Neighbourhoods

Formality and informality (1 of 2): Good Neighbour schemes, and the shadow of coercion

I’ve been interviewing several development workers in rural areas, about how they develop and support Good Neighbour schemes. Inevitably, a key set of tensions that they have to negotiate is around formal and informal arrangements.

These schemes sit sweetly in the space between the ancient informality of neighbouring and the post-industrial formality of organised care services.

Central to the tensions that arise in this space is a widely-anticipated (though not always evident) negative response from community groups to expectations that they should adopt formal procedures. Formal procedures can range from requiring safeguarding checks to maintaining monitoring records.

There are a couple of issues to disentangle here. The first concerns the unpredictable variety of responses at the area level, which I do not think can readily be explained by the worker’s approach.

Thus in one county, in helping about half a dozen new schemes to become constituted, one worker told me that there had been no difficulty in getting groups to accept the requirements of systematic evaluation, for example in administering questionnaire surveys; in another county, I was advised to reduce my expectations to the minimum, because the groups would not take to it. In a third county, one of the schemes was not interested in any form of preliminary information gathering about client needs or availability of volunteers, they just decided to get on with it. I was told of another scheme whose representatives had decided to go beyond just a committee and constitution, turned their first meeting into an agm, and were set on applying for charitable status. It also seems to be the case that most groups expect if not demand safeguarding checks, and this can extend to some non-risk roles for which it is illegal to have someone checked.

It's not clear to me how this variation can be explained.

The second issue is even more nuanced and rather more tricky. It concerns the risk that sensitivities to community groups’ responses can come across as patronising: you don’t want to be implying that they should be protected from some kinds of information because it’s too complex for them or too demanding.

Within the groups that express an interest in forming Good Neighbour schemes, it’s common to find retired people with professional backgrounds – often from the medical and care professions – for whom the generation of a little administrative bureaucracy is an expectation not an issue; who would anticipate the requirement for monitoring data; and who, if it were not provided to them, might well invent their own system for evaluation because they can see in advance that it would help to demonstrate their achievements with a view to future funding. I am told that this configuration and outlook can often be found in low income areas as well as the more affluent neighbourhoods.

At the same time it’s unsurprising that many groups might find administrative tasks a burden; and anything that threatens a group’s sustainability might need rethinking. But it’s fair to say that lack of funding in the future could be as much of a threat as the burden of collecting evidence to justify that funding.

The establishment of a Good Neighbour scheme depends on local volunteers coming forward, with time, energy and commitment. We cannot predict with accuracy what kinds of people these will be, although with an open and empowering approach we can inform and seek to influence what they choose to do.

What one of us might call encouragement or support, another might call coercion. Much of the professional rhetoric may be filtered of dusty heresy, but I’m not sure it’s possible in community development to allow light in, without casting the shadow of coercion. As I recall, Jeremy Brent was very good on this.

 

Community organising at the micro level

I’ve lived in the same street for almost 30 years. Last week was the first funeral we’ve had, from these few homes, in all that time. I suppose a higher proportion of these rituals take place from care homes, than used to be the case.

This was the funeral of my next door neighbour: a straightforward, intelligent, easy-going working-class Irishman for whom I had a deep respect. We had a sound neighbourly relationship of mutual support and keeping an eye out.

Last week I asked my fellow neighbours to join us at the end of the street, when the cars left to go to the church. There were about 20 of us, not arrayed like soldiers but stood informally in silence, as the cortege passed. It was just a simple gesture from residents to one of their own and for the family. And the simplest of community organising exercises.

 

Holding neighbours' keys

It’s sometime since I blogged anything about popular surveys of neighbouring, but this detail offered in a news-related source today caught my eye:

‘29% homeowners aged over-45 leave a key with a neighbour, compared to just 19% aged 25-44 and 18% aged 18-24’.

Unfortunately the article seeks to make an issue out of the fact that younger people tend to be less active at neighbouring than do middle-aged and older people – tsk, I know, astonishing – and doesn’t give a total percentage. Thus far, the sponsors of the survey have not made any information about this available on their website.

So I’ve dipped back into some of the examples I’ve accumulated over the years from this peculiar popular statistical genre, and I find very little consistency.

Here is a summary table of those I came up with, giving percentages of people who let their neighbours hold a set of keys to their home (NB: in several cases the exact question wording is not given):

%	Source	Date	Note
63	ICM for BBC	2008	The figure for over 55’s is 68%
55	Neighbourhood Watch	2006	Note that respondents were members of Neighbourhood Watch schemes
45	Fresh Minds for Gumtree	2010	The figure for over 55’s is 59%
31	Up My Street	2010
27	YouGov for Co-Op UK	2010	The figure for over 55’s is 39%
23	Opinium for the Big Lunch	2015	This figure combines responses for ‘Neighbour’ or ‘Friend who lives nearby’
22	HSBC Neighbours Survey	2012
20	Age UK	2011
12	HSBC	2011	The figure for over 55’s is 23%.

A surprising proportion of the links for this information have rotted.

Looking at the ‘negative’ side doesn’t seem to help, with a range between 78 and 36 per cent. In a 2013 survey for Swinton Insurance, ‘nearly two thirds of the adults polled said they wouldn’t dream of leaving a house key with a neighbour.’

For Legal and General in 2010 - another insurance company, you notice – ‘78% of respondents said they do not share keys with their neighbours’.

For the BBC in 2008 – a more neutral client, you might say - ICM asked ‘How many of your neighbours, if any, would you trust with a spare set of keys?’ The proportion who said ‘None’ was 36 per cent.

In the Manchester Neighbourliness study (2004) which I co-authored with Toby Gale, for some reason we did not publish a total figure but we did conclude that

‘the proportion both holding keys and having keys held increases with age, up to the oldest age group. Key holding is more prominent among owner-occupiers than renters… The propensity for holding a neighbour’s key also seems to increase with length of residence’.

Looking at the survey data or reports listed above, I note that the ICM-BBC survey had over 1,000 respondents and the one carried out by Fresh Minds had 3,400. All things considered, I think we can place more trust in the higher figures given, but it’s not very satisfactory.

A final thought for the time being. If one implication of living in a post-welfare society is that more people age in their own homes and are visited by carers, who in most such cases will hold keys, that is one area where we can expect to see an increase, and one area which needs to be distinguished statistically.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously:

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

 

‘Thou shalt not ask’?

Recently I’ve had the privilege of meeting several clients of good neighbour schemes. I thought I’d share a couple of insights.

I met I man, I’ll call him Danny, who had experienced mental health difficulties for many years following crushing in a crowd incident, which left him so damaged and with so many broken bones that he was assumed dead. He now can’t face people very easily, yet spoke to me with a lively, if battered, intelligence. Vulnerable to encounters on a difficult estate – he’d had an intruder a few nights previously - he lives with his dog in dismal poverty. He could do his shopping on the internet but makes himself go out to get it, between three and four in the morning.

So how does he use the internet? His next door neighbour lets him use his wifi password. Isn’t that brilliant? I’d love to know about the conversation that led to this. Talking about poverty, Danny said it’s a blessing he has no relatives, Christmas would be such a trial if he had to buy things for people.

Danny told me he’d like to go and live at the sea-side. “Even if I lock myself away I could still open the window and see people.” When was the last time you saw the sea? “I’ve never seen the sea.”

“Without the helpers from the scheme, I don’t see anyone, except once a fortnight I see my mental health worker.”

The organiser told me he had said to her – obviously reluctant to make demands of the scheme,

“I need someone to come round once a fortnight, in case I die.”

This relates to the ‘request scruple’ – the reluctance to ask for help – which I have mentioned before with reference to the research of Lilian Linders. This arises also in the second instance. One woman who uses the scheme, I’ll call her Annie, talked about her hesitation:

“Why should they have the time for me? … I grew up the old-fashioned way, ‘thou shalt not ask’. It’s not pride. It’s just not proper. You don’t beg… I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I’m just frustrated because I can’t do the things I used to do.”

