by Phiz for Dickens's A tale of two cities). But that's not the point - just because it's happened before doesn't mean we shouldn't try and eliminate it. My angle would be that it's fundamentally about inequalities and disempowerment: the more unequal a society and unheard the voices of those who experience exclusion, and the more unfair those who are disempowered perceive their situation to be, the more likely they are to express their discontent in violence. And what would a 'solution' look like? According to Auvillain, the Forum suggests setting up "mediation centres" or "mediation services" in the districts affected, 'whose role would be to deal with any mediation requests and to seek the most appropriate solution, by facilitating links and coordinating different interventions.' This sounds like a good way of bolting the stable door, but doesn't really sound like a set of preventative options (which has to include housing, education, employment, community development and so on). In England, we've had very clear and positive strategies since the Cantle review in 2001, which I think have made a difference, but it's not an issue we can afford to take our eye off for a moment.
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Make Space youth review I missed this, and can't tell by how much, but the interim report of the Make Space Youth Review has been published. They get nul points for issuing a press release with no date and a report in an unmanipulable pdf format. I would have liked to quote some of it here. In particular, a well-made point about how young people feel isolated and alienated in their own neighbourhoods, with little say over what goes on. The consistent sense of lack of belonging of young people to their own neighbourhood, reported in this review, is deeply worrying. The review also passes on criticism of 'an overwhelming orientation towards adults - from use of public space and buildings to leisure and recreational services.' Nine key features are proposed for a new government commitment and vision for young people. The pic is of a made-over Tony Blair.

Kevin Harris

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