Neighbourhoods

The hidden wealth of nations: book review

The hidden wealth of nations

By David Halpern

ISBN 978-0745648026, published by Polity Press, 2010 (£13.66 online)

Reviewed by Jan Steyaert 

I have never had the pleasure of meeting David Halpern, but greatly enjoyed reading two of his earlier publications, a book he wrote on social capital in 2005 and a discussion paper he wrote with his colleagues on personal responsibility and changing behaviour.

At the time Halpern was working at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, which gave his writing that extra touch. You knew it wasn’t only influenced by research and good thinking, but that it also was influenced by and had its own influence on discussion in the inner circles of UK’s public policy. So when a review copy of Halpern’s latest book found its way into my mailbox, I could only look forward to Christmas for some quiet reading time. The snow and following immobility made sure there was plenty of that.

What we’re getting in this book is basically five large articles of about 50 pages on average, each exploring a theme that Halpern has seen dominating public policy debates without really being on the surface of these debates. While news media bring us our daily or weekly potion of 'chatter of contemporary politics', Halpern gives us a view of the undercurrents of politics, the themes that really matter but rarely surface.

The first theme Halpern explores relates to a topic popularised by Richard Layard some years ago: while in principle economic growth increases happiness, it does so only up to a certain (rather low) level. Once beyond that, more economic growth doesn’t really have much impact on happiness. Income is just one of the drivers of well-being.

Secondly, the author turns to the theme of people ‘not getting along’, discussing the increased sensitivity to crime (two-thirds of Britons think crime is rising, while statistically it fell by more than a third, p. 59) and the increased worries about immigration (again, the concerns do not relate to overall immigration levels) and terrorism.

Next, Halpern turns to the ‘politics of virtue’ and the area of norms and values, respect and regard. Taking a long-term perspective, he argues that there are few indications of a moral decline: on the contrary, we have become a good deal more polite to each other than our historical forebears (p. 104). Therefore, 'we should be wary of the doom-merchants who tell us that society is in moral free-fall' (p. 95). Having made these observations, the author argues there is indeed a tension between the real economy and the ‘economy of regard’. Building on this, the case for a complementary currency is developed.

The fourth theme covered is fairness and inclusion, or social equality. Halpern describes not only the increased inequality, but also the rise in support for meritocracy, changing attitudes on inequality and the importance of social mobility.

The final theme covered in the book deals with power and governance. This chapter covers the decline in political participation and reform of public services. I read the third part of this chapter, on the paternalistic state (pp. 221-251), with particular interest. While governments seek to allow more room for personal preferences, and citizens are less willing to accept governmental interference in their personal lifestyles (e.g. the many disparaging references to ‘the nanny state’), it becomes clear that many of the future challenges have their origin in our lifestyles.

How can we expect government to solve all these problems, while not accepting a paternalistic stance? If government can’t address our current lifestyle to curb rising levels of obesity, how can we then expect it to organise the enhanced health care services that we’ll need as a result of that obesity? How can greater leeway for personal responsibility be accommodated alongside the idea of a universal welfare state? If those who choose to spend all their savings while young become impoverished pensioners, is this acceptable as a consequence of their freedom of choice? As David Halpern puts it:

'For the most part, we are very big on personal responsibility for other people and when things are going well for ourselves. But when things go badly in our lives, regardless of the cause, we go off the idea of personal responsibility pretty fast. Unfortunately for policy-makers, we hold both these positions quite strongly and at the same time' (p224).

To find an answer to this challenge, the author introduces libertarian paternalism, defaults setting, the power of declarative norms, and the choice architecture promoted by Thaler and Sunstein. That sounds heavy, but Halpern has a way to make it read like the latest Ben Elton (well, almost).

Looking back at these five themes, two observations come to mind. One is that Halpern is clearly an optimist. In each of these undercurrents, he sees not only interesting but also encouraging developments. The ‘wealth of nations’ in the title of his book is an obvious reference to Adam Smith, but also a statement about his views on the future. His analysis is rich in ‘policy options for the future’. The second observation relates to a footnote at the end of the first chapter that still has one of my yellow post-it reminders next to it. Halpern refers to 'the findings of the last thirty years of time budget studies that have shown, across countries, that the wealthy are choosing to work more, while the ‘working class’ are choosing to work less.' (p. 54). So here I am, spending part of the Christmas break reading and reviewing this book. I’m not sure that is enough to classify me among ‘the wealthy’, but I’ve certainly enjoyed his book, and am wealthier in information and ideas.

Decline in informal volunteering: time for a network solution?

The latest topic reports from the 2007-2008 citizenship survey have been published, one on race, religion and equalities, and this one on volunteering which shows a 2% overall drop in regular informal volunteering and a 5% decrease among young people.

Informal volunteering covers things like giving advice, transporting or escorting someone, keeping in touch with someone, doing shopping, collecting pension, writing letters, filling in forms and so on.

Back in October we had the headlines for the first quarter of 2009 which revealed an overall 5% decline among adults volunteering informally 'at least once in the 12 months prior to interview.' I note that the latest release is from pre-recession data.

As I wrote in October, I fear this 5% statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem. I wonder how policy is going to respond?

Comparable decline in formal volunteering might bring specific investment through the volunteering agencies: but who assumes responsibility for promoting informal volunteering? Whose desk does this problem land on? The general erosion of informal interaction at neighbourhood level has worrying implications, because it’s the invisible foundation of many other social benefits we ought to be able to take for granted. We co-produce safety in our own neighbourhoods just as we co-produce our own health and the socialisation of our children. It would be nice to think we also co-provide the dignified ageing of our elders. We can't do that if fewer and fewer people are informally helping each other out.

In some ways perhaps it's as well if there isn't a policy in-tray for this issue, because policy makers tend to reach for their favourite organisations and in my view it's not an issue for organisations but for network-based initiatives. Someone said to me the other day that there is a local authority that seems to think Fix My Street is theirs in some sense: it's so successful that they don't realise it's not their organisation's product - a result of hierarchical organisational decision-making, which is the only form of behaviour they understand. How do we come up with a Fix My Street type solution to the decline in informal support?

One answer might be Talk About Local, which is promoting local social blogging. Since it's not an explicit purpose of the project, it might not be fair to measure the impact on informal volunteering over time in areas where Talk About Local has generated activity, but it would be interesting.

No, the tech doesn't weaken local social ties

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

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

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

These paragraphs, I feel, are important:

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

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

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

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

What about local social networks? The researchers conclude:

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

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

From the press release:

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

Summary. Full report.

Informal volunteering down five per cent

The latest Citizenship Survey headlines for the first quarter of 2009 cover empowerment and participation, community cohesion, and racial and religious harassment and labour market discrimination.

Julian Dobson has reviewed them and made some helpful points as always about the political context. I just have one point to add about some of the data that particularly intersts me, concerning 'informal volunteering':

In April-June 2009, 57 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the 12 months prior to interview.

The report doesn't mention trends here, so I went back to the figures for the whole of 2008-09, and found that in that year 62 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the previous 12 months.

A five per cent decline is sharp and significant. Can it be attributed just to the effects of the recession? If so, will levels recover after economic recovery? Sorry to keep bannging on about this, but there's a scary informal care crisis looming with an ageing population, and reduced public spending ain't gonna help. There will be a growing shortfall of family carers and an imperative to promote care and support at neighbourhood level - ask David Brindle. He wrote a year ago:

Difficult questions about family and community responsibilities are being ducked and the issues risk being overshadowed by a focus on personalisation of services.

This statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem.

Respect soundbite (updated)

The other day the Evening Standard asked me for some words on the subject of respect, in the light of the Pilkington case and the prime minister's reassertion of some kind of policy on anti-social behaviour.

I've no idea what was published but having put scarce brainpower into the exercise, I thought I'd leave the words here.

The government has done a great deal to improve the living environments of many people on low incomes, and that should be applauded. But the relentless association of anti-social behaviour with ‘problem estates’ is distasteful. It’s not hard to point to incivilities and ASB among the privileged and professional classes.

The Pilkington case seems to be about local enforcement of existing measures, so people are right to be suspicious that it is being used to prompt policy.

I suspect that the neighbours of the Pilkingtons may feel they might have provided support and perhaps intervened, if they were more connected to one another and believed that official support was there to call on. So why do so many people not feel that they can call on their neighbours in time of need?

