Sunday, 19 June 2011

Juxtaprose 6


 

‘Rep’ing’ (representing/ defending) a turf has become increasingly common and a significant proportion of reported killings have been linked to ‘postcode wars’. Gary Hewett, of Community Action Team in East London, told the Working Group that ‘so many young people are afraid of travelling across the borough because there’s so many different territories’, and this has been echoed throughout the Working Group’s hearings. For some inner city young people gang-impacted areas are becoming no-go areas. One 17 year old male from London said:

‘There’s certain places in South London where 100 per cent you can say if you’re not from there you’ll get stabbed.’

Dying to belong, CSJ, 2009.

 

 

 Perhaps most interesting about the cartography of the nobility is the tendency for members of noble factions to map the city according to lines of hatred, an emotional mapping that complements the moral cartography implicit in the vicinity. When members of the two noble factions testified in court about the emotional context of their violent exchanges, they painted an image of the city and its neighbourhoods as polarized by hatred. In their testimony, the defendants in the trial that followed on the heels of the great battle of 1351 created a mental geography that carefully partitioned the city into territories controlled by the Vivaut and the Jerusalem and by their allies. From testimony given at the inquest, it is clear that the invading Jerusalem were thought to have offended the residential space of the Vivaut.

Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary cartographies, 1999.

Previously juxtaprosed.

19 Jun 2011 21:53:33 | Juxtaprose

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Neighbouring in low income neighbourhoods The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University has published the final report of their study of low income neighbourhoods. It’s an important body of work, mainly qualitative and thus sitting most obviously alongside Anne Power’s City survivors as a source of stories and quotes. At the same time, JRF have published a paper prepared by some of the researchers and based on the same study, which looks at current social policies and assesses their potential impact on residents living in the neighbourhoods studied. The paper explores some of the underlying assumptions in the new policy agenda. (Summary here). It’s a smart move, let’s hope this latter paper has some impact. The key message seems to be this: There was little evidence in the research of any fault line between ‘cohesive’ and ‘broken’ communities, of places somehow set apart from ‘the rest of us’. Place still matters and, as a rule, neighbourhood mattered most to people where both the economic legacy and future prospects for their community were least favourable. The authors stress the role of social housing - neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of social housing often provided households with an island of stability in an ocean of turbulence (not least in the jobs market). They go on to ask, what happens to those communities that are facing structural economic weakness but where countervailing systems of mutual support and resilience have also become attenuated over time – those at the end of the economic line – if the opportunities for economic growth lie elsewhere? As far as neighbouring is concerned, two familiar points are re-confirmed: that neighbouring is not the same as friendship; and not everyone wants to invest in neighbourliness. But there is one pertinent point that is very well-made in the main research report, concerning the extent to which so many people on low-incomes are both time-poor and cash-poor. This point needs making with research to back it up, because policy too often implies that people in poverty have time on their hands while worthier citizens are busy driving the economy and bringing up more worthy citizens. Lack of time and energy constrains people’s ability to get involved in co-production or civic action or in strengthening their social networks. Here’s one quote that illustrates the way in which this plays out in neighbourhood relations: No I don’t want to be going round for cups of tea and that kind of thing... I think it’s important to say hello and recognise each other but… there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to socialise with the people I socialise with, family and friends as it is… and it’s just trying to find time to do the laundry and keep the house tidy as well as everything else. And finally while I remember it, for the record, there’s one point in one of the research papers which doesn’t seem to have made it into the final report, concerning the negative effect of declined neighbourly overtures:...
PREVIOUS POST
The 'good society'? A quick heads-up, I've been asked to speak on a panel at the Compass conference in London this saturday, on the curious theme of 'How do we build the Good Society in our own neighbourhood?' If that logo on the left is meant to echo the one on the right, is it witty, inspirational, tasteless, or shallow, would you say?

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments