Neighbourhoods

Get out of that without moving

Thoughts on individual action and collective interests

On no, what have we done? We were so angry, we just… We did what?? You mean, we fecked up the future of our country for our kids and their kids?? Just like that? How the heck did we do that? We didn’t realise, I mean… And messed things up for the rest of Europe too? Ooh. Ooh dear. Just wanted to have a go at those Westminster types, that’s all.

There seems to be some substance in the analysis that concludes that many voters felt disenfranchised and chose ‘Leave’ to express their sense of disconnection from the establishment. (I don’t know if it is true, as suggested in various places, that these were predominantly older people in middle and low income areas. Do I hear the sound of Zimmer-frames, incontinence pads and false teeth being thrown out of prams?) They have at the same time, whoops, voted for a dire future for themselves.

This is not just collective self-harm on a spectacular scale, it also perversely and unjustly condemns young people and subsequent generations. It’s ‘profoundly irresponsible’ as one young man said among several other insightful remarks on The World This Weekend today (from about 48 mins).

The force of a protest vote can look rather unfortunate when the issue is your country’s future. It leaves a lot of residual anger towards the people who distorted the reality of issues for their own interest in power, essentially in pursuit of some laughably quaint notion of ‘sovereignty’; and for the leading politicians over a couple of decades who allowed this situation to arise.

So we are left with the hard-to-deny accusation that we are a nation dominated by racists, who by definition are stupid (that seems to have been one of the most widely-used words in commentary since Friday morning).

As for democracy, well it’s been pulled and pushed around a bit lately. The extraordinary scenes of the sit-in at the US Congress have provided a focal point for the tensions between individual interests (the right to carry a gun) and collective interests (er, what about random massacres?) giving rise to the apparent need to try and twist the rules for the latter views to be heard. Here in the UK there are also attempts to twist the rules – or rather, in this case, agree them post hoc.

Many voices have lamented the poverty of the referendum process: what a way to demonstrate that turning from representative to plebiscite democracy maybe doesn’t work on such a scale or with such a historically resonating issue.

Or was it such a big issue? I certainly thought so; but the turnout was only 72 per cent, so more than a quarter of Brits either couldn’t be bothered or didn’t think it affected them. Christ what a country.

The principle that people vote in their own economic interest seems to have been trumped (I shudder to use that word) by fear of the Other. But the key word is still ‘individual’. The crazed recklessness of this result seems like trying to shout down anyone who suggests that ‘No man is an island’ and that no country can be a cultural or economic island. The people who will suffer most for it will be people on low incomes, people with disabilities, and the young who will become old without privileges. Many asylum seekers and refugees will be turned away when we should be offering them sanctuary and succour.

Could we not invent a form of democracy that encourages decision-making in the collective interest?

Lightening the gloom of the referendoom…

Talk about working in mysterious ways. Following my quick chat about Yerp with yer actual almighty the other day, one of his senior agents, an Archbish, no less – has come up with some words of wisdom in response to Nigel ‘I’m-Not-Racist-I-Just-Peddle-Racism’ Farage. Monsieur Farage (on a council estate, should we pronounce this to rhyme with ‘Garridge’?) is so concerned about the ‘cultural’ differences between British society and migrants.

In a scenario curiously resonant with critical moments in the history of this country, this not-at-all-upstart priest sat before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee: quizzed by the upstart democratic representatives. Yes it’s Archbishop Justin Welby – how reassuringly English the name sounds by comparison with his protagonist. He spoke about the ‘burden’ of immigration on communities and the role of government (emphasis added):

'It's a national issue not a local issue - not only for the direct cost of those who are coming in as immigrants but to strengthen the stability and infrastructure around particularly education, health and housing of those communities that are accepting people.

'That actually, in my experience, liberates the natural generosity of people to welcome, once the causes or the reasons for fear have been dispelled - and they are quite easily dispelled.'

Thou art so right, squire: by strengthening the stability and infrastructure around communities, you liberate people’s natural generosity to welcome others.

And let’s be clear, the opposite applies: if you allow the infrastructure to weaken and atrophy, you stifle that natural generosity to the point of animosity. We have already come dangerously close to the tipping point, allowing too much purchase for those like Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who would exploit people’s sense of vulnerability to the Other, in the cynical interests of their own political power. I have nothing but contempt for their readiness to jeopardise the prospects of at least the next couple of generations for their own saliva-dribbling glee at being seen as Important.

 

The divide

Here’s a short message. The Divide, a film about the damaging effects of income inequality, is about to be released and there are screenings scheduled up and down the country. The sub-title is ‘What happens when the rich get richer?’ There’s an intro clip here.

Get your eyeballs on it, encourage others to do likewise, and encourage screenings wherever possible – here’s the how-to info for community screenings.

I was lucky enough to see it last night and was hugely impressed. Given that the film was inspired by The spirit level I was expecting a kind-of glossed-up Richard Wilkinson lecture (not that there's too much wrong with that) – but it’s reassuringly accessible, a cleverly woven mixture of human stories combined with some raw political and economic context. It’s essentially a mini-exposure of the devastating effects of the neo-liberalist project.

It’s also superbly, sensitively made. When you’ve seen the forceful monologue from the imprisoned man (seen in the image above) you will not forget it, either for its artistic power or for its moral and socio-political resonance.

Here’s a longer message. Last week I was at a conference on ‘the future of community work’, arranged following the announcement of the closure of my former organisation, Community Development Foundation (and before that, Urban Forum). In between the organising and the event itself, we heard the announcement of the closure of Community Matters.

Despite the sense of crisis given the collapse of so much community development infrastructure in England, one of my former colleagues was arguing with fervent optimism that the battle is not lost. I must admit that - without analysing what any of us means by ‘the battle’ (was it just a skirmish? Some skirmish) – my sense has been for some time that the neo-liberals have won. There’s a lot of wound-licking and dazed regrouping to be done.

Then following the premiere last night, in discussion with Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson and the film’s director Katharine Round, someone asked if The Divide represents the beginning of the end for neo-liberalism. And again I confess that, like a few others in the theatre, I chortled momentarily at what seemed like naïve optimism. But I wonder. It’s hard to detect the beginnings of things, perhaps the seeds will take.

Neo-liberalism was quite strategic, as Noam Chomsky emphasises in the film. And it’s not that we need an alternative vision. We now have our sustainable development goals and as Kate Pickett pointed out last night, they include ‘Reduce inequality within and among countries’. The Divide website includes a Take Action section. We need roles that we feel we can play.

As I crossed London on my way home, a squatting figure asked me if I could spare some change. I gave him roughly the value of the glass of wine that I had been given at the reception after the film. ‘Good luck,’ I said, feeling immediately how pathetic were my gesture and words, in the context of what I had seen, heard and been thinking about. Yes, we need more meaningful roles.

 

 

‘Superficial’ relationships: near-strangers, weak ties, and older men

Back in 2009, in government guidance on meaningful social interaction, we were told that

‘for interaction to be meaningful it needs to go beyond a superficial level and be sustained.’

I was never satisfied with this and have occasionally wondered if there was a missed opportunity to champion non-meaningful interaction. I have long argued that superficial interaction is the essential ingredient in neighbouring.

It could be time to return to this theme. I’ve been exploring some of the social benefits of Good Neighbour schemes, and this has encouraged me to dust-off another, related theme – gender differences in the sense of aloneness among older people. In one scheme for which I happen to have figures to hand, 79 per cent of clients live alone.

Here’s how the two themes seem to come together, incorporating recent research I have come across. First, two papers by Sandstrom and Dunn published in 2014:

• Is efficiency overrated? Minimal social interactions lead to belonging and positive affect
• Social interactions and well-being: the surprising power of weak ties

In the first, they found that ‘people who had a social interaction with a barista (i.e. smiled, made eye contact, and had a brief conversation) experienced more positive affect than people who were as efficient as possible.’ The authors conclude that people ‘are happier when they treat a stranger like a weak tie.’ No surprise there, but as so often it is helpful to have some things confirmed by robust research.

As an aside, it may be worth noting that the sincerity of the exchange could be important. When a supermarket checkout assistant asks me ‘How are you today?’ the most they are likely to get in return is a grunt, because I know they won’t really want to know but their wretchedly-unimaginative managers have decided it’s a good idea to fill the air with unwanted vapours. There is a difference.

In the second paper, Sandstrom and Dunn report on three further experiments and note that

‘community members who had, on average, more weak tie interactions than others reported greater feelings of belonging. Furthermore, people reported greater feelings of belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual.’

The sampling in this study leaves me wanting further research, but still it’s tempting to say – ‘it’s official’: weak ties are good for you. Of course they are.

Next, here’s a recent paper by Sorensen and Poland, exploring ‘the space between acquaintanceship and strangerhood’. It starts by quoting Francesca Cancian who suggested that, in relationship research in later life, ‘men’s behavior is measured with a feminine ruler’. A little light went on, for me, when I read that.

Sorensen and Poland’s research used photographs to explore nuances of everyday encounters of older men living alone. The men attributed significance to what might seem to others like fleeting interactions; and all were exposed to various opportunities to form other closer relationships and friendships but ‘they sometimes described specifically choosing not to do so.’

The authors suggest that it is not the case that the men had no meaningful relationships,

‘nor can their relationships be considered inferior compared with women’s relationships, but they are clearly different, in terms of mutuality and intimacy, from the reportedly more meaningful relationships that women may enjoy and may be much less visible.’

Which brings us back to the meaning of 'meaningful' interactions.

All this makes perfect sense to me. Interactions that are apparently shallow and ephemeral, to some observers, not only have benefits in terms of social capital (and hence in terms of health and well-being); they may also be a chosen, deliberate strategy to retain human connection with what Sandstrom and Dunn call a ‘minimal cue of belonging’.

Perhaps this kind of behaviour is sufficiently strongly evidenced to characterise older men who live alone in particular, I don’t know. But either way, it is something that practitioners need to take into account, for example when it comes to designing ‘age-friendly’ environments, or when trying to organise social support at local level.

Notably, for me, it helps us to start challenging the way that as a society we have come to pathologise aloneness. Which reminds me, in my book on Neighbouring and older people I quoted the striking example from Tony Parker's The people of Providence, of 87-year-old Mrs Williams:

‘The person I like best is my neighbour next door, the one who goes and gets my pension from the post office for me. She never says anything apart from “Good morning…” She comes back and comes in and puts the money on the table and says “Good morning” again, and then out she goes.’