We hear all the assertions about parenting contracts and Drinking Banning Orders and interventions at the family level, but in many neighbourhoods there is very little interaction among residents. We occupy our cars more and our neighbourhoods less. Children can’t play in the street within site of neighbours who know them and know their parents. We are losing our local shops and our pavements are covered in cars.

The Respect agenda was based on shaming, but we know that doesn’t work. Residents need to feel empowered to take action collectively, confident that official powers will back them up. Schemes are needed – seeded at local level - that promote informal contact and interaction between all residents in an area.

Footnote - catching up with yesterday's Thought for the day on R4 (Presenter: Rhidian Brook, Subject: 'We have a responsibility to our neighbours') reminded me that about a year ago I wrote to the programme suggesting that neighbourliness might be an important theme and would they like an offering? I didn't mention religion, and I didn't get a reply.

'What could the community do to help?'

Here's a good example of several things - the well-established SE1 community site in London announces a meeting tomorrow on Employability & worklessness: what could the community do to help?

The Friends & Neighbours Club in partnership with Blackfriars Settlement invites you to this discussion. Help to get a better understanding of the words employability and worklessness. Share ideas on simple and positive things that community groups could do to address them.

Altruistic behaviour, social connection, and inclusive communities? OK I'll try some

Tonight at the RSA in London, John Cacioppo (author, it says here, of a bestselling book on Loneliness) outlines "the vital importance of altruistic behaviour, social connection, and inclusive communities".

Live streaming, 1800 GMT.

Clubs and informal play

Kids go to organised sessions, kids play out together or hang out, kids stay home. What kind of mix works best? It's not easy trying to understand the social impact of perceived imbalances in a risk-averse, car-oriented, achievement-driven society, but given the power of those forces you'd expect the emphasis to be more on structure and less on informality.

Every year the National Children's Bureau publishes research for Playday (which is tomorrow) and the latest looks at 'making time'. Their survey found that nearly half of adults (47%), think children should go to fewer extra-curricular activities. The focus groups with children and young people offer insights into the recognised value of organised activities, and the extent to which they absorb time from informal play.

'It seemed that some of these children perceived clubs as something they ‘ought to do’, regardless of what they felt like doing with their spare time. Informal play alone or with peers was viewed as having less of a purpose than these organised activities, other than for their own enjoyment.'

'A significant number of children in the study lacked any control over which activities they attended and when they went to them, sometimes eliminating the sense of fun. All of the children favoured a mixture of informal play and organised activities, but for many children there seemed to be an imbalance and children’s time for play was often taken over with structured events.'

The report also contains observations on the reactions of adults to the informal presence of young people outdoors:

'Meeting together, for example on the streets, near shops or in parks, often led to complaints and harassment from adults, including neighbours and local community members. Amongst all of the older children interviewed, those from Sudan were the only group to discuss their experiences of being reported to the police when they met with their friends on the streets and in the parks. Most of the older children thought this was because of their age rather than their ethnicity, although one child reported encountering racism.'

'If we are going on the street, going to the park, sitting there, a lot of people, they will ring the police for no reason and the police would come up to us and say, “Go away” when we haven’t done anything. That happens all the time.’

Playday research page.

Because it’s freedom: children’s views on their time to play.
Haki Kapasi and Josie Gleave, London: NCB, 2009.

Friends and screens

Just in case there's a quiet period newswise, journalists know how to get religious leaders to say provocative things to kick off debates. So the catholic archbishop of Westminster makes comments about friendship and about social networking sites, risking a martyrdom of jokes from atheists about having imaginary friends, and from the connected about confessions and screens.

Zapping via Google (mum, look at me) I find some of his words joyfully misinterpreted, and various commentators following the problematic tendency to generalise very broadly about young people when the issues are quite subtle, fluid and important. But still, it's not too impressive if a prominent religious figure has only just detected a 'rise in individualism'. Does news not travel quickly in Westminster?

Nonetheless I'm interested in, and I welcome, the way the archbish touched upon some themes that have bothered me lately in talking to young people: the idea of loyalty, the question of 'transient' relationships (not sure about his phrase 'impoverished friendships'), and the part played in this by the dominance of consumption as a way of life.

Not all young people struggle with notions of loyalty - to brands, media, friends, football teams or whatever - but I wouldn't be surprised if there is an issue here that we should be exploring. Many youngsters don't see much loyalty around them - their families change, their teachers change, their environments change, their expectations get changed for them. Society doesn't seem to expect any of us to stick with anything.

I too have wondered out loud recently about shallow relationships - I'm not really qualified to call this one either, and I certainly wouldn't pin it to social media; but I don't want to be ignoring the issue when I've found that it resonated with teachers I've spoken to.

And if we look back at a few decades of hyper-consumption, spectacularisation of culture and systematic deconstruction of what is 'public', would we really be surprised to find a thread running through and connecting these trends?

It's not right to dump the blame or responsibility for any of these on young people. It would have been helpful if the archbeak had recognised the contribution of his and my generation, and of politicians and the media, to the erosion of loyalty, the cheapening of relationships and the wretched diminution of the public realm.

More importantly perhaps, instead of pontificating (is that the right word?) about bullying uses of Bebo he might better have used his ability to get an audience, by calling for a forum in which young people themselves reflect upon the extent to which the communications media they use is related to the fact that some feel excluded, become depressed, and commit suicide.

I think it would also help more if we spend some time understanding whether there is some kind of widening divide between those young people who have had the chance to explore their own potential and social relations, and those who haven't. And it may be worth referring back to a piece JRF published a while ago which rightly stressed both how local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour; and the need for young people to be aware of and access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood. This does not justify continued investment in either a 'backseat generation,' screen-dominated upbringings or school catchment policies that work against the value of local connections.

Oh and finally could people please stop talking about online systems as if they exist in a vacuum?

Previously: Kids these days

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect.

 

Local events and community cohesion

I've been sifting the material I gathered from participants at the Wellcome community picnic last month. Report to follow. With the Big Lunch taking place this weekend, here's one remark which impressed me:

"For whatever reason, people don’t tend to be very engaged. There are very few activities that bring people together from different backgrounds and you’ll find people from similar backgrounds tend to stay within those social groupings. So this kind of event is fantastic because what it does, it brings people out into a very safe place where they can engage with other people who they wouldn’t necessarily normally associate with or have much connection to, and I think today’s been really, really successful. I was surprised, there’s a lot more people than I thought would come."

Do we need people asking if we need community?

At the time of its construction in the 1960s the chief architect of Milton Keynes described Melvin Webber, proponent of the notion of 'community without propinquity', as the father of the city. Hurrah, they cried.

Subsequent experience there and in similar places suggests that community without propinquity is quite different to, and does not compensate for local community. It's also apparent that many people really struggle without local support to the point where they may need help reinventing 'community' because policies imposed on them have stifled it.

The RSA has an event in London next Tuesday (fully booked) asking 'Do people need community anymore?' I'm wondering if Liam Byrne might offer some insights into whether or not government policy will finally pick up on the importance of informal care. Byrne is Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and presumably has some awareness of the economic implications of not recognising the importance of local informal support.

Over on the Connected Communities blog, Steve Broome invites questions for the speakers, so this is what I sent:

Supportive neighbourliness is still widely practised. Recent work in the UK and Netherlands suggests that the practice of local community support is still strong but more individualised than in the past. Fewer people are doing more of society’s local social work.

Unfortunately informal care is crassly overlooked in policy. In a post-welfare society we can’t afford for this to continue. The reluctance to ask for support appears to be critical. So what policies would the speakers put forward that would stimulate informal support and care at neighbourhood level?

Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Nesta have organised a substantial event in London next Monday called Reboot Britain, which is about how we can

'punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services.'

Paul Evans has organised a stream of sessions on political innovation. I'm speaking at one of these, alongside Nick Booth, William Perrin and Edward Welsh, which is on the broad-enough topic of Locality: Councillors, Journalists, 'active citizens', community websites and local government communications.

I think I'll focus on the ‘active citizenship’ part of the topic, keep the tech at a respectful distance, and ask ‘What's needed to stimulate active citizenship at local level?’

It'll need a rough distinction between informal and social participation on the one hand, and formal civic and political participation on the other. We need the former in order to stimulate the latter. (Well I know some people do political participation without doing social participation: I've even met folk who voted for them, but we won't have time on monday for the nuances).

To my mind, it doesn't work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

In the nick of time, with local democracy gagged and tied to the tracks and the train of public spending cuts thundering down the line, along come gallant dynamic al-action neighbourhood online networks. Hurrah. Let's get out of this metaphor and ask a few questions:

Does the economic logic of these nets imply a more appropriate geographic scale for democratic involvement than currently exists? (Consider, for example, how much difficulty some authorities have in trying to establish meaningful area forums).

Does the inbuilt interactivity imply more conversation?

Does online conversation stimulate offline activity?

Should local authorities be enabling the development of these networks? (Dunh?)

Place survey: the headlines

Headline results from the 2008 Place Survey, which reflects and contributes to local priorities under local area agreements in England, have been published today.

• 59 per cent of the population felt they belong to their immediate neighbourhood

• 76 per cent felt that people from different backgrounds got on well together in their local area

• 29 per cent felt they could influence decisions in their local area

• 30 per cent feel that in their local area parents take enough responsibility for the behaviour of their children

• 31 per cent felt that there were problems with people in their local area not treating one another with respect and consideration (37.5% in London).

Links to various formats here.

'Community picnic'

Yesterday I was at a 'Midsummer Picnic' in Cumberland Market, north London, promoted by the wonderful Wellcome Collection and produced by General Public Agency. It was described as

'an event for local people to discover personal collections on stalls designed by artist duo Juneau Projects and inspired by Henry Wellcome and his collection. There will be activities for adults and children throughout the afternoon, and visitors are invited to bring food to eat and share at this traditional summer picnic.'

There were various stalls including seed planting, temporary tattooing, veggie-pickling, face-painting, watercolour portraits, and Wellcome's own impressive stand which you can see in the pic. Principles of gift and exchange applied, nothing was bought or sold.

In practice the theme of local people's collections was a minor feature and most people I spoke to felt the event was more like a fete than a picnic. But it was emphatically successful as an intercultural occasion, a relaxed gathering of people from diverse backgrounds in a local space.

I've been asked to write a review and was working with film-maker Dani Jacobs to create a record. I spoke to a Filipino; an Italian; a black South African who has been in England since 1954; three remarkable white Londoners in their nineties, Winnie, Jessie and Ethel (the latter two pictured); an east end Jewish lady, passionate about diversity; two more Italians; two Polish children and one Bengali; a white Englishman; an English mother married to a Muslim; another Bengali and her daughter; a Greek woman; and various others. It took a reluctant effort to remember that the casual ordinariness of all the intercultural and intergenerational interactions is not universal. (Recent reflections on racism).

Among the other themes I'll be looking at are: how this relates to other organised outdoor events like street parties and family picnics, the traditions of festivals and fetes; and the irresistible anthropological theme of eating in public. I'll post when it's done.

Do you have to be civil to talk about civility?

Julia Unwin, CEO of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, posted on the Joe Public blog the other day, on the topic 'Our society has lost the instinct for kindness' - trailing JRF's 'Social evils' publications.

'As a society, we appear to have lost the instinct for kindness and the willingness to extend the hand of friendship. Our responses to children, to older people, to strangers, are all conditioned by a concern not to offend and a fear of getting involved.'

Nothing like a mild generalisation to get Joe Public going. Within the stream of very diverse comments which has been accumulating were a few which tried to acknowledge and navigate the complexity glossed in the article, including this (more nuanced than the quote above, I think):

i think it is very easy for those who are well educated, secure and have nothing to fear to talk about civility / politeness - they find incivil behaviour bewildering - they muse over our 'broken society' and ask why - i think it is very easy to be polite and play by the rules when you are winning the game. If you are constantly losing and need the rules of the game changed asking politely doesn't normally deliver!

I'm pleased to have seen this point made.

Adult learning: why it matters

The New Start blog has a super post from the excellent John Field on the contribution of adult learning to wellbeing and, with regard to policy, his thoughts on 'the damage of the last ten years'. His latest research illustrates the role of adult learning in wellbeing:

'It has a direct impact on people's sense of agency: statistical studies, observational research and interviews all show that people who take up learning as adults become more confident and more purposive about the future. It also improves people's resilience, making them more resourceful and more likely to take action if faced by trouble.

'Adult learning also has an indirect impact on wellbeing. Evidence from research on adults' lives over time shows that people who take courses are, all other things being equal, more likely to find relatively secure jobs. They are also more likely to join voluntary organisations and clubs of all kinds, as well as taking a greater interest in public issues - and are more likely to believe that they themselves can influence public decisions.'

Valuing village life

This one will excite the economists who are trying to work out currency conversions between different forms of capital, such as from social to financial.

A woman in a Pembrokeshire village has bequeathed

'something to everyone over the age of 60 who has lived in the village for more than 20 years. Around 120 people are expected to receive about £500 each.'

From BBC news.

It takes a village

I've always been suspicious of bald calls for heavy cash investment in areas as the solution to social problems, and I've seen enough of some heavily-funded local projects to know how money can generate new unwanted difficulties and tensions. We need to know more, in particular, about low-income neighbourhoods that function well because levels of interaction are relatively high.

The other day my attention was drawn to some research on prosocial behaviour, reported by David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, in Evolution and human behavior (subscription required).

The article describes a study of students in a small city in New York state, and finds that prosocial (or 'altruistic') behaviour correlates strongly with the level of self-reported social support at local level. That support is evidenced in terms of family, school, neighbourhood, religion, and extra-curricular activities. Further, the researchers note that

'it appears to require social support from multiple sources... It really does take a village to raise a highly prosocial child.'

The untrained and untamed anthropologist in me is revelling in the way the authors combine evolutionary, economic and social capital theories to seek to explain why social co-operation can succeed as an evolutionary strategy and not be subverted from within by individual selfishness.

It's interesting that the neighbourhood level of income does not seem to predict prosocial behaviour and indeed may be a negative indicator:

'the most prosocial students live in neighborhoods that are high in quality and low in median income - perhaps because, in the absence of financial capital, they need to rely more on social capital in their everyday lives.'

This could be a seminal research finding. Does it mean that policy should be focusing more on local social relations rather than financial investment and the generation of wealth?

The study is part of the Binghamton Neighborhood Project. More here.

 

Kids parties are class battlefields

I asked, how was your weekend? My friend said, I helped run a party for 25 kids.

Her neighbour had come to her and said, can you help me, I don't have any money and I have to organise a children's party.

There's a school-based network of mostly wealthy families and the children all go to each others' parties. These are events where the families seem to try to outdo each other with extravagant goody bags. This parent didn't want her child to get detached from some necessary friendships, so the whole class was invited.

My friend mucked-in willingly, giving up a substantial part of her weekend. They did it on a shoestring, prepared and served food, organised games and activities, all the children made things to take away, and apparently had a blast.

As so often, the kids were great. Whereas some of the parents showed up, stayed most of the way through, and it was too much for them to lift a finger to help. Presumably they thought the two women doing all the running around were hirelings making a fuss.

Social capital and community resilience

Social capital and community resilience: international conference
New Lanark, Scotland, 4 June 2009

Assist Social Capital have organised an inspiring programme for an international conference at an inspiring venue - the New Lanark Heritage Centre, where Robert Owen made such an impact on the cooperative movement 150 years ago.

The event will

'focus on practical examples of the connection between community resilience and social capital in the success of a community's efforts to cope with adversity and enhance collective wellbeing.'

More.

Consensus, community, and cultural capital

I’ve been gathering some thoughts for a session on empowerment and participation with some MA students at Staffordshire Uni this week, which has sent me back to Jacqui Karn’s excellent book Narratives of neglect. Fearful that I wouldn't do it justice, I failed to blog it at the time; but here are some belated thoughts based around some of my notes, covering two main themes: consensus and community; and cultural capital.

The book is an exploration of the processes of participation and governance in the regeneration of a Manchester estate. No-one I’ve mentioned it to in the participation field seems to have read it, which is a shame, because it's packed with insights.

