Neighbourhoods

Petanque alone

What an opportunity spoiled by bad photography. Sorry.

Social capital in neighbourhoods: two recent reports

CASE, the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, recently published a short report by Anne Power and Helen Willmot on Social capital within the neighbourhood.

It's based on seven rounds of interviews with the main carer (or most present parent) in families with children, in two case study areas: a large council estate, and an inner city mixed-tenure area. The material comes from CASE's eight year longitudinal study tracking 200 families in four representative low-income areas.

The researchers look at bonding capital, in terms of family and friendship networks; and bridging capital, in which they include the role of neighbours (something continues to bother me about the equation of weak neighbourly relations with 'bridging' capital...):

In Kirkside East 70% of the respondents, and in The Valley 68%, explained that there are one or more people with whom they actually exchange favours. Furthermore, approximately a fifth of the respondents in both of the neighbourhoods (18% in Kirkside East and 20% in The Valley) explained that there are more than four such people in their lives. Favours exchanged encompassed immediate, momentary ones and more long-term, longstanding arrangements, including the giving of time as well as other resources.

The report goes on to note that:

A dominant theme in the respondents’ narratives on friends and family was the importance not so much of the actual support received from them, as knowing it is there to draw on when ever it is needed

- although this is not extended to neighbours.

The researchers conclude by echoing calls for policy makers 'to recognise, and then not damage or destroy, existing social capital.'

Around the same time, a report by Marilyn Taylor from an action learning set on Making social capital count was published as part of the national evaluation of neighbourhood management pathfinders.

The report is based on conversations (aha) among residents and agency representatives in Manton, north Nottinghamshire, exploring how a focus on social capital could contribute to change in their area. The content of the pdf is protected (there may be some reason for that, which I'm unable to grasp) which hardly encourages me to offer the findings.

But I do note the remark: 'The beauty of this approach is that it is simple - even obvious.' Indeed.

Older people and isolation from neighbours

Help the Aged has launched a new fundraising campaign which aims to help end isolation and loneliness among older people. This follows a survey which claims that 1.4 million older people in the UK feel 'socially isolated' and nearly 300,000 have gone a full month in the last year 'without speaking to any family or neighbours.'

Had they spoken to any friends, in that time, you want to ask. Unfortunately Help the Aged don't seem to offer a link to a report of the research, although I suppose it must be somewhere. [While I'm at it, and without wishing to seem to be picking on this organisation, why is this contemptuous attitude towards readers so widespread?]

Press release.

Neighbouring, parenting and poverty

This is the kind of stuff that gives income inequalities a bad name. A new report from the Family and Parenting Institute confirms that 'Income is a strong factor in families’ experience of their neighbourhood.' The poorer a family is, the more likely they are to feel unsafe after dark, the less likely they are to feel that their neighbours would help out in a crisis, and the less likely they are to have well-maintained green spaces nearby.

The report is based on an online survey of over 2,000 parents in England with a child or children under the age of 16.

While 70% say that their neighbours would help them out in a crisis (eg look after their children if they had to go to hospital for a few hours), the researchers suggest that this masks significant differences in terms of wealth. Only half of those with incomes below £10,000 think that their neighbours would help them out in a crisis.

On the other hand, there's not a great deal of expressed concern about informal social control. Most parents would not worry about talking to their neighbours’ children if they were being unruly. Some 77% said that they would speak to their neighbours’ children if they were misbehaving in the neighbourhood, or would consider doing so, with only 18 per cent saying they would definitely not do so.

Social network gap?

Three and a half years ago I wrote: 'We're all going to have to wait a while for Keith Hampton's definitive report on the e-neighbors project in Boston.' Well yer tiz and worth the wait of course.  It's published in a UK journal, Information, communication and society, in a special issue on 'e-Relationships'.

The three-year e-Neighbors study involved detailed social network surveys in four localities, in three of which residents were provided with a neighbourhood email discussion list and a website. The paper focuses mostly on the take-up and use in a suburban neighbourhood. The great majority of ties formed as a result of people being given access to the list, were weak ties. Hampton claims that the internet does not isolate people from the parochial realm of the neighborhood:

'Internet use over extended periods appears to be an antidote to privatism – it affords the formation of local social networks.'

