Saturday, 02 June 2012

Signalling with flags

Hard to tell from the pic, but I thought this was a delightful example of bunting, which I came across in a relatively affluent secluded street. All of it appeared to be home-made from cloth, none of it plastic and not a national flag to be seen. It suggests the residents got together and agreed that there were certain messages they did or didn't want to send out.

Bunting 2

What you can't see from the pic is that in the large window in the house at the very end, there is a very large and defiant union jack.

 

2 Jun 2012 20:20:43 | Information and communication, Neighbourhood relations

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Jubilee street parties: a note for the reluctant A few conversations just lately have confirmed that I’m not the only one to find the coming weekend of Jubilee street parties a distasteful prospect. There are at least two kinds of diffidence, which get mingled easily: one caused by the rampant unreflective nationalism of the moment, the other by the familiar sense of enforced sociability. People feel under pressure to conform on both counts but it’s legitimate to feel reluctant. Streets Alive estimates that two million people will be having a street party of some sort: that leaves about 60 million who won’t be. Still, it’s a little scary how many apparently rational grown-up people turn into anthem-humming attention-standing serfs at the sight of those silly red white and blue flags. Even more scary to discover how many of them live around you. Meanwhile, UK Uncut held an alternative jubilee street party in Manchester the other day, with ‘austerity bunting’, a ‘Clegg and spoon race’ and 'upper-class austerity twits'. That's the spirit. Chris Gittins, the source of street party insight and experience, argues against the assumption that street parties are a 'celebration' of the Jubilee: ‘street parties are for life, not just for Jubilees. In any street there are a wide range of views about the Queen and the royals, but they still want a street party together.’ Which is fair enough, but for those who think that neutral unbranded street parties are a good idea, unless you’re governing the process with a few likemindeds, you’re unlikely to be able to stop the royalists dominating. So what to do? Personally, I’ll shuffle out there for a short while as a courtesy to my neighbours, especially those who have put organising effort in. I get on well with them all but the artificiality of the occasion and any tatty, halfmast nationalism will finish me off quickly I think.
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Parkscore Parkscore, just launched in the US, seems like a sensible use of broad statistical measures to contribute to, rather than (as we tend to do in the UK) denigrate public realm management. The system assesses parks simply according to their size (median size, and size as percentage of city area); service and investment - the per-resident spending on the park and number of playgrounds per 10,000 residents; and access (simply, percentage of city population living within a ten minute walk). It’s published by the Trust for Public Land and news-blogged here. Obviously it’s very limited. For instance, at least in the UK, a lot of pocket parks have social values way beyond their scale or level of investment. And there’s no attempt to incorporate any kind of user experience in the methodology, because that sort of data is expensive to accumulate and verify. I fancy Jane Jacobs might have harrumphed a little - although of course she paid a lot of attention to economics just as TPL seem to do in their work. I quite like it as far as it goes, but as always it illustrates the danger of publishing an oversimplified methodology as a ‘score’ and issuing league tables. Will it do more good than harm? (Via Urban Portal)

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