I come at Karn’s analysis from the viewpoint that, from the time of the initial neighbourhood governance proposals, the government’s empowerment agenda was predicated on unrealistic assumptions that community could be construed to mean consensus.

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

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

‘This dual, contractual emphasis on encouraging compliance with a latent community and the control of an ungovernable minority legitimises the use of state agencies’ coercive powers against the “irresponsible.”’

Consensus becomes a question of ensuring (or even guaranteeing) similarity rather than recognising and working with difference. In my view this is an important point for understanding how the engagement agenda might fuse with the cohesion agenda.

The second key theme refreshes some of my own recent thinking about the lack of attention paid to cultural capital. Karn stressed the way power was reflected in the language and knowledge that participants brought to the process she described. She found that

‘The dominance of professional language and knowledge undermined residents’ position both in the partnerships and amongst fellow residents as they so clearly lacked the capital at stake in the process to be able to exert an authoritative voice.’

Karn argues that the professionals in the context she studied tended to conceive of the community as in close contact and united. She adds that they tend ‘to present their knowledge of local problems and solutions as incontestable.’

‘The power dynamics created by this difference in the knowledge claims of participants are particularly important in establishing that the capital at stake in this field is not social capital but cultural.’

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

 

 

Coming round

This blog was in a coma for five days - medical report from Typepad still awaited - so for once I will succumb to the temptation just to offer quick links to some good stuff going on.

What works in enabling cross-community interactions? Perspectives on good policy and practice. This is a paper by Andrew Orton for CLG as part of their work on meaningful interaction. It matters because it's about small-scale community activity and informal connections gradually getting some of the policy attention that is needed.

Dancing with Down syndrome - Hildy Gottlieb links to a striking video to remind us to keep pushing back at the Culture of Can’t.

The Eden Project has launched (more quietly than expected; one suspects there is some tense politics in the background) The Big Lunch - street parties everywhere on 19 July.

'The day after the Big Lunch, people will walk down their street and know someone in most windows.'

Paul Evans shows there's even benefit in a human being of the right calibre travelling to Miami, by coming back with knowledge about Mixed ink, which looks like a sweet way of stimulating civic involvement.

Helen Milner and colleagues have set up a blog on digital engagement (which I applaud) with an invitation to write yet another manifesto (which I don't). Manifestos (manifesti?) have a role, but it's usually to do with the process of structuring action around pricniples and surely we've come further than that. Maybe we should (a) dig out the three or four previous manifesto attempts in this country and be familiar with them, together with the recommendations of the shelf-and-a-half or reports that got generated (unh, mea culpa); and (b) assess what impact they had.

Julian Dobson quite rightly calls for more thought about the over-excited bashing of public sector language ('jargon'). The Local Government Association have got all lathered on this; or rather, I suspect, in New Labour style they are following some assumptions of popular media fancy. Reminded me of my wee challenge to the Plain English Mafia.

DIY and the future of care

This morning the BBC offered us the future of car care - a garage in Norfolk where space can be hired out so that car owners can modify or service their own vehicles.

"They will save money, but they can also come and learn. The more you get into it, the more adventurous you'll become," said entrepreneur Nathan Devlin. "If you need me to help out, I charge £20 per hour."

(I'm old enough to remember, if my dad pulled into a garage to fill up with petrol, a bloke in overalls came out and served him. The man would unscrew the chrome cap from the tank using a clean cloth, then reach across purposefully for the pump nozzle. 'Service stations' they were called. It even happened to me in my early motorcycling days).

This afternoon I heard about a system in Kuwait where patients in long-term care are encouraged to become ‘expert’ in their own conditions and to support other sufferers with the same condition. Certain sources of established expertise, whch may or may not include the internet, are presumably there if needed.

Nothing surprising here really - it's the natural trajectory for the outsourcing, co-production and responsibilisation of us citizens, for too long deskilled in servicing our own bodies and societies. And no more than we deserve, I'm sure.

I'd just like to note that servicing your car in Nathan's garage, or working with other sufferers to understand the details of your illness, is likely to provide rich opportunities for social interaction - further eroding the social separateness of expert and consumer, reasserting a connection between the practice of everyday life and its direction. Which reminds me: when Monty Don remarked that

"All politicians should have an allotment, and if they don't keep it up properly they should lose their jobs"

it's the same necessary nagging at the habits of the old order.

What bothers me is that although I'm starting to come across more examples of care initiatives that revive informal social relations as a natural spin-off, few make reference to this in their descriptions or write-ups. Because we've been conditioned to not even recognise it, far less value it. That's what the quiet revolution is about, that's beginning to stir.

Never mind the BMW, just give us the bridging capital

Straight question about class and social provision from Charlotte Goddard over on the Children & Young People Now blog:

I'd be interested to hear from children's centre workers - what do you think about middle class mums using your services? Is it good because it de-stigmatises the services or is it bad because they are hogging facilities not meant for them?

Informal influences on local social capital

I love these little coincidences. This afternoon I was sitting in the final plenary at an international conference on community cohesion run by the British Council and iCoCo in Manchester. Just before Runnymede Trust director Rob Berkeley stood up to speak, an email from Communities and Local Government plopped into my mailbox offering figures released from the 2008-09 Citizenship Survey:

'76 per cent of people feel that they strongly belong to their neighbourhood with 81 per cent of people satisfied with their local area as a place to live.'

Presumably unaware of this news, although quite possibly already informed about some of the survey findings, Rob reflected quietly on the need to bring some refinement to the evaluation and measurement of cohesion and belonging:

'I live in south London. If my neighbours don't break down the door, I think we're getting on pretty well. In a rural village, if someone doesn't turn up to the fete, their neighbours might think relations have completely broken down. We do need to think about the different ways people think about belonging.'

This echoes a point I made in my own presentation yesterday, consolidating a strong sub-theme of the conference, which was best expressed in a comment by Haroon Saad, director of QeC-Eran (Quartiers en Crise). First, in his presentation, he observed that:

'Intercultural dialogue is taking place on Facebook' (I think he meant social media in general) 'and what's significant is that it's dissociated from institutions.'

Then in a discussion about how agencies were still trying to deal with tensions between local factions in Northern Ireland, Haroon said:

'What organisations are doing pales into insignificance compared with what's going on in the informal sector.'

And that's it: sooner or later policy makers and cohesion practitioners are going to have to get to grips with informal social relations, because everything else we do is not enough. Ciara Wells, deputy director of CLG's Communities and Faiths Division, spoke on Wednesday about the ongoing work on meaningful interaction. Substituting for one of her colleagues, I followed it up with some points about neighbourliness, home zones and neighbourhood online networks, contrasted with reflections on the slightly more organised, formal occasions of street parties and living library.

Devices like steet parties and living library justifiably generate a lot of interest, because they legitimise conversations that otherwise probably would not take place. But ultimately they're artificially constructed occasions, and however transformational the experiences they stimulate, it's hard to see how they can trump all the informal influences on local social capital.

I very much welcome CLG's commitment to further work on meaningful interaction, and I hope it will be seen as an opportunity to develop some more nuanced understandings of the sense of belonging, the importance of trivial encounters, and the value of social networks.

Previously:

On superficial neighbourhood relations

Enter the official local handyman

On superficial neighbourhood relations

From time to time I argue that 'shallow' informal interactions, such as simple gestures of recognition at neighbourhood level, are more significant in terms of social capital than is generally recognised.

I raised this recently in relation to the CLG guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' which argues that for social interaction to be 'meaningful' it needs to go beyond a superficial level and to be sustained. My view is that yes it makes a difference if it's sustained, but 'superficial' does not mean trivial. Superficial is good.

Now I'm just catching up with a paper in BMJ last month about happiness and social networks, which got quite a bit of publicity for its finding that happiness is 'contagious'. The researchers looked at 20 years of data from the Framingham heart study in Massachussetts and found that:

People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected.

This includes close neighbours, but apparently next door neighbours have a much stronger influence than neighbours who live a few doors down in the same neighbourhood. The researchers observe:

the strong influence of neighbours suggests that the spread of happiness might depend more on frequent social contact than deep social connections.

So let's take that as a tentative endorsement. More evidence needed of course.

And behind all this are the challenges of defining (without solidfying) what we're talking about. A few weeks ago I was questioning some of the assumptions about definitions of 'belonging' in the methodologically-creaky Changing UK research, and perhaps there are comparable dangers in assumptions about 'happiness'. One commentator on the BMJ paper observes:

Happiness research that attempts to find generalisations about happiness...  will not challenge inherent assumptions about what makes people happy, what is happiness, and who is happy in society or indeed, as Anthony Storr suggests, who is 'happy alone!'

Social interaction and mobile technologies

Keith Hampton describes research findings (in press) which suggest that social interaction in urban public spaces (parks, plazas, and markets) is likely to be more diverse than interactions through wireless internet use, which in turn are likely to be more diverse than interactions through mobile use.

I think this is just what we would predict, because the serendipity potential of the mobile is negligible compared with face-to-face, and wifi use is more open to interruption than is mobile. But that doesn't mean it isn't reassuring in a way, and you can be sure the methodology was robust.

It builds on Keith's previous paper which looked at wifi use in cafes and included consideration of the possibility of

‘contextual’ or ‘neighborhood effects’ within cafes, whereby the lack of sociability of some cafe users has the potential to reduce the overall sociability of a public space.

Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?

In the early seventies, I seem to recall, the hapless Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the increasing prevalence of dishwashers and similar labour-saving devices in households was likely to reduce family cohesion as people spent less time together doing what needed to be done.

A few more observations like that over the years - for instance about the use of cars, geographical mobility, smaller households, television viewing etc - and understandably we begin to assume that there has been a decline in neighbourhood relations. It's what we would expect. All we lack is some way of proving or disproving it with robust methods.

So along comes the Changing UK report from the Social And Spatial Inequalities group in Sheffield, commissioned by the BBC, which appears to illustrate how Brits are now more polarised and live more 'among our own kind,' than we used to do.

The report is a strange blend of stolid survey-based affirmation of some gloomy, familiar social trends, with constant reference to the BBC's tv and radio areas - a peculiar geography to many of us I suspect. Presumably the client wanted some local and regional social data (tick) and some kind of news story it could broadcast (tick).

Many of the considerations are straightforward:

These trends may be linked to higher likelihoods of fearfulness because we are less likely to see and therefore understand each others' lives... The polarisation and segregation processes may also lead to stronger feelings of isolation and weaker feelings of 'belonging'.

The report justifiably links these trends with evidence of political disaffection and economic polarisation, all pointing to a rather bleak future. To be fair, it's not as if our politicians have been ignoring it all. Although the finality with which social capital was dumped as a policy issue a few years ago remains puzzling, there is a healthy amount of energy being focussed on community cohesion. There is public attention paid to the questions raised, and the BBC is playing its part.

But the evidence does matter. Take this for example, from Mark Easton's piece on the BBC site:

'The study ranks places using a formula based on the proportion of people in an area who are single, those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and those who have lived there for less than a year. The higher the proportion of people in those categories, the less rooted the community.'

Unh? That amounts to a definition of 'rooted community' which I'd be reluctant to sign up to.

What bothers me a little about this research is the bundling of assumptions about loneliness, living alone, isolation, and not belonging. For a start, loneliness is not the same as isolation - the latter implies a dearth of social ties, which some people prefer, while some people can have an ample supply of ties but experience loneliness. And obviously, living alone does not necessarily imply loneliness or isolation at all.

Again, people claiming that they 'belong' somewhere (or don't) doesn't tell us anything reliable about the strength or extent of their social relations. You may have a weak sense of belonging without experiencing loneliness; or a strong sense of belonging (“been here forty years I ‘ave”) but experience profound loneliness.

I wanted the report to be clearer about these nuances, and more critical about its measures. It's hardly contentious to note that if local face-to-face ties are diminishing, network ties may have been increasing in strength or range - you only have to watch how people make non-business use of mobiles.

So I'm left unsure what the research offers. It tells us that local social relations have weakened, which is a message we're primed to hear anyway; but it does so with an unconvincing voice.

Encounters with strangers

Here's today's social capital topic. I went to the station this morning for a train to London and the service was disrupted with cancellations and delays. A few others milled around mulling the options - alternative routes, waiting around for a surprise train appearance, trudging back home?

As I chatted with Joe in the ticket office, a man came up and asked if I'd been planning on going to London - 'I was,' he said, 'and I went home to get the car to drive in, just thought I'd stop by and see if anyone else was stuck here... Can I give you a lift?' (NB it's not like this is remote outback: just 15 miles from central London).

I thanked him for his generosity but had already taken the decision to abandon my attempt to get to a meeting.

Questions for students of social capital:

Was his offer (and presumably his diversion via the station) a moral adjustment sparked by guilt at using unsustainable transport? Would he have made the same offer to a woman? To a hoodied youngster? If I had accepted, should he in turn have accepted my offer to contribute to fuel costs? How much would I have offered, and would I have seemed sincere? Would he have felt obliged to discuss options for liaising on the return journey? What do you talk about to a stranger cocooned in a car with the prospect of a traffic-harassed 90 minutes on a miserable day?

Meself, I don't take a sceptical view, I thought it was a generous and considerate gesture, and partly I regret not celebrating that by having taken it up.

Meaningful social interaction

We're still in the very early stages of 'measuring' meaningful social interaction with people from different backgrounds (that doesn't mean we don't already know a lot about it), and every little step is fascinating.

As in the early years of cohesion policy, it's a shame that this theme tends to get limited to 'people from different ethnic or religious backgrounds' - as if interaction between people from different social classes and different age groups was not hugely significant, especially in neighbourhoods. Lots more to be done, but meanwhile here's the latest snippet from this summer's Citizenship Survey data:

In April-June 2008, 82 per cent of people mixed socially at least once a month with people from different ethnic or religious backgrounds, either at work, at a place of education, through a leisure activity, at a place of worship, at the shops or through volunteering. This has increased since 2007-08 (80%) when it was first measured.

Like a light going on

Earlier this year I worked with Linda Constable on a pilot project with four library services in England, using the 'living library' process. Living library, pioneered in Denmark, allows someone to 'borrow' a person for a conversation, to explore their experience or interests and to understand other backgrounds and cultures. The project sought to develop a community development model, taking advantage of the trusted place of libraries in the public realm.

Among the participants was Harry, a World War 2 veteran about 90 years old. He was in his early twenties when he found himself stranded with his brother on the beaches of Dunkirk. One of the people who 'borrowed' Harry for a chat told us how insightful it was to hear him talk about events: 'Like a light going on’.

The project was funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and involved Bournemouth, Bradford, Kent and Staffordshire library services. The report is now available here.

Previously: The hands in conversation

Living in interesting times

As the overlap of housing crisis and economic crisis blurs and separates like lights in the rain, political hopefuls agonise over the "walk on by society". It no longer seems simplistic to note the connection between an economic system which encourages buying-to-let on the basis of greed, and neighbourhoods with dangerously low levels of informal social control.

It all feels so depressingly predictable - not the economic crisis in its severity perhaps, but the almost visible connection between mindless consumer capitalism and the feeling of lost civility. It's obvious enough: if as a society we systematically encourage antisocial values and behaviour (I'm referring to ASB as practised by financiers) and we don't know those around us and don't trust them, prosocial behaviour and social norms are harder to establish, identify with, and reassert.

John Harris, no relation, has a detailed and lengthy piece in today's Guardian on 'the rise of exploitative landlordism' and the drastic lack of housing, which includes the thoughts of one Rita Giles, who has lived in her three-bedroom council flat for 32 years. Rita 'stayed put, and watched as a once-solid neighbourhood has been replaced by an ever-changing community of people who often appear to be simply passing through.'

"The people who bought the properties don't live in them any more," she says. "This is the biggest problem. They buy them, they do them up, then they sell them, and they get rented out. A lot of them go and live abroad."

"Now," she says, "you might have two or three families in one three-bedroom flat. I've seen that happen on our estate. We get a lot from Africa. A lot of short-term people come from Kosovo. The problem is, any sense of community is utterly eroded. Once, you could walk down the road and everybody who spoke to you, you'd know who they were. People still speak to me: they'll say 'Good morning', and I'll say 'Good morning' back, because it's in my nature to do so. But I couldn't tell you who they are, because with 95% of them, it's the only time I've seen them, and I might not ever see them again. They just disappear."