Of interest in this write-up is the consideration of a 'social network gap'. I've always disliked the notion of a 'digital divide' (why digital? why divide?) and Keith wisely skirts this, raising questions which get us a little closer to the issues. We know that social inclusion is not just about access to stuff but also about social connections, especially weak ties. And some kinds of neighbourhood offer greater potential for establishing ties than do others.

So here's the problem as he puts it to us:

'Those without the technology, and those in neighborhoods without an existing propensity towards local tie formation, are structurally disadvantaged twice over; they are unlikely to build local community with or without the use of information and communication technologies.'

I've always admired the measured clarity of Keith's thought and writing, and it was a privilege to have the chance to contribute some thoughts to the project at an early stage. As it happens, this paper fits nicely onto stuff I've been babbling lately about weak ties and local networks. It's time to get some decent work done on this in the UK: where, for instance, is the housing association that's building or encouraging simple email lists on estates?

Keith Hampton's site.

Previously: On Keith Hampton's 2004 London presentation.

'Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres.'

Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

Yesterday to the Oxford Internet Institute for a session on 'digital disengagement' and social exclusion, where I learned the following from one reported study: 11% of those whose experience of exclusion is most entrenched (ie identified on several measures, not just one or two) are 'internet users.'

Without the source I can't unpack this stat, but I'd like to see more case studies to find out more about what people in this category are doing when they are connected, and what difference it makes to their lives. It happens that I'm involved in the evaluation of a 'social impact demonstrator' at a couple of UK online centres, so may be able to contribute in due course. And Citizens Online's Everybody Online projects should provide some insights.

As it turned out, the need for more qualitative research, to get at some subtleties that were not emerging from survey material, was a lesson for the OII from the seminar. One of the nuances that concerns me is the point that, irrespective of communication technologies, we don't know enough about the extent to which people who experience exclusion are strategic in their approach to weak ties.

People of all ages and classes and backgrounds can be strategic about their need for and approach to connections and friendships, without necessarily being cynically so. Is such behaviour as likely to be found among those whose experience of exclusion is most profound? Whether it tends to be or not will influence people's attitudes to the communication technologies, for example in recognising that mobiles are brilliant for strong ties but maybe not so good for establishing weak ties.

If your personal social network is sparse, then strong ties might be the ones you crave or seem to have most need for. Perhaps also you lack opportunities or skills (or both) to establish weak ties - these tend to require some basic cultural, social or economic capital to start with. But from the early work with UK online centres in low-income areas that I was involved in years ago, it was apparent that some people were establishing weak ties with remote others online, and gaining confidence and skills from that experience.

And right on cue, here's a paper by Sara Ferlander and Duncan Timms, which contrasts users' experience of a 'local net' in a low-income area, and in an 'IT-café'.

The paper examines the extent to which use of the Internet is associated with an enhancement of social participation, social trust and local identity in the area. The Local Net appears to have had limited success in meeting its goals; the IT-Café was more successful...

The IT-Café provided a physical meeting place which facilitated social networking, especially the development of weak ties bridging different local groups, and led to decreased tensions between them. The physical aspect of the IT-Café had positive impacts upon local ties and bonding social capital. Nonetheless, visitors to the Café, in common with the users of the Local Net, mainly used the Internet for non-local networking (bridging and linking social capital) including the creation and/or maintenance of both weak and strong, and interest-specific (bonding) ties. The Internet was used for the maintenance of non-local strong bonding social capital, with many visitors using the Internet to keep in touch with family and friends outside the local community.

It's not an either/or issue of course. And as I understand it (although this is only quietly mentioned) the two resources were sequential, the café established as the Local Net failed, and the latter seems to have been on far too large a scale, so there are all sorts of reasons why the comparison is speculative. It's highly likely that many of those who used the café were already blessed with sufficient confidence and social capital to take advantage of what was on offer. Indeed the authors accept that causal priorities are hard to establish, but 'the evidence suggests that an IT-Café, combining physical with virtual and the local with the global, may be especially well suited to build social capital and a sense of local community in a disadvantaged area.'

