Monday, 01 October 2012

Placekeeping: bringing quality of local social life into the mix

Social Life reportSocial 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 quailty of life in decision-making processes.

 

1 Oct 2012 17:23:16 | Social capital, Space and place

2 Comments

Kevin
If you want more information on place-keeping, there is a whole 4-year EU-funded research project dedicated to it that has just finished!
http://www.mp4-interreg.eu

There are publications too which define place-keeping in more detail: it's a shame that the Social Life report does not quote any of them or even the website, but c'est la vie! A book will be coming out next year as well.
If you subscribe to Town & Country Planning journal, this month's edition has an article all about it. There will be two other articles about it in coming months:

Dempsey, N., Burton, M. and Mathers, A. (2012). "Place-keeping – responsive, long- term open space management." Town and Country Planning 81(10): 431-436.

Thanks
Nicola

Posted by: Dr Nicola Dempsey | Thursday, 11 October 2012 at 12:15

thanks Nicola, that's helpful. I'll take a look, and I'm sure others will also.

Posted by: Kevin Harris | Thursday, 11 October 2012 at 17:45

The comments to this entry are closed.

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