Tuesday, 27 May 2008

Attitudes to neighbourliness

Today is European Neighbours' Day, and there was to have been the launch of my wee text about Older people and neighbouring. The launch has been cancelled, due to lack of take up, which got me wondering how much interest there really is in the topic.

My take on it now is that most people think neighbourliness is a Good Thing, but mostly we just don't get round to doing anything about it. We're not that bothered. Neighbouring is now discretionary and requires a deliberate effort.

Which raises questions about the extent to which it can be incentivised by policy measures. On the one hand we can't help suspecting that low levels of neighbourliness contribute to anti-social behaviour, perceptions of crime and damaging loneliness. On the other hand, we're not going to welcome formal measures that require us to be civil to our fellow-residents.

Hence this little piece on the Guardian's Joe Public blog (they even got a pic of me, in me shorts) which asks to what extent we need a continent-wide scheme, involving 7.5 million people in 28 countries, to prod us into neighbourly behaviour? And will formal schemes lead in time to a league table of neighbourliness?

27 May 2008 13:39:52 | Neighbourhood relations

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'Respect each others' ideas' A few weeks ago a group of young people met in parallel with the trustees of a new charity. The young people began by establishing the 'rules' for their own meetings, and this copy reached me the other day. It has echoes of a similar set of rules which I mention in the first chapter of Respect in the neighbourhood - devised by a group of 10 year-olds at a community project in Harlem New York. When I visited some years ago, they were messing with papier mâché, shaping the bodies of robots they would subsequently programme. They'd established the ground rules for working together: 'Robotics Class Rules'. These are guidelines for mutual respect in a practical context. You can sense the process from the product: young people think about how they'd feel if someone was mean about what they were working on, then come up with measures to resist such behaviour. It's a tiny but potentially profound experience of democratic empowerment and responsibility, which incorporates a sense of ownership over the rule-making process and hence over the sense of respect. Doubtless the rules have since been taken by some of the young people into the more complex arenas of later life. One of the questions I ask myself here is how long you might have to work with a group of adults, to come up with a list like this. Our young people came up with theirs by themselves, unprompted and unfacilitated.
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Older neighbours and street parties Streets Alive has just made available a briefing called Older people and neighbouring: the role of street parties in promoting community cohesion, which I co-wrote with Chris Gittins. The work was part-funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation and gave me the chance to go through some interview and survey material from numerous street parties held in England between 2005 and 2007. We found that 84% of respondents thought that street parties bring together residents of different backgrounds either ‘a fair amount’ (45%) or ‘a lot’ (39%). Respondents met on average between seven and eight neighbours ‘for the first time’ or ‘got to know them better’. Key to the success of the events is that never less than 50% and often as high as 80% of households participate. Street parties appear to be ideal when it comes to celebrating diversity and promoting cohesion between ethnic groupings. But part of our concern was that differences in values between generations can emerge that may be at least as significant as those between ethnic and national backgrounds. It seems that some older people exclude themselves from street parties, and it comes down to levels of recognition and trust. One resident told us: ‘If they know they can trust people and get to know them, they will come out in force. If they don’t know you, the shutter comes down, and that’s that.’ We drew out three conclusions: it's important to make the particular efforts needed to engage older people in street parties, because weak levels of neighbourliness will disadvantage them disproportionately; however, if older people do not attend, it's not a crisis. Street parties will still enhance neighbourliness and the benefits can still be extended to older residents; we should be wary of characterising older people as if they were just the recipients of bounty. The principle of interdependence means that we should put effort into exploring how older people themselves can shape and contribute to the events. The paper is available as a pdf from Streets Alive.

Kevin Harris

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