Tuesday, 02 December 2008

Community engagement and consultation in Manningham

Larger I've just published a couple of reports on pieces of work I did for Bradford Libraries earlier this year, to do with the refurbishment of Manningham Family and Community Library under the Community Libraries Programme.

The first was an exercise working with residents to develop their own plan for consultation on the library development. Rather than impose a consultation framework, Bradford Libraries sought to help local people to prepare their own.

The second was an open event designed to raise awareness of the refurbishment project, engage with local people and invite them to submit views. I designed a treasure-hunt inside and outside the library, exploiting the presence of the architect and his drawings. This was supplemented with some basic text messaging consultation.

The first report is called Ask them.

The second is called Manningham Treasures.

Previously on this blog: Community engagement by treasure hunt.


 

2 Dec 2008 23:00:19 | Citizenship and democracy, Governance and participation

1 Comment

Excellent! Thanks for sharing these.

Posted by: Chris Corrigan | Tuesday, 02 December 2008 at 23:55

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Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence? In the early seventies, I seem to recall, the hapless Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the increasing prevalence of dishwashers and similar labour-saving devices in households was likely to reduce family cohesion as people spent less time together doing what needed to be done. A few more observations like that over the years - for instance about the use of cars, geographical mobility, smaller households, television viewing etc - and understandably we begin to assume that there has been a decline in neighbourhood relations. It's what we would expect. All we lack is some way of proving or disproving it with robust methods. So along comes the Changing UK report from the Social And Spatial Inequalities group in Sheffield, commissioned by the BBC, which appears to illustrate how Brits are now more polarised and live more 'among our own kind,' than we used to do. The report is a strange blend of stolid survey-based affirmation of some gloomy, familiar social trends, with constant reference to the BBC's tv and radio areas - a peculiar geography to many of us I suspect. Presumably the client wanted some local and regional social data (tick) and some kind of news story it could broadcast (tick). Many of the considerations are straightforward: These trends may be linked to higher likelihoods of fearfulness because we are less likely to see and therefore understand each others' lives... The polarisation and segregation processes may also lead to stronger feelings of isolation and weaker feelings of 'belonging'. The report justifiably links these trends with evidence of political disaffection and economic polarisation, all pointing to a rather bleak future. To be fair, it's not as if our politicians have been ignoring it all. Although the finality with which social capital was dumped as a policy issue a few years ago remains puzzling, there is a healthy amount of energy being focussed on community cohesion. There is public attention paid to the questions raised, and the BBC is playing its part. But the evidence does matter. Take this for example, from Mark Easton's piece on the BBC site: 'The study ranks places using a formula based on the proportion of people in an area who are single, those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and those who have lived there for less than a year. The higher the proportion of people in those categories, the less rooted the community.' Unh? That amounts to a definition of 'rooted community' which I'd be reluctant to sign up to. What bothers me a little about this research is the bundling of assumptions about loneliness, living alone, isolation, and not belonging. For a start, loneliness is not the same as isolation - the latter implies a dearth of social ties, which some people prefer, while some people can have an ample supply of ties but experience loneliness. And obviously, living alone does not necessarily imply loneliness or isolation at all. Again, people claiming that they 'belong' somewhere (or don't) doesn't tell us...
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A small token They built a gated estate near me, for the posh people. It's such a shame, as they drive up to their electronic gates, the inhabitants have to endure the derisive glances from people who walk and occupy their neighbourhood, it must be awkward. Someone left this exquisite message by the fence for them.

Kevin Harris

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