Following a serious fall, Annie needed help of various kinds, and first had to overcome the misunderstanding that the scheme was just about providing transport. She takes care not to risk over-demanding: “I work out what’s important, don’t pile it up.” She spoke with delight about how a simple bathroom shelf had made so many things easier for her.

Annie says she has learned that

“If you have a problem, talk to them about it. If they can’t help then they will tell you what you can do.”

This points to the importance of information-sharing and advice that arises in the way the schemes work. The scheme organiser told me it is not uncommon for people to assume they could make only one request of the scheme. Under this misconception they could be holding back from making a modest demand for help, reserving the option for the possibility of a more serious need in due course.

 

Untraceable near-neighbours

I’ve been wondering what happened to Margaret. I used to see her in her powered wheelchair with the wee dog trotting along. A few words, then on. And John, I’d see him on the corner down by the bank. And that woman with the funny walk, who would sit outside the pub with a beer in hand, on a summer’s eve. Sometimes she’d say hello, sometimes nowt.

These are people I came to recognise in my neighbourhood. They are not weak ties; they’re not ties at all. We have or had no particular responsibility towards each other beyond that of common humanity. But the acknowledgement in passing encounters, the occasional greeting - these always contribute to the sense of neighbourhood, of context and belonging. And these in turn contribute to the accretion of potential support that in theory could be called on in time of need.

Except I don’t know enough about them. This is a category of people who I would not say I ‘know’ (as in survey questions like ‘how many of your neighbours would you say you know?’) And since I don’t know where they live or lived, unless perhaps vaguely, then in most cases of need I couldn’t have ‘called on them’ in any sense. They are acquaintances not neighbours: they occupy the space on the continuum between intimates and strangers.

Of course, I can easily think of relationships that have graduated from this kind to friendship. But there are many passing acquaintances that remain just that.

When they stop appearing in the neighbourhood, it may take a while to miss them, until something makes you think… I wonder what happened to her? For some people, faith groups or clubs or third places can help to make such relations recoverable. But in most cases you’re not in a position to find out: they’re untraceable.

Previously : Acquaintances: book review

Engage with them and they will come

I’ve not seen this done before (although Google helps me discover that there have been a few comparable examples) – a construction company has engaged positively with local schools and parents.

Apparently this has involved site visits from infant and primary school groups – what a great learning opportunity – and the chance for some of the children to have their pictures displayed on the boarding.

From what I can see, this doesn’t seem to have come from the NHBC or any other industry lead. But I think it’s brilliant. For many people in urban and suburban areas, rapid change in their visible environment often goes on at bewildering pace without their knowing much about it, which is disempowering in a vague, creeping sort of way. This goes some way to addressing that.

Usual apologies for the wretched quality of my hurried photography.

 

Found, apparently

It’s a while since I wrote about Lost possessions and the reassuring tradition of considerate behaviour towards complete strangers who may have lost things in public places.

Now here’s a rare example of community communication where someone apparently announces the end of a search – a dog re-united with its owner.

I counted at least six of these identical notices – each of which had been laminated and stapled - in the vicinity where I took this picture. I can’t help thinking that if so much trouble was taken at the conclusion of the episode, then a fair amount of community energy must probably have been mobilised in the initial search. But strangely there’s no reference to any efforts that others might have put in.

Previously: How to thank your neighbours

 

Do we look out for children in our neighbourhoods?

The latest PSI report on children’s independent mobility covers data from 16 countries and ranks England seventh among them. The study found that the greatest degree of independent mobility was granted to children in Finland, where the majority of children aged eight are allowed to cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone.

The report includes this fascinating table showing variations in perceptions of whether neighbours look out for children in their area. The findings for several countries, including England and Australia, are noticeably mixed: but most striking to me are the very low levels of disagreement with the proposition in Japan and France.

However, it seems that 'looking out for others' - desirable though we may think it is as a factor in quality of life - does not correlate with measures of children’s independent mobility:

‘Of the three factors examined, traffic seems to be the strongest factor affecting the granting of independent mobility, with ‘strangers’ showing a weak effect and community supervision not being a factor.’

 

Communal living and neighbouring: time for ‘re-co-operation’?

I had a fascinating conversation the other day with Tobias Jones, author of A place of refuge and this recent Observer article on communal living. I am in quiet awe of what Tobias and his family have achieved at Windsor Hill Wood and how they have gone about it. I’m also hugely impressed by the openness of his thinking and the clarity of his writing.

Tobias is exploring commonalities in different approaches to ‘community,’ from communalism to community development to neighbouring in its most manifest - and presumably least manifest - forms. As I understand it, he is searching for ways of strengthening those commonalities. We scratched the surface of a few issues. While I would have my doubts about attempting to package insights into evidence of a lasting contemporary grassroots movement – I’d love to be proved wrong – I think there is much to be said for a more systematic sharing of understanding. I look forward to what Tobias is writing next, an essay for New Statesman.

Just thinking about communal living in comparison with neighbouring is helpful. The amateur anthropologist in me is immediately muttering about how communal living is where we all came from: in the evolution of humankind, neighbouring is a rather more recent way of organising social relations. Tobias neatly offers communal living as ‘an alliance with the past to critique the present in the hope of a better future.’

This lived experience of time eludes most of us, however neighbourly our locality. In the contemporary neighbourhood context, it is much harder to remain immersed in ways of doing things that are mutual and sustainable. Allotment gardeners might have a grasp of it, commuters are less likely to. We struggle to appreciate how to do things sustainably in the sense of reducing emotional and spiritual damage as well as environmental damage. It’s no coincidence that gardeners do most of what they do outdoors, and commuters do most of what they do indoors or cocooned in vehicles. We often get the pace of living wrong and we lose much of the vocabulary of stewardship. I’m reminded of a quote from the wonderful Erri de Luca:

‘Holy man of Africa, I think, you come to impart your wisdom to a European savage who follows the moon on the calendar and the clouds on the radio and can’t read a word without an alphabet.’

Communalism comes with the category heading ‘Lifestyle’: neighbouring does not. I note also that the settlement co-residents described by Tobias are there at least partly to establish or regain a sense of stability in their lives. The context of neighbouring is different: much of it is about asserting and retaining – and often defending – stability. Tobias and his family welcome ‘visitors’ – some for a day or two, some for months: this is about transience – again, acknowledging the natural passage of time, not the generally implied permanence of neighbourhood relations.

There is much to be learned I think from this path of enquiry that Tobias is opening up. A healthy society needs a range of ‘community-related’ institutions functioning smoothly, and we should be exploring commonalities across them all:

• a public realm to maintain the principle of commonality across many aspects of life;
• a democratic structure that allows for reflection and deliberation and reflects the involvement of all participants;
• formal care services for particular needs;
• semi-formal and informal processes (like Good Neighbour schemes and other voluntary initiatives) that provide social support, association and other opportunities;
• third places at local level so that people can encounter one another informally and serendipitously, and by arrangement for specific purposes;
• recognised forms of neighbouring that contribute to a sense of security, belonging  and identity; and
• communal environments to help people recover or establish stability, and to articulate the broader context of humans living together on a fragile planet.

The image above, with its delightful pun, apparently refers to a number of refugee chickens that are taken in at Windsor Hill Wood. I was wondering if anyone thought that the message of communal living is also about ‘re-co-operation’ (not to be confused with ‘eco-operation’) – about refreshing our ability and readiness to co-operate and collaborate. I’m up for it if you are.

 

 

‘Your amazing neighbours’

Yesterday evening I had a charity doorknocker. I’m always courteous but never encouraging with these people. It helps if they appear when I’m obviously cooking but it doesn’t help if they don’t get the message; nor if, when I mention that I give to certain charities in a deliberate way over periods of time, full stop, they don’t get that message either.

True to the standard, this one used the phrase ‘I’m not asking for money’ almost immediately and then proceeded to suggest I gave 20p per day ‘like your amazing neighbours’.