Another respondent in the article talks about the homes bought and re-let:

"People don't take pride in them, because you've got this six-month transit-camp situation. There's no community cohesion, the neighbours don't know each other..."

If the recession brings an end to rampant property speculation in a time of wretched levels of homelessness - and an end to the gormless glut of tv property programmes - that at least will be a blessing.

There are two ironies in today's news which only seem to bind these themes even more strangely. The first is that the person who was killed when he went to the aid of a 35-year-old homeless Lithuanian man in Norwich was a banker with a company which manages assets worth £133bn.

The second is that just as members of the conservative party reflect on the claim that 'too many people making "genuine attempts to prevent crime" had been arrested or prosecuted' they appear to have decided that Margaret Thatcher was 'the greatest Tory ever'.

Now if there's one person whose highly-publicised crimes merit immediate arrest and detention, I'd have thought she was a strong candidate. Lord Baker, who served as her education secretary, apparently said Lady Thatcher was not really "sympatico with ordinary people". Well, it's not like anyone would have regarded that as a criterion for political stature, is it?

'The weather is nice here': New Orleans and social capital

As New Orleans shows the world how to organise for, and minimise, potential disaster, it's worth remembering that some of its citizens are still in post-Katrina recovery. The systematic creation of a ghost city got me thinking about levels of trust and social capital.

They'll be busy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where scholars have been crunching material from hundreds of interviews following Hurricane Katrina. That output is summarised neatly in an article here by Kimberly Hendrickson:

At the core of the project is a deep interest and faith in civil society and a rejection of the pessimistic view of social capital popularized by Robert Putnam. You can sense this optimism in a piece about Vietnamese-Americans’ attitudes about culture, linking New Orleans East’s rapid recovery to residents’ take on adversity and self-reliance. It’s in a piece about public opinion in the Lower Ninth, suggesting that the predominantly poor, black residents of that ward have a strong sense of community that survived both the storm and government malfeasance. It’s in a report commending Latino arrivals in New Orleans for their entrepreneurial spirit. This work is important, because it takes urban politics to a place many students of cities do not want to go: a serious examination of group and neighborhood values and of the diverse cultures within larger cultures that give places vitality and character.

This paper by Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Henry Storr, about the powerful expressed sense of place among returning residents in the heavily-damaged Lower Ninth Ward, refers to the importance of the 'signalling' effects of key services and businesses returning:

When a grocery store returns, for example, people come to expect that the community will rebound. In turn, this positive expectation reduces the perceived risks of returning.

Sense of community in times of adversity is not going to surprise anyone, but it will be interesting to see what social capital effects there are in the present context and the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I quite liked this interview quote:

New Orleans people come outside because the weather is nice here. And they come outside. They do their flowers. They wash their car, and they just sit out on their porch. You notice how a lot a people sitting out now? ...And even in the evening, they do their work in the morning and they come out and they sit out and they listen to their music and their radios and stuff like that. And it be pretty outside and they fellowship with one another. They just don’t stay confined in their house.

The pic above is by Eric Gay: source.

A dangerous group

There's more here about the trend in official removal of neighbourhood assets, in an article by Finlo Rohrer. My attention was drawn to this observation:

Councillors now know to be wary of a dangerous group - the early retirement activists with burgeoning web skills.

Well-being and empowerment (updated)

This morning I interviewed someone who's been trying to implement a community engagement approach in her role helping to provide a local public service.

Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the gulf between the harried and hassled local practitioner, constantly adjusting to change, and the policy context beyond. Through a project I was involved in, a few months ago she suddenly appreciated that the thrust of government policy was in the same direction. Knowing this, my correspondent felt hugely empowered and given confidence to be more assertive in her organisation, thereby accelerating a change of attitude towards citizens.

Here's something else that will make just that sort of contribution. The Young Foundation's local well-being project, working with IDeA and the LSE, has published a report on practical empowerment initiatives in neighbourhoods, called Neighbourliness + empowerment = wellbeing: is there a formula for happy communities?

It argues that the right kind of work on 'neighbourhood and community empowerment' is likely to increase wellbeing in three key dimensions -

• By providing greater opportunities for residents to influence decisions affecting their neighbourhoods
• By facilitating regular contact between neighbours
• By helping residents gain the confidence to exercise control over local circumstances.

What the report seems to do really well is to distil some wishy-washy key contemporary social issues into focused practical points, and this paper looks like it could really give momentum to the efforts of local practitioners and local politicians who have been grappling with (or perhaps avoiding) All That Stuff about social capital, well-being, neighbourliness, involvement, democracy, responsibilisation and so on.

The report puts forward several case studies of empowerment 'done well' (from Manchester, South Tyneside and Hertfordshire) stressing the significance of the balance of control. Yup, it all comes down to mature understandings of the power issues.

But it's also the case that this is an institutional perspective on the issues - this comes across as an impressively crafted practical guide for local officers on trying to stimulate a greater sense of well-being at local level. I think we still need more work to bring local people's experience of such initiatives, and of initiatives they establish and run themselves, to the surface.

Postscript... Two other thoughts about the report.

It seems to have little to do with neighbourliness, which hardly gets mentioned because the scale of the activities and schemes described is well beyond what is likely to be most people's mental map of neighbourly interactions. Perhaps that's understandable from the practitioners' point of view: so is this another example of the appeal of the N word brought on by the exhaustion of the C word?

Much of what is described is good ol' fashioned community development, and the document marks the continued tension between that field of established practice and the trend to take bits of it and call it something else - which again might be fine, so long as the lessons and principles of community development are appreciated and taken into account.

'Respect each others' ideas'

A few weeks ago a group of young people met in parallel with the trustees of a new charity. The young people began by establishing the 'rules' for their own meetings, and this copy reached me the other day.

It has echoes of a similar set of rules which I mention in the first chapter of Respect in the neighbourhood - devised by a group of 10 year-olds at a community project in Harlem New York. When I visited some years ago, they were messing with papier mâché, shaping the bodies of robots they would subsequently programme. They'd established the ground rules for working together: 'Robotics Class Rules'.

These are guidelines for mutual respect in a practical context. You can sense the process from the product: young people think about how they'd feel if someone was mean about what they were working on, then come up with measures to resist such behaviour.

It's a tiny but potentially profound experience of democratic empowerment and responsibility, which incorporates a sense of ownership over the rule-making process and hence over the sense of respect. Doubtless the rules have since been taken by some of the young people into the more complex arenas of later life.

One of the questions I ask myself here is how long you might have to work with a group of adults, to come up with a list like this. Our young people came up with theirs by themselves, unprompted and unfacilitated.

Of the social capital of a social capitalist

Today I had the privilege to be speaking (at a conference of the Society of Chief Librarians, no less; not an indian in sight) alongside John Field, whose excellent book on social capital is about to be published in its second edition. A privilege, but not an easy act to follow.

John spoke about social capital and I was talking about the Living Library project I've been involved in, and about community engagement. I think between us we offered a healthy serving of social policy and practice ideas from beyond the field. There seemed to be a great deal of support for the notion of a locally-grown, non-confrontational model of Living Library - a model which facilitates and legitimises conversations that would otherwise not happen, building relationships in an organic way.

When I reached for a biz card to offer to John, he laughed and said he didn't have one. The explanation being that he came originally from Northern Ireland where 'everyone knows everyone'. Maybe one doesn't need biz cards for bonding ties, and if you don't need bridging ties I guess you can do without. To my delight, our social networks overlap through our common friendship with Alison Gilchrist: I think it took us five minutes at most to discover this connection.

Trust and key-holding

David Sillito has some pieces on BBC Breakfast tv this week, beginning today in a couple of localities where I've done interviews myself, Pembroke Street in Devonport, and Bolton Woods in Shipley.

And if you want to find out more detail on some of the stories David's picked up - and the detail on the research he commissioned which suggested that 36% of respondents would not trust any of their neighbours with a spare set of house keys - perhaps you'd like to come along and hear him speak at this book launch.

The question about key-holding was posed hypothetically. In some research I carried out in Manchester a few years ago, reported here, we asked the direct questions: 'Do you hold a spare key for any of your neighbours? And do any of your neighbours hold your key?'

