Neighbourhoods

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.

 

 

Tracing traces

About a week ago I picked up information concerning two curiosities. First, that the five members of a family that I happen to know, readily share precise location data online and look at what each other is doing during the day, some of them separated geographically by many miles. Some people will find this odd because it sounds like sanctioned tagging.

Secondly, I learned from Robert Macfarlane’s delightful book The Old Ways, of the existence of the Formby footprints. The prints, baked hard into soft mud where the beach is now, have emerged on the shore at Formby Point because of environmental conditions and we are told they are approximately 5,000 years old. Among numerous prints, human and animal, it is claimed that the parallel steps of a man and a woman can be made out clearly. (The pic, by Macfarlane himself, is on the Formby Footprints website).

By coincidence I was in Formby for a couple of days last week, and spent time on the beach at low tide. The prints are hard to find – conditions change and, having been exposed, it seems they are unlikely to last long – but I saw several and yes, they are exciting to a closet anthropologist like me. I happened to speak to a woman who has lived for nearly fifty years within two miles of this extraordinary find, and who knew nothing about them, so I did not feel too ignorant in my belated learning.

The next day in Liverpool, I couldn’t resist this shot of the upturned sole of a shoe that seemed to have been washed up on the dock just outside the Tate Gallery.

Paul Carter in his challenging book Dark writing wrote that ‘Our world is composed of the traces of movement’. Carter was asking why so much of our cultures (he begins with cartography) represents the world as static, when our experience of it is mobile. And so I go back to thoughts of that family who have and welcome the capacity to examine each others’ traces constantly, using their smartphones. It seems like a form of voyeurism that, being approved - just as the revelation of ancient footprints on a beach, and seeking them out and gazing at them, is culturally approved - perhaps exemplifies a fundamental human curiosity for the traces of others. Does this echo themes of privacy, curtain-twitching and looking-out for others in the neighbourhood?

We still have the instincts of hunters.

 

An image of our times

This man’s pointed finger could be a gesture drawing his companion’s attention to the passing Google vehicle. To me, it looks more like a sharp accusation pointed at Google for the sense of intrusion he feels.

The chevrons, contrasting with the wheelchair by implying freedom of movement in all directions; and the blurred faces – a dull concession to the tatty notion of ‘privacy in public’ that some of us grew up with – emphasise the layers of symbolism in this image.

And there’s another. The location is on a seafront in southern England, where in previous centuries members of ‘society’ would have promenaded at certain times in order to ‘be seen’.

 

 

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.

 

 

Blue-sea thinking

A few years ago I took part in a city visioning project in Peterborough, in the low-lying east of England. In a 3D modelling exercise, some of us were putting homes on stilts. I recall that it had to be pointed out to one or two local stakeholders that by 2030, they will probably be under water. (Image via).

The lesson was that this hadn’t been taken on - although recent months of flooding will by now have helped to spread awareness among all but the most bone-headed and selfish (naming no names, some of which are here).

I was reminded of this while flicking through the Guardian’s article and images about floating cities. These places already exist, after a fashion – enormous cruise ships for the flitting unlocated wealthy, who apparently would rather keep circumnavigating the globe than pay taxes to a state – but not yet in the sense envisaged by a few architects, planners and utopians such as the Seasteading Institute.

Either way, in the promo material the sea is nearly always crystal clear and flat. Incidentally, I don't take much interest in films, but I'd appreciate it if someone could direct me to an apocalyptic post-flood movie I saw part of once, which had memorable lines like 'They did something bad, the ancestors, didn't they?' You bet they did.

This is fascinating stuff, and I’m all for an ambitious dose of what amounts to blue-sea thinking, every so often. It’s easy to drift off into some unrealistic scenarios though. Here’s the Seasteading take on the personal advantages of living in a floating village, for example:

‘Personal Freedom - People will soon be able to live in floating cities, and enjoy the freedom of the high seas. As the last unclaimed territory on the earth, the ocean provides the ability to live peacefully without the encyclopedia of laws and tangle of bureaucracies present on land. Seasteaders will be able to start fresh, live with minimal regulation, and explore a bold experiment with personal freedom.’

You might need Californian contact lenses to see things that way, but to me that’s just a cue to think more closely about the nature of neighbouring in contexts where people may not have much choice in the kind of floating neighbourhood they have to inhabit.

What kind of scale are we talking about? What kind of neighbourhood might it be, for instance, if you can’t just get up and walk across some notional blurred boundary into the next one? What are the governance implications? What kinds of social network might we come to depend on?

And who will occupy the physical high ground?

 

Local democracy in action

The bells of St Mary’s church in Ashwell chime every fifteen minutes, day and night. I can imagine that must be fun. But it is said that we don’t like to complain in this country, and maybe you can see why.

Understandably a few residents have asked for the mechanism to be disabled some of the time. Tsk, moaning minnies. The ‘Save the Bells’ campaigners – I’m not making this up – are determined to resist such prissy disregard for tradition, and will turn litigious if their precious din is threatened. Just ask ‘chimes campaigner’ Chris Pack:

"If we have a referendum that asks people if they wish the bells to remain as they are and that referendum is overwhelming, we have the support there and it is captured legally."

He added legal advice would also be sought to overturn any decision which turned the bells off.

Ah, democracy in action eh? If there is some advantage in subjecting residents to routine chiming throughout the night, it is not revealed to us and I’m unable to guess. It would be interesting to reflect on what these campaigners might do with their time, energy and determination if there were pro-social causes for them to adopt.

 

'What kind of neighbour are you?'

I heard this story from a neighbour the other day. It goes back about 30 years, to just before my time in this neighbourhood.

Apparently one of the residents had been knocked down, elsewhere, by a car. A policeman appeared at my neighbour’s door, asking ‘Do you know Mrs N?’ He hesitated - ‘No I don’t think so’ – only to be dealt a stream of invective:

‘Don’t you know your neighbours? What kind of effing neighbour are you?’

He protested: ‘I do know my neighbours but I don’t know that name…’

‘She lives two doors away. You say you don’t know her? How long have you lived here? You’re a disgrace.’

He told the copper that he’s lived here since the houses were built. And of course, it transpired that he knew the lady who had had the accident, by her first name.

As he told me this story I could tell that the police officer’s attitude still rankled with my neighbour. The officer was part of the dominant authoritarian culture that used surnames – and other techniques of course, especially ritual – to contain the risk of personality. I went to a school that tried to do the same.

The pompous and superior attitude is not the only thing that’s changed since then: we don’t submit so readily to the arrogance of people in positions of authority. If I had an official speak to me like that I’d report them. And blog about it.

Previously: Naming neighbours' names

 

 

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.

Social benefits of buses

Margaret Thatcher infamously announced that anyone over 30 who travelled by bus was a failure. Curiously, the government that believes in her eternal reverence has just released three documents constituting a study of the social benefits of bus travel (the reports are dated March but published today).

 ‘Social benefit’ is defined in narrow terms as follows -

‘...the value bus users enjoy from accessing particular services that they would not otherwise have had easy access to’.

Further, the value arrived at only applies to travellers ‘who would choose to not make the trip if bus was not available,’ so again it’s rather limited. But it’s a start, and the significance of the study is clearly that it acknowledges that society has a place for a service that is ‘public’.

It doesn't have to be about measuring the value of a chummy chat about the weather with a complete stranger as you're bumping along. But it might be handy to work out a way of assessing the value of being among fellow citizens in the public realm - and the costs that might be associated with the absence of that experience in certain lifestyles - because that seems to be dangerously under-valued at present.

Previously: On the buses

Parking traumas

A recent survey carried out for the AA suggests that one third of neighbour disputes is car-related:

‘An AA-Populus survey of 23,450 AA members (11-17 June 2013) found that 33% of neighbour bust-ups are rooted in car-related disputes.’

I don’t have access to the questions asked so I can’t tell what is meant by ‘bust-ups’ (or ‘flare-ups’ which is another term used in the media release). It’s a large sample but they are of course all likely to be car users and car-oriented. The two great sins in this field are blocking access to a property; and parking on a designated disabled driver’s space.

I was asked to comment briefly on this finding, on BBC Radio London the other day, and had time only to note the way cars are often treated as an extension of the home, giving rise to a problematic territoriality; and to raise questions about an apparent correlation of aggression and car use (e.g.).

If people spend less time on the streets in their neighbourhood, which seems often to be the case, their perception of the publicness of that space diminishes. When social policy appears to endorse this detachment from the public realm, we can’t really be surprised if there is a growing tendency for people to claim bits of it for themselves.

Two related thoughts. At the time I was unaware of this curious small Polish study which suggests that people who use both a car and public transport have a lower tendency toward aggressive driving, but it seems to confirm what we might expect. Secondly, I heard a presentation last week by Frances Hodgson, who studies sustainable transport: she noted that there seems to be a distinct trend among young people not bothering to learn to drive, on the grounds that they cannot anticipate being able to afford to do so.

 

Exclusion and protest: people left out in the street can make a difference

Yesterday, as various sources report (BBC, Indy), five disabled people lost their High Court challenge over the government's decision to abolish the Independent Living Fund (ILF). Only from Zoe Williams’s less resigned account in the Guardian do we learn that:

‘It's an inaccessible courtroom, so the people who brought the action couldn't get into the room to hear the verdict.’

What an exquisite vignette for the moral bankruptcy of the system. Can the injustice of British politics and the notion of British ‘justice’ sink any lower? We must wait and see. Matt Kenyon’s superb illustration brings a weird sound, a bit like laughter, to the cries of derision.

But there are sources of encouragement. According to Andreas Whittam Smith in today's Indy, action by those victimised across Europe by authorities in the name of ‘austerity’ has brought results:

‘When the President of the European Commission says that austerity has reached its limits, then something profound has changed. The street protests in weaker eurozone countries have made a difference.’

Plenty still to do though.

‘This is a private conversation!’ When we need an official to intervene

I'm enchanted to discover that there is such a thing as the National Campaign for Courtesy. I bet they get some spam. Their chair has been praising the actions of a train driver who made an announcement rebuking a noisy mobile phone user.

The assumption is that ‘the announcement was made because another passenger complained to a guard’. This was a commuter train, and the first class carriage, so perhaps it was neither the first nor predictably the last occasion when the complainant encountered this individual behaving in this way.

Let's pass over the widely-held expectations that people who travel first class either (a) tend to be more civil towards one another than mere plebs, and/or (b) tend to be more assertive about their own importance and rights… It’s more instructive to think about how the story raises a central question in social relations: what is the point at which behaviour perceived as anti-social or uncivil, requires an intermediary?

Should the complainant have spoken first to the phone user? (And in the circumstances, would non-verbal communication, ironically, have done the job?) Some people would say they should have done so. I might have tried that myself, with a smile and gestures towards the ears or a finger to pursed lips.

In the neighbourhood context, where a comparable disagreement arises over noise, the advice is generally to try to speak to and reason with the offender first. Central and local authority websites, housing association guidance, consumer advice materials (e.g.), they all usually recommend that initially a personal, conciliatory approach should be tried.

The story raises a few issues about appropriate behaviour in the public realm and between neighbours. For a start, one-off instances of discourteous behaviour in the public realm are not the same as repeated cases. If you know your journey will soon be over and you are not likely to see the individual again, you may just choose to sit it out.

And community space is not the same as public space. If you live next door to someone whose behaviour you find uncivil or antisocial, your response might not be the same as it would be in a public venue, a park or square, or on public transport, or a non-local online forum, from which you can usually escape - whether or not you feel you have a strong sense of co-ownership of that space.

What’s more, you can’t always count on your fellow citizens to back you up if you do complain. People may not sympathise with your sense of injustice; or if they do, there may be other reasons why they feel unwilling to express any kind of support, which might leave you, finally, heavily dependent on whatever official intervention society has on offer. At its worst, this diminution of social capital can be exaggerated to the point that it puts enormous pressure on those official roles, until they in turn become defensive and cannot cope: think Northern Ireland, for instance, or even the Amsterdam of Anne Frank.

So I have sympathy for the train passenger who chose to refer to the train ‘guard’ (the term used in the report) or ‘steward’ (as we might call them now); as I do for the victims of neighbours from hell who cannot bring themselves to communicate with their tormentors but reach directly for some official intervention. A civil society recognises that humans can still be pretty rugged and occasionally we need officials, accountable to democratic bodies, to keep us from reverting to savagery.

And on the subject of train phone conversations, this seems like a good moment to share one of my favourite anecdotes from the literature, reported ten years ago:

‘A young woman is talking on the cell phone, apparently to her boyfriend, with whom she is in something of a crisis. Her voice projects in far-from dulcet tones. Most of the passengers take up a physical and postural stance of busying themselves with other foci of attention… busy doing “not overhearing this conversation”… Except for one passenger. And when the protagonist of this tale has her eyes intersect this fellow-passenger’s gaze, she calls out in outraged protest, ‘Do you mind?! This is a private conversation!’

Schegloff, E.A., 'Beginnings in the telephone', in Perpetual contact, Cambridge, 2002, p285-286.

 

 

More evidence that driving kids to school isn’t helpful

Quick heads-up for another Sarah Goodyear article in the Atlantic, discussing research showing an association between exercise on the way to school with ability to concentrate. She refers to a survey of nearly 20,000 Danish children and young people aged between five and 19. That’s quite a handy sample:

‘It found that kids who cycled or walked to school, rather than traveling by car or public transportation, performed measurably better on tasks demanding concentration, such as solving puzzles, and that the effects lasted for up to four hours after they got to school.’

I do like to see research that demonstrates what is surely pretty much commonsense, but in a way that most of us hadn't thought about.

All the same, I don’t want to spoil the story, but I should note that for most of my secondary school career I either cycled or walked between 2.5 and 3 miles each way, and was never any good at concentrating on anything other than my lunch or sport. Nor have been since.

