Thursday, 18 July 2013

Neighbourhood futures

Keep an eye on IPPR North’s new Neighbourhood futures research programme. The objectives are ambitious:
  • To build up a view about what makes a neighbourhood a good place to live, drawing on empirical and everyday perspectives.
  • To develop a fresh understanding of ‘the state of neighbourhoods’ in Britain today, considering the types and distribution of neighbourhoods across the country and the trends and forces shaping them.
  • To review how services, institutions and government policies have affected neighbourhoods in the past, assessing the effectiveness of different approaches to neighbourhood and community policy.
  • To consider what neighbourhoods are likely to look like in the future, what strategies and actions might make different types of neighbourhoods better places to live, supported by government, but also drawing on other sources of agency and the capacities and resources that exist within local areas.

At last week’s kick-off meeting there was a lot of interest in the potential to study examples of neighbourhoods which have changed significantly in recent years, according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation – perhaps three localities where conditions have improved significantly and three where they have declined significantly. To their credit, despite the chokingly short (six month) timeframe, IPPR North are keeping the scope of the programme quite fluid at the moment.

 

18 Jul 2013 09:44:23

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‘A series of doors’: young people talking about the experience of poverty Some months ago I mentioned a piece of work in which I designed and co-facilitated a consultative event with children and young people in poverty. The recruitment was intricate but it paid off: the participants were thoughtful, articulate, provocative and insightful. My colleagues and I at Breslin Public Policy made a commitment to help get their views into the public domain, and we have now done so: today we published a paper called A Series of Doors: young people talking about their experience of poverty. The title is distinctive. It comes from a telling remark made by one of the young participants, who observed that: ‘The more problems people have, the less likely they are to be supported out of poverty. It is like a series of doors. One door is being poor, another door is being autistic, another door is being a young carer, another door is living in a bad area… The more doors there are, the more keys are needed to open them and people don’t care enough to make the effort to open them all.’ I urge you to read and reflect on the paper, to circulate it widely, and to let us have your thoughts. The energy and honesty of these young people deserves close and sincere support from all who have the power to help make a difference to their lives, and the lives of others like them. We hope to launch the document with an event and hard copies available, in the autumn: please get in touch if you’d like to be involved. We’d particularly like to hear if you think you can sponsor the travel of one or more of the young people to such an event: it’s their voices that matter most. Please consider it.
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What’s in it for you? I remember a television news item some years ago which demonstrated how vulnerable some people are through leaving information about themselves in their rubbish bins. And if you’re not given to thinking much about what you dispose of and how, then I daresay you’re more likely to be vulnerable. But even if you do take care to detach linkable traces of your identity from your garbage, it must be slightly discomforting if you find someone rifling through your bin. Rhodri Morgan, writing in the Indy the other day, describes the experience in terms of privacy: ‘On their third or fourth visit, I realised my discomfort was a privacy thing; I wondered what the contents of my bin might reveal about me.’ The point being that although in theory you have renounced ownership of the material, by placing it in a publicly funded collection service - and the council owns the bin - it still represents a concentration of sources of possible information about you. And perhaps the age of the golden dustman, portrayed so wonderfully by Dickens in Our mutual friend, is coming round again. But I’d rather live in a society where people didn’t feel the need to rummage through rubbish.

Kevin Harris

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