Tuesday, 27 October 2009

Joining up street campaigns

Street pride The Civic Society Initiative has announced a Street Pride campaign for next year, 'to help rid our streets of unnecessary clutter and create streets we can be proud of'.

'The campaign will include a toolkit for civic societies to involve their members and others in identifying and urging action against unnecessary street clutter and a number of campaign workshops around the country. We will focus on poor pavements and unnecessary signs, posts, bollards and guardrails. The results will feed into a national database and support a high profile campaign for national action.'

No mention there of the chief cause of clutter, cars. All power to their elbows, though: except, aren't there already a few elbows grinding on these and related issues? I could find no mention of the Street Pride campaign on the Living Streets site for instance, nor at Sustrans, but I hope there's been some dialogue. And reading this leader in yesterday's Times I was reminded of the origins and achievements of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

It would be good to be reassured that some joining up is being done.

27 Oct 2009 19:53:51 | Space and place

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Picnic and 'community' Victorian picnics were often feats of military-style organisation and endurance. They established the picnic as a grand social event rather like the 18th century ball, made possible by the servants, at which the manoeuvres of social interests (marriage and money) were played out. But being Victorian English, eccentricity had its place, depicted by Dickens and Surtees among others. Francis Kilvert in his diary for 1870 records one example: ‘We had tea all across the road, completely obstructing the thoroughfare…’ I'm writing an essay about picnic and community, following the Wellcome event back in June. As far as I can discover, the large-scale picnic was never a strategic instrument to stimulate trade from the global tourism industry (although Dorothy Wordsworth probably came very close). But this is is the twenty-first century, and big cities can turn to 'community' as a device to attract attention, strategically, within that global market. In Sydney they closed the harbour bridge for a picnic - turf laid especially, entertainment ditto, breakfast all across the road. In the Beeb's coverage, one of the first words you hear from a participant is 'community': 'It's a sense of community. Everyone's here having a good time.' A politician appears. Sydney needs the boost, we're told. So picnic is a device for 'community' which in turn is a device for economic prosperity. Hence the spectacularisation. And you thought you were just packin' a snack.
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Informal volunteering down five per cent The latest Citizenship Survey headlines for the first quarter of 2009 cover empowerment and participation, community cohesion, and racial and religious harassment and labour market discrimination. Julian Dobson has reviewed them and made some helpful points as always about the political context. I just have one point to add about some of the data that particularly intersts me, concerning 'informal volunteering': In April-June 2009, 57 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the 12 months prior to interview. The report doesn't mention trends here, so I went back to the figures for the whole of 2008-09, and found that in that year 62 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the previous 12 months. A five per cent decline is sharp and significant. Can it be attributed just to the effects of the recession? If so, will levels recover after economic recovery? Sorry to keep bannging on about this, but there's a scary informal care crisis looming with an ageing population, and reduced public spending ain't gonna help. There will be a growing shortfall of family carers and an imperative to promote care and support at neighbourhood level - ask David Brindle. He wrote a year ago: Difficult questions about family and community responsibilities are being ducked and the issues risk being overshadowed by a focus on personalisation of services. This statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem.

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