Goodyear concludes:

‘Many parents pay for test prep and after-school enrichment programs to make their kids more academically competitive, and go to great lengths to schedule time for those activities. Imagine if they invested those resources instead in something as simple as helping their children to travel safely from home to school on foot or by bike, arriving ready to learn.’

Anti-locality: the tube map

Publicity about the 150^th anniversary of the London underground has drawn me back to Harry Beck’s famous 1933 map (1931 draft here) which abandoned the insistence on geographical accuracy in favour of ease of interpretation and use. This Atlantic article shows the evolution of the map over the century and a half, clearly confirming the paradigm shift that he accomplished (more here).

It’s refreshing to talk about 150 years of urban history without being drawn into talking about ‘how everything’s changed’. The tube map has changed little in the 80 years since Beck’s was adopted, but we can use the previous maps to try to imagine the current level of complexity if it had not been.

The fact that his contribution was unsolicited and took two years to be accepted is a wee lesson on sources of creativity for managers everywhere, although largely wasted on most of them of course.

More useful perhaps is the opportunity it gives us to reflect on how universally-applied maps relate to the physical reality perceived around us. Beck’s reconfiguration of this reality is not always helpful. For instance, people unfamiliar with London might well get on at Charing Cross to travel to Embankment; and emerging into the light discover themselves within one or two hundred metres of the point at which they went underground, having travelled three sides of a buried vertical square.

The point Beck’s map highlights for me is that underground there are few landmarks, and our bearings are vulnerable at best. Here we are extraordinarily dependent on the information supplied to us by signage and which we cannot confirm or augment except by correspondence with our fellow human beings, all strangers.

As an environment it is thus an exquisite anti-locality (I won’t say non-place). The first sense in which you are here, by which you locate yourself, is because of a huge layered construct of information. You are not at Holland Park or Parsons Green or Chalk Farm, you are somewhere unrecognisable way below the surface, or believe yourself to be.

Having good reason to trust the information that you may or may not have absorbed, you let yourself be guided through tunnels and up moving stairways where you sense light and cross into the world you can confirm as Holland Park or Parsons Green or Chalk Farm. There you re-adopt your sense of being-in-place, intact and in perfect working order. What a marvel.

The unruly element (it's just a shot away)

If you ever feel you need reminding, against the general steady flow of filtered public opinion, that maybe the past wasn’t entirely devoid of anti-social behaviour – or that when anyone got a little boisterous it might not just have been high spirits – try this short interview extract (at about 17:20) with a not quite obscure popular music combo from a bygone age. (Six days left to listen).

The band in question had their kit trashed at a gig. Note the diffident, cultured accents, non-judgemental mild fascination at the episode, the interviewers' phrases like ‘an unruly element,’ and the question which begins ‘You must have been in some wild scenes before…?’

Wait, there's more. An account (at about 40:33) of some chap in 'bright purple velvet trousers... gaily embroidered collar and cuffs' - think Malvolio - reflecting that 'one perhaps doesn't ask for responsibilities... Perhaps one is given responsibilities when one is pushed into the limelight...' Thank you beeb.

 

Power points

I’m a bit late catching up with this, but it’s too good to pass over. Atlantic cities ran a piece by Will Doig about how New Yorkers got access to electricity to power their portable devices in the wake of hurricane Sandy:

‘In Midtown Manhattan, where the lights are still on, residents have strung extension cords out to their stoops.’

I’m surprised there weren’t more examples of civic mutual aid and self-help; perhaps they just remain undiscovered.

The article goes on to ask whether city councils might not do more, hurricane or no, to facilitate access to power sources – crediting New York, in passing, with having installed ‘42 electrical outlets throughout Bryant Park, making it the first fully-wired public park in America’.

So let’s turn to the comments, one or two of which reveal the tortuous brainlessness of the anti-public-service, Don’t-Tax-Me mentality. Some respondents feel the idea that a city’s authorities might help citizens to help themselves, by sorting access to electricity in a crisis, as unacceptable. No doubt they will reach for their guns in defence of the freedom not to help or share. These are real human beings, it seems, and probably have been educated:

‘Free fuel for our cars next?? Hell, let's be BOLD and just make EVERYTHING free, and available to everyone, all the time, without limits of any sort. Yeah, that's the ticket. Utopia, baby!’

According to one link provided in the comments section, it costs just 38 cents per year to charge an iPhone. Their convenience as devices for people to support one another in time of crisis is obvious. America’s real crisis is the proportion of people who do not understand collective value, being quite possibly in denial about state provision from which they have benefited.

I witnessed this quite graphically in New York once with friends, when we saw a fire engine jammed in traffic, siren blaring: no one made the slightest effort to move out of the way, presumably determined that a publicly funded service meant for someone who was just unlucky wasn't going to delay them in their individual progress.

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.

 

Hurry up please, it’s time for discourse

In any neighbourhood there are several kinds of time. In a delightful short paper for the ESRC ‘temporal belongings’ programme, Alison Gilchrist writes (perhaps I should say ‘wrote’):

‘time flows are rarely aligned between the different ‘players’, resulting in hidden tensions, impatience, token gestures, fragile decisions and fraught meetings. Calendar and clock time is used to co-ordinate the contributions of various stakeholders but this regulated time may not be a universal reflection of how community members perceive the way time flows through their lives, with its unpredictable eddies, pools and torrents.’

Alison’s paper prefaced the Temporal conflicts workshop in Manchester this week where we had a fascinating discussion of these and other issues. Referring to a neighbourhood where he’s worked with local people on a community garden, Ronnie Hughes highlighted the contrast between political (or developers’) time and residents’ ‘gardening’ time. And it doesn’t take long to pinpoint some of the other kinds of time, such as -

• children’s time
• car drivers’ or commuters' time
• older residents’ time
• environmental time
• internet time
• institutional time, and so on.

It would be hard to capture all the insights in the workshop around, for example –

acceleration, rhythms of everyday life (Marli Huijer), co-ordination, spontaneity, ‘the value of impatience’ (Jess Steele), routine, ‘meanwhile time’ (Katie Hill), the importance of incomers (Irene Evison), the analogy of dancing (Naimh Moore) as being required to keep the beat (ie consensus), chaos as a nuance of time (Jen Southern), the weakening of corporate memory in key agencies (Angus McCabe), animal and plant time (Chris Speed), letting things go and ‘moving on’ from the past (Alison Gilchrist), hegemonic time (Rob Trueblood), different kinds of ending (Graham Crow), how today’s stars in community action ‘can become tomorrow’s black holes’ (Mandy Wilson), and many more… (I hope my fellow participants will excuse any mis-attribution).

Accentuating the theme, all the presentations were tightly constrained five minute ‘lightning talks’. My own contribution, headed ‘Is internet time different?’ offered examples of the immediacy of online; the ways in which expectations in the timescales of agencies and residents are now sometimes reversed in the online world, with officials now sometimes struggling to keep up with local action; and the refreshed appeal of local history online.

I was the first speaker of the day, and got through breathlessly before the brutal buzzer sounded, by virtue of three double espressos, providing an experience of ‘caffeine time’. I could not resist misquoting the famous misquote of Pascal, 'I would have prepared a shorter talk, but I did not have the time'. My final slide showed a question from the 2010 Online neighbourhood networks study, in which we’d asked people if they agreed that in online forums ‘discussions sometimes move too quickly to allow proper reflection’. (For the record, only 30 per cent agreed or strongly agreed).

A key message from the workshop, for practitioners, is recognising these different experiences of time at the local level, and the ways in which their intersection sometimes causes conflict but sometimes creates benefits. The question arises, what are the options for social technologies in helping people deal with these multiple times?

I almost always enjoy sessions that bring academics and practitioners together. As I left hurriedly for another meeting, ha, I was reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘discourse’. Originally it meant running hither and thither, with an obsolete meaning (according to Merriam-Webster) of 'social familiarity'.

 

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.

 

In the nabe-or-hood: an etymological excursion

‘the kids can’t get ice cream

cause the market burned down

and the newspaper sleeping bags

blow down the lane

and that goddam flatbed’s

got me pinned in again’

Tom Waits, ‘In the neighbourhood’ [Swordfish trombones] 1982.

There are nuanced ways of describing where you live, which may well reflect class differences – people who live on gated estates don’t call it an estate, they call it ‘community’. What does the American use of ‘nabe’ rather than ‘hood’ tell us?

Henry Grabar explores the history of the terms in yesterday’s Atlantic, uncovering for instance a 1922 reference to a ‘nabe gym’ as well as the more regular ‘nabe theatres.’ ‘Nabe’ predated what he calls ‘the back-end shortening of neighbourhood,’ which began with a Chicago gang in the 1960s.

It seems use of ‘nabe’ increased significantly in the 1990s, generally in connection with ‘wealthy and gentrified’ localities – places that were definitely not seen as ‘hoods’.

Discussing the origin of ‘hood’, Grabar observes that, to some,

the original sense seems to be lost, and perhaps irrelevant, rubbed away by time and frequent use. To others, no doubt, calling an up-and-came neighborhood a ‘hood’ imparts a coveted sense of black authenticity.

Perhaps if the differences between black hoods (remember the use of the word ‘ghetto’?) and white enclaves had been less pronounced in the US, this might have become a case of assimilation and we would have seen trendy gated estates referred to as hoods. Grabar senses that

the word ‘hood’ seems to be gentrifying nearly as fast as its brick and mortar counterparts.

The article is a useful reminder to pay attention to street culture for its linguistic innovation and power to reflect social contrasts. That doesn’t mean a kind of ‘no pressure’ irony attached to Plan B – yes, some of us might dare to harbour expectations of what the writer-rapper can achieve after ill Manors, but please, no assimilation.

Grabar concludes that

hood and nabe may be converging, but they don’t mean the same thing yet. The nabe… is a place you try to live. The hood is still a place you try to leave.

By way of a footnote, and to add a little European perspective on this excursion, here’s a wee curiosity about the etymology of ‘neighbour’ and ‘neighbourhood’. Although the former is clearly quite ancient – Chambers’ etymological mentions Old High German, Old English West Saxon, Old Icelandic and so on – the first recording of ‘neighbourhood’ meaning ‘vicinity’ or ‘environs’ (meaning an approximate place irrespective of residents) does not arise until 1577.

Of course, ‘neighbour’ implies a consequent neighbourhood, and the etymology reinforces it. The word neighbour (neah-gbur) meaning ‘near-dweller’ - or, in some interpretations, the person who tills the near (next) field - is etymologically linked to the word ‘borough’ (burh, burg), a bounded place of dwelling, which in turn has links to the meaning of stronghold, fort, mound (‘barrow’) etc. There’s even a slightly far-fetched link (Italian, borghetto) with the word ghetto.

Ah OK, maybe I should get out into the vicinity more.

 

Which is worse, unplayable streets, or no front gardens?

We have smaller households and more cars between us all (1.14 per household: some of my neighbours appear to be collecting them). A new report from the RAC Foundation shows that

‘the average car is parked at home for about 80% of the time, parked elsewhere for about 16.5% of the time, and only actually used for the remaining 3.5%.’

Each requires a parking slot at each end of each journey. Where should we put them all? Apparently about 80 per cent of Britain’s 26 million dwellings were built with a front plot. That’s nearly 21 million properties. The press release says that

‘Almost a third of these plots have been turned into hardstanding. This means seven million front gardens now contain concrete and cars rather than flowers and grass.’

But 25 per cent of vehicles are still parked on-street overnight, and this rises to a choking 60 per cent at the highest densities.

I don’t know how far it’s been heeded, but the government introduced guidance on the permeable surfacing of front gardens in 2008, noting:

‘From 1 October 2008 the permitted development rights that allow householders to pave their front garden with hardstanding without planning permission have changed in order to reduce the impact of this type of development on flooding and on pollution of watercourses.’

Recent research confirms that car use is rather more susceptible to policy influence than car ownership. But when the choice is reduced to having no front gardens or having unplayable streets, maybe it’s time for a behaviour change approach to this peculiar cultural obsession.

Previously:

Front gardens

More on front gardens

The right to an impermeable front garden?

Local democratic participation and parking

 

How does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past?

Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours, Cheek by jowl, which I’ve already referred to a couple of times, is packed with little anecdotes of neighbour relations in England since the late medieval period. I’m left in awe of her achievement in accumulating so much absorbing evidence. The pace is sometimes a bit breathless as story follows story; and the author is never in a hurry to offer a theory or generalised conclusion from what she’s shared. But the style is very readable, laced with occasional dashes of light humour.

So come on Emily, we all want to know: how does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past? In spite of her general coyness as far as conclusions are concerned, this bit sounds pretty confident:

‘Active neighbouring has declined, but latent neighbouring has remained. Most neighbours still trust each other and will help out in an emergency. Who would want to return to traditional neighbouring, if that came with the hardship and lack of privacy that fostered it? Modern neighbouring has a different character because the context is different. We rely on neighbours less; we can be passive neighbours.’

Sounds about right to me, and it pretty much fits with other conclusions such as those of Mary Godfrey and her colleagues. My take on it would be something like this:

One form of neighbouring that has almost certainly declined is what we might call ‘negative neighbouring’ – a moral governing culture typically referred to now under the label ‘curtain-twitching,’ which had evolved to establish and reinforce norms, and those norms extended into gender, racial and other stereotypes.

Of course there are plenty of contemporary anecdotes about this form of neighbouring but I don’t think anyone is putting forward the argument that it is more prevalent and influential today than it was 60 years ago.

If we think of some forms of neighbourliness in more neutral terms – just knowing and recognising people whose help could be mobilised in time of need – it’s probably fair to say that the numbers of local people we know in this way have decreased. But that may not be at all critical if, as for most of us, the number of people we know whose help we can summon readily has not decreased. Even if some or many of our contacts are not going to be physically within reach in a home-based emergency, their power to engage appropriate neighbourly support may still be strong.

Finally, what about what I have called ‘supportive’ neighbouring, the sort of behaviour between co-residents in which people go just a fraction out of their way to be supportive and imply readiness to help in time of need, without transgressing the norms of privacy? I really have my doubts that this has declined to any great extent if at all.

Where Emily and I probably differ though is in the weight given to the welfare state as having ‘crowded out’ people’s readiness to offer support. It’s obvious that to some extent, formal services have taken over occasions such as childbirth when in the past neighbours were more or less forced to depend on each other. We’d expect that the nature of neighbouring would change as a consequence; but it wouldn’t necessarily have declined significantly.

My sense is that if neighbourliness really did decline over the past generation, then of all the contributory factors, the crowding out by the welfare state was not one of the most important. The availability of organised social care for those who needed it not only made life more liveable for millions, it probably had far less of an impact on positive neighbouring than did the availability and use of cars; television; new forms of housing; comparative wealth; population diversity; and a cohort of women in the labour market.

And so, as I wrote here:

‘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.’

I do believe that when residents connect through neighbourhood online networks, where those are collectively-oriented, the potential to resolve this challenge is significant.

Against that, as I’ve said before, investing in formal initiatives in order to generate local social connections may be of limited value, being back-to-front. Emily's pretty emphatic on this:

‘Good Neighbour societies are founded on a notion that organisation will bring about a return to traditional neighbourliness. It will not.’

So with all this in mind, I’m proposing a meeting about the past, present and future of neighbouring, in London in about a month’s time – just before the jubilee street party brouhaha swamps us all with romantic representations of community and soppy insistence on formal mechanisms as the key to revisiting a past golden age of neighbouring… More on that very soon.

The real costs of car use

Here’s a delightful 4 minute video from Mexico explaining how induced demand and misdirected subsidies make the use of cars so much more of a problem than is duly recognised. (Note the presence of the British Embassy in the credits at the end. Should we look to the Mexican Embassy in London to help produce a version for the UK market?)

'I want to recreate that sense of community'

I’m not doing this to be mischievous, honestly. I read the following paragraph, the sort of statement that reaches me about once a week on average:

“I grew up in [N], in a neighborhood where my family knew everyone on the block and we all looked out for each other. All the kids played together, and if we did anything wrong our parents would hear about it from one of the neighbors. I wanted to recreate that sense of community.”

And for some reason, you know how it is, this is what I interpreted:

“I grew up in Placetown, in a neighbourhood where my family knew everyone and truly nasty rumours abounded and there was a lot of obvious domestic violence that no-one talked about and if you were gay you just had to suppress it, and if you were disabled you were patronised if you were lucky but doomed anyway. All the kids played together (except of course that little disabled girl, can't even remember her name) so there was no end of bullying that you had to put up with and if we did anything wrong our parents would hear about it from one of the neighbours, who made it their business to exert control because they’d missed out on promotion in the army during the war, and my god they could be vindictive and brutal. I want to recreate that sense of community, cos I’m like that.”

Yes maybe I'm being a little unfair.. But the rosetinting of community really is unhelpful, because it stifles serious policymaking about neighbourhoods. I know that many neighbourhoods in the past were much better in some respects and much worse in others. Now, can we move on?

 

The problem of civility: a parking vignette

I thought I was lucky to grab a parking slot on the edge of a row, with a yellow crossed box marked on the passenger side. This kind of thing matters if you’re moving from place to place with a growing bairn who is hard to manoeuvre into his seat at the best of times.

I got back to the car to find a large van snuggled up alongside, leaving me enough room to get the door open about one and a half feet. Aware of the potential havoc to my back I cautiously got the bairn strapped in and closed the door. I then heard the van driver approaching to say ‘You alright there mate?’ I grumphed audibly. ‘Where do you want me to park?’ he says, ‘on the roof?’

Er, well how about legally?

‘Oh what you gonna do?’ says he, ‘call the police?’

Which epitomises the problem of respect and civility in public spaces. It’s impossible for any system of government to oversee all potential disputes, so our society depends on most of us taking other people into consideration in the first instance (citizenship), before questions of legality come into play. Some people seem to see inconsiderate acts first and foremost as either legal, or illegal-but-can-be-got-away-with.

One of the popular questions of our time is whether the proportion of the population in the latter category is increasing. I’m more than ever persuaded that this perception is related to the amount of time we spend cocconed in our cars, a peering position which subtly alters the relationship to the Other. And if it is increasing, I think the next question to ask is: where’s the tipping point?

 

Pavement parking: time for windscreen stickers?

As a pedestrian and experienced buggy-pusher living in an outer urban area that has a high car population, I'm pleased to see this: the good folk at Living Streets are cranking up their campaign against pavement parking.

I know parking options are a problem for a lot of people - inadequate housing supply often means several people in the same household who depend on their car (or think they do) for work, living in houses not designed for multiple car ownership. But there are two far worse problems I suspect - unnecessary use which suggests possible unnecessary ownership, and downright inconsiderate parking.

Because authorities have been so slow to crack down on the habit, it is seen as acceptable. What effect will the campaign have?

I suggest it needs universally available stickers issued to all buggy-pushers, wheelchair users and pedestrians with mobility problems, with a legend saying 'please show more consideration to pavement users'. The stickers could be applied to the windscreen and should not be too easy to remove: it should take at least as long for an inconsiderate driver to remove the sticker as it does for a buggy-pusher to wait for a safe moment to go into the road, around the vehicle and regain the safety of the pavement.

Another option of course would be a website with geo-located and time-stamped images - and forget that stuff about blanking out the registration plates.

 

Keeping an eye on surveillance

"CCTV usually achieves very little on its own, it needs to be part of more comprehensive security planning; it works much better in access-managed areas along with a guardianship presence, community support and a response capacity.

Policing, security and crime prevention are social relationships and if these are characterised mainly by division, mistrust and inequality, CCTV surveillance technologies are likely to exacerbate social problems and tensions."

Peter Squires, University of Brighton, in a European Urban Knowledge Network interview.

Running on the roof

'This particular interviewee explains in detail her love of running, and describes the geography of her neighbourhood, distinguished by a letterbox at the end of the road. Such are the gendered and social constraints imposed by other residents of the refugee camp, however, in a place where there is little privacy, that she is forced to run round and round the flat roof of her building instead of down the road, with her husband measuring out the distance in recognisable terms. 'Have I reached the post-box yet?' she reports herself asking, imagining that she is in fact running along the road outside her house, an activity forbidden to her because she is a woman.'

K.H.Adler, in 'Gendering histories of homes and homecomings', in this volume, referring to a video art project by Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal called Roofs: public private open spaces in the camp. According to this note the project was 'produced in a refugee camp in Hebron on the West Bank in cooperation with UNRWA [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency] and the University of Stuttgart.'