In my view this in no way discredits neighbourhood networks, but it does put a nice big tick in the Third Place box. And it sweetly reinforces what some of us were saying 10 years ago (The net result) about the need for local resource centres; or a few years later for example in a paper to government which I co-wrote in 2002:

• Access centres function best as part of wider generic community resources that attract local people for a range of activities. It is not realistic to expect them to become financially self-sustaining without distorting their roles, although they do tend to add value to whatever funding they receive;
• Where they are part of generic community resources, access centres fulfil fundamental social roles that contribute to government objectives on community cohesion, social capital, and community capacity building. They reach parts that other agencies cannot reach, and seen in this context they justify public funding. Such funding would need to reflect recognition of their role as community sector resources rather than as centres of formal learning.

Regrettably, government lost its nerve at about that time, and funding for the centres came with badly-misconceived requirements for formal learning, wholly inappropriate for the policy objective. Now they're wondering where the social inclusion results are going to come from.

'We're most gregarious'

Some time ago I expressed a concern about the tendency to theorise and problematise social capital away from local everyday life. It's important to take account of shallow conversations and brief interactions that take place in the public realm. And now I've just been reading about some research into ephemeral relationships on the trams of Antwerp, carried out by Ruth Soenen.

Over eight months Soenen observed the kinds of brief relationships that spring up and disappear in this kind of public context - she notes for example how people start talking if they have to help one another avoid falling when there's a sudden stop, or if they see something unusual through the window. She records the catalytic effect of a colourful and talkative person stepping on board.

She tries to link this to notions of 'community', arguing that in-depth relationships 'don't have a priviliged status' in this respect:

'Duration doesn’t seem to be the essential marker for the experience of community... Ephemeral relationships can be a social base for the experience of community.'

Soenen goes on to argue that there are limitations in the measurement of social capital when we ignore the potential of ephemeral relationships. Her book about this study is published in Dutch only.

Thanks Jan. My title, showing my age, is from Flanders and Swan.

Previously: Segregation in public space (with reference to buses in Jerusalem).

Social capital entanglements

Here's an example of how difficult it can be to get clarity on where social capital comes from and goes to. Marilyn Taylor, in her recent assessment of the extent to which the neighbourhood management Pathfinders are generating social capital, refers to the significant growth in neighbourhood watch schemes in one of the case study areas, by way of evidence.

But neighbourhood watch organisations are based not on trust, but on distrust: hence their contribution to social capital is ambivalent. I think Marilyn's probably right, to the extent that these groups would be buzzing with bonding and linking capital. But they're probably not going to be doing much bridging: and in a lot of Pathfinder areas, bridging capital is in short supply as it is.

This is a reminder that we still lack sophistication in our analysis of social capital. Hopefully the report, which renews the focus on social capital, will stimulate more work to bring out the implicit contribution of neighbourhood management in its generation.

Previously: Social capital makes a comeback?

The social impacts of heat waves

Here in the UK summer forgot to show up this year, but it's reassuring nonetheless to see that the Environment Agency has published some research into The social impacts of heat waves.

In our family we joke about how my mother used to put on Factor 50 to sit in the shade, but sometimes there's no joke. As Eric Klinenberg's famous study of Chicago showed, excessive protracted heat can be deadly, especially in urban areas, and there are social dimensions (eg strength of social networks and neighbourhood ties) which impact on the chances of survival.

And as it happens, Kit Hodge was reflecting on heat in Chicago just the other day over on Neighbors Project.

Social capital makes a comeback?

I've pondered a few times the curious way in which the term 'social capital' (and the debate around it) seemed to disappear from publicly articulated policy in the last few years. The notions of well-being and happiness flickered on the screen, for a time, presumably in anticipation of greater resonance.

Some people of course have kept talking about s.c. anyway, not least the excellent North East Social Capital Forum, which has now organised a conference 'Social cohesion and community wellbeing: is social capital the secret ingredient?' for 28 September in Sunderland.