It’s possible he knows something I don’t, but I suspect not. If I’d had the patience, perhaps I might have asked him (a) where he lives, and (b) in what ways he has been amazed by my neighbours – things that have perhaps eluded me all these years.

But unbeknown to this man and his well-trained phoney positivity, my neighbours are fairly special because a lot of informal mutual support goes on amongst us. There’s nothing unique about that of course, but it is noteworthy.

What was striking about last night’s encounter was how it illustrates the gulf between informal neighbourly support and philanthropy. People think of them as close together on the pro-social spectrum; and our government likes to promote this notion because it suits them that philanthropy serves to reinforce disempowerment. But having a clown delivering this sort of patter on my doorstep will remain for me a symbol of the ideological contrast.

 

 

What is the tone of the neighbourhood?

A couple of weeks ago I turned on my phone at about seven o’clock and it rang almost immediately. BBC Radio London - had I seen the pictures in the papers of the candy-striped house in Kensington? They gave me a few seconds on air without time to say anything meaningful, but since then there’s been a new twist to the story.

The owner, a property developer called Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring, found that there had been objections from neighbours to her modest plans to demolish the building and replace it with a five-storey house, including a two-storey basement – nothing much, swimming pool, media centre, that sort of thing.

Planning permission was originally approved but then withdrawn after objections. It is believed that the deck-chair décor was a statement of revenge at this decision. One resident was reported as saying ‘Without sounding very pretentious, it isn’t very Kensington.’

Of course it’s entertaining to hear about squabbles among the Haves, and it did strike me that the house might not look out of place in Amsterdam. Also I’d like to note that the owner didn’t paint her house: she had workers do it for her.

But this story exposes serious issues of ownership and privacy which as a society we struggle to deal with. The first point to make is that if you create the cultural conditions in which houses are treated as commodities, you are going to get people treating houses as commodities. Logically this could mean total disregard for the interests of anyone else in the vicinity. Writing in the Sunday Times(£), India Knight argued that a neighbourhood

‘needs as much, if not more, maintenance than the housing it contains. If you want to live somewhere “nice” – clean, friendly, well-maintained, cheerful – then you need to play a part in making it so.’

What this means is that we need to do away completely with assumptions that the individual owner has the right to do what they like with their house. I’ve discussed this sort of thing before with regard to Christmas decorations and the constraints that home-owner associations can impose on residents. The space around the house affects others in all sorts of ways and their views have to be taken into account when changes are proposed, temporary or not. How we do that is another matter, and from the little I knew at the time of this story I couldn’t see how the authorities could stop or have stopped the resolute Kensington developer from having her house painted whatever colours she chose.

Well it turns out that the house is situated in a conservation area and planning law has something called a Section 215 Notice, tada! One of these has been served (I love the language):

“The owner has the right to appeal the notice by 5 June in the magistrates courts but, if no appeal is forthcoming, the owner must repaint the front elevation white and carry out repairs to the windows by 3 July.

“If the notice is not complied with by 3 July then the council can enter the property and carry out the necessary works. Furthermore the council can charge the owner for the costs in carrying out the works and prosecute them in the magistrates courts.”

Apparently Section 215 can be used ‘when one building affects the tone of the whole neighbourhood.’ Ask yourself how you would describe the tone of your neighbourhood, in a court of law.

Incidentally, in a rather unconvincing way, India Knight suggested in her article that estate agents’ particulars should include details about the neighbours. I’m not sure that would do much more than provide many field days for many legal people, but she’s in the right area: one of the Good Neighbour schemes I’m currently evaluating is cited by estate agents routinely, I’m told, and quite right too.

 

 

How many light-bulbs does it take to confiscate tiny social interactions?

I’ve been reviewing the documentation for a number of Good Neighbour schemes recently, as part of a process and impact evaluation that I'm working on. The descriptions of what schemes offer is generally very consistent: in addition to the universal offer of transport to hospitals and shops etc, they often include reference to helping with basic household tasks like ‘changing a light-bulb’.

It happens that I’ve also had builders in recently, and had to go with them to buy various bits and pieces including ceiling lights for the bathroom. The lights that have now been fitted have an estimated life, I’m told, of 35,000 hours. At an average of, say, an hour-per-day, they can be expected to last around 95 years.

Hoorah for technological progress. But as I get older, there’s one less reason to have a volunteer come round and check on me while doing handy things about the house. What we have here is another variation on what I have called Kev's Automatic Door Principle, which notes that

‘there are distinct advantages to using technology to open doors for us: especially for people who use wheelchairs, also of course if you are overloaded with luggage; but automatic doors do not have to be held open for the lady with the stick just behind you, or for that bloke with the buggy just approaching. This is technology confiscating tiny social interactions.’

I mentioned another instance - external security boxes – here.

And just to be clear, I am not suggesting that there aren’t technological advances helping us in the opposite direction.

 

Neighbourhood encounters happen at all hours

I set out for a run at about five this morning, and wobbled round the corner up towards some nearby almshouses. In the faint light from at least 50 metres I thought I could make out a figure at one of the doors. As I drew closer I realised it was an elderly lady, on her doorstep, bent over and reaching down for something.

'Excuse me' says I, 'are you alright?'

Then I saw a pack of potatoes on the ground below a couple of steps. The woman stood in her nightie holding onto the doorframe, groping at and failing to grasp the pack (which presumably had been left by the milkman) and was in danger of toppling forward onto the path.

I passed her the spuds. And conscious that, déshabillé at that hour, she probably wouldn’t want to engage in any more conversation than I would, I moved on with just a few words. She thanked me laughing and said ‘Don’t get old’.

Incidentally, if you're one of these people who assumes that when you're sleeping, so is everyone else around you, you might be surprised. Neighbourhood encounters happen at all hours.

 

Appreciating kindliness: informality in neighbourhoods

JRF’s programme on risk and trust in everyday relationships was designed to break new ground and it has done so, with a range of stimulating papers. The latest is Landscapes of helping, an absorbing report on informal helping – ‘kindliness’ - at local level, by Meg Allen, Helen Spandler, Yvonne Prendergast and Lynn Frogget. It’s based on an extended case study in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.

Perhaps because the theme overlaps strongly with issues of neighbouring and neighbourliness, I was privileged to have sight of a draft of this report. I admire the way the authors have drawn out a number of mechanisms that foster kindliness while simultaneously contributing to neighbourliness and sociality. These they describe as:

• Making kindliness palatable
• Nurturing bonders and bridgers
• ‘Creating a shared myth’ and ‘Building common cause’
• Third spaces and ‘Hubs of helping’ as ‘ways of connecting communities’; and
• Creating kinder economies.

Some of this we know about: for instance, community development practice and the literature of social capital already give us insights into how bonding and bridging capital can be nurtured, and we know quite a bit about third places, or think we do. But the first and last in the above list are striking as barely-charted areas for potential enquiry.

Talking of barely-charted areas for enquiry, this paper helps us realise how little the notion of kindliness is discussed, reflected on or researched. Here’s how the authors came through the entangling thicket of definition – acknowledging several difficulties in distinguishing concepts:

‘It was often difficult to identify boundaries between help within the family and outside; and low level help between neighbours could easily transform into longer-term more intensive support and care. We also found it difficult to distinguish between informal and more formalised (or semi-formal) help and our exploration of kindliness involved going through, and observing, semi-formal organisations who often mediate more informal relationships.

‘Similarly, while we started this research trying to distinguish between giving and receiving help, we increasingly realised that this distinction was hard to sustain. In everyday life it is not always possible, or desirable, to separate out the needs of the self and the needs of others (Munn-Giddings, 2001). People practise kindliness, not only to help others, but to help themselves, and to improve the communities in which they live.’

Ah, I recognise this part of the landscape: we’re back at the corner of Altruism Avenue and Reciprocity Road.

And it’s good to know that informal and semi-formal relations in neighbourhoods are receiving a  bit of attention at last. While JRF continue pursuing their programme, my good friend Alison Gilchrist has recently won a Plowden Fellowship to explore the theme of ‘informality’ in relation to good governance and social justice. And less gloriously, I’m currently working on a project for Nesta to produce a process evaluation and impact evaluation of Good Neighbour schemes. More on that in due course.

 

Neighbourly co-operation

I just came across this concise news post (from October 2013) which I felt was well-worth sharing, from Whissendine in Rutland:

'In one sunny day, A gave B a blueberry bush, B gave A some alchemilla mollis, D used his 4x4 to pull out a shrub then B and E helped move D's greenhouse from his garden, via the gardens of B and A. Good neighbour co-operation?'

 

 

Can anything be salvaged from this?

Apparently, the Wellington suburb of Tawa is the most "neighbourly" in New Zealand.

Over the life of this blog I’ve referred a few times (e.g.) to the notion of ‘league-tabling’ neighbourliness, usually with a sense of half-disguised disquiet – a concern justified I think by the managerialism of recent governments. Much less frequently, I may just have expressed suspicions, once or twice, about the integrity of top-down commercial online systems operating at neighbourhood level.

Let’s pop back to New Zealand, where it seems league-tabling has become a reality not through the insensitivities of target-obsessed ministers but as an expression of tacky commercial drive, through the online service Neighbourly. This is new to me, although I realise it may have been happening elsewhere around the world.

As far as I can tell from this article (in a source owned by the same un-embarrassable company that owns Neighbourly), the suburb of Tawa has got to the top of the leaderboard by virtue of having more than 1100 residents signed up to the online system. That’s it. That’s the measure of neighbourliness. Dang, simple, how come I didn’t think of that?

OK, I know, good stuff happens around online neighbourhood connections. And this isn’t ‘serious’ league-tabling; but it’s clear that some people take it seriously and think it has meaning. Which in turn makes it that bit easier for even a well-meaning government to follow suit in a determined manner.

 

Exchanging a favour and a few words

I was drafting some text this afternoon about neighbourhood communication, for a project bid, when I was interrupted by a tap at the door. It was a neighbour, looking to return an outdoor ladder I had lent him a few days ago. It’s an ancient, heavy lump of a thing, possibly from the iron age, so we lugged it round together, which meant we had a couple of minutes to catch up briefly on domestic and personal news.

In terms of the quotidian practice of neighbourly borrowing and lending, it was obviously unremarkable; but it illustrates nicely how ‘exchange of favours’ is not a watertight category, because it lubricates the exchange of information and other benefits that contribute to the valuable accretion of allowable knowledge, and hence a shared expectation of support that could be mobilised in time of need.

(And yes, I am aware that mixing oil and water, as in the metaphor above, is questionable, but somehow I could not resist).

 

Not seeing the neighbours around

Here’s a curious survey finding:

Almost 71 per cent of Kiwis cite ‘not seeing their neighbours around’ as the reason for not knowing them better.

This comes from this article in Scoop, which I just caught up with, referring to a survey conducted by Neighbourly.co.nz, an online networking service. It echoes the theme of ‘occupation of the neighbourhood’ that I bang on about from time to time.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything more about the survey on their site, but I assume that this phrase was one of a number of answer options, and perhaps the responses might have been ranked. It would be handy to know what the other options were.

I also learned (here) that 78.6 per cent of respondents claim to have at least one neighbour ‘from whom they could borrow a cup of sugar’. This serves to remind me that one day I’d really like to include a survey question somewhere asking if anyone has ever borrowed a cup of sugar, anywhere. Where did this strange assumed tradition come from? And why is it perpetuated in surveys? Asking about holding neighbours' door keys might be more useful, I suggest.

 

Sixty-seconds of neighbouring

I was out front filling window-sill cracks this morning when one of my elderly neighbours appeared alongside, with a bottle of medicine. ‘I don’t want to come too close,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a dreadful cold. But could you help me to open this?’

It had a modern child-proof cap, which I loosened. As he took the bottle back I thought, perhaps this is an innovation that post-dates the last time he took medicine? That would be characteristic, for this is a ruggedly independent, practical man who would seldom ask a favour. We talked briefly about other things and off he went.

There are several classic neighbouring themes bound up in this tiny encounter: I’ll try to round them up concisely.

First, it’s a reminder that when we ask survey questions about whether neighbours ‘exchange favours,’ the point is really about the latent potential for support, together with the readiness to draw on it. Time and again we’ve had studies on aspects of neighbouring which say this happens or that happens to a given percentage, but don’t help us to get at the ways of optimising informal support. Seeing me out there, from his window or door – and faced with a medical need he had not managed to resolve by himself – my neighbour took the opportunity to draw on the accretion of adequate familiarity from years of recognition and the occasional few, largely inconsequential words. As I noted some years ago, the essence of neighbouring is that it is low-level and relatively trivial, but it accumulates.

Next, we have the old theme of visibly occupying the neighbourhood. I was outside and therefore legitimately open to interruption. It’s unlikely he would have gone round knocking, for such a favour. It reminded me of comments from a workshop participant years ago (reported here, p11), relating how long it had taken her to paint her front door, because of all the neighbourly conversations that followed from occupying that semi-private, pseudo-community space. I also recall someone in an audience deciding on the same basis that she was going to grow potatoes in her front garden.

And two more points, based on the fact that we have been neighbours for 28 years. This exchange was nothing to do with ‘visiting in each other’s houses’ – as some surveys like to frame relations; nor was it anything to do with knowing names. We call each other by our first names; I don’t know his surname and I doubt he knows mine. I have never been in his house nor he in mine.

An understanding of neighbouring that gets distracted by such details, it seems to me, risks overlooking more important ingredients: mainly - the fundamental importance of recurring visual recognition; that neighbouring is not the same as friendship; and that it is founded on respect for privacy and the navigability of semi-private space.

 

Neighbourhood communication

Latest in an inexhaustible series:

State intervention in keeping an eye out for older neighbours? Views from London, 1918

As the impact of the ‘Great War’ is much in people’s minds at the moment, this blog offers some reflections on neighbourly support for older people, originally published (unparagraphed, in tiny font) in 1918.

Lonely dwellers and their neighbours

‘It was stated in the newspapers recently that a woman, 73 years of age, living alone in a house in Gray’s Inn road, fell down stairs one Wednesday evening, and, being unable to move, was not discovered until the following Saturday. On the next day she died in the hospital to which she had been taken. Stories of this kind, or of solitary persons who die and whose bodies are only discovered after some time, are not infrequent, and such cases occur in the country as well as in great cities. Probably, however, they are rarer in rural districts and small towns, where eccentric characters and the poor and lonely are of greater interest to their neighbours than they are in the metropolis. It is difficult, indeed, to suggest any means which would prevent such an occurrence in the crowded area around Holborn, nor can we say that any duty of neighbourliness was neglected by those in her vicinity who went their daily way while an old woman lay at the foot of a staircase in a house which they had no reason for entering. Nor does society, the State, or the local authority appear to be called upon to interfere if persons of mature age , whether poor or not, prefer to live alone rather than in surroundings which would expose them to observation. In the absence of organised intervention it is usually the baker, or the milkman, or the postman, particularly the last in country districts, who reports that he cannot get the accustomed answer at a certain door, when further inquiry shows that a lonely dweller is ill or dead. It might conceivably be made an instruction to postmen to be observant in such matters, and to report the non-delivery of a letter through failure to get a reply to a knock at the door. But lonely dwellers receive few letters. There remain the baker and the milkman, whose services might also be requisitioned in normal times, but even then there are many cases where the customer fetches his own bread from a shop where his abode is not known. It is, indeed, likely that any such system as we have suggested, even if reinforced by the aid of the police, would not only lead to many false alarms, but would break down and be inoperative in a substantial proportion of genuine instances. Cases, therefore, such as that on which we have commented will continue to fill us with pity, but will not be averted unless and until the State undertakes even greater surveillance over the details of our daily lives than it does at present. Do we want that?’

The Lancet, 192(4959), 14 September 1918, 362-363.

 

Re-playing NIMBYism

Recently I visited an area where there had been tensions around a proposed new development. I heard someone say that when they had moved into the village ten years ago, they’d been told there would be ‘council housing’ built on the fields opposite. And it does seem that there was something like a decade of planning, rumour, uncertainty and objection.

Perhaps mischievously, much of this was characterised as people 'complaining that they would have nowhere to walk their dogs'. It’s likely there were more serious concerns. Nonetheless the new (mixed tenure) estate is now about half-built, with plenty of pleasant landscaped green space and paths (if few amenities), and is partially occupied. On my visit one of the new residents quipped:

‘They’ve a lovely space to walk the dogs, and they don’t have to put their wellies on.’

NIMBYism is easily over-simplified and caricatured, but there are studies to be done of the degree of correspondence between fierce objections to anticipated plans and the subsequent reality and experience.

 

The curious incident of the dog-owner in the early morning

Into the last mile of an early hour’s run last Saturday, I passed through a wicket onto fenced common land. The field is about a mile in perimeter and mainly used by dog-walkers plus a few other runners. I found the gate unfastened (there is a rather pointless leather strap that can be used to hold it in position) and I left it so, as it is more often than not.

Fifty metres further on I heard a bellowing accusation, directed at me – ‘You might have shut the gate…’ I pointed out that I’d left it as I’d found it. There followed a torrent of abuse, extraordinarily loud for 06.35 in the morning. Amongst it all was the instruction, whatever the circumstances, to fasten the gate shut out of ‘respect for the public’. (That’s a subject I can claim to know a little about, but this feller wasn’t to know that. In that context, he provided a tidy example of anti-social behaviour in the public realm).

He stomped off, telling me to fuck off. Bemused, I congratulated him on being sufficiently grown up to be able to swear at people.

There are two other gates to the field, neither of which has a fastening. It’s possible he feared a marauding horde of fierce peasants from the estates of the nearby town, I really don’t know. But the self-evident folly of his attitude seemed to illustrate perfectly the arrogant, superior middle-class middle-England conviction that it is the right of the Haves to tell others how to behave, whatever the context. It was like a local echo of the Westminster approach to Scotland.

I often puzzle over whether this is a universal phenomenon across time and geography. My experience from time spent in other countries suggests it is: but in England, with our centuries of pretend (and pretentious) imperial dominance, people do it better – with more emphasis, more conviction, more individual presumption of their own superiority. It seems such a shame.

 

Confronting ‘awful neighborhood apps’

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

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

More here on the BBC site.

 

 

Neighbourhood belonging in the UK: could do better

So the UK and Germany – according to some media coverage of a recent ONS report - are the 'least neighbourly' countries in the European Union.

The report reproduces a hard-to-find figure from the Third European Quality of Life survey (3EQLS) which used a five point scale for the following statement: ‘I feel close to people in the area where I live.’ Some people might think that's as much about belonging or cohesion as it is about neighbourliness.

For those who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, the average across the EU apparently was exactly two-thirds. For the UK it was a miserable 58.4 per cent – very narrowly superior to Germany’s 58.3 per cent.

Here are two little curiosities. Cyprus appears at the top of the list of countries on this measure, with almost 81 per cent of respondents saying they feel close to people in the area where they live. However, Cyprus also has a very high rate (2.6%) of people who say they never have face-to-face contact with friends or neighbours outside the household (the UK figure is 1.4 per cent, similar to most countries). 

And Table 3 of the EQLS report on subjective well-being (2013) offers a finding which perhaps might have appealed to the more exploratory journalists in the recent coverage. It gives ‘the worst and best’ for all European countries in the study. The UK does quite well on the loneliness score, but has the following three ‘worsts’ –

I think that means that, out of 27 European countries, the UK population is the most consistently knackered (whether rested or active) and with the lowest sense of neighbourhood belonging (which is what the latest ONS report confirms).

‘Consistently knackered’ can also serve to describe your blogger's state of health these past few months, hence the shortage of contributions in this space, but I hope the drought may now be over.

 

Overheard

Street market

At the plant stall Danny is talking about the weather it's been so fine but cold. For April. One of me customers lost a load of stuff to the frost on Monday. So everyone says it's going to rain tomorrow, it’s my only day off, we organised a barbecue an' all didn't we. With the neighbours. And I can't stand them.

Garden centre

‘My neighbour tried to give me one, they’re unstoppable. I don’t think she realised I’ve got one that’s reaching over her fence already.’

 

Informal support: I ask you

JRF has some fascinating work going on at the moment under the heading of ‘Risk, trust and relationships in an ageing society’, which includes a theme frequently covered on this blog, ‘everyday, informal support between neighbours, friends, and in communities.’

One of the striking features of this JRF thread is the refreshing focus on the notion of ‘kindness.’ You might not see it being fitted into current government policy all that smoothly, but that’s no reason not to treat it as worthy of research and likely to generate insights.

And let’s pay tribute to the fact that this is not a new departure for JRF, they’re building on a decent track record. Two examples: in 2004 they published Building a good life for older people in local communities, a delight which I’ve cited many times; or you could go back to 1998 for their superb study on the importance of ‘low level’ preventive services to older people.

Now here’s a recent example of the way this work is going, an interim report by Helen Spandler and colleagues on perceptions of giving and being in receipt of informal help. The work so far is based on a quick and not-all-that-dirty street survey, apparently designed to harvest a range of attitudes (and the associated language) to frame subsequent investigation. What the researchers are trying to do is get at the implicit ‘rules’ surrounding the giving and receiving of help.

They note that ‘only a small number of people felt completely comfortable in receiving support from others.’ Religious and cultural contexts have a strong influence, and the tensions around mutual interdependence vs independent individualism soon emerge:

‘Many participants … made reference to Northern working class backgrounds, which they felt valued relationships over material wealth. Yet, that same culture also taught a strong sense of individual independence, which could make the need for help seem like a weakness. In this way, cultures could be experienced as both supportive, and simultaneously as harsh and inflexible.’

A few years ago I drew attention to the work of Lilian Linders in the Netherlands, exploring the significance of the reluctance to ask for help. Lilian’s research highlighted the fact that the imbalance in the provision of informal care lies on the demand side, not the supply side: the extent to which we live in a caring society is constrained by the ‘request scruple’ – a widespread reluctance, for various reasons, to ask for help.

It looks like the present project is finding similar issues. ‘Giving and receiving support’, the researchers note, ‘is constantly negotiated within a complex 'moral economy' of familial, local and societal expectation.’ They describe this as an ecosystem that requires cultivation. Families can be fortresses of support, implicitly discouraging help from elsewhere, but there can be examples where asking is disouraged even within the family. One correspondent said:

‘It makes me feel vulnerable to ask. I reckon my family would translate asking for help as weakness.’

At the heart of all this is the tension between not being seen as 'weak, needy, demanding or ‘undeserving’’ and ‘a strong sense that giving was a good and moral thing to do.’

As we know, social care policy is concerned with the supply side, whether it be support for carers, the uneven provision of personal home care, encouragement to volunteer or whatever. But the challenge for JRF at the end of this programme may be in articulating a call for much broader cultural change: change that will help in overcoming the scruples that people have about asking for help.

 

Neighbours won’t be incentivised to police bad parents. Can we move on now?

Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills, seems to like to lob a banger into the fire every now and then. A few sparks have arisen this past few days after he made remarks that have been taken to suggest that neighbours should pry on and police the parenting of fellow-residents.

In some cases, perhaps unsurprisingly, this has been interpreted as deliberate policy-distraction on behalf of the government, to keep the anti-scrounger attitude levels high.

To be fair to Wilshaw – there’s a phrase I never would have thought I would write – I think it’s nothing of the sort: it was just an eccentric offering of his own, pre-considered and ill-considered.