The image is from the Occupied Palestine blog.

 

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.

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.

Hurrah, the citizen voice is here

Over on Our Society, Your Square Mile founder Paul Twivy has posted a response to questions posed by Julian Dobson. He includes a couple of rather odd statements.

'Our role is as the citizen voice.'

What can this mean? Was it deliberately intended to sound so incredibly arrogant, or did it just come out wrongly? On what basis can you attract large-scale funding and head off into people's neighbourhoods proclaiming 'we're here, we're here at last, sorry you've been waiting sooooo long, and you with such needs...' (A citizen's voice: 'Well, welcome, nice to meet you. Er, who are you?' YSM: 'We're the citizen voice.' CV: 'Er, I already got one mate. Are you saying I'm not a proper citizen?')...

Wait there's more:

'YSM is about enabling people to make the changes they want to see in their area in their way and not about us imposing ideas from the outside.'

Really? So what are you doing there? Were you elected? Do you have taxpayers money to allocate to services? Were you invited in? And if so, by who?

As with big society and coalition government, we're seeing an insensitive officer-class attitude towards ordinary people in their neighbourhoods - from telling them what to do, through savagely cutting their services in ways they can't defend against, to telling them that important people have come to help them make changes. And expecting to be applauded for this peculiar form of imperialist behaviour. I'm tempted to ask, do you have a flag?

One wonders who's next for the Grand Tour for Saviours of Low-Income Neighbourhoods.

Community and archeaology: streets and people

Here's a sound idea neatly presented, the Streets Museum, tracing lost streets of Salford. Apparently over 1500 streets have been demolished in central Salford in the past fifty years. (Why?)

'We focus on  our lost cultural and architectural heritage, which are intricately related. We gather together fragments of the past, placing them in active spaces of dialogue and encouraging social networking between fragmented families.'

Presumably what this could lead onto is a redefinition of 'lost' and some archiving of the way many streets have changed from being community places to spaces reserved for privatised mobility. And from there, hopefully, to more widespread recognition of the social damage caused by the loss of streets.

But don't expect much soon - remember we have a government that pretends, laughably, that there has been a 'war on motorists' which in brain-free populist mode it wants to 'end'.

Smuggled into the new year blur was this press release announcing the abolition of parking space limits for new homes and guidance encouraging higher parking charges. More evidence of rampant anti-social policy to put the charming rhetoric of big society into perspective.

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?

 

How the government is encouraging people to get more involved in politics

Some observations on yesterday's news. It's about information, poverty and power.

First, I was struck by the extent to which the government's bullying of the BBC has pushed it to the right. BBC TV coverage of events in Westminster was almost devoid of any attempt to analyse why protestors were angry. The BBC has become afraid to say anything that might upset the authorities. Luckily for them, they had a couple of over-paid celebrities to get excited about. (Incidentally, it obviously wasn't just students, there were other citizens protesting. It suits the establishment to explain the protests as just young people being over-exuberant).

I'm perplexed though at the lack of attention paid to the abandonment of education maintenance allowance (EMA), which is a proven way of supporting young people from low income families who want to stay in education. Secretary of State Vince Cable described EMA as 'enormously wasteful'. Well, it helps poor people with the objective of trying to equalise opportunity, so why would this government want to fund it? The arrogance and complacency seem impregnable. And they're surprised that people are angry.

We don't get many opportunities to be proud to be British (and frankly I don't look for them) but yesterday sort-of counts. While Wikileaks has left most of America apparently supine in acceptance of the arrogant stupidity of its bullying powermongers, in London people have come out and shown the politicians and authorities that their stupidity is unacceptable. I use the word 'unacceptable' because the Haves have been queuing up to use that word with reference to yesterday's street performances. And I use the word 'stupidity' with reference to leaders in the US and UK who have completely failed to grasp the role of new communications media in these confrontations. It's laughable how the establishment feels that the old hierarchies built on hierarchical communication systems (most obviously the bible and the pulpit, but by extension the analog divide generally) can still be depended on to keep people in their places.

Yes, the old question 'why do we have such stupid people in power?' applies as forcefully as ever, but it's gratifying that ethical hacking globally, and the use of google maps to outwit the police in central London, are exposing the powermongers' attempts to deny social justice.

One of the tenets of community development is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and this is shown to apply at the national scale. Sometimes in community development we are disappointed at people's reluctance to get worked up about things; sometimes we are taken by surprise at the vehemence of the response. I count myself among those who have been surprised, and refreshed, at the sudden and fierce discovery of readiness to take political action. It has value which is increasing in proportion to the declining credibility of those in government.

 

Home is where you can park your car

Royal Mail published some findings from an online (UK) survey into home moving habits recently, including these headlines:

• More than a quarter of people (27 per cent) said that car parking was most important if they had to move home, while just 17 per cent said being close to family was the top priority.
• Fifty per cent rate being near green space as one of the most important considerations for a new area.
• Seven per cent stated that they would not wish to move their pets to an unfamiliar neighbourhood. (Well blah, how's yer hamster gonna get a rounded education, appreciate diversity and experience different cultures?)

Neighbourliness designed-in

Spiegel Online has an article, 'The challenge of making HafenCity feel neighborly', about a large new city centre development for 12,000 residents in Hamburg.

It's a very protracted initiative with an emphasis on social mix, and on residents and other stakeholders having an input into the ongoing project. The sociologist involved in the development, Marcus Menzl, says:

'You cannot build a neighborly feeling. But I think that architecture can help certain processes and hinder others.'

The pic is from their photo gallery.

Almost certainly not my last word on cars

I spent six and a half hours driving yesterday, to and from a project. It was not possible to use public transport and get there in time on a Monday morning (not without bleeding the project travel budget out on taxis).

Since I very seldom drive for anything like that amount in a month, let alone a day, I just want to record here some very simple thoughts - not so much to do with the small but probably measureable negative contribution I have just made to the condition of the planet, but to do with the fact that this is an utterly ridiculous way to travel. It makes no sense. It's stressful, tiring, anti-social, environmentally-unsustainable and almost completely unproductive. Social capital accumulated? Zero.

I can't do single-tasking, I like to be doing stuff. I can single-task while I brush my teeth, because I have to, but that's about the limit. I find it scary to think that much of our economy seems to depend on millions of people shooting off in vehicles in different directions, not getting anything done while they go.

It was a brilliant project though, featuring drama work with young people looked after, so there was some reward at least for me.

Village fate

The village of Grassington, previously tipped for the prize, has now been 'chosen' for the tv programme in which twelve outsiders

“move into a house in a beautiful rural village and the residents decide who they think is the right person to become a permanent member of their community and win the house”.

Villagers have dwelt on their fate. Will it all end in tears?

Mr Isaacs, who is the studio’s creative director, said his team was looking for a handful of strong local characters who would act as mentors to introduce people to the village.

He said he would like to get as many people as possible involved in voting people off the show, but had yet to “nail down” how it would work.