We found that in the 65-74 age band some 49% had keys held by neighbours, and 43% held keys for at least one neighbour, but the other age groups were significantly lower. The size of our sample left some of our stats a bit shakey, whereas the BBC survey had 1000 respondents and shows little variation across regions (England and Wales) or age groups.

Are we a nation of strangers? / David Sillito 6 May 2008

Neighbouring and older people

My text about older people and neighbouring will be published shortly by Community Development Foundation.

There will be a launch, or to put it more technically, an excuse to gather and guzzle, at Shared Intelligence in London on Tuesday 27 May 2008, which happens to be National (wait, make that European) Neighbours Day. (Thanks to Ben Lee from the National Neighbourhood Management Network for providing the venue).

Speakers include David Sillito from BBC News, Chris Gittins from Streets Alive, and Ryan Campbell from Age Concern England. If you'd like to come along, please register as places are limited. Further information is here.

Music and collective wellbeing

A while ago my daughter got herself a t-shirt printed with the inscription 'What if the hokey-cokey is what it's all about?' Community singing certainly does something special for some people, but why?

There was a totally absorbing programme about music and health, broadcast on R3 today, parts of which explored how 'music facilitates communication and community'.

I learned about one project, Singing for the Brain, which taps into the associative memories of those with dementia and Alzheimer's and has a demonstrable healing effect. I heard from people who have studied the ways in which music affects our brains, emotions and wellbeing, telling us that in health terms music is 'not a drug - it's the opposite', and

It only works when it's part of a relationship.

And if like me, you wondered whether the legendary longevity of many musicians was something to do with socio-economic class, here's a more likely explanation: musicians are 'self-medicating'.

Post offices, informality, and participation

And so the threatened closure of too many post offices brews a storm, and the issues seem to get more complex. Today I was at an Involve workshop about community cohesion and participation, which might have had nothing to do with post offices had not another participant mentioned them to make a point, sparking a clarification for me.

It seems that everybody (presumably including MPs who voted for the closures but want to defend those in their constituencies) believes that post offices play a social role - variously described as being 'at the heart of' or constituting 'the hub of their communities' and a 'lifeline' especially for older residents.

There's no reason why there should necessarily be only one such heart or hub - indeed a mix of third places (broadly defined) is surely desirable. Pubs, cafes, libraries, parks, community centres and other venues claim this status from time to time.

But when the threat is made to post offices on economic grounds, as I've noted before, we don't have the methodology to defend them because we don't know how to quantify their value in terms that The Accountants Who Run Things would understand or accept. (Incidentally, the threat to post offices is commonly described as a rural issue, but closures in urban areas could also be devastating and there's a lot of concern in London).

My point is this: the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of such amenities is because no political value is placed on human processes that are informal and organic. Which also presumably partly explains why we don't get much research on social networks (eg on home zones).

To return to the Involve workshop, which was thoroughly absorbing, not least because I met some very experienced and articulate folk. I found myself banging the drum for informality because of the tendency (better expressed by others who, under Chatham House rules, I may not name) to discuss participation within a context of formal structures and strategic (service delivery) processes.

The point was made painstakingly by other participants that this is an unsatisfactory approach. We need to prize, stimulate and protect the values and knowledge that local people bring to their shared experiences in their neighbourhoods, for its own sake. To do that we need to ensure that there are more occasions for encounters, more conversations between different groups of people, more recognition - before oganised participation can be expected to have a role to play in promoting cohesion.

To put it another way: we need a healthy ecology of conversations and encounters and recognition and relationships, and places to bump into people or to sit and gaze or go for a natter or just hang out, before we can have meaningful 'participation' that in turn serves to strengthen cohesion. I guess you could say that this blurs into some forms of civil participation - being part of stuff that goes on in the neighbourhood.

So maybe the question, both for understanding the contribution of participation to cohesion and for appreciating the social role of third places, is perhaps something like 'how do we get our policy makers to place more value on organic development, informality and local social interaction?'

Answers on a postcard please.

Previously:

The local post office: a brand in jeopardy.

Post offices and social value.

Please serve yourself: rural post offices.

Rule of thumb about word of mouth

I was talking to a group of community workers today, getting their views on the use of community centres and ways of getting people through the door. Most of the way through a 12 month funded programme, they told of an influx of new people coming in. This is in an area of low expectations and high needs.

The explanation is that 'word-of-mouth takes 8-9 months...'

'It's about people having the courage to act on what they're hearing. It can take you a year to get confidence in the community, that there's something new for them to try and to trust it. It takes time for the confidence to work through.'

Having spoken to quite a few of the residents about their levels of confidence before and after contact with the centres, this makes sense to me. Funders please note.

Commuting and local acquaintances

The other day I posted a comment over on Front Porch Forum in a discussion about the effect of commuting on local social networks. It was sparked by a post by Facebook's Cameron Marlow, picking up some Putnam material which noted that:

The car and the commute... are demonstrably bad for community life.

I was just adding a point that, if people have to travel for economic reasons, some forms of commuting are not totally detrimental to local social relations.

That same day I was at a meeting in London, after which I met up with my brother and we took the tube for a few stops. When we got out he said, wow, talking on the train, I don't usually do that, that doesn't happen on the trains I use.

Later that evening I took the overground train to my home in the sticks, and as I left the station chanced to meet an acquaintance I've got to know over the years from our local gym. He lives about half a mile from me, so I'd certainly not classify him as a neighbour. We walked up the hill together chatting. 'Tell you who I haven't seen for a while' says he - 'Irene.' (Another long-time fellow gym-user). Nor I, says I. Hope she's ok. I know whereabouts she lives, but not where exactly. We may have just missed her. We could ask the staff at the gym.

Which sort-of illustrates not just the way local connections can get reinforced in the commuting context, but also the limits of this kind of relationship. Maybe it's not my role to check on Irene, although she's getting on a bit and always on her own. But the missing component is the communication channel which would legitimate such a role - the local online network of course.

Respect, neighbourliness and narratives of decline

Community safety journal has just published a piece I wrote on the theme of 'respect in the neighbourhood.' I drew on sections of the book plus interviews and focus groups I ran last year with older people and street reps.

A key argument I try to make is that serious policy attention being paid to social networks is long overdue:

Once the discredited ‘crack-down’ policies have been cleared away and the rhetoric of community engagement has stopped echoing, what remains is a lasting failure of policy to acknowledge the significance and vulnerability of local social networks, and to minimise damage caused to them...

Because we know too little about how local social networks function and how vulnerable they are, we lack the intellectual resources to defend them or to detect weaknesses; and it is not until they have gone missing that we begin to recognise their significance.

In the work I carried out last year for Age Concern (not yet published, watch this space) people were describing the density of the enfolding networks in the past, in neighbourhoods characterised by a greater volume of available connections. Reflecting on this leads me to comment in the article on the notion of 'community lost':

People readily describe acts of helpfulness and friendliness around them now. But these interactions and exchanges are more individualised and do not seem to amount to a healthy stock of neighbourliness, as a resource on which everyone can draw with confidence and without hesitation, as of right. For the people I spoke to, the resource of neighbourliness has somehow become impoverished. A sense emerges in their accounts of a former enfolding community now mysteriously mislaid.

To what extent is the local close-knit community recoverable, given the networked nature of contemporary relationships? Various researchers have contested the general validity of the ‘community lost’ thesis: Sampson for instance suggests that it ‘was wrong 100 years ago and remains so today’. But there is a question of degree here: on an individual level, and within many neighbourhoods, a sense of loss is what people experience and express.

There are two points I’d like to make about this. First, ‘community’ lost or mislaid is demonstrably recoverable. The notion of a surrounding sense of ‘mutual support spanning the generations and involving everybody’ – a sense of community as sanctuary, as fostering, and as protecting – has not disappeared entirely, and those who dismiss it as a myth in the past may need to spend some time examining its contemporary manifestations...

Secondly, however - while filtering out some over-romanticised claims for such close-knit communities, which could be harsh and unforgiving – we should reflect more carefully on the feeling of loss that is being expressed. The sentiment points to the validity of a secure, enfolding community, for older people especially, one in which norms are readily absorbed and recognised, and which also offers interdependence.

A version of the article is available here.

Social capital in schools

Social capital continues to make a comeback. Last month the Department for Children Families and Schools published research into 'the development and impact of young people's social capital in schools.'