And here's a recent report by Marilyn Taylor for the Department for Communities and Local Government, on Neighbourhood management and social capital. The report is based on three case studies. It looks at activities which can be seen to contribute to social capital and explores ways in which their impact can be assessed. Is the term making a come-back because we can't do without it, or is this just a bit of conceptual archaeology?

'Can't complain'

Defra have included a provisional list of 'wellbeing measures' in a recently published set of sustainability indicators.

Fear of crime
  - Perceptions of anti-social behaviour
Workless households
Childhood poverty
Pensioner poverty
Education
Healthy life expectancy
  - Self-reported general health
  - Self-reported long-standing illness
Mortality rates (suicide)
  - Mortality rates for those with severe mental illness
Accessibility
Social justice
Environmental equality
Housing conditions
Satisfaction with local area
  - Trust in people in neighbourhood
  - Influencing decisions in the local area
Wellbeing
  - Overall life satisfaction
  - Satisfaction with aspects of life
  - Frequency of feelings or activities which may have a positive or negative impact on wellbeing
  - Level of participation in sport
  - Access to greenspace
  - Level of participation in cultural activities
  - Positive mental health

The document acknowledges that there is quite a bit more work to do. I'd say this list seems a bit weak on personal and social relationships - friendship, friendliness, neighbourliness, and 'sense of community.' But according to a survey summarised in the Guardian,

While over 85% of those questioned were satisfied with their relationships, less than 65% were satisfied with feeling part of a community.

Also: New Economics Foundation press release on the Happy Planet Index.

Public space, diversity, and social interaction

Back on the theme of public space, I just found out that Demos have published a report on public space and interaction between diverse communities, by Joost Beunderman and Hannah Lownsbrough, about the extent to which public spaces can foster everyday positive interaction between people.

It's hard on a quick reading to say what this report adds to the recent glut of material on this theme, particularly following the rich stack of JRF work published last year. It looks to me like it brings together some key threads from all over the place concisely and, as we would expect from Demos, there's the customary intriguing list to provoke us:

• Exchange spaces: places where people exchange ideas, information and goods
• Productive spaces: used by people engaged in activities to grow or create goods
• Spaces of services provision: support services are run from these spaces, either by statutory or voluntary providers
• Activity spaces: where people gather for leisure, such as for play, sport or informal events
• Democratic / participative spaces: for shared decision-making or governance
• Staged spaces: ‘one-off’ special occasions where people are brought together for a specific purpose
• In-between spaces: places which are located between communities
• Virtual spaces: non-physical spaces, such as those created online by social networking sites.

The authors also note that the number of spaces which fall unambiguously into the category of ‘public’ is dwindling; and that 'many seemingly "public" spaces have implicit barriers to entry that diminish their truly public character.' The lessons put forward, however, don't feel as if they are going to transform practice:

1. be flexible in the use of space, understand the grain of people’s everyday lives and reflect it in the design of public space;
2. aim to create the setting for ‘trusted’ spaces, where people feel secure to take part in unfamiliar interactions;
3. foster positive interactions but don’t promote them: take an indirect approach to changing behaviour;
4. embrace creativity and innovation in finding new and imaginative uses for spaces that will transform interactions between people.

As so often I think the missing voices in this debate are the community and social psychologists. I'd like to learn more about how we associate value or non-value or distrust with confused or neglected spaces, especially those leftover spaces of uncertainty that attract some and repel others. I can't believe that the psychology of space doesn't have a refreshing contribution to make to the issues of cohesion and integration, towards which this report and others (eg Dines and Cattell) have been groping.

This report was prepared for the Commission for Racial Equality, referring to diversity in its sub-title, and Beunderman and Lownsbrough have woven-in some interesting points about territoriality and segregation both in general terms and with reference to their case studies. As the list of lessons above suggests, however (at least to me) we still don't have the confidence to make clear statements about the way some spaces seem to promote and some discourage interactions with people from different backgrounds.

And I do wonder if we don't have too much emphasis on the engineering of sociability, as in phrases like 'the design of public space.' As I've argued often enough, sometimes the first principle is for professionals to make sure they're not doing damage to social networks, and to respect informality as a principle. But then, me putting it like that isn't going to transform practice either.

Residential segregation and community cohesion

The recent report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion was important partly in giving new policy emphasis to what's known as the 'isolation thesis' - the notion that residential segregation restricts social ties between minority ethnic groupings and the host population, and that these ties are important.

I've just been reading some research based on survey analysis in the Netherlands which appears to confirm the first part of the argument:

spatial segregation hampers the social inclusion of ethnic minorities, as it stands in the way of contacts between ethnic minorities and native Dutch.

Perhaps surprisingly, this conclusion was found to apply more clearly to 'non-deprived ethnic minorities' than to deprived.

van der Laan Bouma-Doff, W. Confined contact: residential segregation and ethnic bridges in the Netherlands. Urban studies, 44(5-6), May 2007, 997-1017.

_________

Update

Meanwhile, guidance published today sets out what schools in England will have to do under a new duty to promote community cohesion. The press release includes a broad definition of community cohesion which I haven't seen before.

Integration and Cohesion: the report

The report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is published today, with a strong emphasis on improving cohesion through local action. If you work in or around community development in the UK, you won't be able to escape the significance of this document and I hope you wouldn't want to. If you are outside the UK but interested in cohesion issues, I think this could still be an important document for you.

'Some of the key influences on poor cohesion are low satisfaction with an area as a place to live, high perceptions of levels of anti-social behaviour and a high level of deprivation – all issues which can be addressed locally, or be tackled by local institutions. Our analysis also found that there was no simple link between poor cohesion and any of these factors; or good cohesion and the reverse. Local history, trends or events are also important... Improving cohesion in the long term is about local action: local areas have the expert knowledge about particular local circumstances; and local actions are what will result in integration and cohesion.'

Here's my first, undeniably positive reaction from a quick skim, as I won't have much time to deal with this in the next few days.

The report is structured around four principles:

• shared futures - this is about 'an emphasis on articulating what binds communities together – rather than the differences that might divide them – and is about prioritising a shared future over divided legacies';
• strengthened rights and responsibilities;
• mutual respect and civility, also referred to as 'an ethics of hospitality';
• visible social justice.

The chapter on respect and civility is of particular interest to me and I may post about it separately in due course. I picked out the following:

There is a call for government to take integration and cohesion seriously in relation to youth services provision, but I get the impression that the role of intergenerational work in promoting community cohesion is not given nearly enough momentum in this report.

The Commission proposes a nationally sponsored Community Week (I suppose continued abuse of the C word is inevitable) 'with a focus on celebrating all communities and inter-community engagement'.

The Commission has also acknowledged the dearth of evidence on the most effective ways of stimulating meaningful interaction and building cross-cultural friendships, and it calls for a programme of research, hurrah, 'to explore more closely what works' (in this respect) 'in different neighbourhoods and why.'

There's a healthy emphasis on education and citizenship and the promised and needed support for ESOL classes (English for Speakers of Other Languages) is there, plus an interesting recommendation that authorities should reduce the amount of language translation they do: 'translation should be reduced except where it builds integration and cohesion.' There also seems to be a sensible detachment from media over-excitement about notions of 'Britishness'.

Annex B looks like a very useful categorisation of what seems to work well and less well in five types of area (unhelpfully called 'family groups'). They are: changing, less affluent rural areas; stable less affluent urban areas with manufacturing decline; stable less affluent urban areas without manufacturing decline; changing, less affluent urban areas; and areas with tensions arising from a single issue.

Article by Madeleine Bunting in yesterday's Guardian. More in today's Guardian including comments by Ed Cox on the point that cohesion needs to be considered everywhere, not just in urban areas with a visible ethnic mix: 'cohesion tensions in the future are more likely to be experienced in unexpected places where 'diversity' is new.'

'As local diversity becomes more complex, we think mutual respect and civility should underpin the way we as communities navigate a shared course through different understandings of what is acceptable or normal.'

The third place game

Last thursday in Caloundra, Queensland, I helped facilitate a game about third places with storyteller Gail Robinson and city librarian Louise Bauer, as a prelude to their third place forum. We're preparing a write-up: meanwhile here's my short account.