“We’ll always be available to engage people before, during and after production. We want our relationship to continue,” he said. “We do care about your community, but we also want to make exciting, grabby television.”

That's 'grabby' spelled with an 'a', I checked.

I can see there are understandable views on either side of the debate, but what's striking is where the power lies. Presumably residents did not proactively invite the tv company in, at least not collectively. Now that they have apparently accepted their nomination, I imagine residents are going to find themselves with less and less influence over what happens.

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

The amount of emotional or instrumental support that you receive from your social network, and the amount that you give, can be calculated and represented on a reciprocity scale.

So you might give a lot of practical help to others and not need much yourself at the moment, scoring positively for instrumental reciprocity. You could have been going through a hard time and be needing more emotional support than you've been able to offer others, scoring negatively for emotional reciprocity.

Back in 1992, as I've been reading, some Dutch researchers plotted these scales for a large sample of older people. As we'd expect, instrumental support given decreases sharply with age. The researchers found that instrumental reciprocity began to decrease at the age of 64, echoing that rather crummy Beatles song.

More interestingly, they identified a turning point, where a relative surplus of instrumental support given changes into a relative deficit, at approximately the age of 66. Of course, you can expect your social network to decrease in size as you get older, and your reciprocity scale will also be affected by living in a care home where most of your instrumental needs are going to be catered for. The research seems to suggest that a sizeable minority of older people do deliberately seek to increase the amount of emotional support they give as their ability to provide instrumental support declines.

Unfortunately, as a society we're not very good at providing contexts for emotional support, so that too many older people experience a sense of dependence rather than interdependence, submerged below the hoizontal line in the graph.

I'm hoping there has been some follow up to this research: I've not found it yet, but would be keen to learn of it.

van Tilburg et al. Flow of support. In: Living arrangements and social networks of older adults, VU University Press, 1995.

It'll all end in tears

The London Olympics, a grotesque folly if ever there was one, is throwing up more regeneration issues than it should. Regen and Renewal reports a study by the London Assembly’s Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee (aka life the universe and everything) with concerns that deprived local residents could miss out on the legacy of the Olympic site. Now there's a  surprise.

The report highlights a string of no-brainers for the legacy. Like this for example -

the sports facilities in the park should be made available for community use

and, wait for it,

new homes built on the park must be suitable for, and available to, local people - not just wealthy people moving on to the park.

I know we're dealing with people in suits here, but why does it require a study from a separate and doubtless expensive committee to come up with these not-exactly-revolutionary suggestions? I guess the problem is that the regeneration industry is so preoccupied with the physical world it is trying to dominate, and people are a real nuisance.

Just a thought to be added to my recent blurted critique of regeneration.

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.

Pause, look back, reflect

Julian Dobson uses a handy live metaphor, a 404 on the community empowerment action plan, to illustrate the fickleness of priorities in government policy.

He points to the amount of energy that gets put into whatever is the current Big Idea until it moves into the 'file and forget' phase. I was told at the time of the empowerment white paper that more than 100 officials were working on it, suggesting a CLG equivalent of Parkinson's law, that work consumes the time of as many people as can be made available for it. Julian notes that:

'This form of leadership, sadly, appears ingrained in our political system,'

and goes on to link the syndrome to international political failure in Copenhagen.

To be fair, the CLG website is a large and very fluid organism and I hope we can forgive the occasional 404. I hope we can also recognise that not all politicians have been slow to respond to climate change and not all can be blamed for the failure of the summit.

But the connection between transitory, even capricious, attitudes to policy and critical failures of leadership is wholly valid. I'd like to add that it's part of a wider culture which may or may not be fuelled by government attitudes. This culture includes over-emphasis on novelty and innovation; reluctance to refer to the past of more than a few months, in case it tells us things we don't want to know; and systematic dismissal of the experience of older people.

It also encompasses the cultural devaluation of loyalty. Sports celebrities aren't expected to show loyalty to their teams; nor employers to their employees or vice versa; nor teachers to their schools, nor consumers to their brands. Nor families to each other. Nor, as Julian's post reminds us, do governments seem concerned to remain loyal to their policies. Only people of faith seem to be exceptions to this rule. If young people are supposed to inherit values from the adult world, this does not bode well.

This phenomenon plays out in a curious way in our hurried public language, nowadays saturated with Important Verbs. Take this for example from Steph Gray's Helpful technology blog, coralling verbs from various government departments:

At the FCO, it’s Listen, Publish, Engage, Evaluate. In the DIUS of Justin Kerr-Stevens, it was Educate, Enable, Engage, Promote.

For Steph, it's listening, explaining, engaging, convening. Others commenting think 'connect' and 'collaborate' should be in there. I've played this game meself in suggesting a model for participative evaluation (Listen, Interpret, Play back, Listen, Interpret, Report). And so it goes on. A few weeks ago DCMS published a widely-condemned document called Empower, Inform, Enrich - of which Rachel Cooke wrote 'sounds like a scented candle'.

Why are we all doing this? I suspect the media and politics engine driving this culture can't stop itself accelerating and we're at risk of losing the habit of reflection. I'm not sure I want to be on board. (Just a quick observation, feel free to tweet).

School-run parking

David Hembrow posts about a school stopping ban in the town of Groningen, NL, which he says makes it illegal to stop with a car adjacent to the schools between 8 am and 4 pm on week days.

I've only been to Grongingen once but I remember it as a fairly quiet town: the roads really aren't as packed as urban and suburban Britain. As David says, 'By British or American standards, the rate of children being taken to school by car is already extremely low.'

I always take an interest in this theme because I recall my mother campaigning on it (with some difficulty) in the 1960s, when levels of car-abuse were significantly lower than they are now.

So when I look at the (altogether typical, but scary) images David offers of examples of parking outside a school in England, I find it disheartening. The arrogant selfishness of people when they get into cars has a deep psychology to do with cocooned individual privilege and suspended denial of the interests of others.

Steve Stradling's 2004 study in Scotland found that around a third of those surveyed would be able to shift from car to bus for short trips, but just eight per cent were 'both willing and able'.

Previously: Unwillingly to school?

School run report

Yes, kids walk

The curse of the free rider

Theft and vandalism continue to plague the Paris self-service bicycle hire scheme, Vélib ('la ville est plus belle a velo').

'The Curse of the Free Rider is everywhere' wrote Joost Beunderman on the 00 blog back in March, and in a comment I wondered if it's partly a problem of scale. The scheme in Lyon apparently has been less troublesome. (I also alluded to thefts from public libraries, which are not insignificant but not so high as to endanger the model of a public resource).

According to the Independent,

'vandalism and theft remain so rampant that Paris city authorities were obliged yesterday to come to the aid of the private company which runs the scheme. In less than two-and-a-half years, 8,000 bicycles have been stolen and 18,000 have been damaged beyond repair. In other words, each of the 21,000 Vélibs, which cost €610 (£550) each, have been replaced at least once.'

So the business model changes slightly, but hopefully the idea is not in danger. It would help if it could be demonstrated that the scheme had contributed to reduced pollution engine and influenced health.

Via Regen and Renewal.

Local delivery

Here's a tap at the door early evening, a young lady from the local dairy trying to woo me back (I feel like I'm in a folk song, but it'll pass) to having milk delivered.

I explained that we used to have milk delivered some years ago, but two things changed that - the fact that milk in glass bottles seemed to go off much more quickly than in plastic; and of course the hugely improved ease of recycling plastic.

The lady's siren song was along these lines - we now sell at the same price as the supermarkets, we sell milk in plastic bottles, and of course we deliver to your door. And it was not lost on me that this is a relatively local business, selling milk from farms not too far from here, using the wonderful traditional environmentally-preferable milk float.

I recall the grandly named United Dairies floats from my childhood, and our milkman called Alf who served the same round for I believe it was 27 years. I recall also that, more recently, the father of one of my daughter's friends, in a fit of rage, backed his milk float into the canal. I wish I'd seen that.

The pic comes from the truly reassuring milk floats site (this is what the internet's for!).

Anyway it was refreshing to be asked. Is this part of a general movement apparent elsewhere, I wonder?

Our very own surveillance

Here's a new take on the outsourcing of surveillance. The Beeb reports that a ceremony has been held 'to celebrate the installation of CCTV equipment bought by residents' after two years of fundraising.

Colville Estate Residents' Association raised £16,000 for the equipment in Cherry Hinton High Street, Cambridge.

Councillor Robert Dryden from the residents' association said: "We are the first in Cambridgeshire to have bought our own CCTV."

Gosh, I'm impressed, are you impressed? When charity begins at home, people give generously.

Let's all reflect on the use of the word 'celebrate'. And ponder a few questions. Is the £16k matching funding, or the entire amount required? If the latter, it would be interesting to know why residents did not have the support of public agencies.

Did the fundraising activities not generate sufficient social capital to obviate the need, at least in part?

Who owns the data collected by these cameras?

Busyness

Yesterday to a really buzzy conference on community development organised by Age Concern Oxfordshire, where I had the privilege of speaking alongside CDX's Amanda Greenwood. I talked about neighbouring and older people, and different understandings of 'enfolding community'.

One of the issues I've been pondering but didn't have time to cover is people's varied relative 'busyness', simply having or not having time to interact informally in the neighbourhood. It's an issue that scalds my conscience from time to time when I'm rushing to the station and can only burble a greeting to a neighbour because I've not been sufficiently organised to leave home a little earlier.

But I got plenty of insights yesterday into how older people can experience the contrast between (for many) their own sense of becalmed marginalisation and the relentless purposefulness of others' mobility, and how this affects their occupation of neighbourhood.

With this in mind, I sat on the train on the way home flicking through a marvellous report into a participative research project called Get the picture: older people's day to day lives in rural west Oxfordshire 2004-2007, written by Margaret Godel of Oxford Brookes University. And I came across this quote from one of the participants:

'One issue that stood out for me is how many hours in the day there are to fill if you are alone. One remark that came up a few times was how much time people spend looking out of the window. It's good to be able to do this but sad too that this is all there is.'

Another nuance to be taken into account in the consideration of 'curtain-twitching' or 'eyes on the street'.

After the car

I'm really looking forward to this. Publication 8 May; form an orderly queue.

More here at CeMoRe, or here on the Wiley site.

Privacy and the home

Google Street View continues to expose the fact that we haven't done our thinking about the changing nature of privacy. On Wednesday, residents in the village of Broughton, near Milton Keynes (described by the Mail, which doesn't like to burden its readers with accuracy, as being in Cambridgeshire) blocked the passage of a Google Street View car and persuaded the driver to turn around. Ah the playful rebelliousness of middle England. The Times has them as a 'village mob'.

There's an account here that is altogether more placid.

In the Beeb's report, one of the protesters said:

"If they were simply going to view the street as a street scene rather than drive almost into people's drives and take pictures of the houses - I think that's a different issue."

Almost into people's drives? That would be like what we call 'going past' then, would it?

The Mail managed somehow, don't ask me, to raise the possibility that 'it's an invitation for burglars to strike':

"I don't mind estate agents taking pictures but this shows people how to get in and how to get out."

Getting out as well as getting in? I didn't realise there was so much detail.

But don't we need to get beyond the petty mindedness of the property-obsessed, to reflect on how the house-as-home remains central to our understanding of notions of privacy, even while that privacy has been reshaped by other forces around e.g. data, citizenship and broadcast media?

The excitable defensiveness of wealthy home-owners is not enough to convince me that I have a fundamental, irrevocable human right to stop people looking in my windows. As I recall, Witold Rybczynski's book Home is a good start for understanding how very recent the idea of the private home is in human history. The privacy part of it may already be in decline - not because the notion of 'home' has changed necessarily, but because the notion of privacy is changing.

There are other confusions, such as discussing Street View with reference to the high number of CCTV cameras we have in this country (about 20% of the world's total, I heard recently). But as one comment here notes,

There is a big difference between cctv and streetview for example, number of violent crimes caught on street view isn't quite as high. It's privacy invasion for the sake of privacy invasion.

But that's my point - what do we mean, 'privacy invasion'? Where's the public debate that gets us away from knee-jerk insistence on a vague sense of interference and the self-righteous defence of property?

I can't say I'm particularly bothered about Street View, and the notion of there being people who might describe themselves as 'Street View Enthusiasts' is just depressing. But it's more depressing to have people getting pompously worked up about keeping others away from where they live. If having lots of stuff gets you so fussed about losing it, maybe don't have so much stuff.

And if I find myself feeling that the sight of a car with a camera on it is sinister, I hope I'll have the grace first of all to examine why I feel like that, before squalling for the police.

Anyway, I liked this little comment on the Mail's adjectivally-super-charged coverage:

"I'm outraged! I just saw clear pictures of my street and the houses with kids playing on the road and their little faces not blanked out.

Mind you, they are in black and white and taken in the early 1900s!"

Guerrillas against greed

The Telegraph reported the other day on a variant of NIMBYism which may have gained strength from the recession:

Protesters daubed "No More 2nd Homes", "Greed" and "Go Away" on buildings in a picturesque village where many of the properties are empty for large parts of the year.

It comes amid growing concern in some parts of the countryside that wealthy city workers are pricing locals out of the housing market and turning communities into "ghost villages" by buying up homes that they visit rarely.

Gosh, who'd have thought it? One resident commented:

"People were angry when we lost a craft shop and a cafe because we knew it would be turned into houses. And we knew they were not going to be affordable houses for young local people."

At last, the gentle English are getting fed up with vulgar greed, and they can be a tenacious and persistent lot when they get momentum. Should be fun.

I can't help thinking that the politicians who have been ignoring the arguments for so long must carry some of the blame if things turn nasty - and not just those who somehow are allowed to benefit from dubious development deals.

Another Paper has some pics.

Previously: Second homes.