Friday, 08 May 2009

Mixed neighbourhoods: mixed views

Here's a pensive post from Diane Dyson about segregation and gentrification, in which she finds herself 'awfulizing' about three problems - 'the economic, the racial, the homogenization', concluding that the answer is to plan purposefully for mixed neighbourhoods:

Left to wider economic forces, the poor (and, by corollary, people of colour), are continually displaced.

Which reminds me, last week I was working with some long-time residents of Milton Keynes, famously fascinating as a new town, and picked up these remarks:

‘They tried to force people into getting on together and of course it didn’t work.’

‘You had neighbours who you wouldn’t mix with if you were dying. It was theory-led, they had this theory that everyone had to mix together and it wasn’t going to work.’

Previously:
Social mix and attachment
Mixed tenure and mixed income neighbourhoods

8 May 2009 09:28:00 | Neighbourhood relations

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'Local paper makes headlines' With the exaggerated death of local newspapers much in the news lately (William Perrin reflected on the histrionics here) the BBC news magazine has run a little series about local billboards. Included is an entertaining "hack's view" from local journalist Mike Lockley, who puts forward this little gem - "Woman in owl attack dies of diarrhoea" - and notes: 'I may not have the new technology skills, but I have a contact book crammed with "curtain twitchers" and devoid of numbers for gushing PR gals... And I, like every other weekly journalist, can play a part in the community I work in. I've helped save schools, stopped telecommunication towers being erected and even put pink custard back on a school menu.' One of the comments on Lockley's piece made me pause: 'Eroding communities and endangered toads are no joke. In my sleepy coastal village, I look forward to Wednesday and still howl with laughter at my local rag's headlines... The serious side is my local paper had its office closed and is now run from a larger regional office in Southport. Who will tell us as about the scout hut fire, the cat in the tree, the man who has just raised money for charity, or that my son scored a goal on Saturday for our local team? Sleepy newspapers being ditched for profit by the regionals so it can go online. I'm 41 and can use a Mac and a PC but I want to read a paper with a cup of tea.' For sure, the days of neighbourhood online networks are not far off. Local nets will give you all this and better, more efficiently, less expensively, with genuine options for user-involvement and interaction - and by extension in my view, conversational democracy. But without the paper. And I'm not sure about the mystery of the 50 year old parcel in the image above, but I note that elsewhere the Beeb is talking about Stanley Milgram's lost letter experiment.
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Invisible mutual support at the margins Last night I was talking to a group of eight Somali men and one woman who are active in supporting members of their faith/ethnic-origin group locally. We started by talking about the range of more formal participative roles they play, and in the circumstances it's fair to say I was genuinely surprised - running youth activities, English classes, formal interpreting roles, organised volunteering with people with special needs, school governing roles, community centre committee, fire service volunteering and so on. And in much of this an integrating role was being played, working with other identifiable social groups. If I hadn't been expecting quite so much at the formal end of the spectrum, in a seriously disadvantaged group in a meanly marginalised locality, I was more fascinated when we got on to informal support. One man spoke about the number of calls and visits or encounters that he fields from other Somalis around. Broadly, these are requests for support, from people who are accustomed to an oral culture and a very different language, in the face of bureaucratic requirements - to do with school conditions, housing needs, what is this form about? why do I have to show my passport at the doctor's surgery? - that sort of thing. Often these calls lead to the activist having to accompany the individual on a visit to an office and interpret, and can be very time-consuming. This voluntary role is compensating heavily for the inadequacy of the bureaucracies, for the shortfall in formal social provision. Nothing new there, this is a classic example of invisible mutual support, and to some extent of course it's healthy for social networks to be stimulated at the interface with services. So I asked for a considered assessment of the number of such calls and visits in a typical day. We spent some time discussing it because I really wanted the figures to reflect reality and not be exaggerated for my benefit. Two people said about ten (often rising to fourteen or higher), one said about eight, others less. The total among these nine people (one of them a recent arrival to this country so less involved) was 39, and this was not of course a fully representative group. When we've extrapolated from such figures to weekly, monthly, or annual estimates of internal community support in the struggle against poverty and marginalisation, there are old questions we need to be asking afresh. Like, how much more do we expect people to do on their own behalf? What would it take for the state to remove the risk of this system collapsing from exhaustion, and to reduce the burden? Where precisely should that resource be invested? And how come all this effort seems not to make any difference over time?

Kevin Harris

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