Monday, 25 July 2011

Covered in roses

Stratford re olympic Hughs picI like this example of a public record of pre-Olympic demolition in north east London, captured by Hugh Flouch. One of the boards proclaims simply:

'When they knocked down the flats I sat on the roof of my house to get a good look. My hustband covered in [sic] roses so they don't get covered in dust.'

25 Jul 2011 12:21:51 | Vignettes

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
More on neighbouring and recession Here's more tentative support for the argument that economic hardship is stimulating neighbourliness. The Co-op has published a press release (but as yet no report or data) on another survey of neighbourliness following their 2010 report which I blogged a year ago. They suggest that people are helping their neighbours more, with increasing numbers looking after pets or plants (32% up from 23%), fetching shopping (15% up from 6%) and accepting mail or parcels (73% up fro 63%). At the same time, they note an increase in the number of people reporting problems with their neighbours. To me it seems a bit too simplistic to associate slight reported changes in neighbouring with the recession - especially when we don't know what the questions were - without also taking account of other forces and changes like localism, the decline of trust in large institutions, and networked support.
PREVIOUS POST
17% would not help a neighbour Here are some new data on neighbourliness, from a large US survey conducted for StateFarm, an insurance company. The sample was 17,000 and the project has been overseen by Keith Hampton, so is definitely worthy of attention. To their credit, StateFarm provide more than the usual upbeat press release. Here are some of the things that I noticed on a read-through of the findings. I was most struck by negative responses to the question: 'What would you do to help a neighbor in need?' Seventeen per cent would not help a neighbour in need, and this figure is pretty much consistent across age, gender and urbanicity. So if you thought, say, that older people in rural areas would be nearly universally neighbourly, think again. The survey asked about the channels used where people 'interact with their neighbours on a monthly basis'. It seems to me there's plenty of online contact going on, but the 10 per cent of text interaction is higher than I'd have expected. Almost 40 per cent lend to neighbours and 24 per cent borrow 'at least several times a year' (don't ask me to explain the discrepency, although I note that 7 per cent are disgruntled about neighbours who don't return borrowed items). One other thing. The data suggest that 17 per cent of 18-34 year olds know 'most of their neighbours' by name. I think that's pretty high, at least for under-25s. The graphic seems designed to imply that it isn't. What are our expectations? And here's Keith's take on it all.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments