Saturday, 29 September 2012

Never mind ‘birds of a feather’ – for some people, local social interaction ain’t worth the aggro

Are you and your neighbours all similar? And does it matter?

An anonymised Economist blog post takes a reported increase in neighbourhood heterogeneity from recent US General Social Survey data, and links it to an apparent increase in ideological polarisation. Wait, I can explain.

The recent data suggest that ‘Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbours than before’ (yes I agree we should expect a modest level of competence in sentence construction from an Economist journo).

‘In 1974, 44% of respondents said that they had spent a social evening with neighbours more than once a month. By 2008, that number had dropped to a tick over 30%. Over the course of the study’s existence, the number has been dropping consistently.’

OK, so neighbours are less likely 'than before' to be friends. I don’t think it necessarily means they won’t interact in a socially supportive way: but let’s suppose it matters. The author suggests that

‘Reduced interaction with fellow citizens probably only reinforces a person’s own beliefs. However like-minded a neighbourhood is the odds of friends and relatives sharing similar political views seems much higher.’

Hmm, speculative, you might think, but the idea is that (a) neighbours interact less, so (b) people’s political views are more likely to get reinforced, principally by friends and relatives who are likely to have similar views. And there could be something in it, but there’s the usual stack of issues with the first bit, such as –

  • neighbourliness isn’t the same as friendship, not even in the US;
  • whether it’s adequate to explain neighbourliness over time in terms of spending ‘a social evening’ on a regular basis;
  • whether this decline correlates with other alarm-ringing social change;
  • whether online interaction detracts from face-to-face local interaction or augments it while changing it, and so on.

Oh, and the almost but not quite obvious question - if strong ties between neighbours are weakening over time, is that necessarily a bad thing?

I’m not going to rehearse that stuff here, but I do want to follow one interesting lead. The article concludes forcefully:

‘The primary culprit here is suburbanisation.’

One of the comments to the article refers to a study of social interaction and urban sprawl (Brueckner & Largey, J urban econ, 2008) which tested the hypothesis that urban density has a positive effect on social interaction. The authors preface their results like this:

‘To understand the argument, suppose that people value social interaction, and that the extent of interaction in a neighborhood is an increasing function of the area’s average population density. By putting people in close proximity, high average density could plausibly spur interaction among them.’

The paper makes an important contribution to challenging negative assumptions about suburbs. It concludes:

‘The results are unfavorable: whether the focus is friendship oriented social interaction or measures of group involvement, the empirical results show a negative, rather than positive, effect of density on interaction.’

Somewhat half-heartedly, they add a rider, which I have raised myself from time to time: it's possible that people who are less inclined to sociability could be more inclined to inhabit certain kinds of housing or areas of greater density. That’s assuming they have much choice in the first place.

But I want to go back to the initial assumption that ‘people value interaction’. Allowing for a small percentage of humankind who maybe don’t, I don’t think anyone’s disputing that basic generalisation; but there needs to be acknowledgment of the differential extent to which that value is attainable.

If you live in an attractive, peaceful, relatively affluent area where the stress levels are generally low, then the cost of investing in social interaction is low. But in some neighbourhoods there are serious real or perceived risks in establishing social contact with a view to interaction. If you try to start talking to someone at the bus stop or in the lift and they mug you, or you justifiably fear that they might, you will be less inclined to seek out social interaction. And if other factors are negative (eg a disordered local environment, poor services, badly maintained housing, child ill-health, domestic violence, do I need to go on?) the risk is too high for the perceived benefit. If the risk is too high, people don't try to connect. And they keep themselves to themselves.

So at no extra cost (tada!) here’s a very special reward for readers of this post who have got this far… a unique never-to-be-repeated offer of an exquisitely-wrought principle: ‘birds of feather’ is a red herring. Indeed it could also prove to be a wild goose; more research is needed. The homophily principle - or come to that, the heterophily principle, if there is one - is neither here nor there: what matters for social policy is to address residents’ differential cost-benefit assessment of the value of social interaction. You do that by improving the quality of life for those who most need it. Unh, that should put the cat among the pigeons.

 

29 Sep 2012 21:12:34 | Neighbourhood relations, Social capital

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Sand and the aggregate of local issues Over on New Start, John Houghton takes this image of sand, magnified 250 times, as a handy analogy: ‘To the disinterested observer, sand is deadly dull. Yet when you look much more closely, as this image allows us to do, its surprising richness and diversity is revealed. ‘The image makes me think of neighbourhoods because there’s a similar tendency in policy discourse to talk about the ‘ordinary families’ living in ‘typical streets’ that make up ‘your average neighbourhood’. From this lofty perspective, neighbourhoods must seem equally monotonous… ‘The reality is very different. If we take time to look, we can see that neighbourhoods are full of gems and shells, rocks and pearls. People with unexpected stories, landmarks loaded with significance, networks of friendliness and gossip.’ The analogy works nicely to expose the awkwardness of generalisation in policy: but we still have to address that problem. One place to start would be by dealing with the heavily centralised power base that dominates most policy discourse. An interview today with Simon Hughes on The World This Weekend provides an example. The point was made that the unpopularity of a government in power is commonly a direct cause of the demise of local councillors at local elections. The Lib Dems lost 40 per cent of their local elected members at the last local election. As Hughes conceded (at around 14:15) - ‘that’s very unfair on councillors.’ It’s also an inadequate foundation for localism, demonstrating how the dominant cause-effect reaction between centre and local is in the wrong direction. Localism will remain little more than a conceding gesture until we have circumstances in which central government is forced more consistently and realistically to take account of local politics. At the moment that tends only to happen when MPs feel threatened locally by constituents’ reactions to central government policy. If we had some way of packaging and presenting in the aggregate, to coin a phrase, the achievements, distinctiveness and concerns of local people through the legitimate channel of local democracy, and central government had no choice but to take it into account, we might start to see policy at a national level that reflects the fine-grained richness and diversity that John refers to. Long way to go, especially since the political party (aforementioned) most likely to push such an agenda has messed up a bit lately.
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Placekeeping: bringing quality of local social life into the mix Social Life have just published a report developing a methodology to measure social sustainability in new housing developments: ‘The aim of this project is to create a practical and cost-effective way of measuring people’s quality of life and the strength of community.’ This could be significant because, as the report argues, ‘A new emphasis on social sustainability means thinking about placekeeping as well as placemaking. It requires us to recognise that some intangibles – the emotional relationships that people who live in and use a space develop – are as important as the hard infrastructure we deliver.’ (Be warned, at the moment some of the links say ‘download full publication’ but you may only get Part 1, which itself doesn’t appear to carry links to Parts 2 and 3. Part 1 gives the deceptive impression that it's a self-contained report). The first part seeks to demonstrate how the methodology as it stands could be applied, in this case to new developments, three of them in London. Since residents presumably moved in at roughly the same time, have similar issues to discuss, and a similar drive to get to know people, you’d expect levels of neighbourliness and satisfaction to be reasonably high for the first few years at least. Plus they just invested emotional energy in the move, so folk are more likely to be upbeat about the place. The housing provider has to really mess up to get bad marks early on. But the real point is the development and testing of a methodology that can bring the social quality of local life into the mix. The framework applied to the four localities has three ‘critical dimensions’: amenities and social infrastructure social and cultural life, and residents’ voice and influence. A fourth dimension, change in the neighbourhood, will be assessed in due course using data from the 2011 Census. These dimensions are populated with 13 indicators comprised of a total of 45 questions, mostly taken from or adapted from established surveys. The findings for the four study areas are based mainly on nearly 600 face-to-face interviews in the four sites, with site surveys and some interviews with professionals/practitioners, and benchmarked against London and national comparative data. The first thing that might strike you is that all the indicators, and indeed the three dimensions, are treated equally. This is not addressed in the main report but is covered in section 2: ‘It is probable that different questions have different significance in explaining social sustainability, and there is as yet no evidence available that provides any rationale for weighting.’ Weighting will have to wait. Fair enough. This is enormously thorough, detailed work, and further refinement could make it very strong. We will all have our doubts about some of the questions used but there's no doubting the soundness of the overall approach. Whether or not it becomes a standard tool as we strive to become a nation of housebuilders, it all adds to the drive to embed the factors of local social...

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