Previously:

• on meaningful interaction (on the Joe Public blog)
• Try a little MSI
• Untraceable near-neighbours
• Acquaintances: book review

 

What has become of our humanity?

On the subject of the Other and the shame of Calais, here's Frankie Boyle in yesterday’s Guardian:

“If we can look at another human being and categorise them as 'illegal', or that chilling American word 'alien', then what has become of our own humanity? To support policies that dehumanise others is to dehumanise yourself. I think most people resist that, but are pressed towards it by an increasingly sadistic elite. If you’re worried about threats to your way of life, look to the people who are selling your public services out from under you. The people who will destroy this society are already here: printing their own money, printing their own newspapers, and responding to undesirables at the gates by releasing the hounds.”

 

 

The ‘attentional commons’?

Many years ago, oh before your time surely, as a student of information science I recall a moment of minor enlightenment when I understood a key point about information in a consumer society: information consumes, and what it consumes is attention.

Several decades on I have just been intrigued by this article by Matthew B Crawford in the NYT. He posits an ‘attentional commons’ on the grounds that there is

‘a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed.’

The short-hand term for this legitimised aggression is spam, e.g. all those spam phone calls you may still get, and the spam snail-mail through the door, the interference from the charity salesperson on the high street, spam information on public display boards and so on.

Crawford’s article feels like a worthy but desperate rear-guard salvo attempting to defend the collective during the assault on privacy. Is anyone interested? Part of the problem perhaps is that in a fierce battle around private attention intensified by personal networking technologies, to most people, collective social relations don’t seem such a big deal. Crawford suggests:

‘Of course, you can seal yourself off by putting on noise-canceling headphones, staring at a smartphone or opening a novel. But what is lost is the public space that is required for sociability, the kind that depends on people not being self-enclosed.’

Did we really have our own right to silence that it was possible to ‘sacrifice’? A couple of hundred years ago, strolling in London, you’d have been bombarded with spam of all sorts, with peddlers and beggars and tradespeople flinging demands and offers of all kinds at you. Go back further in history and reflect on any urban context, and you have to wonder how we can have come to assume a right not to be addressed. The class system did that, to an extent, otherwise there was an assumed right to spam others. Personally (ha) I would love to have the right not to be addressed, but I suspect it is a weak twentieth century social construct, and not robust enough to defend societies against the exclusionary momentum symbolised by gated communities, for example.

And I wonder if Crawford has been paying attention, if I may put it like that. There is a counter-argument, and I fancy Keith Hampton would be pointing this out gently – people are more likely to spend time together in public spaces than they were 30 years ago.

Something is going on here, and it may have to do with the shift from societies with strong normative centres to societies that are almost chaotically diverse. Try not to take it personally. As I noted some time ago, we still haven’t done our thinking about the changing nature of privacy.

 

 

Confronting ‘awful neighborhood apps’

‘This app depends in large part on the wholly subjective judgments of its entirely anonymous and self-selecting user group, whose impressions about what makes a neighborhood unsavory are unreliable at best.’

Karston Capps, in the Atlantic, confronting the issue of 'social' technologies that can work against social cohesion, reviewing another ‘safety app built by white startuppers to help smartphone users avoid "sketchy" areas.’

More here on the BBC site.

 

 

Pull yourself together

Linked-In being the un-navigable system that it is, it is hard for me to provide the source of this, but I thought it well-worth sharing.

via Ronan O'Beirne on Linked In, via Paraic Hegarty.

 

Whatever happened to that programme about community?

I missed this when first broadcast back in December, but R4 are now repeating three programmes under the heading ‘Whatever happened to community?’

Giles Fraser, recently appointed priest in the parish that includes the Heygate and Aylesbury estates in south London, sallies forth in search of a few questions and possibly some answers.

Slipping from labelled urban to fabled rural, he solicits views from some insightful folk along the way, including David Goodhart for example. Scale and diversity were the main themes of the first episode, which you can catch for a few more days here, with the remainder in the next couple of weeks.

As these programmes go, I thought it was pretty good. At least we got an unequivocal statement from a resident about how the architects and planners had got things plain wrong. This is not trivial when you think how determined architects can be to defend their mistakes. There was also some brief reference to the experience of community over the centuries, and there is plenty to be gained from a more thorough look in that direction, as Emily Cockayne for instance has shown.

Scanning the blurb about the forthcoming programmes though, I saw no reference to gated communities. Given the attention paid so far to ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ community, inclusion implying exclusion, and so forth, it would be a curious omission not to use gating and locking and ‘secured by design’ as a lens for further insight: especially if the last programme is to bring us back to the reality of those huge built estates from which we are still learning.

I'm also starting to wonder about the widespread assumption that neighbouring in recent decades has been changed fundamentally by the proportion of residents who are at home during the day - the decline of the housewife. I think there is something in this argument, but maybe after an interim period, diverse others are now more likely to be at home, so is it time to test the theory with some thorough research? Perhaps the Royal Mail have some data that could be used?

Thanks Martin for the heads up.

 

Network capital, racial segregation and mobility

You don't often hear reference to the concept of network capital these days, which is odd since we're now firmly embedded in a network society, like it or not. But it's reappeared in an unlikely corner. It must be fifteen years since I heard Geoff Mulgan talking about the concept, but here's Mimi Scheller describing how it was crucial to the forms of resistance to slavery in the southern US.

Scheller argues that the institution of slavery can be seen as being defined 'by the exercise of control over mobility, and the immobility of an entire labour force... Almost all of the elements of network capital, ever since the founding of plantation regimes across the Americas, are more concentrated in white hands, and were denied to enslaved people and later to freed people.'

She goes on to talk about how

'The production of space through racial segregation of dwelling places and neighourhoods, of private and public spaces that are racially distinguished, of transit corridors and vehicles that have segregated use of them - all of these areas which became central within US politics and governance of mobility - are arenas of racial domination, racial privilege and demands for racial justice.'

Given my post-Mandela note the other day about the demographics of London bus travel, and given the whiteness of privileged forms of transport that she refers to, this seems a salient and resonant theme. Maybe it is worth reconsidering the potent 1956 image of Rosa Parks on the Montgomery bus in terms of network capital - reflecting on the fact that it was an orchestrated event, that there was a photographer and that that is a reporter sat behind her. The civil rights movement had had to fight first to establish some network capital and learned to exploit it. Mobility was a key factor in that struggle just as Mandela's immobility was a factor which worked first in the interests of, and then against, apartheid.

I humbly suggest that Scheller's video might be a good use of ten minutes of your time. She was co-founder with John Urry of CeMoRe, the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster, and I'm not likely to forget the privilege of having been present at their memorable launch conference in about 2005.

Making the links: poverty, ethnicity and social networks

JRF have published a piece of research on the links between poverty and ethnicity, which examines how social networks help or hinder people in moving out of poverty. I was involved in the study in a partnership led by the Third Sector Research Centre. Among the key findings:

• People’s social networks were shaped by factors including ethnicity, class and gender, but personal characteristics, such as confidence, were also important in developing useful connections. Family and friends were seen as the basis for most relationships but there were low levels of awareness about wider social networks and how they might be used for moving on from poverty.
• People’s links beyond their own ethnic community were important, but the added dimension of racism could prevent access to ‘mainstream’ influential networks.
• Social networks tended to be ‘like with like’, so while they were used to access employment, this was often into low-paid jobs which relied on informal recruitment processes.
• Strong bonds with family and friends helped mitigate the effects of poverty. However, developing bridging and linking ties with networks that could move people on from poverty involved risks and scarce energy and resources.
• Voluntary, community and faith based organisations were seen as important for facilitating access to cross-cultural networks.
• There were examples of good practice in agencies encouraging people to consider how their social networks could help them move out of poverty. However, there was no consistency in practice between agencies.

There’s a four-page summary here. The full report is here, and if I may say so, well worth a read.

The other members of the team were Alison Gilchrist, Angus McCabe, Asif Afridi and Paul Kyprianou. This is the place for me to record that, taking into account all the consortia and partnership work I’ve been involved in over the past thirty years – where relationships with co-conspirators have meant a great deal to me and almost invariably been rewarding - it’s been an outstanding privilege to work with such a genial and inspiring group of people. I hope our work has some impact and leads onto other things.

 

More on the benefits of neighbourliness

Via a piece by Sarah Goodyear in Atlantic, here’s some significant research evidence supporting the link between local social cohesion and positive health outcomes. Researchers from the University of Michigan studied a wide range of potential confounding variables using a large and nationally representative sample of older adults. They found that perceived ‘neighbourhood social cohesion’ was strongly associated with both stroke mortality and non-fatal stroke.

‘Each standard deviation increase in perceived neighborhood social cohesion was associated with a 15% reduced risk in stroke incidence after adjusting for age, gender, chronic illnesses, marital status, education, and total wealth. The relationship persisted after adjusting further for behavioral and psychological covariates. Even after adjusting for two individual-level social engagement measures, factors that may have confounded a respondent's perceived neighborhood social cohesion rating, perceived neighborhood social cohesion was associated with a reduced risk of stroke.’

That sounds pretty thorough to me. And towards the end of the article the authors speculate that:

‘residents may experience a lack of perceived neighborhood social cohesion because their neighborhood lacks an infrastructure that allows them to mingle and build community. A lack of these community resources may inhibit healthy behaviors.’ (Emphasis added)

In the US, according to this article, stroke is responsible for an estimated $25.2 billion in direct costs. Porportionately, the UK figure would presumably be lower but not luxuriously so. I think I spy a way of reducing it. This probably needs to be spelled out very slowly for A Politician Near You. But it’s commonsense really: investing in the local community sector to generate local social capital and cohesion will bring health benefits of huge economic significance.

Let me know if you come across a politician who gets it.

 

The social networks of refugees

A research report on Social networks, social capital and refugee integration has just been published by the universities of Birmingham and Cardiff. The study was based on an analysis of The Survey of New Refugees (SNR), augmented with a short online survey.

Among the findings:

• Social connections have a clear impact on health and language.
• Those who participate in quality English language learning get more help and have more frequent contact.
• There were clear social capital benefits from family reunion.
• Frequent contact with kin has no impact on access to employment.
• Those in contact with a formal group are less likely to need emotional support.
• No kind of social network is anti-integrative.

And there are a couple of surprises (to me at any rate). First, there seems to be comparatively low interest in associating with ‘co-national or ethnic groups’. When asked to rank 15 priorities, respondents placed greatest importance (understandably) on ‘Absence of verbal or physical attack’ (9.5) and ‘Housing’ (9.29). The lowest priority was accorded to ‘Volunteering’ (7.09) (understandably); and (surprisingly) association with ‘co-national or ethnic groups’ (7.49).

Secondly, the research challenges the model which suggests that if you spend time and energy investing in strong ties (e.g. for emotional support) that detracts from investment in weak ties and bridging social capital (e.g. for getting work). The researchers say there was ‘no evidence that having strong kin networks precludes getting support from formal networks’:

‘The positive correlations between different types of contact… provide compelling evidence against the argument that immigrant and ethnic minority communities are ‘inward looking’ and only ‘invest’ in bonding social capital... There is no evidence that receiving help from relatives and friends (widely considered as ‘bonding’ capital) is mutually exclusive with gaining ‘bridging’ social capital from ‘out-groups’ and more formal organisations.’ (p11-12)

 

Starting to get serious: how we treat asylum seekers

It’s fairly routine to come across a report of a working party or an official inquiry that laments certain conditions that were found. Of course, if an investigation or inquiry is set up with busy (and sometimes expensive) people deliberating, we’re not going to be surprised if there proves to be a good reason for it.

But occasionally the reality that an inquiry discovers is so disturbing that it deserves wider attention, and should command that attention.

Today saw the publication of one example, from the cross-party parliamentary inquiry into asylum support for children and young people. Former children’s minister Sarah Teather, who chaired the inquiry, said

‘The evidence we have heard is shocking and appalling. It is an affront to this country’s proud tradition of giving sanctuary to those fleeing danger and violence.’

For the Children’s Society, Matthew Reed said:

‘Children and their families are being forced to live in appalling conditions that are unacceptable by anybody’s standards. No child, no matter who they are or where they’re from, should be treated with such a complete lack of human dignity.’

It sounds pretty serious to me. I don’t want to live in a society in which vulnerable families are separated routinely and people are treated like this:

‘The inquiry received evidence documenting reports of eggs thrown at houses, stones thrown at babies and children hounded from school. Evidence details how flats where asylum seekers lived were targeted in arson attacks; in one case a man begged to leave the area after a petrol bomb was thrown through the window of his home. The most extreme form of this violence has been the murder of asylum seekers in cities across the UK.’

Fortunately, the system is not always the end of the line:

‘One woman started to go into labour, did not have a midwife, did not know where the hospital was, and it was only the kindness of strangers in the street that got her to hospital.’

Is that what’s known as big society? It’s hardly contentious to point out that the Tory rhetoric of ‘benefit scroungers’ is at best unhelpful and in practice likely to be a consistent contributory factor here. The report notes that

‘Some segments of the population, including some frontline professionals and statutory agencies, have vastly inaccurate ideas about asylum seekers and the reality of their lives. This has fuelled a hostile reception for many thousands of children and young people, desperate to live in peace and safety.’ (Emphasis added)

And as if the evidence were not bad enough, its publication surfaces another distasteful feature of contemporary life – the inevitable trolls who see no reason, hear no reason, and speak no reason; for whom it is easier to dismiss this systematic inhumanity as ‘self-inflicted destitution’ (you can find examples in the comments section here). It’s scary when people are insistently wrong about these issues; when they also seem to take pride in being devoid of any kind of compassion it’s close to terrifying.

Looking out for a neighbour called Hitler

Here’s a BBC article offering a slightly different take on looking out for a neighbour. Edgar Feuchtwanger was a young Jewish boy who lived opposite Adolf Hitler's home in Munich in the 1930s. As it turned out, Edgar and his family were relatively lucky.

‘On Hitler's orders, other Jewish families had been moved out of the neighbourhood to make way for his servants and bodyguards. But no-one had come knocking on the Feuchtwangers' door.’

The writer in me half-imagines a short story in which the boy drops a ball on the pavement, and it bounces towards the infamous chancellor who is striding from the apartment door to his waiting, gleaming car. The man instinctively picks up the ball and hands it to the boy, only then taking notice of him. What might he have said? Does he bend slightly and offer it good-humouredly? Most humans in history would have raised a smile at least, at the momentary easygoing connection with a child from their neighbourhood. But I can’t see it, and shudder.

Then I recall a moment on the London underground yesterday, when I heard a platform announcer encouraging passengers, in a buoyant, frankly irresistible Jamaican accent, to take care and make sure we buy and wear a poppy, to remember those who fought in the war. Humanity has to be unrelentingly assertive: don't take your eye off the ball.

 

Against gentrification: the Siege of the Elephant

Southwark Notes Archive Group are currently inviting folks to contribute to ‘The Siege of the Elephant,’ a one-day convergence against the gentrification of Elephant and Castle and surrounding area in London. The event aims to bring together local communities, activists, campaign and amenity group members and traders, as well as academics, students, researchers and members of campaign groups involved in similar regeneration/gentrification struggles in other areas of London.

London, Saturday 17 November 2012

Further information

Proposed themes for the day:

• How does gentrification work and what are its causes and effects in
  Elephant and Castle?

• How can we resist or alter the dynamics of gentrification?

Southwark Notes Archive Group ‘have also been organising regular anti-gentrification walks, printing postcards, posters, maps and comics, and keeping active on within various groups and campaigns in the ongoing struggle whilst keeping an eye on the history (the mistakes and successes) and the big picture (globalisation, financialisation and all that!)’

The one reason not to bother with lists about ‘community’

Kaid Benfield has written some good stuff, but this latest Atlantic piece – ‘What Are the 7 Keys to a Strong Community?’ - is perplexing. It’s based on this previous article by Scott Doyon.

Not long ago I had a little dig at the ritual of offering lists, so no more on that theme now. But there’s something more serious I want to get at here, which Kaid’s piece has helped me think about.

Without wanting to seem harsh, it comes across as naïve to start talking about ‘strong communities’ without acknowledging that the concept has, shall we say, negative aspects. You don’t have to spend time in Northern Ireland to appreciate that, I believe there are plenty of places in north America where the ‘communities’ are quite strong enough thank you. That has to be accommodated.

And when we talk about ‘community,’ strong or otherwise, we have to recognise that some people don’t want it, whether they are deemed to need it or not. And many more don’t want it thrust down their throats by policy makers or practitioners or neighbours. That too has to be accommodated.

The list offered in the article is curious in that, with the exception of the first item, it does not appear to have much to do with people:

1. Good governance
2. Walkable, connected, mixed-use character
3. Parks and gardens
4. Partnerships
5. Programming
6. Neighborhood-responsive schools
7. Tree culture.

Nor does it include anything about communication and information channels. Or people’s homes. Or disorder. Or traffic levels. (The answer may be that this is a placemaking approach to ‘community’ qua neighbourhood).

The idea of coming up with ‘seven keys to a strong community’ – or three, or twelve, or whatever number takes your fancy – seems charmingly nostalgic, as if we could just ignore some of the fundamentals of living in a highly networked, car-dependent, dispersed mass consuming global economy.

But the trick for the 21^st century is to describe and buttress an appreciation of ‘community’ that takes account of networked individualism, ethnic diversity, class fissures, high rates of mobility and increasing proportions of older people. Which reminds me, I wrote something like that towards the end of Neighbouring and older people:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

Over the years this blog has felt like a clumsy, perhaps unconvincing exercise in groping towards that understanding, based on an unsentimental belief in the importance and value of local social interaction and the informal communication that supports it.

So without resorting to off-putting journalistic devices, perhaps what I should be doing is working out how far that project’s got.

 

The advantages of moving from one kind of poverty to another

Can the quality of life of people in poverty be improved, without changing their economic circumstances?

Let’s talk millions. I was passed a paper from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner the other day that tells me there are 2.3 million children living in poverty in the UK. (The figure rises to 3.6 million if the After Housing Cost (AHC) measure is used).

About the same time, I read this article in Science which begins by telling us that:

‘Nearly 9 million people in the United States live in “extreme-poverty” neighborhoods in which at least 40% of residents have incomes below the federal poverty threshold.’

In both cases these are scary numbers of people in poverty. And we probably all assume that to help people who are in poverty, you really need to help increase their income and/or decrease their costs.

But the research reported in the Science article, based on a large scale experiment in the US, challenges that assumption by suggesting you can improve quality of life significantly by helping people to move out of ‘distressed neighbourhoods’ – without necessarily increasing their income.

Here’s the gist of the research. Between 1994 and 1998, a US programme called Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomly assigned vouchers to a large number of low-income public housing families living in high-poverty areas in five U.S. cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The vouchers enabled families to move to another area, and many chose to do so:

‘By far the most common reason applicants reported signing up for MTO was to get away from gangs and drugs, with around three quarters reporting this as one of their top two reasons for wanting to move.'

The researchers used ‘a comprehensive measure of people’s quality of life as they perceive it, using adult self-reports of subjective well-being (SWB)' and found ‘sizable positive effects‘:

‘moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term (10- to 15-year) improvements in adult physical and mental health and subjective well-being, despite not affecting economic self-sufficiency.’

In other words, a statistically significant and sustained change in reported sense of well-being (‘a measure that represents a comprehensive assessment by the participants themselves of the extent to which their lives have been affected‘) resulted from moving out of a challenging area, even though the families were still in poverty.

The researchers conclude:

‘The [MTO] program failed to produce detectable impacts on family income. But if the goal is the broader one of improving the well-being of poor families, then policies that seek to ameliorate the adverse effects of dangerous, distressed neighborhoods on poor families are worthy of careful consideration.‘

This could be politically tricky. Do we want our policy makers to assume that the misery of poverty can be ameliorated more readily by a programme of physically moving some families around, than by addressing economic inequalities?

I don’t think we want them deciding that poverty is a housing allocation problem which can be deemed to be the responsibility of social landlords. It’s great that we now have some evidence of the impact of living in unsafe and stressful environments; but we still need to see some action to transform such places, and to address the increasing problem of poverty itself.

 

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.

‘Now I’m loud at home’: working with young inspectors

I’ve been co-authoring a report on a ‘young inspectors’ project in East Sussex. It has been revelatory for several reasons, two of which I’ll mention here.

The project involved training and support by participation workers for eight young people with a mix of disabilities, to carry out inspections of public venues and services. They inspected an outdoor activities centre, the catering service at that centre, a youth centre and a public library. This was the second such programme in East Sussex.

The report describes the significant benefits both to the inspected agencies and to the young inspectors, especially in terms of self esteem, skills and employability. My conversations with some of the young people, and telephone interviews with some of their parents, showed that for most if not all, the impact for them has been transformational.

One young woman hinted that ‘bad things’ had happened to her, and said that she was always ‘very shy in school’ and used to put herself down a lot:

‘Now I’m loud at home, more confident, I don't need any help in any lessons… It's made me feel more special in a way, I speak more in class, I'm more confident in what I do.’

The father of a young man who experienced intense anxieties and phobias, reflected in very low self-esteem, told me that the project had ‘helped him to overcome his fears and helped him to go to places.’ Simple things like having a clipboard and a badge helped his sense of identity enormously.

Two things in particular resonate with the work I have been doing in the east of England with young people looked after (eg).

One is just to do with the inclusive diversity of the group. The age range was from 12 years to about 20 years. I suggest that a bunch of relatively privileged young people, covering that age range, is quite likely to be hard to handle; but not this lot. Just as with the diverse groups of young people looked after that I’ve observed, they are dependably mutually supportive and tolerant. They’re an inspiration and the rest of us can learn from the way they unfussily co-operate to overcome difficulties.

The second point is a consideration of the costs and benefits of a project like this. In our evaluation of work with museums and young people looked after, Martin Dudley and I found that significant personal benefits accrued to the participants, reliably and sustainably, for around £30 per young person per hour. A typical programme in that field might run for say 15 hours, and this is quality, skilled work we’re talking about: in terms of funding, you’d think it was a no-brainer.

The same goes for the young inspector programme. Some of these young people had serious challenges in their lives, which might leave them marginalised and not in a position to contribute to society. The benefits were consistently attained and the risks of failure were low. The estimated cost to the state of providing these benefits was just over £3,000 per young person for the whole programme – and that cost is likely to fall of course as practise and familiarity develop. Even if only half of them establish a participation career and/or become employable and contribute socially and economically, that represents exceptional value.

It’s another uncontentious low-risk opportunity for social investment. What chance policy makers spotting that?

 

Social justice is no longer available

‘People come together through day-to-day activities, not 'integration projects' which too often feel irrelevant and prove unsustainable… Central to this will be ensuring that the integration benefits of programmes and projects are recognised and supported.’

These sentences come from a paper on Creating the conditions for integration published yesterday by DCLG. They suggest, first, that the government recognises the value of interactions in everyday life, so it must place value on a public realm where such integration can be stimulated and take place. That's a relief, the sceptic might have been wondering.

Secondly it suggests that the government values the evaluation and demonstration of 'integration benefits' where they can be shown to have occurred. That's good too ain't it?

The paper raises a few other points. First – I don’t think I have a problem with using the word integration rather than, say, cohesion (which is what we’d have expected in the past): but it might be interesting to ask why, why the change in vocabulary? At the Institute of Community Cohesion, they know about some of this stuff: do they feel snubbed, I wonder?

Second – is there an understanding that social injustice, poverty and unequal access to power and influence might be critical barriers to integration and should be part of the equation? (Answer, no).

Third – at least three times in the paper the following phrase is used: ‘We want to hear further ideas for action…’ but there is no channnel offered, no named author with contact details on the document, only the switchboard number for the entire department. Somebody’s not being sincere.

And on the question of social justice, here’s some curious news. A week ago the DWP set up a survey to help define social justice (be quick if you want to catch that link):

'The government will shortly publish a social justice strategy paper, detailing a new approach to it. This will define what social justice means to the government, and principles and current practice underlying activity in this area. The government would like to know what social justice means to different stakeholder organisations, so would like organisations to complete a short survey.'

If you follow the link now, this (at the moment) is what you see:

This survey is no longer available.

Please contact ( ) for further assistance..

 

 

Picture this

Thanks to a fascinating academic meeting this week about ‘researching contemporary communities,’ I was directed to this striking image based on shopkeepers’ countries of origin. It comes from an ethnographic study of the Walworth Road in south London, carried out by Suzanne Hall, an architect. The illustration is dated 2006. It neatly captures what Doreen Massey meant by a ‘global sense of place’.

I like this particularly because of the immediacy of the story it tells. Rather like Donald Appleyard’s famous (1981) drawings of local social interactions on ‘light traffic street’ and ‘heavy traffic street,’ you get the message straight away, and it confirms what you are already likely to know, so it’s more reassuring than thought-provoking or challenging.

 

Online, local social capital, and network diversity

Some years ago there was interest in the possibility of what was known as ‘cyber-balkanisation’ – the expectation that online activity would create silos of communities of interest at the expense of diversity of networks; and perhaps that local communities based on face-to-face contact might atrophy as a direct consequence. I even wrote an article for the New Statesman about it, it must have been at least ten years ago.

Now here’s research to confirm that social networks are not less diverse when mediated online, and that online use makes a ‘positive and substantive total contribution’ to network diversity and hence to the social capital that is accessible through personal networks.

This is the most recent output from Keith Hampton and his colleagues based on the data collected for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

I've just posted a summary review of the paper over on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog. The journal article linked above is subscription only, but Keith offers a draft here.

 

Occupying the neighbourhood: 'everybody knows who you are'

Yesterday I was working with my colleague Hugh Flouch with some residents on an estate in Wolverhampton. They're all tenants of Wolverhampton Homes, and like many local people have been there for a long time.

Coincidentally, when I got home, BBC4 were re-broadcasting Michael Collins's sensitive and insightful programme about council housing, The great estate, which you can see here (well worth the time, I'd only seen glimpses before). Collins records the sense of worth, permanence and belonging that characterised council housing at a time when it was considered 'a step up, not a step down'.

The residents Hugh and I have been working with articulate a sense of pride in the history of their (low rise) estate, and some bewilderment at the way in which this form of housing tenure and its associated culture has become socially discredited.

I'm not intending to offer an analysis of the programme here - check Dave Hill's article and links for that. Instead I want to draw on some remarks (at about 24 mins into the film) offered by one of the contributors, who grew up on an estate in Liverpool:

'All our friends lived there. All the people you went to school with lived there. But I think, because you knew all the kids, you also knew the parents and there was a lot of respect at that time. You always called the parents, 'Hello Mrs Burchall' - you always called them by their surname. You knew them but, more importantly, they knew you. And that's a powerful commodity when you're a kid, the fact that everybody knows who you are. I think that's maybe what separated the gangs of kids from the squares where we lived with the pockets of kids which hang around on street corners now who are totally anonymous.'

It's ok, I'm not suddenly about to go all soppy about some golden age of neighbouring. But I do want to try and get a sharper focus on the connection between localness (by which I mean, day-to-day occupation of the neighbourhood) and housing, as mediated by families. This is by no means entirely concerned with 'public parenting', but the forces which stimulate connection between children and their peers' parents can be exploited for other connections in the neighbourhood, contributing for example to neighbourly concern for isolated older people. Why were these kinds of social relationships seen as the default in many places but they are not now?

Here are some contributory factors that come to mind:

• routinised lifestyles and a high proportion of mothers as housewives
• lower car ownership, with playable streets
• more local employment and local schools, to which people walked or cycled
• availability of local trade, ditto
• ties that overlapped in the spheres of leisure and workplace as well as home environment
• a heritage of deference to authority (which depended often on unhealthy, disempowering relationships)
• housing that people valued.

I do not overlook the disadvantages of close-knit neighbourhoods, but for once I am not going to bang that particular drum.

Some of the subsequent social changes are desirable, some perhaps not. Some are subject to tweaking through policy influence; others, like the transition from an authority-based organisation society to an initiative-based network society, have too much momentum and are long-since out of reach of significant policy influence.

What strikes me, reflecting on the remarks quoted and the little list above (additional suggestions welcome), is that policy makers might sensibly reduce the rhetoric about greed and responsibilities, and focus more on the circumstances of life in neighbourhoods which help to establish and reinforce local social connections - like promoting local schools to which most of the pupils are expected to walk; genuinely discouraging large supermarkets, and supporting local trade; moving far more quickly to help the beleaguered local pub trade; actively and purposefully promoting local clubs and associations, and so on. It would be good to see schemes for playable streets and some serious efforts to reduce car use. And given the wretched plight of the housebuilding 'industry', let's give airtime to some ideas for reinventing social housing.

Cohesion and disturbance

Could this just be coincidence? Research carried out for Regeneration & renewal by Experian, reported here, shows that '71 per cent of riots occurred in local authority districts ranked in the bottom 10 per cent for social cohesion.'

In most of the areas people who have been trying to make a difference will be disheartened by conclusions like this, although my recollection of the Experian Mosaic system is that it is surprisingly specific.

According to the article, we're talking about

'some of the most disconnected communities in the country'.

That's 'disconnected' in terms of local social relations; maybe not in terms of the reportedly heavy use of Blackberry Messenger by a small proportion. And probably not at all connected in terms of the kinds of social capital we know can be generated by online neighbourhood networks.

Say, here's an idea. Why don't we invent some shared ways of bringing people together at local level to stimulate cohesion and involvement, and help people to influence the decision-making processes that affect them? We could call it, oh I don't know, something like 'community development', how does that sound?

It could be exactly the sort of thing the government would be interested in supporting, especially since it's a lot less expensive than having disconnected communities.

'I didn't know I could': museums and young people looked after

Last year I worked with Rebecca Linley and Martin Dudley on an evaluation of museum-based activities with children and young people looked after, and we were surprised by and impressed with the outcomes that we found.

Our report (the MaCLA report) has now been published by Renaissance East of England, along with a summary and some case studies. The main points are these:

• The young people gained consistent benefits in terms of confidence, self-knowledge and identity; social skills; cultural capital; and learning.
• These outcomes can be attained reliably and sustainably, and can probably be accessed for considerably less than £30 per young person per hour.

These are young people who either experience exclusion or are at risk of being excluded from many social and economic opportunities and benefits. The work is empowering because it targets young people’s options for empowering themselves.

The observations and interviews were instructive in helping us appreciate some of the nuances of inclusion. In one instance a fairly withdrawn young man was ‘drawn in’ by the others in the group in sessions he attended. They arranged to meet up independently and invited him along. His carer told us that he did not mention it at the time and so he did not go. Her interpretation was that

‘inclusion has never happened to him before.’

These were initiatives designed exclusively for children or young people who are looked after. They were based in museums (although several initiatives involved extra-mural visits), and involved some kind of activity (usually both group and individual activity) such as drama, design, craft etc. The activities varied in number of sessions and duration, from a single to fifteen sessions and from 90 minutes to five and a half hours. The age range was 7-17 years.

We argue that the activities are low risk and inexpensive; not addressing the young people’s needs is high risk and expensive.

 

Public space: overseas thoughts from back home

Having referenced Hugh Schofield's thoughts recently on 'the fact French and other European societies are more socially-minded,' I spent most of the past week in southern France. I'm just unpacking and found a few loose thoughts about public space. I'm certainly not in a position to imply any conclusions about cultural differences, these are just reflections.

When I first went to France, it must have been about 1967, I remember commenting on the constant background sound of emergency sirens in urban areas. I'd make the same observation now, it's so dominant. Who knows, there may just be some connection to the extraordinary French appetite for minor road collisions: there were four within metres of me at various times over four days.

So it's a relief to observe that the French seem far less likely than the English to use their mobile phones while driving. I saw only one instance. In terms of offensive behaviour in public space, using a mobile while driving displays stark disrespect: it says unambiguously, 'my conversation is more important than your safety'. That's one reason why it's depressing to be returning to the British public realm.

Public space in England is mcuh more information-intensive. In France there are fewer advertisements and signs - in train stations for instance, which can be remarkably dull - and on the trains and buses there are far fewer announcements. If you get on an inter-city train in the UK you are bombarded with announcements, about your ticket validity, destinations and bacons burgers, along with concerted attempts to catch you out and criminalise you. When you look out the window at a station, all sorts of information competes for your attention. Perhaps it mirrors the difference in food cultures. In France, the public realm doesn't rush you.

And the more restrained approach to information provision may have subtle social consequences. If you need to know something, you ask - that is to say, you engage with others around you. Perhaps we have here an instance of Kev's Automatic Door Principle, which notes that there are distinct advantages to using technology to open doors for us: especially for people who use wheelchairs, also of course if you are overloaded with luggage; but automatic doors do not have to be held open for the lady with the stick just behind you, or for that bloke with the buggy just approaching. This is technology confiscating tiny social interactions. Information overload in the UK could be doing something similar.

Uninvited encounters on the street seem far less frequent in France. If I walk through a town in England I know I will be accosted by people thrusting pieces of paper at me, people asking me for money or opinions or time. It could be argued that this is an acceptable part of the bustle of the urban public realm. I did note however that on the one occasion last week when I was offered a leaflet in the street, the lady said 'Bonjour m'sieur' as she held it out: that reflects a fundamentally more respectful attitude to the Other's retractable right to privacy in public.

What else? Smoking and dog shit. Smoking seems still to be far more prevalent than it is in England, a phenomenon that continues to surprise me. Given that it's a great way of trashing your taste buds, how explain its popularity in a nation of people who pride themselves on taking food seriously?

It seemed to me that there is far less obesity in France. If nothing else, that helps make sure there's enough public space for everyone. But then I wasn't always looking around me because it really is necessary to keep an eye on where you walk. The ubiquitous ladies with lapdogs, they're probably the experts at negotiating the pavements.

Just as we've taken a regulatory approach to smoking in the UK, we also use the law against dog-owners who allow mess. Apparently not in France. Maybe it's just another of many apparent contradictions in the French 'vive la similarité' love-hate relationship with regulation and universal standards.

But having been away from France for some years, what struck me afresh was the sense of generalised respect in the public realm. When you go into a shop, you say bonjour, and merci au'voir when you leave. When you sit down on a train or get into a lift, likewise you acknowledge the Other. This was emphasised with perfect clarity for me on the train home, as a loud party of Brits got on at Avignon, oblivious to the way they disrupted others' space. I'm inclined to agree with Schofield, the French really are more socially-minded, and there are things we should be thinking about.

 

Income inequality and violent crime

The Equality Trust have published a research digest on the effects of income inequality on violent crime, noting that:

• There is a relationship between inequality and homicide. It has been found in many different settings.
• Research has shown that small reductions in income inequality cause large reductions in homicide.
• This relationship seems to be part of a more generally divisive effect of inequality, which weakens the social fabric.

 

Localism and equalities: dark age ahead

Over recent months I've been party to a few conversations about threats to the equalities and rights agenda posed by public service cuts and the coalition government's apparent enthusiasm for throwing out safeguards.

An example came up just the other day, with Children's Minister Tim Loughton quoted as saying that 'it is a "nonsense" that some carers have to get permission for everyday activities such as haircuts or sleepovers'. Yes but no. In many circumstances it's highly desirable that the parents of a child in care are encouraged to retain responsibility for precisely these kinds of decisions. As a foster carer there are definitely cases in which that is what I would want to happen, in the interests of the child, however awkward it may seem.

Only bureaucrats benefit from excessive regulation, but when you start looking at why some safeguards are in place there are usually minority interests at stake. It's depressing to have a minister of government showing such a nuance-free disregard for the rights and needs of parents.

I got onto this because I've been reflecting on the latest paper from the International Longevity Centre, on localism and neighbourhoods. Authors Dylan Kneale and David Sinclair argue that

'The Localism Bill should include greater safeguards to ensure that the rights of marginalised or minority populations to access a full range of amenities and services locally are protected.'

They go on to call for

'a joined-up approach among bodies representing minority and marginalised groups to research and lobby for changes in the way spending cuts affect marginalised populations.'

I didn't realise that it's well over four years since the ILC published their excellent paper on lifetime neighbourhoods - no less insightful or important now.

The present document is an update to that thinking, in a less sympathetic political context where for example we no longer have CABE to defend and promote good quality design of neighbourhoods, and instead we have the bizarre and nasty government fad of bashing planners and the planning system.

Dark age ahead, as Jane Jacobs foretold.

So remind me, what was the problem with multiculturalism?

I'm a month late getting to it, but am more than happy to draw attention belatedly to this tidy post about multi-culturalism by the dependable Rob Berkeley.

If like me you've been suspicious as to why people of influence have been trying to put the boot into multiculturalism, it's worth a read. Or even if you haven't. As he notes, the term simply means

'the existence and recognition of different identities in a shared political space within a framework of human rights.'

Ah, maybe that's why our leaders don't like it? Doh, it's about power, innit. Berkeley notes:

'Mr Cameron may find that policies that:

    • Remove the poor from housing in affluent areas;

    • Deter students from poorer backgrounds from entering university;

    • Create constituencies that disenfranchise the third of black and Asian people not on the electoral register;

    • Increase youth unemployment (which is already double that of white communities for Pakistani youth); or

    • Increase tension between black and Asian young people and the police

…do not help in creating meaningful or positive contact between people from different backgrounds. Similarly, a patchy commitment to human rights, whether votes for prisoners, detention of children and the suggestion last week from Policy Exchange that we withdraw from the European Convention, cannot help in establishing what core values we expect from each other and our relationship with the state.'

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

It’s obvious that informal support and social networks can be critical to the way society looks after its members. When people can use their social networks to get support without going through formal agencies, there are social and economic benefits. Has the time finally come for this logic to be recognised in policy? (Image from Viil Lid).

I happen to think this is quite a big deal. I’m just back from an utterly absorbing study tour in the Netherlands, organised by my friend Jan Steyaert for researchers from the Centre for Social Justice in the UK. We were exploring policy issues around the changing nature of social care in the post-welfare society, and Eindhoven is replete with thought-provoking initiatives and articulate people who have been reflecting on the significant shifts implied for practitioners and citizens. I tagged along to make wonky observations in the background, a role to which I seem to be peculiarly suited.

The basis of lots of urgent fresh thinking is the 2007 Social Support Act (known as the Wmo) which requires a shift in care work and social work towards what is known as ‘welfare new style’. Of course, as in the UK and elsewhere, much of this is driven by the mismatch between increasing care costs and shrinking public funds; but here, unlike with big society, there is immediate and valuing recognition of people's pre-existing connections.

The main points that dominated discussion of Dutch care practice were these:

• Focus on the strengths and resources of the individual, not on their problems
• Map, stimulate and involve the individual’s social network as a key resource
• Emphasise collective rather than individual support solutions
• Use professional care as a ‘last resort’.

I think this is both radical and exemplary. Quite apart from the community development principle of bringing collective solutions into the frame, here we have at last got governmental justification for stimulating social networks, with policy makers pushing care agencies of all kinds to pay due attention to people’s social connections. For example, one disability adviser who visits people with particular needs begins with a conversation based on a simple social network mapping template. Expect to see rapid standardisation of social network mapping in the Dutch public sector.

No-one seemed to know how the idea came so marvellously to be given such primacy, but here it is. And the logic is straightforward. For a long time it has been apparent that formal care is too dominant, has unacknowledged negative effects, and is provided at unaffordable levels. Ergo, we need to recognise and invest in informal support; ergo, we need to emphasise and encourage social networks – especially at local level. Why has this not happened before or elsewhere? Is it because we don’t make measureable claims for the part played by social networks, because we can’t see the results? Is it because no budget gets attached to them, so no-one with influence wants to ‘own’ them? Incidentally, this is not about consigning professional care to insignificance, but about re-establishing an appropriate balance between formal and informal.

In theory the Wmo seems to use the term ‘informal care’ with reference mainly to long term intensive carers. But the term seemed also to be used to imply what we might call informal support, thus covering a broad spectrum from low-commitment, dip-in dip-out five minute neighbouring; through something regular perhaps like weekly shopping with or for a frail elderly person; to high-intensity 24x7 unpaid care for someone with physical disabilities. This breadth of meaning may reflect developments in thinking since the act, and would account for the emphasis on social networks.

One advice worker rationalised the process by saying that as a society,

‘We have to go back to normal and look after each other.’

And so philosophical and anthropological questions about ‘community’ get raised. On what scale and under what circumstances is it 'normal' to provide informal support to others? The nostalgic plea doesn’t work very well, I suggest: some people challenge the mythology of the close-knit community, others point to the downsides and the basis in necessity neighbouring, and so on. Against that, we need some basis on which to establish the levels of trust that can in turn give rise to useable network connections.

An acknowledged problem for the Dutch approach is that many people are reluctant to ask for support, to make claims on their social network, to invest in their social network or exploit it for such purposes. One observation we heard was that in some cases ‘the social network is broken’. Another story concerned an individual who appeared at first to have no appropriate sources of support, then when they went out onto the street with the social worker there was plenty of recognition by others and the individual acknowledged,

‘yes of course I have a network, but I didn’t want the network to know my situation’.

We heard about this on several occasions and in particular in the significant research of Lilian Linders – which I happen to know a little about and which I will describe in a separate post in the near future.

 

 

Intelligence versus racism

The other night I sat in on a session with four boys who are looked-after, attending a museum-based programme in an English town. It’s a super project which they began some weeks ago, looking at the topic of public campaigns. They've gone on to design various elements (T shirts, badges, posters, bags, drama) of a campaign of their own choice, namely anti-racism.

The boys are all aged about 12 and you can be sure none has had an easy childhood. The conversation was all over the place and the behaviour relentlessly disruptive, but sporadically they discussed the topic with impressive maturity.

One lad said with unfussed confidence that if he was asked to speak about racism, he would talk in terms of objectification. There are five more syllables there than his peers are usually comfortable with in one blast. Without pausing, he told us all precisely what he meant by that – treating people of different ethnic groups as if they were objects.

This young black man is growing up in a town which today will host a march and demonstration by an overtly racist group of people who simply are not in his league.

 

'In there, or out here'

On one of my favourite themes, gated communities, check out another little gem from babycakesromero...

'You're looking to come into a non-gated community, so unless you can show me proof of residency for out here, I can't let you proceed...'

Searching for a culturally unifying notion

Along comes a recession, and maybe the political advantage goes to the first to come up with a compelling and uniting conceptual framework. Except, 'big society' hasn't quite engrossed or convinced enough of us. OK keep thinking.

Here's a new collection of papers (via Will Davies) about associational democracy, asking questions about approaches to governance and economics that can 'increase the flow of information, accountability, trust, inclusion, choice, as well as enable individual empowerment and freedom.' And noting in passing that part of the problem is that

'we have become too constrained by an individualised, abstract and largely economistic set of beliefs and practices. So how can we become more collaborative and human, to improve our wellbeing, increase the effectiveness of what we do and manage the processes and tensions of both desired as well as unavoidable change?'

(More useful stuff about la vie associative and associationalism on the Infed site here).

I wonder whether searching for some all-encompassing culturally unifying ensign is ever again likely to be fruitful. Where it seems to work in its own terms ('God Bless America') its consequences seem, er, questionable at best. Big society won't be the last ever attempt of its kind, because we humans don't give up so easily, but it could be that western civilisation has outgrown that sort of large-scale cohesion. Ah of course, what we need is a culturally integrating notion that accommodates the sense of cultural disintegeration (or diversity, if you prefer). 'Small society' could be a good starting point. Let's see what happens.

 

Harvest, neighbourliness and altruism

I generally treat narratives of the decline of neighbouring with cautious respect. Here's a comment responding to a post on the global Irish Central site, raising a valid point about the impact of technology on local social relations, which I don't recall having heard before:

'When I visited Ireland as a child, saving the hay was a community event. The neighbors would pitch in and help each other. The mechanization of farming has removed that shared sense of community gained from helping one's neighbors.'

There's no doubt that community involvement in the economically-critical harvest applied in many countries over centuries. We think of Levin over-exerting himself with the serfs, in Anna Karenina. Excluding imaginative aristocrats, most of the participants in such scenes would have experienced intermittent mutual dependence which defined community for them. The basis was necessity neighbouring: individuals had self-interested motivation for co-operating with their neighbour (and coercive religious practices often did the rest). Failure to maximise the harvest, perhaps with too few hands available to bring it in before the weather changed, seriously threatened the chances of the whole village getting through the winter.

We might also ask about some of the oppressive social structures under which this sometimes tortuous labour was unavoidable (no apols for sounding momentarily marxist) - who was benefitting most from this skilled, physical, coordinated effort? - and therefore the conditions under which the mutual commitment that we call 'community' arose.

By all means we should reflect on the contrasts (and similarities) between local social relations in other societies and those that prevail today. But let's at least recognise that versions of 'community' which may have become scarce and and are now regretted, had their basis in motivations that were not necessarily altruistic, and in economics that were not necessarily inclusive.

The contemporary challenge might be expressed thus: how does neighbourliness and sense of community emerge in societies that lack identifiable, manifold mutual dependence?

 

'They leave each other in peace while they grow old and die'

The persistent problematic weather in the UK, blown-in on the prevailing bitterly cold politico-economic weatherfront, has brought plenty of appropriate calls for us all to look out for older people in our neighbourhoods. I think this is genuine and welcome change: politicians, councils, broadcasters and newspapers have reminded people, and local websites have reinforced the message.

Coincidentally I found myself reconsidering the penultimate chapter of the Tao; as you do. The poet writes of, and appears to favour, a small sparsely populated country. In the famous translation of Feng and English:

'They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbours,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.'

This is deceptive: can Lao Tsu be condoning un-neighbourly behaviour? I wouldn't rule it out; and if you have a neighbour with noisy livestock, there may be a temptation to, er, contemplate their demise. But the poet seems not to be referring to neighbours in the sense of local co-residents. As I understand it, throughout the section he is being prescriptive about how citizens should relate to nearby countries.

This sense emerges from other, less seductive editions, where you feel the translators struggling while trying to be more explicit. Here for instance:

'The neighbouring place can be overlooked, can be so near that one may hear the cocks crowing in it, the dogs barking; but the people would grow old and die without ever having been there.'

Or in this rather ungainly version (trans. James Legge):

'There should be a neighbouring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.'

Well there you go: I think this means that in Lao Tsu's model state, you would be content but not be granted a passport. Whether this favouring of segregation was contrasted with a proactive attitude to cohesive residential neighbouring, we do not know, but it would not be that unusual.

 

Locality, diversity, and internet use

A new study published by Keith Hampton and colleagues confirms that internet use has little if any negative impact on the diversity of people’s networks. There are now fewer and fewer voices claiming that internet use will lead to the rapid descent of the human race into dysfunctional incommunicative bestiality (religious leaders and academics like John Locke in his book The devoicing of society have tried to spread misguided alarmism). Things have settled down a bit lately and hopefully with this research, based on and reinforcing last year's Pew study (which I reviewed here), we can all get back to what we were doing.

(Image from).

The article assesses network diversity and technology use in relation to participation in traditional social settings including public spaces, semi-public spaces, religious institutions, voluntary groups, and through neighbourhood ties. It concludes that the use of social media primarily supports diverse networks through participation in these settings. On the whole, internet users have networks that are more diverse than those who do not use the internet, although causality cannot be demonstrated definitively:

There may be bi-directionality; use of traditional social settings may drive some technology use, which in turn drives more use of the settings.

The importance of local place is thoroughly re-confirmed, even without reference to neighbourhood online sites:

The findings show only limited evidence that place-based relations have less resonance with Internet users; this was in one setting (neighborhoods) for one type of technology (social networking sites) – and an alternative explanation, as has been found in other research (Hampton, 2007), is that those with few neighborhood ties are more likely to adopt social media... Place is not lost as a result of the affordances of new technologies, but place-based networks are reinforced and made persistent.

The authors go on to conclude that social networks may be more persistent now than at any point in modern history.

ICTs afford relationship maintenance in ways that reduce the likelihood that ties will ever become completely dormant. Unlike in the past, when networks of high school and neighborhood ties were abandoned with marriage (Kalmijn, 2003) or migration (Hagan et al.,1996), it is increasingly likely that both the relation and the content of the relation’s messages remain persistent over time as “friends” on social networking services and as data stored and engaged with online. As our finding about the use of social networking services suggests, this directly benefits network diversity and access to social capital.

 

Diversity and representation on local websites

I've had a few conversations and thoughts lately (beginning with the London Neighbourhoods Online [LDN10] event last month) about diversity and representation on local websites. I just wanted to capture them for the time being.

The founders I've spoken to about this have set their sites up with a vague sense of social purpose but no explicit intention to promote community cohesion. The sites don’t set out to be or claim to be democratically representative or culturally representative or accountable.

Those we've looked at in our London study are clearly dominated by people who are relatively affluent, educated and empowered. These are the people who put energy into helping the site grow, contributing and generating social capital (vaguely defined) and civic involvement to sometimes enviable levels.

Around them and among them live clusters of less affluent people, renters rather than owners perhaps, people from minority groups and with English as a second language, perhaps people who may not have home internet access but who use telecoms shops in the high street to call family in other countries and access websites in their own language.

Meanwhile, let's acknowledge that participation on some of these neighbourhood sites can call for a high level of confidence and assertiveness, which may be closely related to levels of literacy. These are text-based environments and the currents are fast-flowing.

Some of our respondents expressed bald criticism of the lack of representativeness, while others suggested that perhaps the sites could make more effort to be inclusive. For example, one wrote:

‘Seems to be for white middle aged people, basically.’

And others:

’I would imagine the website doesnt attract a contribution from a full range of social demographic backgrounds to reflect the actual community as a whole’

‘doesn't seem to represent the diversity of the local community, particularly ethnically and in terms of social class.’

This is more about cultural capital than social capital. Most of the cultures in question have strong family-based networks re-inforced locally. The easy and insensitive English way of detaching ourselves from our elders, leaving them to live out their years in isolation or in homes, is going to seem strange at best to people from Bengali, Turkish or Kurdish cultures for instance. They also network around their foodstores, their cafes and hairdressers, cultural centres and places of worship. So it could be argued that these groups have less need for a structured form of neighbourhood network. This assumption may be misguided. And if it is accurate, there is still a danger in it, which I'll come to.

The logic of the technology allows local ethnic minority groups to set up their own space within or alongside the dominant site. At least one of the sites has tried to encourage this, and it's hardly surprising that so far it has not happened.

We should also recognise that pseudonymity on local forums permits a hidden diversity. We were given a striking example of this at LDN10. On the internet, no-one knows you're a black single-mother who drives a bus. However, that gives no visibility to diverse perspectives.

The point that bothers me is this. Neighbourhood websites are set to increase and to have greater influence. Our survey of council officers and elected members shows recognition within councils that they see online forums as ideal for identifying issues of concern to residents. Local politics gets discussed by those elderly Cypriot men in their local cafe, and it gets discussed on local online forums; but in terms of potential influence over what happens, there's no comparison.

There will come a time when there is a pronounced tension between the legitimate but unsystematic influence of local sites on the one hand, and their lack of representation of diversity on the other. It's worth trying to get in front of that I think.

 

It's the poverty, stupid

Now, a word about the received wisdom that ethnic diversity at neighbourhood level gives rise to lack of cohesion and weakens social relations. There seems to be an assumption that directly relates diversity to perceptions of antisocial behaviour and disorder. It matters because I suspect the assumption influences many actions and decisions in a hidden way, in policy, practice and everyday behaviour.

