Thursday, 10 January 2008

Neighbourhood communication

Communicating with your neighbours - latest in an inexhaustible series. From the letters column of a local newspaper in Andover, MA, USA:

We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to our neighbors on and around Pasho Street for disturbing their sleep in the early morning hours on Friday, Jan. 4. We were unaware that one of our automobile horns had malfunctioned due to the extreme cold and was incessantly blaring until the Andover police made a courtesy call to our home to make us aware of the situation.

Via the Neighbors Project blog.

10 Jan 2008 18:25:00 | Information and communication, Neighbourhood relations

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Older refugees The Refugee Council and Age Concern England today ran a conference about their work with older refugees, which has included a set of interviews and three regional 'listening days.' Key points I got from the presentations I heard: Older refugees define integration in terms of their labour market experiences and their local social interactions. Many refugees feel isolated and this is related to the sense that neighbours are seldom welcoming. Service providers tend to assume that older refugees are invariably cared for by their extended families, which is often not the case. There are intergenerational aspects to integration - being accepted by people of different ages is important, and having all generations of one's family accepted is important. The lack of (unconditional) respect shown to older people in the UK is very offputting to many people from other cultures and can seem a barrier to integration. (There's a nicety here, which I tried to bring out in Respect in the neighbourhood, about distinguishing between respect for others as a default value of human relations, and unconditional respect for an office or status, such as being a teacher or being old. It may be that we have lamentably low levels of both kinds in the UK, but seeking to re-establish the latter may not be the way forward...) Copies of reports are available via Age Concern on this page.
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Respect, neighbourliness and narratives of decline Community safety journal has just published a piece I wrote on the theme of 'respect in the neighbourhood.' I drew on sections of the book plus interviews and focus groups I ran last year with older people and street reps. A key argument I try to make is that serious policy attention being paid to social networks is long overdue: Once the discredited ‘crack-down’ policies have been cleared away and the rhetoric of community engagement has stopped echoing, what remains is a lasting failure of policy to acknowledge the significance and vulnerability of local social networks, and to minimise damage caused to them... Because we know too little about how local social networks function and how vulnerable they are, we lack the intellectual resources to defend them or to detect weaknesses; and it is not until they have gone missing that we begin to recognise their significance. In the work I carried out last year for Age Concern (not yet published, watch this space) people were describing the density of the enfolding networks in the past, in neighbourhoods characterised by a greater volume of available connections. Reflecting on this leads me to comment in the article on the notion of 'community lost': People readily describe acts of helpfulness and friendliness around them now. But these interactions and exchanges are more individualised and do not seem to amount to a healthy stock of neighbourliness, as a resource on which everyone can draw with confidence and without hesitation, as of right. For the people I spoke to, the resource of neighbourliness has somehow become impoverished. A sense emerges in their accounts of a former enfolding community now mysteriously mislaid. To what extent is the local close-knit community recoverable, given the networked nature of contemporary relationships? Various researchers have contested the general validity of the ‘community lost’ thesis: Sampson for instance suggests that it ‘was wrong 100 years ago and remains so today’. But there is a question of degree here: on an individual level, and within many neighbourhoods, a sense of loss is what people experience and express. There are two points I’d like to make about this. First, ‘community’ lost or mislaid is demonstrably recoverable. The notion of a surrounding sense of ‘mutual support spanning the generations and involving everybody’ – a sense of community as sanctuary, as fostering, and as protecting – has not disappeared entirely, and those who dismiss it as a myth in the past may need to spend some time examining its contemporary manifestations... Secondly, however - while filtering out some over-romanticised claims for such close-knit communities, which could be harsh and unforgiving – we should reflect more carefully on the feeling of loss that is being expressed. The sentiment points to the validity of a secure, enfolding community, for older people especially, one in which norms are readily absorbed and recognised, and which also offers interdependence. A version of the article is available here.

Kevin Harris

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