Thursday, 15 July 2010

Who's that knockin at the door?

For those like me who feel that the plague of unwanted commercial callers slouching round the neighbourhood with their handouts and patter, is a contemporary problem, sparked partly by the privatisation of utilities (all those ridiculous salespeople trying to persuade you to switch supplier) and exacerbated by the recession, this article in yesterday's Guardian is enlightening. It's from the archive, published 80 years ago:

'You have either to jam the door on to the foot, or listen to the carefully composed and hundred-times rehearsed speech about the coal that will 'save' you a penny a bag on your present prices. It seems heartless to stop it, yet you can't make these men believe that they are wasting their own time as well as yours.'

Plus ca change? Well, numbers of unwanted calls could well be similar, but I wouldn't be surprised if levels of polite receptiveness have declined. Given that far more of us now live alone, it might not be surprising to hear that a high proportion of people simply do not answer the door and the frequency and persistence of these calls is one of the reasons given. One more thing to be overcome if we are to help older people to age in place.

15 Jul 2010 17:17:52 | Neighbourhood relations

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Why neighbouring matters I just opened the Facebook pages for '50 Ways to Meet Your Neighbour' and I'm looking forward to seeing people's ideas and suggestions, whether or not they are lyrically consistent. I'm keen to see whether anyone can improve on Nick Buckley's 'Just take in a parcel, Marcel'... Meanwhile, here's the wordy justification bit in the background: Not everyone lives in a neighbourhood, but everyone has the right to try to improve their locality by improving relations with those around them. This principle is seldom acknowledged in policy. Yet mutually-supportive connections that generate trust between residents can make an enormous difference for a wide range of social policy measures. Neighbouring is already subject to policy influence. Decisions affecting planning, local transport, local trade, schools, welfare, safety, parks and so on, all have an affect on whether or not people encounter their neighbours and have something in common which they feel able to talk about. Of course, individual choices also have an affect. If you only ever get into a car when you leave your home, you’re less likely to recognise your neighbours and have a supportive relationship with them. If you don’t have – or don’t use – a local park, café, pub, post office or community centre, you’re less likely to meet other local people in a safe, neutral space. You’re also less likely to know the young people who share your neighbourhood – who almost certainly occupy it more than you do. One way to persuade policy makers that neighbouring is worth taking seriously is to focus in on the sort of actions that make it easier to meet other neighbours. The idea behind ’50 Ways’ is to make a loud statement about why neighbouring matters and what can be done to stimulate it.
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Big street party With Big Lunch day tomorrow, there's quite a bit of rhetorical bunting flapping over notions of neighbourly traditions and the generation of 'sense of community'. But the idea of 'an alfresco frolic with the neighbours' evokes cringes as well as cheers (Bell & Valentine 1997) and this counter-theme is never entirely drowned-out. For some people street parties are equated with a tacky false-jollity that seeks to impose an unwanted, strong-tie version of neighbouring. The trick, as always with an event that can sometimes border closely on spectacle, is probably to loosen and informalise everything and make it escapable, so that people can easily dip in and out. Perhaps we reinvent street parties - much as, in my view, we reinvent neighbourliness - according to the concerns of our age. Here's an interesting article by Joe Moran suggesting that 'the street party was ever more a romantic ideal of community than a show of genuine togetherness': 'The history of the street party suggests that a sense of community is rarely a naturally occurring phenomenon; it has to be continually created by these acts of faith.' (We're not told, but I'm assuming that this is the Joe Moran who wrote Reading the everyday, which I remember as an absorbing read). Historically, most (but not all) street parties in the UK have been a neat mechanism of the establishment, keeping ordinary people in their place with modest cheerful events, sanctioned by authorities to endorse royalty and the achievements of leaders. The Big Lunch develops this tradition, laid out on a very contemporary, tightly-branded tablecloth. As Moran notes: 'In a society fragmented by free-market globalisation but still suspicious of state solutions, a lot is being invested in this idea of the street as the model for a vibrant civic life.' The small-scale of the street may be beautiful; 'Big' almost certainly is not. Let's keep in mind, with Big Society as the new (likewise branded) all-purpose marquee under which we are invited to shelter chummily in these stormy times, that it is coerced, state-approved civic life that is of interest to the top-downers.

Kevin Harris

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