I recently mentioned a paper by John Hipp (Social networks, 32(2), 2010, subscription required) which hints at a little more complexity: perceptions of disorder are explained by general social distance between individuals, not simply social distance based on ethnicity.

And last week the ESRC published some research on neighbourhood social heterogeneity. The researchers found 'little evidence' of a significant effect of ethnic diversity on people’s perceptions of a neighbourhood.

Among the findings:

• Population turnover does not influence perceptions of antisocial behaviour but is associated with lower levels of social cohesion and trust.
• Living in a low density area is strongly associated with more trusting, supportive and cohesive communities.
• Deprivation has a negative impact on levels of cohesion, trust and informal social control. It also increases the chances of perceiving high levels of antisocial behaviour.
• While there was some evidence to suggest that ethnic diversity is associated with reduced levels of community cohesion, trust and informal social control, the impact is much smaller than that of neighbourhood deprivation.
• The ethnic make-up of an area, either in terms of mixing or dominance, was not significant in explaining perceptions of antisocial behaviour.
• Those living in the most ethnically diverse areas were the least pessimistic about the national crime trend.
• Ethnic diversity does not influence the significant associations between deprivation and negative perceptions of a local area. However the effect of ethnic diversity on levels of social cohesion and trust is dependent on the level of deprivation in the area.

So, it's the poverty, stupid. And attitudes towards people who are poor. There have been people working their backsides off in the field of poverty alleviation and wealth equalities, ready to voice this message to those who would hear it.

So one of my next posts I hope, Clegg inspired, will be about the nastiness of povertyism: I want to ask why there isn't any debate about disrimination against poor people?

Tragedy festers in neighbourhoods

Here's a reminder that our neighbours aren't all shining with bonhomie, goodwill and sugar-coated tweeness. There's a lot of crud that people have to deal with. Diane Dyson has this really remarkable post about some of the tragic lives she knows about in her neighbourhood.

The peculiar persistence of racist hatred

Many years ago I was giving a lecture at a university in Brasil, through an interpreter, and I told a fictional story involving an Irish man and assumptions of violent intent (it was an information science lecture, the point of the story was not political but about available information and the ways in which it can be interpreted). My interpreter, an academic who had spent time in the UK, prattled on a little and people laughed, until I looked over at him quizzically. He said, 'I was explaining, we have the same attitude here towards Polish people.'

I had to retrace the story to explain that I did not imply a racist slur against Irish people, which is what he had anticipated. He then backtracked with the students to retract the anti-Polish slur. And we moved on.

A few years ago I was in Kyrgyzstan with a British study group. We spent one night in the mountains camped in yurts, hosted by an Uzbek woman. We taken aback by an instance of nasty, overt racism from a small exuberant group of Kyrgyz, and our hostess was clearly shaken. Through our interpeter and our behaviour, we offered as best we could what I would describe now as a form of civilised comfort.

Now, with this news from that country I am saddened by the way racist attitudes, against people who happen to be of slightly different stock, escalates to collective wild aggression.

Hard to explain, this apparently universal phenomenon of persistent tribal hatred acted out in uncontrolled violence. Of all the sources I've read that touch on this theme, the most memorable was a curious and absorbing ethnographic study by Mattijs van de Port, trying to understand the 'eruptive character of violence' among the gypsies and the settled people of Serbia during the Balkan war.

It makes me think that those of us who try to pronounce on racism simply from a position of civilised comfort, seem to do so with pitifully inadequate appreciation of the thirst for sensation, the seduction of chaos, the persistence of the primitive, what van de Port calls 'the choice of irrationality,' the comforting adoption of the barbaric, the suspension of civilisation, 'an affinity with some pre-cultural state,' the impermanence of our own truths and values. Having worked recently on a bibliography of racial inequalities, I'm surprised at the reluctance of commentators to go deeper. But it is folly to proceed as if these forces do not need to be explored and understood.

Local activism and a general election

Diane Dyson has an excellent recent post about third places, including this observation:

Early British suffragettes did some of their best community organizing in the town laundries, away from the strong pitching arms of visiting farm boys who lobbed rotten produce at them when the women stood on the back of wagons at village markets calling for the vote.

An exchange of messages with Diane helped me to this recent post about Hannah Mitchell - about whom, to my shame, I knew nothing. It's at moments like this that I feel most keenly the half-hearted incompleteness of my education; but really, for me in late-20thC england, dealing with that lack was trivial compared to the systematised exclusion which people like Hannah Mitchell confronted and overcame.

I invite you to take a few minutes to listen to this reading from her autobiography (scroll down) describing her intervention at a meeting before the general election of 1906. And if your mind happens to be on the fluid nuances of the forthcoming UK general election, this is something to reflect on - not just for the ferocity of the local action against vested interests that was necessary to bring democracy out of the cradle and belatedly learning to walk; but also for the stark political differences and the enviable(?) focus that was possible on causes of social justice.

Well, it would be an insult to those campaigners to envy the context of their struggles, but perhaps politics now does suffer from a lack of distinct causes.

And there's another point to be made, which I am not qualified to explore, about the comparative contribution of women to local anti-slavery activism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the suffragette movement. Maybe someone will tell me this has been done? It's the localness of their action, its morally-forged courage against far broader political forces, and its need to accumulate patiently in order to have effect, that interests me, and from which I feel we should be learning.

Helping with enquiries

An hour after posting here a few thoughts about racism, I was out for a run in the sun and stopped by white van man. 'Do you know of any gypsy sites round here?' he asked. His mate peered at me from the wheel.

When you're moving at reasonable pace and the heart-rate is around 90% of max, it's hard to stop suddenly and reflect on such an odd situation in a country lane. I noticed the sign on the side of the van, suggesting they were building or engineering contractors. My breath-catching pause gave him the chance to explain:

'We've had some stuff gone missing. They've probably stolen it.'

Unfortunately I'm a compulsive information-sharer. It's incurable. If I'd had the knowledge they sought, I have to admit that in that situation I would probably have divulged it. Perhaps harmlessly, and anyway the council website will probably tell them. But I genuinely didn't know, it's years since any of the local sites were used, as far as I'm aware.

I trotted on, with distaste for the collusive presumption in the accusation. And struck by the fact that twice - at the beginning and end of the conversation - they apologised for having stopped me, which is more courteous than is usual.

Ethnicity and racism: contradictions and realities

I picked up a claim the other day that the standard survey question (eg in the Place Survey) "to which of these groups do you consider you belong...?" obliges people to classify themselves in racist terms. I think this may be as much about instinctive resistance to being pigeonholed (a sentiment with which I have much sympathy) as it is about confusion between ethnic categorisation and racism. But I could be wrong.

Racism is crackling away in this country as our politicians (well, some of them) grapple with unfamiliar pre-election tensions, amid predictions of extremist opportunism in the gloomy economic climate. I've just started a piece of work helping my colleague Alison Gilchrist prepare a literature review on 'race inequalities,' which concentrates the mind thoroughly. The volume of practice-related material published in the last few years suggests that the problem hasn't gone away, and may indeed have got worse.

Then yesterday I was in Luton on a study visit, and a woman stood up and said how delighted she had been to come to a country where there is so much tolerance, acceptance and understanding of diversity. She had come to England as a refugee from Bosnia in 1992.

The discussion dwelt for a moment on the claim of emerging extremism in white nationalist and muslim groups, and she was asked whether she felt that a conflict comparable to the Bosnian war could break out here. The day before war broke out, she said, it would never have occurred to her or her family that it might. The eruption of 'irrational' violence may have its prominent history in the region, but I suspect it's natural to live in denial of that, and terrifying to find suddenly that your neighbour wants to kill you for reasons that are rational to them but not to you.

The future of regeneration and the politics of power

Over on Living with rats, Julian Dobson has started and reflected some convened-group thinking about the future of regeneration (here and here).

The debate will be featured in New Start magazine in due course. I think the focus on the relation between economic development and environmental sustainability is spot on. And there's a very welcome jab at the refusal of institutional thinking to recognise its own demise:

'There's a difference between [an] organic, assisted process and the directed, programme-driven forms of regeneration we've seen in the last three decades. The role of institutions should become one of nurturing and supporting what already exists and enabling it to grow, not one of constantly imposing grand strategies and plans.'

Indeed: the main thing stopping the network society from flourishing as it takes the place of the organisation society is, gosh who'd have thought it, people in organisations. The snapshot of this is councils blocking their staff from using social media.

The New Start debate brought out an emphasis on ethics and values, but that seems not to have been linked to the politics of power, as expressed through models of governance at local level.

If we speak about a future for regeneration, we need to explain what is so problematic about attitudes to governance under recent and current regeneration regimes. We can't just elide it or imply that it can be smoothed over. This is a recurring theme on this blog and I won't revisit all the arguments, but I want to get at the issues from the point of view of local groups. (I use three main sources: references at the end).

The first problem is the appropriation of language. The Third Way (let's dignify it with capital letters) has applied itself to transforming the meaning of 'community' into something we're all supposed to recognise, something unfailingly harmonious and positive which will deliver the state's objectives without ongoing state commitment. It relegates conflict to an issue of public management. Jeremy Brent put it like this:

'Time and again "the community" is referred to as an existing and unified structure, there to be consulted and relied on... Local communities are seen as both identifiable and good, with the certainty of their existence posing no problem, and as places where perpetrators of crime do not live. They have a unified and collective mind that identifies "needs" (a word commonly used in connection with community) that a benevolent authority (of course) can and does meet.' (Brent 2009, p245)

Unfortunately it would be hard to deny that the community development field has been complicit in this, or at best docile.

The second element concerns the policy determination of 'community as consensus'. Richard Sennett warned us about this decades ago when he wrote of 'destructive gemeinschaft' and pointed to the distaste for disorder. I reviewed Jackie Karn's Narratives of neglect a few months back:

'Problems arise where consensus is not apparent; or, being assumed, appears to be threatened. The idea of ‘moral community’ which characterised the Blair years requires practitioners to pursue consensus at all costs. In this context, as Karn puts it, ‘community is in essence constituted as unproblematic,’ and participatory practices constitute ‘the community’ as those who participate constructively, cooperatively and reasonably within the process.

'Those who do not adhere to the assumptions of what is best for the community are labelled as ungovernable and subject to demonising mechanisms that exclude them. Groups come to be categorised in terms of governability, which in turn legitimises coercion.'