I reach this view because I have watched a good deal of the select committee meeting where the remark was made. Committee chair Graham Stuart MP (at 10.00.49) was asking, somewhat optimistically I felt, for some guidance on how as a society we might go about compensating for the (perceived) ‘hollowing out’ of family and community.

The Chief Inspector’s remarks were contextualised with reference to the idea of the ‘big society’, first by a member of the committee (at 10.02.46) and then by Wilshaw himself (at 10.06.01). He deliberately prepares the ground for his remarks, even saying that it’s a point he intends to return to later in the discussion.

He talks of addressing ‘social taboos’ (such as fathers not accepting their parental responsibilities and parents not engaging with their children’s schools) that he believes are diminishing. (Wait: though this be method, yet there is madness in it). He says that this creates a vacuum and that ‘there will be people who can step into that vacuum.’ Then follows the now widely-quoted challenge to policy:

‘How do you incentivise good citizens, good people, good family members to engage with the worst, the most difficult members of society? That’s a policy issue for government. How do you financially incentivise those people to get up in the morning and knock on the neighbour's door and say 'your children are not up yet, they've not had their breakfast yet, why aren't you taking them to school?'’

To their credit, it seems like the committee, unlike some journalists and many others (e.g. in the comments here) were ready to dismiss this as random silliness and move on; and so should the rest of us. It’s not a sensible suggestion and it’s unlikely to have been fed cynically into the system by Tory Central, despite their fondness for blunt and polarising moral over-simplification.

But it was articulated in public and was clearly pre-considered. So not for the first time there are questions about how someone who thinks so carelessly at times can have so much power and influence in the educational and child care sectors.

And how can we have a head of Ofsted who talks so irresponsibly about responsibility, flinging around arbitrary judgemental phrases like ‘good people’ and ‘the worst, most difficult members of society’ when giving evidence to a parliamentary committee? We can only wonder, as these questions have since been overtaken in the news by the subsequent rumoured spat between the minister and the chief inspector. What entertainment.

 

'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

 

 

Not borrowing sugar and blaming technology

Thanks to the simple efficiency of google alerts, my attention was drawn to this peculiar statement:

‘In many ways, technology has erased the proverbial world in which if a person ran out of sugar, he or she would go next door to borrow a cup from a neighbor.’ (Source).

I don't think the idea of online technology erasing neighbourly relations has much basis in reality. I think the author might be taking one ‘proverbial’ world - if the word (which means 'well-known') is used ecccentrically in the sense of ‘imaginary’ – to conjure another ‘proverbial’ (imaginary) world.

I’d love to hear if there is any known instance in recent history of someone finding themselves in unexpected need of a cup of sugar, and falling back on the generosity of a neighbour to supply it? It sounds like fairly unusual behaviour; but rather more probable than the erasure of neighbourly relations through online technology.

 

Always the way with neighbours

The little joke about neighbours related by Chris Gittins in a comment yesterday reminded me of a line from Arnold Bennett – a subtle and neglected author -

‘We thought you'd forgotten us,’ said Mr. Orgreave. ‘But that's always the way with neighbours.’ (Clayhanger, ch17, s5)

 

Who is my neighbour?

From the Royal Mail, you can choose a functional response:

'Someone who lives in the same postcode area as you. For example, in most cases if your postcode is SE25 1AA, the same postcode area would be another address where the postcode also starts with SE25.'
(via this page)

Or a more nuanced one:

'For the purposes of delivering items, a neighbour is considered by Royal Mail to be a person who lives within close proximity of the address on the item. They may be a next-door neighbour or someone who lives sufficiently close by.

'Our postmen and women have the flexibility to make an appropriate judgement of which neighbour to approach and indeed whether to approach a neighbour at all. In exercising that judgement they may rely on their familiarity with their walk and pointers of occupation such as previous experience, a car in the drive, or an open window.'

(Why it might matter).

That's nothing, I had sick thrown at me by an unknown neighbour

There are some neat vignettes in Guardian writers’ accounts of purposely meeting neighbours, illustrating for example that someone who has known the people next door for 30 years might not know their names; how you can assume yourself reasonably connected and suddenly realise that neighbourhood networks are partial and fractured, so that a neighbour will know plenty of others but not those known to you; and - echoing some of the history reported by Emily Cockayne in Cheek by jowl - that some architectural quirks mean you can have intimate relationships with people you don't actually know.

People mistakenly assume neighbourhood cohesion in much the same way they assume consensus, and probably for the same reasons to do with reassurance. Collectively, what these articles confirm is that the artificiality of a manufactured occasion (‘I’ve got to write 300 words on meeting a neighbour, can you help me?’) is easily overcome and can help to establish a relationship or even inclusion in a whole new network; but you need to have the occasion in the first place.

Like Hallowe’en, by way of example. The whole spectacle encapsulates the process of confronting the fear of neighbour. We get our children to do the ice-breaking, and complicate it by insisting that disguise is de rigueur.

Last night there were only two pairs of young children who came to our door, and one of the individuals I could not recognise. On this occasion, radically for me, I opted for a trick. OK, she said, throwing something like a small card frisbee at me.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘Sick,’ she said, taking it back, for re-use presumably in case any of the other residents was foolish enough to take them on.

To me there's also something seasonally symbolic about the adoption of disguise for Hallowe'en: with winter coming on, the children won't be playing out in the street for several months, after which I sometimes find it hard to recognise them again. Then next I'll be told they're back from university or running a major company or something...

 

Naming neighbours' names

91.5 per cent of neighbourliness surveys ask the wrong questions.

And an astonishing 98.2 per cent fail to provide the evidence for the stuff that gets reproduced in newspapers.

These random remarks have been conjured out of nowhere (consistent with the evidence-free policy environment that we currently inhabit) following the publication in today’s Indy and several other sources, of survey results from a home insurance company. I have not been able to find the questions or data behind the press release; nor the press release, come to that (although of course that can be fairly accurately reconstructed from the articles published).

We are told:

‘About 70 per cent of people do not know their neighbours’ full names.’

The questionable assumption being that knowing your neighbours’ names is necessarily a good indicator of neighbourhood relations. And I suppose one reason you might ask about full names (how full?) in a survey would be in the anticipation of getting a figure you could broadcast to imply that neighourliness is in crisis. But surely not, who would do such a thing?

Next -

‘Less than a third of those polled would classify their neighbours as friends. This falls to 18 per cent for those aged between 18 and 34.’

Are we supposed to absorb the assumption that neighbouring is equivalent to friendship? Being on what is called ‘first-name terms’ might be a necessary condition for someone to be categorised as a friend, although I think even that is questionable. Taking the above two quotes together, it’s reasonable to suggest that survey respondents are more fully aware than those behind the survey, or the company releasing it, or the journalist reproducing it, that neighbouring is not the same as friendship.

Glancing back to this rough summary (which I know I need to update) I notice the following from previous surveys:

Don't know name of next door neighbour
Aviva (Norwich Union) 2006 - 55% (maybe a typo?)
Full of Life survey 2008 - 5%

It's hard to know what to make of these without seeing the wording. But here’s some good news. A while ago Swinton put their name to a rather more responsible-looking survey, and their communications agent, SKV, kindly sent me the basic data. I intend to try to do justice to this material when I’ve had a little more time to look at it, but for now let me share one minor detail. The survey asked ‘Do you know the names of your next door neighbour?’ (I suspect that should have read ‘neighbours’ plural). The results were as follows:

So that’s 85.5 per cent of respondents claiming they know the name(s) of at least one of their next–door neighbours - not all neighbours, just those on either side.

These figures do not necessarily contradict those published in today’s articles based on the idea of knowing a neighbour's full names. But I suggest they are both more useful and more dependable.

Finally though, here’s what I think is the most interesting finding offered from today’s mysterious source:

‘Exactly 13 per cent of people said they distrusted, disliked or deliberately avoided people they lived next to.’

Don’t you just want to know more about that?

 

 

More on the benefits of neighbourliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Envisaging the 'sidewalk-free' neighbourhood

We're accustomed to the implication that car-dominated layouts damage local social relations by discouraging walking; but here's an unusual take on neighbourhood characteristics... An interviewee (aged 69) in research carried out into place and social connectedness, mentioned that 'she preferred that there were no sidewalks where she lived, because it deterred people from walking around her neighborhood.'

One wonders whether a 'sidewalk-free' local environment might ever be seen pospectively as a desirable feature for someone wanting to relocate. Can you see the estate agents finding the right form of words?

But where would people put their cars, if there were no pavements?

Cats in the 'hood

I had a minor construction project in the garden this summer, and the hardest part was putting up with the cat-shit. I do try to keep off this subject but by chance, I have since discovered this sensible and welcome survey report from the Neighbourhood Cat Campaign.

Great credit to those responsible for including in the survey a sample of 206 non-cat owners. Almost 70 per cent of them said their main complaint was that the neighbour’s cat uses their garden to go to the toilet. The survey found that less than 15 per cent of cat owners had taken the trouble to provide an outdoor latrine for their pet.

That’s a very low proportion. The report stops short of describing it as anti-social, but having been for many years on the receiving end – including at a time when my kids were tiny and playing in the garden - I have no hesitation in doing so.

I hope the campaign can have some impact on the percentage of responsible owners. Perhaps a repeat survey in a couple of years will be able to make such a claim.

 

Troublesome neighbours?

And what if your neighbours are elephants?

Here’s a neat solution, on the Practical Action blog, using rows of palmyre trees. Local people can harvest the nuts and leaves, then -

‘once mature, one row at a time can be cut for wood, while still retaining the integrity of the boundary.’

 

 

 

Intolerant neighbours ‘a major barrier’ to children’s play

The latest Playday survey was published last week, with some insistent messages about play in the neighbourhood:

More than a quarter of adults (28 per cent) cited intolerant neighbours as a major barrier stopping children playing out where they live. The same proportion of parents fear being judged by neighbours if they let their children play unsupervised outdoors.

Almost a third (32 per cent) believe allowing their children to play ball games or make noise outdoors would cause problems with other residents.

‘It is hardly surprising that a quarter of adults (25 per cent) felt that a more friendly community and better relationships with neighbours would encourage young people to play outside more often.’ 

Some 40 per cent of adults said that children playing out where they live improves community spirit; and 45 per cent said that it helps families to get to know each other. It’s clear that reticence is self-reinforcing: 60 per cent of parents said they would feel confident to let their kids play out if others were playing too. 

Play England and their partners are doing their best to crank up the action, but this is not a new issue and these figures illustrate the perversity of the British attitude towards young people. In interview on the Today programme this morning Cath Prisk, Director of Play England, alluded to the social costs of children not playing out. It needs a cultural shift in attitudes, which in turn requires a bit more effort from policy makers than we’ve yet seen.

Eyes on the street?

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, many Americans are doubtless pensive about the role of neighbours in local community safety. And much of the debate refers back to Jane Jacobs’ straightforward explanation of the power of residents’ presence in their own neighbourhoods.

I once used the phrase ‘eyes on the street’ in a radio interview and was told it was jargon, though it seems a pretty self-evident concept for people who aren’t too lazy to think about the words they hear. (I also once tried to discuss with a bunch of senior police officers the notion that residents 'co-produce' their own safety. Sigh).

Perhaps the idea of eyes on the street is due a re-interpretation, as this short article in the Atlantic seems to suggest. There’s plenty that might be added to the mix discussed, such as the part played by ‘defensible space’ and ‘secured by design’ principles, and the politics of segregation… but I love the image. It comes from Justice for Families, who are ‘inviting communities to gather for a Night Out for Safety, Democracy, and Human Rights.’

 

 

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.

 

Lost possessions: new publication

Lost possessions is a richly illustrated essay exploring the curious tradition of picking up items dropped by complete strangers in public places, and placing them - in routine acts of simple anonymous generosity - on fences, walls or branches to make it more likely that their owners will recover them.

If you’ve ever dropped something in the street and found that someone unknown has taken the trouble to pick it up and place it safely in view, so that you could recover it, you may have been struck by the simple thoughtfulness of their action.

Lost possessions is a collection of striking photographs, with a light-hearted essay exploring this reassuring tradition of uncelebrated, considerate behaviour.

16 pages, printed in full colour on high quality, FSC-approved sustainably-sourced paper.

Text: Kevin Harris.

Images: Martin Dudley, Kevin Harris and Jan Steyaert.

Price: £3.00 + £0.75 p&p. To order please click here.

 

Don’t start blaming the neighbours

Now things have quietened down a bit, what can we say about the questioning of neighbourliness around 2207 Seymour Ave in Cleveland Ohio? Don’t blame the neighbours; avoid knee-jerk conjuring of halcyon historic community; and take mental health more seriously.

Exhibit A is the cliché of American ‘community’ life, half-heartedly examined by Rupert Cornwell in the Indy for instance:

‘Cleveland has somehow given the lie to all this. If communities are supposed to look after their own, this particular one failed.’

I think it must be a bewildering, deeply disturbing experience for the neighbours concerned and I don’t see that it helps to clobber them with a sense of having let the side down. As I wrote a year ago with reference to such contexts, the experience of local people may be complicated by a sense of guilt mixed with cruel deception:

‘Can we understand how it felt in retrospect to have been a neighbour of Josef Fritzl, and to have respected his privacy? I imagine people saying simply, We knew nothing, what should we have done? – and never really recovering. An anti-social or deranged individual determined to use privacy as a smokescreen will do so, unless as a society we were to dismantle the structures and culture of privacy…

‘How close could the best of good neighbourliness have got to an Anders Breivik or a Josef Fritzl? No closer than they’d let you, through a street rep scheme perhaps, and no closer. You cannot see what he brings home from the stores in boxes or the magazines going through the letterbox, or what he views online.’

So far I don’t see that the case of Ariel Castro is particularly different. And it doesn’t help to refer to more halcyon days or localities, mythical or not, unless we are also going to offer analyses which suggest how we can reduce the likelihood of deranged behaviour having brutal and lasting impact on the lives of others.

With that in mind, there’s one social imperative which seems to be missed every time: the need to create a culture in which the disorder of the individual in question is self-recognised as treatable by an available, confidential, caring system. Castro is said to have prepared a ‘suicide’ note in which he speaks of a sex addiction and said he needed help. What realistically were his chances of getting it, of taking it? Maybe we need to put more effort into pre-emptive services for all kinds of mental ill-health; and to normalise or de-stigmatise the idea of consulting them. Implementing the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Mental Health and Policing would be a start: ‘mental health is core business’ it says.

Today we tend to find the treatment of people with mental illness, in previous centuries, distasteful or even barbaric. Unless we learn how to learn from tragedies like Seymour Avenue, I think that future societies may reflect in the same way about our own primitive disinterest in mental health.

 

You probably don’t know your neighbours, it says here

Research reported by the Big Lunch claims that more than 50 per cent of respondents ‘don’t know their neighbours’, with one in four ‘having no idea what their names are’.

There’s no way of finding out what this means, as there is no press release on the website, and no indication of who carried out the research or how the questions were worded. Of course it’s part of the BL process of cranking up its publicity, which is fair enough; and it gives the Daily Mail something to put in its columns, which maybe can’t be helped.

All I can offer is a quick comparison with some previous ‘findings’, noting the three tentative conclusions I drew a few years ago that

• about 90% of us enjoy good relationships with our neighbours and speak to them often
• about 5% of us have no contact with our neighbours
• there's no consensus on whether neighbourliness is in decline.

I could point out once again that the phrase ‘to know your neighbours’ needs a bit of unpacking if it is to be helpful; and that knowing names is not the same as recognition, which is what underpins neighbourliness.

I can also promise to try and do another mini-analysis of collected ‘findings’ from sources like this, because they do have a fascination and possibly some lessons. But it remains the case that if organisations don’t feel able to reveal the source of such eccentric conclusions, their credibility will need rescuing.

Little tiny fridge

I don’t know when Sheffield City Council stopped being known as ‘the corporation’ but if you have any idea, you may be able to date this story about neighbours. I’ve no doubt it dates from those well-known halcyon days when men were real men, fridges were real fridges, and close-knit northern communities were real close-knit northern communities.

BBC Radio Sheffield covered the topic of neighbourliness this morning (thanks for the heads-up Martin) and a lady called Frieda called in (for the next few days you can catch her remarks here at about 2:20.40). At the mention of ‘neighbours from hell,’ Frieda said in a matter of fact way, ‘I’ve ‘ad ‘em luv’ –

‘When I first came in ‘ere. They tried to make my life hell but I stuck ‘em out and they’re dead now… Anonymous letters, threatening me, threatening me children…’

Why was that then?

‘We’d just moved into our house… and we bought a little fridge it were, one of them that you used to buy for a pound off the corporation, we’d just moved in, bought this little fridge, and all hell were let loose. I don’t know why, but when t’police came, they said it were jealousy... Little tiny fridge. But I stuck ‘em out… for about four year, if not more.’

 

From Muck Flick to Bad Sir Brian Botany: an ironical salute to posh neighbour disputes

In today’s Observer, Catherine Bennett picks up on a piece in the Telegraph about a planning dispute between super-rich neighbours in west London. The story is almost worthy of a Carry On movie, the villain being Jonny Foreigner (with a distasteful lineage) Gert-Rudolph "Muck" Flick. Herr Flick and his partner have a desperate need for extra space – swimming pool, gym, cinema, that sort of thing – requiring some disruptive excavations which the council has approved:

‘Kensington & Chelsea has ruled that the digging out of their planned, two-storey basement, forecast to cause two years of disruption in the Onslow Square area, along with the pointless destruction of the house's 1884 Red Room gallery, should have its blessing, since it would only end in "visually discreet additions" to his existing £30m house.’

Julian Lloyd Webber, president of the Onslow Neighbourhood Association, has said previously that

‘If we can’t preserve this area, nothing is safe’

- and for all I know he could be right. Nothing may now be safe, there’s a thought.

Bennett’s article reviews other posh people’s tiffs and suggests that culturally we expect neighbourhood disputes to be

‘almost exclusively the province of the disadvantaged, strongly linked to poverty and poor education, limited social skills and a propensity to spit.’

It’s reasonable to suppose that people who live in dense proximity, who have fewer opportunities either to escape or to protect their own territory, would be more likely to experience tension in relationships with neighbours. But where there’s a chance for the muscles of power and egotism to be rippled, the wealthy often like to express themselves to excess. The pointless epic tangle between Boythorn and Dedlock over rights of way to a trivial stretch of land in Bleak House comes to mind.

My favourite example is probably still the reported problem faced by King Abdullah of Jordan a few years ago (Smell thy neighbour). But while it makes good entertainment when the Haves are subject to disruption in their protected enclaves, I wonder how far it really is from historic examples of dynastic rulers, religious zealots, and megalomaniac industrialists, who can turn disputes with the neighbourhood equivalent of national, ethnic or faith groups into devastating wars if they don’t happen to get on very well, or if their egos need something.

Disputes between the powerful and the oppressed, manifested at neighbourhood level, are different, and rather more common than publicised spats among the Haves. Sometimes these get mediated by a little neighbourhood vigilantism. So let’s take the chance to celebrate the poetic come-uppance of Bad Sir Brian Botany:

Sir Brian had a pair of boots with great big spurs on,
A fighting pair of which he was particularly fond.
On Tuesday and Friday, just to make the street look tidy,
He’d collect the passing villagers and kick them in the pond.

“I am Sir Brian!” (sper-lash!)
“I am Sir Brian!” (sper-losh!)
“I am Sir Brian, as bold as a lion -
Is anyone else for a wash?”

Sir Brian woke one morning, and he couldn’t find his battleaxe;
He walked into the village in his second pair of boots.
He had gone a hundred paces, when the street was full of faces,
And the villagers were round him with ironical salutes...

 

Low level interaction

Hello, what’s this? Someone else who thinks that sense of community doesn’t necessarily require strong or dense local social ties? A year ago I mentioned the initial thoughts of Queensland sociologist Lynda Cheshire on community resilience in the 2011 floods. Now here she calls for more participants for her study and offers early reflections:

‘Even outside of emergencies, a good relation with neighbours has been shown to increase individuals' sense of community and attachment to place, and to improve health and well-being.

‘This doesn't necessarily mean we have to become close friends with neighbours or organise street barbecues. Low levels of interaction - such as friendly greetings when you see them, keeping an eye on each other's properties while away, and exchanging telephone numbers for emergencies is all that's really needed.’

The point being, I think, that these low level connections require much less effort to establish and maintain than do close ties, and we all have more of them, so our chances of mobilising help in time of need are going to be more efficiently increased through recognition than through close relationship.

Cheshire has been interviewing residents from flood affected streets and I’m looking forward to reading papers from the study in due course.

Privacy and the 'neighbor across the hall'

Even doing what she regards as nothing, Debbie seems to have a neighbour who invades her privacy:

'Did it ever occur to you that I didn't turn on the TV or stereo because I know you're spying on me and I'd like to be able to just be AWAKE without you knowing about it?'

 

Neighbourliness and social networks: a little welcome attention?

In a new RSA paper Nicola Bacon argues that

‘we need to find fresh approaches that can be delivered in an age of low public spending and a shrinking state... we need to find new ways to put the lived experience of residents at the centre of regeneration policy and practice. We need to build on local assets and boost resilience in a way that both supports mobility for those who wish to leave, and stability for people who choose to stay in the areas that they call home.’

Plenty of ‘we needs’ – this is think-tank language - but not much to disagree with there. I have an open mind about whether or not ‘new ways’ or ‘fresh approaches’ are required. This is an essay about community development and I’d say there is nothing much wrong with the values, principles and processes of CD - maybe it’s the political context in which it is expected to perform magic, and the forces working in the opposite direction, that need attention.

Having said that, new tools – for local digital spaces for example, or tools like the Young Foundation’s well being and resilience measure which exploit the power of statistics - can surely help to bring a compelling persuasiveness to the local case.

So what we have is the RSA keen to keep building its presence and credibility around the practice of local social development; together with a welcome determination that the importance of local social networks should be recognised in policy, especially in times of severe financial constraint.

Emphasising the value of local social networks is here packaged as ‘turning strangers into neighbours’ - translating from the language of sociology into that of local newspapers without shaking off the questions of the kind of neighbouring and the kind of privacy that is assumed to be desirable, in policy or by 'strangers'.

Anyway, the opportunity as presented is to ‘explore the viable ways of “turning strangers into neighbours”’. The point is made strongly that

‘neighbourliness and social networks are a critical protective factors against many neighbourhood problems’

(the unedited grammar being symptomatic of the paper as a whole, I’m afraid) - but we scarcely get beyond that assertion, and I couldn’t see any ‘new ways’ of encouraging the wholesale conversion of strangers into local network connections. Just when you think something special might be coming up, the paper ends, quite abruptly.

So as with the Res Publica paper, that I reviewed six months ago, I’ve approached with a sense of optimistic anticipation and been disappointed, the redeeming factor being that important topics are being aired by influential agencies.

Maybe we’re not supposed to be bothered too much about papers like these? Are they just territory markers? It’s like we’ve got think tanks going round the policy townscape cocking their legs and spraying the conceptual lamp-posts. Guaranteed to make me go sniffy.

In this case, most people are going to find the relentless reference to the Young Foundation at best tiresome, particularly given the extensive overlooked literature on most of this stuff. Other authors like Chris Phillipson might get a mention (albeit miss-cited) if they happen to have published in a TYF publication. Lazy reference to someone called ‘Puttnam’ serves to further dissipate any confidence that had been built up in the first pages of the report. It's just a thought, but, maybe don’t publish; or treat the reader with a little more respect?