Saturday, 26 June 2010

'When you have a dog you know everyone'

Dogwalkers7 "I live in a block of flats and I'm on the second floor and all my neighbours are fine, we all know each other. When you have a dog you know everyone - before I had a dog I didn't know anyone. We've got half the world in my street but we're all fine, we all get on."

From a selection of comments on knowing thy neighbour, collected by the Tottenham, Wood Green and Edmonton journal in north London.

26 Jun 2010 16:02:22 | Neighbourhood relations, Social capital

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The Big Nudge: can it accommodate awkwardness? Yesterday I shuffled from a meeting with someone working on Big Society, to an event about how to get citizens involved in public policy. This latter was the launch of findings from the 'Rediscovering the civic' project run by the universities of Southampton and Manchester, known as 'nudge-nudge, think-think' because of the experiments exploring the effect of policies which 'nudge' people into prosocial behaviour, and those which encourage people to think through the issues in the hope of prosocial consequences. Inevitably, set in the heart of Whitehall with an array of learned speakers, the debate was at a high level of generality while acknowledging the significance of the political moment. Combined with the preceding meeting, it's helped to clarify for me quite where Big Soc fits and what it might mean. First, the suspicion that the thinking behind Big Society has been based on a shallow appreciation of the realities of the community sector have been confirmed. That can be remedied, perhaps is being remedied (well, they invited me along for a chat!). Second, we are all starting to see more clearly where it has come from, historically. Take these two quotes, via former Blair advisers, which are going the rounds: (i) Matthew Taylor referring I believe to a Norwegian journalist who pointed out that Labour's failure was a failure of public mobilisation, having campaigns like child poverty that should have been public campaigns which they turned into technocratic exercises. Can't argue with that. (You can? Go on then). (ii) Attributed to David Halpern, something like this - 'we're not trying to do more with less. We're trying to do more with more, and that comes from the social fabric'. I've heard this discussion elsewhere, when people say the Big Soc is just what we were trying to do before... Yes, at local level it can certainly look like that. But wouldn't it have helped if new Labour managerialism, and all the arrogance of previous administrations (not that much different), had been supportive instead of so often obstructive and (to pick up a point made by Sue Goss yesterday) infantilising? To put it another way, did previous administrations culturally stifle public involvement? To me these are little insights which can help measure the change to a new context. Third, insights from Phillip Blond of ResPublica, revealing the centrality of nudge to Big Society. He said that nudge is a modern way of referring to tradition or tacit knowledge, which has become derided and devalued in recent decades. 'Tradition is already a pre-selection of how we should live. Nudge is about group behaviour.' For Blond, it seems that the Big Society is about restoring the public value of tradition, of accepted shared forms of collective life. Neither De Tocqueville nor Putnam got mentioned, which I suspect is a good thing: whatever is being invented here, it's more than US-style bowling together, because of the political niceties. Still, association is key in Blond's view: 'There's almost no context in which association is...
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Valuing common ground The English tradition of common land is a physical representation of collective interest that defies exclusive and privatising practices. 'People may not know what a common is, but they have some sense of its survival through history, perhaps that the land once belonged to the people, and they want to keep it that way.' This comes from new guidance for assessing the community value of common land, prepared by Kate Ashbrook and Nicola Hodgson for The Open Spaces Society. It's full of fascinating insight and some individual reflections like this: 'Zoar Common is the link between my home and the high moorland and is welcoming, familiar, territory where I‟m most likely to meet near neighbours coming and going, exchanging a few friendly words and keeping in touch with local matters.' The guidance is intended to identify mechanisms to recognise and take account of local community interests on commons, hence complementing established criteria used in assessing national importance of land for interests such as nature con-servation and landscape. The intention is not that community interests should be graded or weighed and balanced against national interests, but rather that they should be given proper recognition and attention when considering man-agement on a common, seeking to integrate local and national aspirations within management frameworks. Specifically, the purpose of the commission was to provide information to enable the user or practitioner to: i be aware of issues relating to the community interests of common land, ii assess the importance of common land to local neighbourhoods, iii engage with communities and understand their perspectives, iv incorporate community concerns in any scheme examining the future and management of commons. Via Planning bulletin.

Kevin Harris

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