The third aspect is managerialism, which detaches and sanitises local experience, appropriating it for out-of-reach policy objectives, with assumed consent. 'Community' has been reinvented in corporate liberal regimes, according to Ann Ingamells, as a mechanism of governance:

'it is no threat to neoliberalism if residents in specific localities push for more of a voice and better conditions. Such demands will be managed by (non-elected) professionals (public sector, housing corporations) whose performance is tied to managerial benchmarks and who... will use a variety of means to ‘manage’ such claims, including tight control of information, agendas and meetings, as well as some tightly administered concessions.' (Ingamells 2007, p243)

One might respond that 'twas ever thus; or that there have been many examples in the past decade of inclusive, just and collaborative community involvement initiatives, which I would not want to deny. But what I'm trying to understand is a significant underlying shift in the way power is converted to energy at local level. For the moment, it looks as if power remains where it was but somehow causes energy in neighbourhoods. The entropy is not yet apparent. Or perhaps there is no 'community' equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics.

Where does this leave us? A new government may come in, relishing the new economic realities to justify a debilitating malnourishment of the public sector. The extent to which public agencies can now help people to address collectively the social injustices they might identify is just as constrained, I suggest, by the subtle and nuanced disempowerment through professionalised regeneration and the systematic neutering of conflict and adversity.

In this thin light, Ingamells calls for 'a new repertoire of community development strategies and techniques' and a shared analysis of how it is that we are currently governed. Picking up where she leaves off, I'm wondering how local groups respond to this context, when it is so hard to recapture the language that is used. Here, we are at the same time within and beyond conscientisation: this is about the logic of counter-counter-insurgency.

Brent, J. (2009). Searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate. Bristol, Policy Press.

Ingamells, A. (2007). 'Community development and community renewal: tracing the workings of power.' Community development journal 42(2): 237-250.

Karn, J. (2007). Narratives of neglect: community, regeneration and the governance of security. Cullompton, Willan.
 

The spirit level

Here's a fun short animation to help persuade you to get a copy of The spirit level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which is now available in paperback.

I note that the hardback version is subtitled 'Why more equal societies almost always do better' and the paperback is subtitled 'Why equality is better for everyone'. I infer that people who view society at the macro level are thought more likely to be hardback buyers, and those of us who see things at the individual level, er, maybe don't.

I seem to recall that Ray Oldenburg's The great good place also had its subtitle rephrased between editions. I infer that publishers like to keep librarians on their toes.

Via the Equality Trust.

Up the wrong tree? Social exclusion in the network society

Yesterday, absorbed in that well-known activity of looking for something else, I happened across a book chapter on 'income inequality and the information society'. It argues that poor people stand to be excluded from the information society by being priced out of commercial information services,

'and left with an impoverished and over-stretched system of public provision which is increasingly unable to meet their needs.'

The second bit resonates at least, and it's a curious little discovery just after a colleague and I had a meeting in a borough which has challenging levels of poverty and low levels of technology use.

The author was the much-respected Graham Murdock and the chapter appeared in Excluding the poor, published in 1986 by the Child Poverty Action Group (still listed on their publications page).

It's a good example of the thinking at the time around what was called 'information poverty' and concerns over the levels of exclusion that would result from these things called computers, telecomms and databases. I was involved in a lot of the debates at the time and we thought the threats were very real.

But they did not really emerge. It's hard to say how much of that is down to the refreshing initiatives taken by the incoming Labour government in 1997. Perhaps it was even down to the influence on those policies of people like Graham Murdock. Or were we all just wrong about information use and poverty? Britain did indeed become information-intensive, but we stopped hearing arguments about the widespread denial of access to information for people in poverty.

Then we started to see adverts on the London tube with the mysterious letters 'www'. Around 1999-2000 I served on a government task group tasked to consider 'access to IT'. Suddenly the issue was about people on low incomes getting their hands on the technology which provided access to the information they weren't otherwise being denied. Then came an insistence in some quarters that people on low incomes weren't participating in this tech-binge because the diet wasn't to their taste, ie there wasn't enough content of the right kind.

This was accompanied and then succeeded by efforts to promote a more empowering, less philanthropical approach, which would necessarily mean stimulating self-publishing. Oh and then something called web 2.0 came along, and behold, before long people did publish stuff themselves. (See, in this respect, my thoughts about where local websites fit into this history).

So where are people on low-incomes in all this now? Sorted? If it wasn't about access to information sources; and it's clearly not about appropriate content if it ever was; and for all the rhetoric about 'digital divide' it's no longer significantly about access to the kit or connections; is there still a sense in which people who experience exclusion are constrained in their use of information and communication technology to address their own circumstances? Yes there is, as I and my colleague heard clearly while we sat in a town hall the other day learning about the difficulties of bringing social media to certain culturally self-excluding groups.

We were told about an area comprising mainly white working class families after the collapse of a dominant industry, where the dependency culture is deeply embedded, racist tension is high and levels of motivation to overcome disadvantage are very low.

The neutering effects of this culture are profoundly damaging. I think the central point is this: workers feel that people self-exclude from contexts of dialogue and engagement, so there is little advancement of thinking and no empowerment. This means that the openness of social media may be a non-starter.

From his study of contributions to neighbourhood email lists, Keith Hampton concludes firmly that a significant proportion of people in disadvantaged localities in north America are online and participating in discussions; and also that those contributions afford the formation of collective efficacy in ways that other media do not. This evidence is hugely valuable, but it still leaves us in the UK with a lot of people in low-income areas, who have a connection and spend time online, but are unwilling to participate in digital conversations with others or to engage with agencies online.

Perhaps in time, once again it will come to be seen that we've been barking up the wrong tree, but how do we identify the right one? I'm not aware of any studies at local level, since those I was involved in a few years ago, that are involving people on low incomes themselves in exploring the answers to these questions. I'd be keen to hear of any, cos that's what we need.

Community Conversations

I've been talking about conversations in the community development context for years without being aware of a project called - wait for it - 'Community Conversations'. Galling at first, then immediately inspiring.

Conflict and Change is a group of people working in east London who have backgrounds in mediation work, and they marry this with a community development approach to help local people explore issues of potential or actual disagreement, misunderstanding and conflict.

Conflict and Change recently published a set of learning points from their experience. They've run over 70 conversations with between four and 20 participants in each, including inter-faith, intergenerational and multi-ethnic encounters. I'm told they have just received funding for another three years, which seems like a good thing. The key learning points include these:

• Community conversations impact on participants by finding common ground and increasing respect for difference.
• Good facilitation skills – including an ability to work with conflict - are essential to ensure that participation and energy remain high, and that every person’s contribution is given value.
• It is helpful to develop and utilise partnerships with other agencies to help recruit participants and to ensure that there is a forum for any actions resulting from the conversations.
• The positive and future-focus of community conversations can enable participants to go on to take part in shared activities. In this event, it is helpful to provide training in participative facilitation skills to participants and to partner agency staff so that the inclusive approach can be taken forward.

This experience attracts comparison with Living Library. Community Conversations seems to have a less photogenic style with more emphasis on the local level, is more likely to work with groups, and is more likely to require effort put into the recruitment of all participants. But for both, I'd have thought the pre-negotiation of trust must be crucial; and there are sure to be common lessons which might profitably be shared.

No, the tech doesn't weaken local social ties

The results of Keith Hampton's latest study, on Social isolation and new technology, have just been released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The study surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,512 adults in summer 2008. It finds that Americans are not as isolated as has previously been reported. People’s use of mobile phones and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. Internet use in general and use of social networking services in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

The researchers claim that the number of Americans who are truly isolated is at most only slightly higher than it was 30 years ago. Few people have no one with whom they can discuss important matters, and even fewer have no one who is especially significant in their lives. But they do confirm a more pronounced change, over the past two decades, in the size and diversity of people's core networks.

These paragraphs, I feel, are important:

Compared to the relatively recent past, most Americans now have fewer people with whom they discuss important matters, and the diversity of people with whom they discuss these issues has declined. There is a wealth of scholarship to suggest that the implications of this trend for individuals and for American society are starkly negative. Smaller and less diverse core networks diminish personal well-being by limiting access to social support. There are simply fewer people we can rely on in a time of need – whether it is a shoulder to cry on, to borrow a cup of sugar, or to help during a crisis.

Small and narrow core networks also impede trust and social tolerance; they limit exposure to the diverse opinions, issues, and ideas of others. If we increasingly rely and trust only a small inner circle of likeminded others, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize, accept or understand opposing points of view. A great deal of research has shown that diversity within our closest relationships – even in the age of the internet – is vital for the flow of information, for informed deliberation, and to maintain the participatory ideals of a democracy.

As we would expect, Hampton and his colleagues clear up some of the thinking about the contribution of technologies to this trend:

What is the source of this change? We don’t know. But, we believe we have ruled out one likely source: new information and communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phone. Our survey finds the opposite trend amongst internet and mobile phone users; they have larger and more diverse core networks.

What about local social networks? The researchers conclude:

Our findings also suggest that there is little to the argument that new information and communication technologies decrease participation in traditional, local social settings associated with having a diverse social network. When we look beyond people’s core network, to their full network of relations, we find that most uses of the internet and mobile phone have a positive relationship to neighborhood networks, voluntary associations, and use of public spaces. There is some evidence that very specific internet activities, such as use of social networking services (e.g, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), substitutes for some neighborhood involvement – the internet allows people to obtain traditional forms of neighborhood support from a social circle that extends outside of their neighborhood. Yet, internet users continue to give support to their neighbors, and the level of face-to-face contact with neighbors is the same for internet users as it is for non-users.

As we know, many people use the internet to reinforce local connections. The research finds that people who belong to a neighborhood discussion forum are far more involved locally than are others. (Previously: Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?)

From the press release:

“There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs,” argued Prof. Keith Hampton, the lead author of the Pew Internet report, Social Isolation and New Technology. “This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite. It turns out that those who use the internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages. People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities.”

Summary. Full report.

A cafe for people with learning difficulties

Sarah Coward has learning difficulties. Her mother Suzanne realised she could use direct payment money to set up a cafe in Sutton Coldfield, offering a place for people with learning difficulties to hang out, socialise and feel enabled to do things which they wouldn’t often get the opportunity to do.

This story comes from a new selection of grassroots stories (with high quality photos) over on Podnosh. Here's the podcast.

Previously, on the socialisation of people with learning difficulties: Juxtaprose 4