Drawing on survey and qualitative interview data from two inner London schools, the researchers looked at the sense of school belonging, access to social support networks, and attitudes to diversity.

As we'd expect, their conclusions assert the importance of the school context in the social life of young people. They emphasise the uneven distribution of social capital (with white boys from lower socio-economic backgrounds having the lowest levels of social capital, and white girls having the lowest levels of socio-psychological resources).

They also point to the need to relate the citizenship curriculum to the neighbourhood context and build extended services that promote collaborative relationships between different social groups.

The report refers to the new duty on schools to promote community cohesion, and I noted one striking finding described in the summary:

The schools in this study were highly ethnically diverse and, on average, students tended to hold positive attitudes to cultural and racial diversity... However, in both schools gay people were perceived as a small minority, and students seemed much less positive to diversity in terms of sexual orientation. Hence, while cultural diversity appeared to be valued, or at least regarded as a non-controversial issue within school, the data suggest that homophobia was a considerable problem in our two secondary schools.

The value of community centres and the costs of sociability

I was talking to some young mothers the other day about the use of their community centre, and what they went there for. In these cases, in a low income neighbourhood with demanding toddlers at home and nothing much to do, it's mainly social contact.

Once they've gained the confidence to get across the threshold of the centre, they would do pretty much whatever course was available if there was free or cheap creche provision. And when that course's finished they sign up for the next.

Two of the women I spoke to had decided to set up their own group at the end of a course on self-esteem and stress management. One of them told me the only problem was the extent to which her mobile phone bill had gone up:

A year ago I didn't have any friends. Now I make so many calls I've had to switch to a contract.

Family neighbours

Speaking about City survivors the other day, Anne Power was emphatic about the need for policy to help extended families stay together on estates or in the neighbourhood.

Her remarks are unlikely to generate much passionate opposition, but they did remind me of the Australian research which questions family support by comparison with friendship networks, in terms of the benefits for older people.

I don't think there's a conflict there, necessarily. The needs that parents of young children have are often acute and persistent, and may be best satisfied by other family members. For older people, family neighbours can play an invaluable role in informal support: in one study, 83% of the informal helpers named were family members.

Meanwhile, to my surprise, according to a recent BBC/ICM poll,

'Almost a quarter of people see the parent they are emotionally closest to every day, but 45% say they see them once a week or less.' (Emphasis added)

It could be that as local friendship networks seem to have weakened (if indeed they have), it places more demands on extended family and so they increase in significance for those that have them.

Families in cities

I'll come straight out and express a sense of mild jealousy here. Anne Power and colleagues at LSE ran a well-funded programme of work to generate seven years of interview data with parents in cities. That's a lot of material reflecting what it's like bringing up children in contemporary urban neighbourhoods. One result is City survivors, just published by Policy Press and launched last week.

I'll also readily admit to not being a fan of Anne's previous Jigsaw cities, which I found a real slog to read, with all the evidence of being hurriedly slopped together and crying out for an editor's attention. City survivors however looks much more significant, if only because the connection between the expressed experience of local people and the policy assertions is clear.

The edited material is interwoven with analysis and generalised reflections on the policy context. The book is packed, and punches are not pulled: a key message for regeneration is that 'neglect ends in disorder.' At the launch Anne said that regeneration needs to be brokered and 'any withdrawal of effort immediately results in a deterioration of conditions.' How do we explain, for example, how this sort of thing comes about:

'They've pulled all the swings down. The kids have nowhere to play. We tried to fight the council to stop them taking our play area away but they sold it to private buyers.'

(I don't know. Previously, eg, A crisis of community presence).

Here are some of the points I got from Anne's wide-ranging presentation:

• Community involvement really makes a difference: 'families are much happier if they're involved. Those who are involved, loosely or seriously, feel different to those who aren't.' (So why is there still so little investment in community development?)
• Keeping extended families together on estates or in the neighbourhood can make a huge difference to parents' ability to cope: this means housing allocation policies that prioritise relatives.
• People do notice when agencies attempt outreach.
• Establishing friendly rapport with neighbours is a significant factor in helping families survive. The usual constraints are apparent - precarious, unstable community relations with too many strangers.

And I noted Lynsey Hanley's striking observation in her comments, referring to the experience of neighbourhoods where there is constant building, constant traffic, and no sense of place:

'You have to be massively adaptable in order to get beyond just existing, in marginalised places.'

The overall message is that families are abandoning cities in large numbers, because they are such unsympathetic environments for young children, and this is bad news all round. The a rgument is made that families can regenerate cities if conditions are right:

• Neighbourhood conditions have a direct impact on family survival.
• Families can counter wider problems by creating support networks.
• Cities can help families by creating more locally based structures to deliver sensitive local services.

One further thought, provoked by various comments made by academics at the launch: why is the idea of talking to local people about their experiences seen as such an eccentric way of finding things out? You'd have thought, by the way people were talking, that some kind of methodological breakthrough had been achieved. More interest among funders to support this kind of work would be welcomed (he pleaded naively)...

I'd link to the publication page, but Policy Press haven't got their act together yet.* Get hold of it anyway.

* Update: it's here.

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

It may be that the story about the delinquent Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker could be trumped in England. According to this BBC report yesterday, children in this country have been arrested (unh, arrested?) for:

• drawing hopscotch on a pavement
• taking a slice of cucumber from a sandwich and throwing it at another child, and
• damaging a tree while building a den.

Not perhaps in the same league, but we've also had the heinous disgrace of flip-flopped feet on seats.

Meanwhile, the risk aversion debate has received significant renewed momentum from publicity following Tim Gill's No fear, published recently. (Various links currently on the Gulbenkian home page). And some energy is being coordinated in the US with Playborhood.

Questioning risk aversion was a rumbling cross-departmental sub-theme in Whitehall in the early years of the Labour administration at the end of the nineties, but it didn't stick. Maybe the urge to control took over, and anyway the culture is highly resilient, resisting some passionate challenging, eg What are we scared of? And yes I do accept the importance of recognising, as the Health and Safety Executive put it, that the term is shorthand for 'excessive risk aversion.'

It seems as if there are two trends in tension here, with two related themes - risk and respect - but I'm not clear how they are related. On the one hand we have attempts to program most risk out of children's lives (which is profoundly disempowering, and means that many seem to grow up expecting and accepting disempowerment as what society does to them). But measured exploration of risk can be stimulating and creates bonds: games and sport, still occasionally practised in some quarters (although very much subject to risk averse policies) offer semi-formal arenas in which such exploration can be played out.

And on the other hand, we have created neighbourhood contexts in which learning the give-and-take and cheek-by-jowl rubbing-along of socialising, getting along with people you might not necessarily choose as friends, is structurally minimised. And we have overseen a degree of family disintegration so that many young people can avoid having more than the most minimal contact with older people, and the separated generations are often bewildered by each other. Result, a crisis of respect. On its own, transforming the design of neighbourhoods won't cure this combination, it seems to be a deep cultural problem.

I was having a conversation the other day with a teacher who was telling me how depressing it is to have to try and deal with young people when they relentlessly swear and spit (in the classroom or corridor, this is, when in conversation with a teacher). It's unambiguously disrespectful behaviour, which must have some basis in the sense of not being cared about or valued.

How does that square with a society which appears obsessed with protecting its children from risk? I think it's partly because systematised risk aversion is in conflict with notions of genuine caring, it reflects self-interested detachment that says - children are too much trouble to be bothered about, we must constrain what they do. Bollocks.

The teacher and I reflected on the fact that we both know plenty of remarkable young people - far more mature and socially-supportive than most of us were in my day, inspiring young people who are a privilege to be with. And we were left wondering whether there is some kind of divide developing, between those who have had the chance to explore their own potential and responsible social relations, and those who haven't. I suspect I'll be revisiting this theme.

Young people and social networks

Recent JRF report shows both benefits and disbenefits in local social networks.

Place identity can be a source of strength, but it also appeals to the parochial.

Local connections can give some young people strong advantages in the labour market, with family and friends providing valuable support; while wider social and spatial horizons can expand the range of opportunities young people consider and improve their prospects. In more peripheral areas their choices may remain constrained because of limited employment opportunities.

The authors conclude that:

• policy needs to recognise that local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour;
• it is important that young people are aware of and can access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood.