Neighbourhoods

Occupying the neighbourhood: 'everybody knows who you are'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some contributory factors that come to mind:

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

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

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

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

Cohesion and disturbance

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

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

According to the article, we're talking about

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

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

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

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

Call me old fashioned, but maybe nostalgia isn't the only problem

Here's a curiosity. Ryan Shorthouse in Prospect magazine has a go at both Philip Blond (Red Toryism) and Maurice Glasman (Blue Labour - you still with me?) for their 'nostalgia for a "golden age" of British communities'. Quite right too. 

[Start of short Kev rant, partly lifted from a forthcoming paper] The contemporary media-political rhetoric is partly problematic because it finds 'community' historically still within reach, through the living-memory images from the nostalgia industry. (I often think we would gain greater insight discussing the assumed decline of neighbourliness in early modern England). Our politicians and journalists invite us to do penance before the curling monochrome prints of streets where doors were always left open and everyone knew everyone. The problem is not that this mythology is entirely misleading – it isn’t, not entirely - but that it is packaged as universally flawless, implicitly recoverable, and key to the resolution of expensive problems of social policy. For politicians and political commentators to peddle this rhetoric uncritically is either ignorant or disingenuous. [Rant ends].

Perversely, Shorthouse ends his article by claiming that market forces and private capital

'could sustain and improve public services that people rely on. Revitalised community life will only really come from improving the skills of individuals: boosting education levels and improving employability, for instance.'

Well, and one or two other things we can all think of. A reliable economy would help, one that is not held to ransom by the Tories' dear friends in the financial sector and rescued at the cost of public services that are used by people who happen to be below their lofty field of vision. Meanwhile we all have to be patient while the current experiment in 'progressive conservatism' demonstrates quite how education levels and employability will be boosted by cutting education funding and closing libraries.

Call me old fashioned, but I too think that it's in society's interests for people to associate more, and more pro-socially, at local level. But we're not likely to achieve that with the current vicious assault on the public realm or by decimating services that people need just to give them the strength to reflect on their own circumstances.

 

What did you call me?

I spend quite a bit of time every day talking gibberish to a baby.

I do this because I'm aware that children in care have a high likelihood of delayed development and consequent disadvantage; and because early gains in speech and language can be of critical importance in later development. I'm helping to care for a baby who could easily get left behind if he doesn't get plenty of face-to-face communication right now. This kind of effort to compensate for disadvantage is routine in foster care.

But through a compelling piece on R4's Today programme this morning we learn that a noticeable proportion of children are starting school without knowing their own names, or in some cases not knowing that they have a name. How excluded can you get?

Once I ponder the implications of that in terms of sense of identity - let alone the development of communication skills - I find it scary, and feel ashamed of our society. One example given in the article referred to a parent who simply didn't know that you can talk to a child before they can talk back to you:

'he don't talk to me, so I don't talk to him'.

Some attempt was made lamely to blame contemporary media for this state of affairs. But Jean Gross, who has the great job title of 'the government's communication champion for children,' referred to young parents lacking contact with other adults of different generations.

And I think it might be worth asking about the sometimes-missing contribution of the extended family, intergenerational relations at neighbourhood level, and the impact of poor housing design. Where someone's immediate environment seriously discourages them from stepping out with their baby or toddler, and diminishes the likelihood of conversational encounters with others in the nieghbourhood if they do so, the reduction to silence and hence namelessness may be understandable.

Neighbourhood natter about parenting may not always be packed with wisdom, but at least there's a good chance that names will be exchanged.

Blaming the media and blaming the parents is way too easy. We need also to think about how parenthood is affected by the social and environmental character of our neighbourhoods, and what can be done about that.

It also strikes me that we bring a legitimate urgency to our calls for people to check on their elderly neighbours, especially in winter: surely a similar urgency should apply to connecting with parents of children who are in the fragile early spring of life.

 

17% would not help a neighbour

Here are some new data on neighbourliness, from a large US survey conducted for StateFarm, an insurance company. The sample was 17,000 and the project has been overseen by Keith Hampton, so is definitely worthy of attention.

To their credit, StateFarm provide more than the usual upbeat press release. Here are some of the things that I noticed on a read-through of the findings.

I was most struck by negative responses to the question: 'What would you do to help a neighbor in need?' Seventeen per cent would not help a neighbour in need, and this figure is pretty much consistent across age, gender and urbanicity. So if you thought, say, that older people in rural areas would be nearly universally neighbourly, think again.

  The survey asked about the channels used where people 'interact with their neighbours on a monthly basis'. It seems to me there's plenty of online contact going on, but the 10 per cent of text interaction is higher than I'd have expected.

Almost 40 per cent lend to neighbours and 24 per cent borrow 'at least several times a year' (don't ask me to explain the discrepency, although I note that 7 per cent are disgruntled about neighbours who don't return borrowed items).

One other thing. The data suggest that 17 per cent of 18-34 year olds know 'most of their neighbours' by name. I think that's pretty high, at least for under-25s. The graphic seems designed to imply that it isn't. What are our expectations?

And here's Keith's take on it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on neighbouring and recession

Here's more tentative support for the argument that economic hardship is stimulating neighbourliness. The Co-op has published a press release (but as yet no report or data) on another survey of neighbourliness following their 2010 report which I blogged a year ago.

They suggest that people are helping their neighbours more,

with increasing numbers looking after pets or plants (32% up from 23%), fetching shopping (15% up from 6%) and accepting mail or parcels (73% up fro 63%).

At the same time, they note an increase in the number of people reporting problems with their neighbours.

To me it seems a bit too simplistic to associate slight reported changes in neighbouring with the recession - especially when we don't know what the questions were - without also taking account of other forces and changes like localism, the decline of trust in large institutions, and networked support.

 

Chat about neighbours on t'wireless

The Beeb seems to be doing more of those programmes in which articulate knowledgable people speak about issues in which they're not expert, I suppose because it's cheaper than the programme-makers having to do any research. This is an example of the kind (30 mins, available for seven days), an underwhelming programme about neighbours in which the thinking was done on the hoof.

Laurie Penny rescued it in part by pointing out that we can all live near to people and 'know' them and still be shocked or surprised to find out something fundamental about them; and that the same can apply in the online world. That was about the only insight on offer I'm afraid.

But I don't like to appear too negative, so here's an instance of where it might have got interesting, with a bit of thought. Guy Browning suggested that people would be more neighbourly if they were forced together more. The unstated and unexplored implication being that neighbourliness is an objective sufficiently desirable for other benefits (like comfort and privacy, say) to be sacrificed. Next time, they could start the debate there.

Thanks Martin for the heads-up.

 

Does austerity cause increase in knowing neighbours' names?

Between 2008 and 2010 the proportion of American adults who say they ‘know all or most of their neighbours by name’ increased by some 11 per cent, to 51%. In 2008, 31 per cent said they did not know any of their neighbours by name: two years later, this had dropped to just 18 per cent.

This comes from the latest output from the collaboration of Keith Hampton and his colleagues with Pew Internet Research - a study of the impact of social networking sites on levels of trust, personal relationships and civic and political involvement in the USA. (I’ll be posting some thoughts on the main findings of that study, over on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog shortly). The authors note that:

It might be that the persistence of the poor economic conditions of the American economy has prompted – or necessitated - that people to turn to their neighbors for informal support. It would be premature to suggest that this current trend is part of a gradual increase in social capital in America.

I’ll make my customary point here briefly about the assumption behind the question – knowing someone’s name implies a level of relationship not necessarily consistent with people’s understanding of neighbouring (certainly not mine). Knowing someone by name implies a stronger relationship than is necessarily needed or wanted. So as I’ve noted before, this emphasis perpetuates the unfortunate habit of over-privileging strong ties in the understanding of local social relations. The basis of neighbouring is recognition, which does not depend on knowing names, as nicely illustrated in this quotation from last year’s Gumtree research:

'It's true I don't know many neighbours by name, but we recognise each other, know who lives where and are aware of each other's routines. If something is out of place, we notice. We also pick up the litter in the street and close each other's gates when the postman leaves them open.'

The closest comparable recent UK data I have found offers responses to the statement ‘I know my immediate neighbours’ names’ with a return of 83 per cent (Circle Anglia Community Census carried out by ComRes 2009). Maybe this can be compared with the 81 per cent in the Pew survey who know some, most, or all by name.

A final point from the Pew report, which is mainly about the impact on social relations of the use of technologies: the authors found

'no indication that different types of technology use predict neighboring. Internet and non-internet users are equally as likely as others to know at least some of their neighbors.'

The main point of this post though is to suggest that the positive effect of austerity on local social relations is probably not fanciful and is certainly worthy of closer scrutiny. Any self-respecting community development worker knows that nothing succeeds like adversity.

And if an economic decline does have a positive effect on local social relaitons, does the reverse apply?

 

 

Would you choose neighbourhood or housing?

So at yesterday's Compass conf I was on a panel about neighbourhoods and 'the good society', and there was an interesting question from the floor: can you have a 'good neighbourhood' with poor housing? It didn't fall to me to try and answer, but the consensus seemed to be 'no'.

Our mythology of course says 'yes'. But that could be because it confuses collective resilience with what it might be reasonable to call 'good neighbourhood'. I think for example of the experience of women from the tenements of Edinburgh and Glasgow retold in a super book called She was aye workin' - challenging

the idea that 'We may have been poor, but we were very comfortable and cosy' - it's just not true. Their life was hell. It was a constant daily grind against dirt and disease.

That reminds us is that a functioning neighbourhood is not just a set of cohesive relations where people support one another out of necessity against the odds. That kind of 'community' may seem laudable to those who know no better but it should not be wished or imposed on anyone, and it's a brutish society that is prepared to do so.

In my few words to the seminar I had tried to suggest that the idea of 'community' - far from being the magic solution to a long list of social problems which governments would like to see resolved by someone else at no cost - is a minority interest. Most people are most concerned about house and family, with 'community' a distant third (Lyn Richards' excellent but seldom-cited study Nobody's home brings this out forcefully).

So my own reflection on the question - can you have a 'good neighbourhood' with poor housing? - is to ask, if you could only have one, which would you choose?

 

Rebuilding the Smurf Society

Here I sit trying to think what I might say at today’s Compass seminar on ‘building the good society’, only to get distracted by this BBC headline:

Do Smurfs provide a model for a good society?

I have never knowingly watched the Smurfs, but apparently they

lived without money, using their individual skills for the common good, without individual reward, to ensure their community thrives.

So that seems to answer the question in the headline, and suggests that today’s delegates might ask themselves if they’re inhabiting a fictional cartoon world. Ah, you know where this is going don’t you? -

You can even see echoes of the British government's Big Society idea, part of which encourages individuals to form community groups and engage in social action, particularly through volunteering, says Prof Ellis Cashmore, a sociologist from Staffordshire University.

"There are similarities between David Cameron's idea of the Big Society and what we see embodied in Smurf society.

"Cameron [is asking people to get] organised with their local community, have organic collectivity and work for each other, like we used to before industrialisation came along and fragmented society."

The last bit needs a bit of qualification of course. Historians do still argue that neighbourliness declined at the end of the middle ages, but it was a debt-based society with a great deal of mobility, and the home was a public, not a private place, which must have made a difference.

But it’s the phrase ‘Smurf Society’ that catches the eye. I’m floundering in a surfeit of universalised kinds of ‘Society,’ but if I have to choose one, this could be it.

Neighbouring in low income neighbourhoods

The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University has published the final report of their study of low income neighbourhoods.

It’s an important body of work, mainly qualitative and thus sitting most obviously alongside Anne Power’s City survivors as a source of stories and quotes.

At the same time, JRF have published a paper prepared by some of the researchers and based on the same study, which looks at current social policies and assesses their potential impact on residents living in the neighbourhoods studied. The paper explores some of the underlying assumptions in the new policy agenda. (Summary here).

It’s a smart move, let’s hope this latter paper has some impact. The key message seems to be this:

There was little evidence in the research of any fault line between ‘cohesive’ and ‘broken’ communities, of places somehow set apart from ‘the rest of us’. Place still matters and, as a rule, neighbourhood mattered most to people where both the economic legacy and future prospects for their community were least favourable.

The authors stress the role of social housing -

neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of social housing often provided households with an island of stability in an ocean of turbulence (not least in the jobs market).

They go on to ask,

what happens to those communities that are facing structural economic weakness but where countervailing systems of mutual support and resilience have also become attenuated over time – those at the end of the economic line – if the opportunities for economic growth lie elsewhere?

As far as neighbouring is concerned, two familiar points are re-confirmed: that neighbouring is not the same as friendship; and not everyone wants to invest in neighbourliness. But there is one pertinent point that is very well-made in the main research report, concerning the extent to which so many people on low-incomes are both time-poor and cash-poor.

This point needs making with research to back it up, because policy too often implies that people in poverty have time on their hands while worthier citizens are busy driving the economy and bringing up more worthy citizens. Lack of time and energy constrains people’s ability to get involved in co-production or civic action or in strengthening their social networks. Here’s one quote that illustrates the way in which this plays out in neighbourhood relations:

No I don’t want to be going round for cups of tea and that kind of thing... I think it’s important to say hello and recognise each other but… there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to socialise with the people I socialise with, family and friends as it is… and it’s just trying to find time to do the laundry and keep the house tidy as well as everything else.

And finally while I remember it, for the record, there’s one point in one of the research papers which doesn’t seem to have made it into the final report, concerning the negative effect of declined neighbourly overtures:

I tried to make friends with these neighbours but they won’t so I left it at that so basically. I don’t know anybody in this street unless somebody dies and ‘oh her name was Mary’ or something… it’s not like you would go out and knock on the neighbour’s door and say ‘hello can I borrow a cup of sugar’. I even started that when I first come over here, I cook and I would take plate of samosas or whatever to the neighbours and so I stopped and I just keep to myself….people keep to themselves, they don’t have the time… I think people are busy, they don’t want to get involved, they don’t want to bother, because I’ve got two neighbours here, they’re both the same, don’t want to know. So I gave up.

I’m reminded of a very similar sense that Toby Gale and I got from talking to refugees and asylum seekers (case study 3) for the Manchester neighbourliness review.

The silencing of the unanswered voice is probably quite prevalent, if we did but know it, and obviously damaging. How might it be countered? Thinking up lots of formal devices like street parties is only a partial solution at best, not just because not everyone is comfortable with them but also because they overplay expectations of neighbouring and try to coerce us into chumminess, whether false or not. So we have to fall back on all the old key drivers like design, occupation of streets, locality of services and amenities, limited churn, and so on. Oh, and neighbourhood online channels of course.

Let there be strong networks

Here’s another report calling for policy to bolster social networks – this one is from the International Longevity Centre UK, Can localism work for older people in urban environments? In this case the call is ‘to strengthen interpersonal, intergenerational, and multigenerational networks, particularly in urban areas.’

This accumulating acknowledgement that our dependence on institutions has left us vulnerable, as a society, is not misplaced in my view. The echo is familiar, as is the echo of the echo. Network poverty was worthy of more research attention than it got in recent wealthier times. Now that we really need some data on it, I suspect we’re going to be leaning heavily on the RSA study because I’m not sure there’s a great deal else to go on.

So what does it mean, to a policymaker, this call to help strengthen social networks? How should policy respond?

I’d start with a requirement that local policies should avoid doing damage to existing local social networks, a bit like the duty to involve. Vicki Nash suggested something similar, ‘community proofing,’ some years ago.

It would mean for instance that a new supermarket or road widening or library closure could not be approved without an intelligible analysis of its impact on local social networks, an analysis that in turn would inform public consultation. It wouldn’t take us long to develop the methodology, once we had to. I’ve suggested before, the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of local amenities that stimulate social networks is because no political value has been placed on human processes that are informal and organic.

Will that change, with all these calls to strengthen networks? Is there the political will to acknowledge that local social interactions have value which plays out in, and profoundly affects the costs of, other social provision?

The requirement to avoid network damage does not have to be accompanied by a given standard of social network strength, to which all neighbourhoods should be expected to aspire. Wrong approach, don’t go there.

But yes it should set us thinking about other ways of enhancing informal interaction, for example through the design of local spaces and dwellings; placing more than crudely economic value on local third places; support for local online networks; policies that discourage unnecessary car use and encourage walking; promotion of the principle of local (walkable) services and local (walkable) schools… All these will seem eminently sensible, if they don’t already, once there is government-level recognition of the essential value of informal interactions and the local social networks that they represent.

All this has drawn me back to a book chapter I wrote on policy and local social relations, here, in which I noted that

‘social relationships in neighbourhoods are organic, requiring a healthy ecology that reflects informality and also requiring that most of the time formality keeps its distance.’

And in which I quoted Robert Ellikson’s observation that

‘…lawmakers who are unappreciative of the social conditions that foster informal cooperation are likely to create a world in which there is both more law and less order.’

 

 

Student housing and neighbourhoods

Concentrations of students inevitably alter the natural ecology of neighbourhoods, because they contribute to a-typically high rates of churn. In some respects the effect is doubtless beneficial and in others it won't be.

Length of residence, on its own, can be misleading as an indicator of neighbourhood quality of life. But the usual assumption is that people who are not expecting to stay for long in a neighbourhood are generally least likely to invest in relations with their neighbours. The higher the proportion of these 'under-investors,' the more likely that there is a negative effect on neighbourhood quality of life.

If you're a student in this situation, you can over-compensate for the comparatively small capital investment you are making in the locality in all sorts of ways - helping with shopping, baby-sitting, odd-jobs etc for neighbours, and generally being considerate of course. But you have to do so proactively, or live with the perception that you are not 'pulling your weight'. Universities tend to take seriously their relations with their towns and cities, but I'm not aware that they do much to encourage students to consider neighbourhood social relations.

So is it best to let the market dictate, or should councils have policies to minimise the extent to which students in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) are concentrated in any given area?

Oxford City Council has announced a threshold of 20 per cent of houses in any 100 metre stretch of residential street, for all new houses for student tenants. (They do not have the power to reduce the existing percentage in a street if it's already higher than that). I can't see it catching on, but it will be interesting if it does.

For a theory of the neighbourhood based on economic principles of transaction costs and property rights, see a paper called 'The nature of the neighbourhood' by Chris Webster in Urban studies, December 2003 (subscription).

Webster notes in passing that:

'Owner-occupiers and long-term tenants have an economic incentive to deploy private resources in investments that yield collective neighbourhood benefits. Neighbourhoods characterised by short-term tenancies — such as student quarters, inner-urban high-density rental areas and some types of social housing — require institutional structures that provide incentives to act with restraint in the use of common resources and that encourage investment.'

 

National schemes to promote neighbourliness: what impact?

Some early results have been released from the evaluation of Neighbours Day Aotearoa 2011, which took place at the end of March. The survey is still open.

• Those who thought their neighbours would be "highly likely" to ask them for help increased by over 25% after Neighbours Day Aotearoa 2011.
• 57% felt more positive about their neighbours/neighbourhood.
• 74% said that they would be likely to participate with their neighbours in 2012, and a further 22.1% said they might.

Influence and local social networks

About ten years ago in community development and policy circles there were lots of conversations about using social network analysis to get at understandings of 'community' and thereby contribute to policy. To their credit, folk at the RSA just got on and did it, and have now published the second report of their Connected communities project.

This one is called Power lines and looks at social exclusion in terms of isolation from networks of influence and power. The report suggests that

'people feel a greater sense of empowerment if they have a larger and more varied number of local connections and relationships.'

Social networks reflect the ways power plays out, so that influence accumulates from influential connections, and exclusion accumulates from weakness of social ties.

Hence the authors' recommendation that local public bodies should assess their funding for community groups on the contribution that groups make 'to building stronger, more diverse social networks.'

'In particular, initiatives should seek to connect those who are currently isolated or at risk, with others.'

The hard bit is working out how. There's plenty to build on, and firm justification. Asif Afridi, in a review for JRF published in March, suggests three main ways in which social networks can address poverty:

• They can enable the sharing of resources (time, expertise, support) and information (job opportunities, benefits advice, influence).
• They can provide mutual support and opportunities to learn or develop skills (support to start a business, for example).
• They can create strength in numbers and enable collective action or voluntary effort (improving a local area, for example, or social campaigning, or ensuring a voice in local affairs).

Understandably, the report does not dwell on what it means to have or not have a sense of influence and empowerment. But it provokes questions for me, which I'm not sure have been answered in previous work either in this project or for instance by MORI (Searching for the impact of empowerment) or in the important National Empowerment Partnership paper (which I discussed about a year ago)...

To begin with, who wants to have influence? What do we know about the sort of people for whom it does or doesn't matter to be able to influence policy?

And then I suppose I'd like to know, is wanting to have influence associated with believing you have influence? Are there survey data that tell us who says they want to have influence; and a comparable data set that tells us who thinks they have influence? Looking at that would be a start, after which we should maybe see if we can find out who actually exerts influence.

Finally, two quick reminders. Using social network analysis to help understand meanings of 'community' is not new. For instance, it's been used in the debate about the idealisation of late medieval English villages as harmonious close-knit communities. People were found to have manifold external connections, which tells us a little about our assumptions of levels of cohesion in the past - and maybe hints at unrealistic expectations in the present.

And it's worth remembering that Geoff Mulgan was writing about network poverty in relation to digital technologies as long ago as 1990, possibly earlier. Notwithstanding the pioneering work of people like Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, and the important contribution that the Connected communities project is making, we maybe should have got further by now.

 

Neighbourliness, street parties, and apartments

With street parties taking place around the country today, there will be plenty of fodder for those who fancy the contemporary political line on local community: this rhetoric continues a long tradition calling for local social relations to be close and supportive in the way that friendships are, echoing chocolate box close-knit neighbourhoods of the interpreted past.

And indeed, I've no doubt that many new connections will be made today, and many established relationships will develop from recognition to conviviality and perhaps to friendship.

Of course I don't have any problem with that, but I do wonder about the insistence that it is 'what we need' as a society, the implication that this need is self-evident, and the expectation that we should all be looking for mechanisms that help to bring it about.

As I sat uncertain in my own neighbourhood get-together this afternoon, watching the conversations, I was thinking about the temporary sense of beleagueredness of the least clubbable. Those for whom this kind of nationally-decreed sociability is at best awkward may well resent the social forces that try to make them feel guilty.

Also happening a lot during today's street parties, I'd guess, will be plenty of qualification of the assumption that we choose to live near people who are like us. You might wonder about this received wisdom if you have republican views and suddenly find out you've been living among flag-waving monarchists all these years. Or vice versa.

Perhaps the point is that, to the extent that we are able to choose, we choose to live among people whose values and behaviour we can get along with, so long as we don't have to find out too much about them. That's why we don't tend to talk about politics with people we don't know very well. Certainly the popular political ideal of a country full of strongly-bonded, unified local communities that readily achieve consensus and exploit it for the nation's greater glory just seems plain daft. No amount of royal weddings or associated street parties is going to change that.

Would the anthopologists tell us that living among people without knowing or wanting to know too much about them is normal? Normal for advanced urban societies? Or peculiarly British? Well, while you're thinking about that, here's Hugh Schofield offering the beeb's 'From our own correspondent' view on the code of neighbourliness in Parisian apartments (thanks to Paul Evans at Local democracy for pointing to this):

'I am certain that the fact French and other European societies are more socially-minded, both less free and less individualistic, is linked to the habits of apartment living.'

I've come across this view before in architectural discussions about the potential for neighbourliness in tower block living, referring to mainland European cities to suggest cultural differences based on urban housing forms. But I'm not aware of any comparative studies. Schofield claims that:

'In apartments you get to know your neighbours much more intimately than perhaps they or you would like. So you learn to keep your relationship one of formal distance, respectful but not friendly. You learn not to express your independence too readily by playing music late or having parties, or running a bath at midnight.'

If you go to the Neighbours from Hell website it's likely you'll find plenty of people who would welcome widespread adoption of this accommodating culture in the UK, because their experience is painfully different.

So how do we get our politicians to recognise that you don't invest in a sense of neighbourliness that is 'respectful without being friendly' by repeatedly asserting the romantic gospel of earnest, committed, close-knit community? It's rather like the government's over-insistence a few years ago, on meaningful social interaction, as if apparently superficial neighbourhood relations were not important. They are.

 

Loneliness, isolation and social media

JRF have published a useful and clear literature and practice review for the Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme.

It's worth reiterating a few points. As I've noted before -

• loneliness is not the same as isolation - it's an unwelcome form of isolation which has social (and by extension economic) consequences;
• loneliness is not age-related (the Gulbenkian Campaign to End Loneliness is focused on people in old age, and I fear this serves to perpetuate the social dismissal of the issue among other age groups);
• loneliness is quite separate to the sense of belonging or not belonging to a place; and
• the way we address it could be influenced by the power of social media in strengthening and sustaining local connections.

There seems to be a widespread assumption that loneliness is increasing. The Mental Health Foundation's excellent report last year suggested as much but does not seem to confirm it. I think we should be alert but sceptical.

As it happens, with a little time to do some catching up over the past few days, I've managed to read one of Keith Hampton's recent papers, on the relationship of internet and mobile phone use to network size and diversity. Among the points made with characteristic thoroughness are the following:

• reports that social isolation has increased significantly in the USA since 1985 seem to have been exaggerated and in fact isolation may have declined; and
• there is no evidence that the use of internet or mobile phones diminishes the size or diversity of people's core networks. Specific uses of social media were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity.

The Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness programme includes a question about new media, but JRF's approach to technology has always been tentative, not to say reluctant. It would be good if they would grab the initiative in this case, and really open up the potential here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the evidence on local online channels gives us plenty to go on.

Previously:

• Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?
• Loneliness and mental distress

 

Neighbourhood environment clearly affects neighbourliness

For a long time, I've been saying that neighbourliness can be 'designed-out', and asking why it cannot more deliberately be 'designed-in'. The literarure is gradually starting to accumulate and this question gets a little extra feeding from some interesting research recently published in Environment and behavior (subscription, online first).

The researchers used measures of the physical environment in ten neighbourhoods in Portland, Oregon, and found

'a greater probability of higher levels of neighborliness as the total number of positive physical-environment characteristics increased.'

Judiciously they used the neighbourliness index from the 2003 social capital report on the General Household Survey.

Strikingly, the results were unchanged

'after controlling for race, self-reported health, perception of safety, years of neighborhood residence, age of house, market value of house, and proportion of homeowners in neighborhood.'

The authors point out that causality is not demonstrated: conceivably, people who are disposed to be neighbourly give rise to neighbourly environments. But it seems more likely that it is the other way round, don't it?

The picture I took some years ago in an area called The Roger in Joao Pessoa, Brasil. I've chosen it because it reminds us that there are probably quite a lot of features not solely to do with the physical environment, that influence neighbourhood interactions. Like for example: low volume of cars, favourable weather, people having stuff to do outdoors, dogs, children, impromptu seating arrangements contrived in community spaces and so on.

Neighbours Day Aotearoa

I’m fascinated by the momentum for nationally coordinated, policy-sanctioned efforts to stimulate social capital. One day perhaps it will be possible to study and compare the expressed objectives and reported outcomes of some of these schemes.

Our kiwi friends had their inaugural national celebration of neighbourliness, 26-27 March. Hopefully there will be some useful evaluation material to emerge: at least they’re giving it some thought. One of the founders, Rebecca Harrington, is reported here on Scoop:

'Because the idea of Neighbours Day Aotearoa is focused on locally organised gatherings in homes, backyards, or footpaths across the country, gauging exact levels of participation was always going to be a challenge.

'The indicators we have are the visitors to the website, media coverage, participants in social media, and direct contact from individuals (which was hard to keep up with)' she says. 'A huge number of websites have helped spread the word, and we’ve discovered mentions published in all kinds of places we didn’t know about from kindergarten notices to businesses’ staff newsletters. So we think the real level of involvement is a lot higher than we can see or measure.'

The pic is from here.

Can you have local community when you don’t need to have it?

Pseudonymous comment on Carlone Carter’s article on street parties, in the Economist:

‘…when people are poor, vulnerable etc, they need to support each other. When people are rich they don't. Perhaps it is in human nature for people not to care about each other once they are not vulnerable...or perhaps its a negative externality of our neoliberal society. Perhaps you need government intervention..as when my local council sent out SMSs asking us to check on neighbours since apparently people have been dying at home without anybody knowing. Surely what ever the cause, the decline in community is not a thing we should aspire to.’

 

 

'I need your help'

I wrote a few weeks ago about the 'request scruple' and people's willingness or unwillingness to ask for help. Now here's Amanda's engrossing tale of neighbouring from Boston, Mass. 'I need you to help me pick up my motha,' gasps the passer-by. I can easily see this one getting taken up by the neat but cringingly-yclept good gym.

For me it brought back memories of being in Boston for the marathon and for some seminars about neighbourhood relations at MIT, in 2003.

It also made me think about occasions when I've been approached for help by people on the fringes of my neighbourhood or theirs. Usually they're wholly trusting encounters, for example when as I was passing I was asked to go into a house not far away but outside my immediate neighbouhood, to help shut a window - the owner was away and their keyholding neighbour was anxious about security. I didn't know her but maybe she recognised me as a local, as a regular pedestrian hereabouts for many years.

One encounter not long ago rather nonplussed me, when I was asked when passing a bus-stop - the guy suddenly up so close I felt his breath on my face - for a pound. I asked what for, he said so he could buy a book in the charity shop.

Neighbourly relations: events

Rethinking Cities and PLAYLINK are hosting an event on 6 April on 'making neighbourhoods more neighbourly'. It's in two parts: a Walkshop from 3.00pm - 5.00pm Meeting at Denmark Hill Station and a Talk the Walk from 5.00pm - 7.30pm at the Clore Studio at the South London Gallery London SE5 8UH.

The theme is 'making neighbourhoods more neighbourly': informal social neighbourliness, a sense of ease across generations, are qualities too infrequently associated with inner city or suburban neighbourhoods.  Why should this be so?  We believe that the local outdoors can and should allow for fun and the easy inter-play between generations.  Why is this not happening as often as we think it should? If we can imagine – and wish for - a playable and walkable neighbourhood, what needs to be done to make this a reality?

More.

And here’s the blurb about a more academic event in St Andrews -

'The Social Dynamics of Neighbourhood’ Postgraduate and Early Career Symposium

23rd May 2011

Centre for Housing Research, University of St Andrews

'There is a belief that local neighbourhoods impact the lives of those that live within them; a relationship extensively explored in the literature on neighbourhood effects. However, there is increasing acknowledgment that the behaviour of residents also changes the character of their neighbourhoods and it is on this second proposition that this symposium takes its focus. The rhetoric of the UK government’s ‘Big Society’ aims to move the control of the neighbourhood increasingly into the hands of local communities and it is therefore ever more important to understand how social change can alter this local arena. Aspects of this social change have been explored throughout the social sciences for many years through discussions of social capital, social inclusion and community cohesion amongst other topics, but the re-examination of topics such as these at the local scale is vital in the current policy climate.'

Confirmed plenary speaker:

Ade Kearns, Professor of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow and Principal Investigator on the GoWell Programme

Attendance is FREE and both lunch and tea/coffee will be provided

Offers of workshop papers are invited (title plus an abstract of 200 words) and should be sent to: Alice Oldfield (aeo4 (at) st-andrews.ac.uk)

Centre for Housing Research, University of St Andrews The Observatory, Buchanan Gardens, St Andrews, KY16 9LZ

OFFERS OF PAPERS SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY FRIDAY APRIL 22nd 2011

 

Reflections on bonhomie snake-oil and social pharmaceuticals

Disasters like hurricane Katrina or the recent earthquake in Japan understandably give rise to examples of neighbourliness and generalised discussion on the nature of community. I posted some points on post-Katrina social capital here.

Here's an example of an article considering sense of community, following the Christchurch earthquake. The author, Emma Woods, writes:

The resiliency of areas not only depended on how extensive the damage was, but also on what resources were available and how well these were pooled. A friend in one of the most damaged areas of Christchurch told me how one of her neighbours had a generator, several had barbecues and all shared the food that had been in their freezers. Everyone had something they needed and something they could share.

The stories that emerge in this genre are not dissimilar to historic forms of 'necessity neighbouring' which became institutionalised, for instance in the mythology of British urban communities in the first half of the twentieth century. People share and collaborate and support one another partly because it is in their interests to do so, as well as out of a sense of common humanity. It seems to me that only a theoretical psychologist would feel compelled to separate these two motivations rigidly. If humans were able completely to separate altruism from long-term self-interest (of self, family, species...) then I suspect we would not have evolved as social animals.

People rightly recognise enormous value in the social phenomenon of community when it emerges to play its part after a disaster, and it's not unusual to hear regrets voiced about how our societies have 'lost' the values that are starkly evidenced when adversity strikes. What is meant, I think, is 'wouldn't it be nice if we could have the community bit without the adversity?' Unfortunately the question  tends to be asked with so little reflection on people's motivations to connect with each other, that it becomes meaningless. It might be better to understand the metabolism of community and study the micro-conditions under which the flourishing of highly-visible communal support emerges.
 
Sense of community during times of large-scale crisis serves to fuel the interest already committed by policy makers who have been searching for strategic devices to stimulate routine neighbourliness. Yup, we're talking social chemical engineering, you just need a prescription-oriented culture and the elixir that captures the market.

Schemes like the Big Lunch or l'incroyable pique-nique or European Neighbours' Day - or even the Big Lottery's recently-announced People Powered Change programme (see David Wilcox's report here) - all appear to be macro-level attempts to stem the supposed decline in social capital and sell us all some universal-cure bonhomie snake-oil. This industry sector appears to be growing rapidly. The Prime Minister has a term for it, wait, no, i've forgotten it again.

Apart from asking where the money goes and where it might go if it didn't, it might help if we could be reassured that what is being injected into the social system is genuinely pro-social and not antibiotic (ie a substance that destroys micro-organisms). If you work at micro-organic level, it's easier to see, and necessary to care, whether (a) it is appropriate to talk in diagnostic terms, (b) any prescription is called-for, and if so (c) it is working. Personally I distrust this social pharmaceutical industry strongly.

Fatal error: (include_path='.:/local/): suicide and community

A single suicide can numb a neighbourhood with guilt and confusion. Significant numbers of suicides must feel like a great inexplicable weight burdening those who have invested in and seek to sustain local social life.

We don't seem to know much about its impact on the way residents interact at local level. It must be scary when the number of suicides around you is high enough to attract media and policy attention.

Here's an article by Mary O'Hara in yesterday's Guardian about Northern Ireland's lasting pain, noting a 64 per cent increase in the past decade. And here's an article about somewhere else with an unprecedented contagion a few years ago.

I think I'd like to live in a society where people consistently show 'respect for those who are asking for help' and where the state is prepared to invest in mental health services, and to support voluntary sector responses. Here for instance on Gerry Adams's blog you will find, in addition to the telling image above, the observation:

'The people of the Colin area deserve a crisis intervention response to the surge of suicides in their community. There is a huge amount of good work being done on the ground by youth workers, young citizens, teachers, church groups and others. But they should not have to carry this burden.'

Social care provided by older people is worth £34 billion

WRVS have published distinctive research into the socio-economic contribution of older people in the UK.

The report, Gold age pensioners, claims that people over 65 made a net contribution to the UK economy of £40 billion last year, even allowing for the costs of pensions, welfare and health services. 'This equates to just over £100 million per day, challenging the widely held view that older people progressively become a burden and a drain on society.'

The hidden value of older people’s volunteering is said to be worth £10 billion per year. Provision of social care by older people is worth £34 billion, predicted to grow to £52 billion by 2030.

The contributions range from leadership or high levels of membership of local clubs and societies, to informal support looking out for vulnerable neighbours and helping them stay independent for longer.

• ‘Sixty-five per cent of older people regularly help out elderly neighbours – and are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.’

• ‘Older people are very often the driving force for local community-based organisations, with active retirees combining their expertise, skills and experience to provide the leadership, as well as a disproportionate quantum of the membership, of many local organisations, groups and societies.’

I was told about this report yesterday while I was at a drop-in session for older people (part of our Neighbourhoods Connect project in Haringey) - at more or less the same time as one of the participants was saying:

'You can come here and make people cheery; and if you can do that, it makes you cheery too'.

 

The ‘request scruple’ and the demand for neighbourliness

Our society seems to be crying out with a perceived need to stimulate neighbourliness. The assumption is that the supply of neighbourliness in many residential populations is simply inadequate for the demand: people are not neighbourly enough, it seems, and the entire social structure is in jeopardy. The hunt is on to invent ways of stimulating neighbouring. So here's the Campaign to End Loneliness starting to capture ideas for instance, and we have one or two over on the 50 Ways site also. Is this the right approach?

Back in 2009 I had the privilege of editing the English language summary of a Dutch PhD thesis submitted by my friend Lilian Linders.

The study was about ‘the significance of proximity’ and looked at the nature of informal care at neighbourhood level. What Lilian found and describes is starting to excite the social welfare field in the Netherlands, and there are good reasons to reflect on her conclusions.

The research was carried out in a low income urban area, perceived as fairly cohesive in the traditional sense, with a population of about 2,400, clamped between an industrial zone and several highways. (I was driven close by last week, as it happens). Lilian speaks of ‘informal care’ in a very broad sense, she means I think the full range of informal support provided, including informal care and some very intimate tasks carried out by known co-residents repeatedly.

‘Apart from the willingness to help a neighbour, a plethora of problems like poverty, alcoholism, incest, disease, divorce, debts, domestic violence and loneliness was found. Therefore the dividing line between givers and receivers of informal care is blurred. The model is one of mutual aid.’

She found that most support was provided one-to-one, not on a collective (‘community’) basis, but simply because people knew each other. It had everything to do with trust at a personal level.

One of the things that Lilian latched onto, with keen insight, was the reticence in requesting neighbourly support. She calls this the ‘request scruple’ – a reluctance to ask for help. This contrasts sharply with the ‘support scruple’ – the reluctance to offer support.

Neighbours prefer social distance and are surprisingly reluctant to ask for support. Nonetheless, they do help each other, on an individual one-to-one basis, in personal and sometimes demanding and intimate circumstances.

The reluctance to ask for support extends to friends, acquaintances and family members, largely because of the fear of dependency and the social ideal of autonomy.

Lilian’s key finding is that the request scruple is far more of an impediment to informal care than is a shortage in the supply.

This helps to clarify the argument that informal care is not a consequence of neighbourhood cohesion: it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you have a cohesive neighbourhood, people will care for one another in time of need. That depends on personal relationships.

One last point. Lilian draws attention to the significance of mutual support between vulnerable people. This is a tidy example of the difference between the Dutch approach and the English. Big society thinking clobbers away at notions of charity and philanthropy, thinking those of us with some kind of surplus should be supporting those without. In the Netherlands, as I have been describing in recent posts, there is serious policy impetus behind the principle of informal care and mutual support.

You can see a clear English language presentation summary of Lilian’s work here.

Speaking to the study tour group last week, Lilian's colleague Rick Kwekkeboom had some important points to add, particularly around the invisibility of informal care. She noted that informal support only becomes visible when it is over-loaded. The role for formal services is to help people to care for one another and not get overburdened.

I don't see the request scruple as a peculiarly Dutch phenomenon. In the UK we could do with an approach to social support that acknowledges these nuances of mutual support, and is less obsessed with some kind of charitable or philanthropic motivation.

Previously:

Social networks and informal support

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

Other posts tagged 'Informal support'

 

Social networks and informal support: the big shift for policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

'What were people like where you used to live?'

Here's a little parable, offered in a blog comment here by Steve DeSanto:

A man moved to a new town. He asked a local resident whether the people there were friendly or not.

The resident asked the man, “What were people like where you used to live?”

The newcomer scowled and said, “They were really an unfriendly and rude bunch, and I couldn’t wait to get away from that place.”

The resident said, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll find the people here are pretty much the same.”

A week later, another man came to town. He happened to meet the same resident and asked him the same question. The local asked this second newcomer the same question: “What were the people like in the town where you used to live?”

This newcomer smiled and said, “Oh, that town was the friendliest place you could ever imagine.”

The local returned the smile and said, “Well, I’m glad to hear it, I think you’ll find people here are very friendly too.”

On invitations to conversations

To Cambridge for a meeting on nieghbourhoods today, as a guest of a theological college at the university. A novel environment for me, exploring the role of faith (not faith groups, necessarily) in local life.

My take on that, FWIW, was to draw attention to the interesting tension between, on the one hand, people's suspicions of religion as a form of social control; and on the other, the fact that people of faith tend to go round wearing a badge saying 'values' very clearly. You might or might not agree with them, but it helps enormously to know that values matter to this person.

Two things in particular I brought away with me to ponder. The first was the direct consequence of having several Americans in the room. What, it was asked, is the English equivalent of the American front porch? This is a use of semi-private space close to the home where everyday conversations can be started without threat or awkwardness.

The response of Hank Dittmar of the Prince's Trust, was to say we should look for precedents elsewhere in the English way of doing things, and build on those. But I'm not sure that gets us much further than dogwalking. We've surrendered the street, and the cars are all over our front gardens as well. I'd like to see more communal waste and recycling bins, with the greater likelihood of neighbourhood encounters around them; but it doesn't exactly have romantic charm as a design solution, does it? (Better suggestions over on 50 Ways to Meet Your Neighbour please).

My second takeaway came from a remark made by Indy Johar which got me thinking about the difference between having opportunities to participate in local initiatives, and being invited to participate. Often enough people have cause to complain about how opportunities have been created through community work or action, for people to just get together or roll their sleeves up and do something, and people haven't taken them up for whatever reason.

Success can depend on creating an invitation in which people's interests or needs are aligned with whatever might be going on. It doesn't have to be personal but it does need to be more than an announcement of an opportunity. I remember a good example from talking to someone at a community centre in Shipley. He had never previously been to a community centre and was telling me how he went along to a school of an evening to hear a talk about doing classes at the centre, in this case on digital photography: he said, 'it was as if she were talking just to me'.

'In there, or out here'

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

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

These are the people you need to know

Here's a tidy post from my friend Liz Ixer over on Harringay Online, rehashing this o.p. and suggesting seven ways to make your neighbourhood a better place. Liz makes the principles locally pertinent and weaves-in the role of the neighbourhood online network.

I see lists like this quite often, this one has the virtue of simple practicality and relative brevity. The headings are:

1.    Plant something
2.    Pick up litter
3.    Get to know your neighbours
4.    Find out who your government/local representatives are
5.    If you see something, say something
6.    Shop locally
7.    Go for a walk.

And credit to the original poster, Sarah Goodyear, who makes this point under the heading 'Get to know your neighbours':

'If anything bad happens - a blackout, a flood, or worse - these are the people you need to know. It starts with hello.'

 

Juxtaprose 5

'They shout conversations through rooms rather than talking face-to-face, they argue constantly at very anti-social hours (e.g. 3am), they stamp about and slam doors, cupboards etc. Last night my sister came to mine in tears at 12:30am because the chavs had arrived home drunk and proceeded to sing at the top of their voices then have a huge argument. 'Whilst there is clearly a problem with the lifestyles of these people, there seems to be an acoustics problem too. When sitting in my sister's bedroom, you can every single word, perfectly clearly, that the upstair's people are saying, even if they are talking at normal levels. If they have friends round, the noise from their conversation is so high it's unbearable. I have witnessed this myself, it's no exaggeration.' (1).

'It was determined that the noise was coming from a broken fan blade in a basement air conditioning unit that cooled computers that controlled cell phone antennae on the roof of a nearby building. The super of the building said to call the landlord. The landlord said call AT&T. AT&T said lady, we don't have a location within three miles of your address, so it must be Verizon. Verizon said they're our towers but AT&T rents them. AT&T said call AT&T Wireless, separate company. AT&T Wireless said press 1 for a new cell phone press 2 for a new rate plan press 3 to learn more press 4 to repeat the menu and offered no menu options regarding the slow march toward the brink of insanity. My landlord said why don't we just gain access to the basement and turn it off? Their landlord said only the super had the key to the basement. The super's grandson said the super wasn't home.' (2).

How to really annoy the neighbours at Christmas

For the affluent, there's no need to hang around in the neighbourhood and risk encountering the neighbours, you can annoy them remotely by outsourcing the task to the technology. Just piss off somewhere expensive and leave a burglar alarm switched on.

A moaning burglar alarm is a highly efficient communication device. It tells you four things:

(i) this house is not occupied

(ii) we think there's something here worth stealing

(iii) we can't be bothered to connect with our neighbours and ask them to keep an eye on the place while we're away

(iv) we haven't got the intelligence to realise any of the above.

Harvest, neighbourliness and altruism

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Loss of balance



Alice told me Rick, he must be nearly eighty, had gone down three times on the ice, he went down hard and his back is bad. I saw him go down on the corner she said, you know he goes out for his paper, it was treacherous, I won't go out she said, no you mustn't, I echoed.

Then up in the village by the stonemason, you know the pavement is so bad there said Alice, he fell again. How does she know these things. Anyway I said should I pop round see how he is does he want anything should I take him to the clinic, No.

And Doug said you can't do that he wont like that, you see he's very independent, he never had anyone care for him, you couldn't offer to help him, that would upset him.

Anyway I met Rick out of the paper shop a couple days later, well not very well he says when I asked, anything you need shouldn't you go to the, No, says he, Thanks, shaking.

Locality, diversity, and internet use

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

(Image from).

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Neighbouring is pretty much what it used to be

I was in London today, talking to two groups of people about neighbouring, trying to surface stories and engage interest. This afternoon I spent a good while talking to an older lady who has lived in the same house since 1957. Her memories of traders, customers and places where she had worked behind the counter or as a cleaner were vivid. Neighbourliness was simply based around her connections as a mother through her children and daily errands.

It was clear that there were plenty of people who she knew enough about to dislike and distrust thoroughly. Nowadays the assumption is that if residents 'know' a high proportion of others in their neighbourhood then everybody is probably getting on well together. This received wisdom is weakened by this lady's account: she was still spitting distaste for quite a few folk not seen for forty years and was ready to detail precisely why.

She felt neighbouring now was no different really, except that for her personally she knew fewer people, she couldn't keep track of the coming and going. When I asked what she thought it had been like for older people forty years ago, were they at risk of being isolated or did neighbours look out for them? she said they all had 'home helps' and meals on wheels, that's what was different. So maybe the state was bigger then, proportionately.

A different take on holding a neighbour's keys

Pouring rain as I made my way back from the train station. Five minutes from home I saw a near neighbour approaching, just dashing into the post office. He paused, held out his car keys: 'you can sit in my car if you like, it's just round the corner, I won't be a minute.'

Neighborly Conversations Against Mosquitoes

It makes sense - mosquitoes breed in standing water and don't travel far, so for those affected, a little neighbourly collaboration can make all the difference. Not a problem round our way, but it seems to be working in Arizona. Suggestions include 'holding block parties to talk about mosquitoes' (who could resist?) and

'When your neighbors go on vacation, offer to police their yards. You might offer to clean your elderly neighbor's rain gutters as well.'

The first aid approach to community safety: views of a tourist in wonkdom

Ben Rogers in yesterday's Guardian:

'Strengthening civility and neighbourhoods is important, but the police have only a minor role to play. Other things – the way places are designed, traffic is managed and the public realm is maintained; the character of shops and local public services, the provision of activities for young people – are just as important as anything the police can do.'

(Most of these and more were covered in Respect in the neighbourhood)

'Some figures have a particularly important role to play in maintaining local social order – park keepers, estate managers, shop keepers. But the capacity of a community or neighbourhood as a whole to help police itself is also crucial.'

The role played here by citzen-run neighbourhood websites should not be missed: our research suggests that where they exist they are greatly valued residents and agencies for the way they facilitate the maintenance of local order. He then goes on to talk about a first aid approach to community safety -

'training people beyond the police to deal with antisocial behaviour... People can be taught how to read a situation so they know when it is appropriate and safe to intervene, and when to call the police. They can be shown how to protect themselves and others from attack. And they can be given mediation and conflict resolution skills. As with first aid, this training should be available to anyone who wants it.'

It's the next step in the logic of co-production. I can see benefits and attractions. But it would be the next step in the formalisation of informal neighbourhood life: like Neighbourhood Watch, it's formalising relations on a basis of distrust, rather than trust.

Starting from trust of course is far harder. As some of the comments insist, there needs to be a better appreciation shown for the realities of living with the threat of the kind of anti-social behaviour that does require policing. Rogers leaves himself wide open to exactly this kind of reponse:

'Can someone arrange for the author to leave cloud-cuckoo land or whichever magical land of dreams he inhabits and demonstrate his idea on one of our estates? The last time I saw some yobs dismantling a bus shelter they had an overexcited pit bull with them. As I didn't know dogspeak for 'Calm down bro. Let's talk through the issues', I left them too it.'

Or this:

'We need proper policing to deal with louts, and not some Big Society codswallop.'

I know what Ben is trying to say, but that comment resonates with me because I have a strong sense of what people experience and their desperation at ever getting a response from policy. It's not good enough to say that ASB is not out of control, because the same people go on experiencing it and have done for a very long time.

'Not out of control' reads 'hasn't yet spread to middle class areas'.

The intention behind the first aid approach to community safety is to address lower level incivility; but there's a real problem in distinguishing unstable behaviour that might be just boisterousness, but could tip unpredictably in an instant into drug-fed random violence.

After 20 odd years (some of them very odd) on the fringes of Westminster and working with people from various think-tanks, still feeling like a tourist in wonkdom, I'm convinced of this: sometimes it doesn't matter how good the idea is, what you don't do is publish it in the Guardian saying 'here's a policy suggestion: we could try doing this to people'.

 

 

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.

Older people in poverty

This is a note I prepared recently on neighbourhood support for older people in poverty, for a friend working in a think-tank who asked for my views. I had forgotten it, rediscovered it, and thought I would share it.

Apart from the obvious problems associated with declining health and mobility, many older people have difficulty adjusting to changes in their social and built environment. I see these issues in three groups.

• In addition to a general sense of discrimination against them, older people often feel economically discarded and left without a role, disempowered by the ethos of consumption, their values outdated and their memories not valued;
• They are often bewildered and challenged by the speed of change, for example in terms of the built environment in their neighbourhood, or in the cultural diversity around them;
• They will almost inevitably experience network erosion – the loss of personal contacts – as they age.

For older people in poverty, it is far harder to get protection from these forces. Inevitably they will struggle to compensate for the loss of members of their social network if they lack the resources (not just money and mobility, but also cultural capital and confidence) to engage new non-local contacts.

Furthermore, these are compound problems: being disempowered and experiencing exclusion makes it harder to deal with change in your environment; struggling to come to terms with change in your environment makes it harder to compensate for the loss of contacts; and so on. These accumulating effects cause profound social damage.

Policy tends to get no nearer to this cycle than through piecemeal support for formal schemes of carers and buddies. Worse, we try to resolve the difficulties by displacement, drawing older people out of their homes and into sheltered care, rather than addressing the issues that would enable more of them to age in place.

How can policy gain purchase on these issues? We need comprehensive cultural awareness in order to bring about change. We need policies that genuinely confront and reduce poverty. We need a media campaign that refreshes generalised respect for the fact of age. We need to promote localism – a policy emphasis on local solutions to social problems and the valuing of blended local cultures. We need to insist consistently on an intergenerational element in local initiatives. And we need policy to recognise and allow space for informal and semi-formal solutions, encouraging recognition of neighbours and stimulating interaction at neighbourhood level.

In this respect it is interesting to note how local online networks seem to be releasing a latent demand for informal opportunities for neighbourhood support, among people who are disinclined to participate in formal organisations. The potential for social media to help support neighbouring, especially for older people in low-income areas, merits early investigation.

Neighbours these days: not recognised, not interested?

Legal and General's Next door strangers survey report got some press coverage earlier this week (eg) and more to come I gather.

It's gloomy but what I like about this one is the recognition of recognition. It goes further than assessing socialisation with neighbours and knowing their names, claiming that 70% of respondents 'wouldn't recognise their neighbours if they passed them in the street'.

This echoes a point in the literature about the fractured nature of contemporary neighbouring compared with the sense of collective neighbouring experienced (and evidenced) in close-knit neighbourhoods in the past. The necessity neighbouring of close-knit neighbourhoods disguised major disadvantages which we would not wish to see return in the looming effects of the recession. Most of those self-defined communities were gradually eroded by relative economic wealth and by diversity (the latter reflected in the Legal and General study) so the need for 'manifest neighbouring' has diminished. But that does not mean that recognition is any less important, indeed one could argue that it's more important, and I think this study highlights it in a smart way:

'On average, Brits would only be able to pick one in three of their neighbours out of a line up.'

At one point the report refers to the notion of 'immediate recognition' which I also like. Of course, as often with reports like this, we aren't told the wording of the questions so it's sometimes hard to interpret the findings. But as I've suggested before, we can still draw conclusions from even the most 'methodologically-carefree' of studies. To be fair, generally it's not the methodology but the writing-up that is a bit carefree. Here's an example:

'Our findings indicate that people feel less responsibility for looking out for suspicious activity in their street...'

Note the word 'less'. Less than when or less than who? Implicitly I think I'm supposed to hear 'less than they used to be'. As so often, the language contributes to the narrative of decline, without justifying it. We simply don't know if neighbourliness has declined, although it's what we'd expect, but we're surrounding ourselves with assumptions which make it harder to see either other benefits or how the role of neighbouring may have changed.

There's one other striking finding that I'd like to dwell on:

'More than a third (35%) of us don’t believe that we should have any responsibility for the safety or security of our neighbourhoods.'

Someone should tell David Cameron and the orchestral conductors of Big Society: if some of the co-producers haven't turned up, others are gonna have to play louder and longer. This is a good example of where we could do with more from the data: if 35% said 'no' to whatever the question was, what proportion said yes and what proportion said 'don't know' or declined to answer? Just 16% of 'don't knows' might suggest, for instance, that less than half of us are prepared to co-produce the safety of our own local environments. That would be surprising and not be good news at the best of times: these are not the best of times.

Legal and General are an insurance company and they have their products to sell, which is fine. They are under no obligation to package the data in any way that doesn't suit them. But with reports like this I'm entitled to wish that just a little more resource might be put into the interpretation and presentation of the results, and some way found of making the data available: that would be a real service beyond the commercial sphere.

Press release is here.

 

Previously:

Five per cent have no contact with neighbours.

Shock news: neighbourliness might or might not be in decline.

 

 

Tragedy festers in neighbourhoods

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

Neighbouring ain't what it used to be

I sometimes feel I'm a bit of a lone voice in calling for an understanding of neighbouring that takes account of social change. Neighbouring ain't what it used to be, and that's only to be expected; most other things ain't, either.

Now here's Chris, who's thought about it a bit, commenting on this blog post about the Vermont network Front Porch Forum. Chris notes wisely that 'being neighborly' has been redefined:

'Many people today, in cities at least, just don’t feel the need to know and interact with people regularly simply because they live next to them. We’ve silently succumbed to the realization that we want better reasons to invest time in strangers...

'I may not know my next door neighbor but do I really need to just because he lives next door? What if we have no interests in common? Don’t worry, I’ll still call the fire department if his house catches fire and I’ll still watch for suspicious people in his yard (in addition to mine), but I just don’t care about his obsessive gardening because I don’t care at all about gardening myself.'

With the advent of the internet and global real-time communications, Chris notes, 'most people in the modern world have simply recognized subconsciously that making friends in person one neighbor at a time is just damned inefficient.'

Walk the neighbour

I was talking to a friend the other day about how her father, recently out of hospital, had become bloated without exercise, overweight, swollen ankles etc. She was having to go over and get him up and walking round the house, up and down a bit. I recall doing this with my mum, starting with the nearest lamp-post on the street and back, then maybe targeting the next one, a little further each time. In her case we were fortunate in that she had wonderful neighbours who helped, in many ways.

This is not a rare situation though and there is obviously a role for neighbours here. It couldn't be much more suitable for neighbourly involvement could it? No special skills needed, a very modest amount of mutually-convenient time, a little interaction, being there.

But as we know, older people tend not to want to trouble others; their children often don't know their parents' neighbours; and care workers are even less likely to know them, and more likely to retreat from safeguarding obstacles. One example I found here:

'My Good Neighbour takes me out for a walk and helps me with silly little things, like reaching items in the house that I cannot do. I cannot walk outside unaided so it is helping me keep mobile and to get some fresh air.'

Nudging neighbouring from research towards policy

Friday saw the launch of Gumtree's research into the 'state of neighbourhoods,' carried out by Fresh Minds and trailed here. I'm told that the data will be made available and when anything comes up I'll point to it. The NANM's Ben Lee chaired a small gathering of a fascinating mix of invitees, for a wide-ranging discussion about the implications of the findings, how they shape up alongside other knowledge, and what contribution can be made by a company like Gumtree.

To recap briefly on the context: the well-publicised recent Co-Ops research claimed a substantial decline in neighbourliness in the UK over the past 28 years. The Gumtree study seems to challenge that: 59 per cent of their respondents said that they had 'tried to be more neighbourly' in the last 18 months.

I don't think I care particularly if neighbourliness has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same, unless that means something. Logically I'd expect it to have gone down a little (if measured using some base index that would have to be a few decades old) until about 18 months ago, when we began to hear echoes of new (or rather refreshed) social values in response to climate change, the recognised shambles of Thatcherism, and the exposed hollow morality of small clusters of bankers and of members of parliament.

I'm more interested in understanding historical changes in what we expect neighbourhood relations to do for us (hence my questioning of the usefulness of an outdated base definition). For instance, increasingly more of us satisfy more of our emotional and communicative needs remotely, using technologies; and at the same time, many more of us are living in single-person households, so there are fewer causes of connection with neighbours than there might have been previously, and we need to put more thought into devices which allow appropriate encounters. This doesn't mean neighbouring has to be formalised in any sense: attempts to do that, eg through 'good neighbour' agreements, are going to have limited impact at best. So what is the role for policy?

Neighbouring matters to policy because the neighbourhood is the default environment for socialisation; it's still the locus of response to urgent need for many situations and for mobilisation against perceived local threats; and it's a natural nursery for the development of prosocial behaviour. If people don't learn and practice civil behaviour and respect in their immediate surroundings, it's that much harder to accomplish elsewhere.

But policy struggles to do more than declaim against the perceived absence of neighbourliness - meaning, negative social phenomena perceived to be in part the consequence of weak and fractured local connections. Policy neither recognises the contribution that neighbouring makes as a platform for collaborative behaviour, nor finds ways to stimulate it. The vague sense resonating in policy over the past ten years and now in Big Society, that there's something important about the local context, is still way out of focus. For example, policy does little to counter planning and transport decisions and behaviours that are anti-neighbourly; or to strengthen the localness of schools in ways that might help to provide young people with local friendships and obviate the need for backseat lifestyles.

The main message from the Gumtree study is that people want to be more neighbourly: the researchers point to a clear 'appetite for deeper connections'. There seems to be a latent interest in being prosocial, which could be turned into momentum if we can contrive the right sort of policy nudge.

Among the key points discussed at the debate on Friday were these four which I feel are well worth capturing:

• why is it often seen as unusual to take an interest in one's locality? (Is this just the historical knock-on of reinforced gender divisions, whereby parenting, housework and neighbouring were socially designated as so unimportant that only women could be expected to do them, and what men did in distance offices was far more important? Or is there something more to this, to do with physical mobility and territory, the use of cars and our reluctance to occupy our neighbourhoods?)
• how do we stimulate neighbourly support for older people to help them to age in place? (Plenty on this blog on this theme already)
• how do we make neighbourhoods more neighbourly for young people?
• the overlap between formal civic involvement (like being on a decision-making committee) and informal connectedness at neighbourhood level (people who are good at looking out for others) is often weak; so initiatives to encourage neighbouring probably need to be thought-through quite separately from programmes to stimulate volunteering (without ignoring common lessons of course).

Big street party

With Big Lunch day tomorrow, there's quite a bit of rhetorical bunting flapping over notions of neighbourly traditions and the generation of 'sense of community'.

But the idea of 'an alfresco frolic with the neighbours' evokes cringes as well as cheers (Bell & Valentine 1997) and this counter-theme is never entirely drowned-out. For some people street parties are equated with a tacky false-jollity that seeks to impose an unwanted, strong-tie version of neighbouring. The trick, as always with an event that can sometimes border closely on spectacle, is probably to loosen and informalise everything and make it escapable, so that people can easily dip in and out.

Perhaps we reinvent street parties - much as, in my view, we reinvent neighbourliness - according to the concerns of our age. Here's an interesting article by Joe Moran suggesting that 'the street party was ever more a romantic ideal of community than a show of genuine togetherness':

'The history of the street party suggests that a sense of community is rarely a naturally occurring phenomenon; it has to be continually created by these acts of faith.'

(We're not told, but I'm assuming that this is the Joe Moran who wrote Reading the everyday, which I remember as an absorbing read).

Historically, most (but not all) street parties in the UK have been a neat mechanism of the establishment, keeping ordinary people in their place with modest cheerful events, sanctioned by authorities to endorse royalty and the achievements of leaders. The Big Lunch develops this tradition, laid out on a very contemporary, tightly-branded tablecloth. As Moran notes:

'In a society fragmented by free-market globalisation but still suspicious of state solutions, a lot is being invested in this idea of the street as the model for a vibrant civic life.'

The small-scale of the street may be beautiful; 'Big' almost certainly is not. Let's keep in mind, with Big Society as the new (likewise branded) all-purpose marquee under which we are invited to shelter chummily in these stormy times, that it is coerced, state-approved civic life that is of interest to the top-downers.

Who's that knockin at the door?

For those like me who feel that the plague of unwanted commercial callers slouching round the neighbourhood with their handouts and patter, is a contemporary problem, sparked partly by the privatisation of utilities (all those ridiculous salespeople trying to persuade you to switch supplier) and exacerbated by the recession, this article in yesterday's Guardian is enlightening. It's from the archive, published 80 years ago:

'You have either to jam the door on to the foot, or listen to the carefully composed and hundred-times rehearsed speech about the coal that will 'save' you a penny a bag on your present prices. It seems heartless to stop it, yet you can't make these men believe that they are wasting their own time as well as yours.'

Plus ca change? Well, numbers of unwanted calls could well be similar, but I wouldn't be surprised if levels of polite receptiveness have declined. Given that far more of us now live alone, it might not be surprising to hear that a high proportion of people simply do not answer the door and the frequency and persistence of these calls is one of the reasons given. One more thing to be overcome if we are to help older people to age in place.