The Third Place Forum was established as a libraries initiative, but we wanted to explore the characteristics of third places generally in order to bring out some tensions we anticipated around 'community'/public, public/commercial, inclusive/cliquey, and so on.

I worked online with Louise and Gail for a week or two before I went out, sharing ideas for what could be done, and we came up with a five-part exercise. About a dozen good folk, enough for three groups, were recruited into the Caloundra art gallery early on thursday evening.

The game started with a plenary flipchart exercise to warm people up and get a set of attributes of 'community life'  -  features like 'inclusive,' 'green,' 'supportive' - which they believed to be important.

Each group was then given a set of cards representing suggested third places, and asked to discuss each one and record some notes about the features of community which it relates to, is there a cost at point of use, what are the key attributes of the third place, who uses it, and who's excluded?

Groups then took the cards to a large-scale aerial map of the city to locate examples of the third places they'd worked on. Anticipating that the cards would be clustered, we'd grandly invested in some toilet roll stands and clothes pegs, only the best will do, in order to show where the places occurred on the map. This classy high-tech solution had the advantage of adding a physical third dimension to the map as it developed.

The third stage of the game required each group to spend a few minutes developing an imaginary character and inventing a set of problems that the character faced. (With this technique in particular we acknowledge the ever-present influence of Drew Mackie and David Wilcox, (see their Useful Games site). One of the 'characters' was in fact a small family, the others were an old man living alone and a young professional woman who is wheelchair-bound.

The character was then 'introduced' to the next group who had to spend time developing 'a week in the life' of their character and recording this on the sheet. Whenever the group made reference to a third place, they noted it on a small colour-coded post-it, which was afterwards removed to the map.

The final phase was to discuss, in plenary the narratives constructed by the groups about their characters, and what lessons might be learned from the card-clustered map.

There are follow-up phases too: first, some insights may be gained from an analysis of the notes made on the cards (when I get round to it) and these can be explored with participants online. Secondly, participants suggested that it might be interesting to explore third place use during a week in their own life, so we're thinking about how best to follow this up: it won't be a representative survey but we could test some methodology.

On the whole it worked very well for a first run, especially the links from one phase of the game to another. We haven't cracked the uncertainties you get when you mix fictional characters or venues with real, mapped places. And we may have needed to be less selective and more comprehensive in our list of third places (which would be a challenge). A final point is that it was noticeable how these Aussie participants, with their unfailingly positive outlook, managed to sort most of the characters' problems and left them living pretty much happily ever after. I'll be surprised if we can get a similar effect running the game in the UK.

Once we've done the write-up and clarified next steps, I'll post again about this.

Neighbouring, privacy, and the outsourcing of social control

In today's Guardian Lynsey Hanley reflects on her own recent experience of neighbouring, with allusion to some of the things she and I were discussing recently.

Her chance first meeting with a next-door neighbour who had been there eighteen months stimulated a sense of guilt. But it's not uncommon of course, and indeed several of the blog comments provoked by the article confirm that that's the way a lot of people like it  - respect for privacy, discreet distance rather than anything that could remotely be considered nosiness.

A few pages further on, Gillian Draper offers what in my view is a wholly justified attack on the culture of surveillance. She describes what seems like comprehensive camera coverage in a public access residential area of Sevenoaks in south east England, with the footage in the hands of a residents' association which has no accountability to non-residents.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's interested in the connection between the themes of these two articles - a connection explored in this book (excuse the self-promotion: it was referenced by Lynsey Hanley but unhelpfully cut out by a Guardian editor).

We have less need to be neighbourly, and increasingly we expect privacy and seek to defend it. As we do so, we have less and less common ground on which to establish connections with those around us; and so we find we need to worry more about incivility and anti-social behaviour. Which leads us to outsource our social control; for which the technology comes in very handy.

It seems obvious to me that by allowing the surveillance culture to proliferate, we're starting at the wrong end: we need to be working out solutions to the crisis of depleted and impoverished local social relations, not exacerbating it. Which brings us back to Lynsey's point:

I felt my cheeks redden in sheer shame and confusion that we had lived next door to each other for over a year without even seeing each other to pass the time of day. My smugness was replaced with a feeling that our ability - as comfortable, materially sated humans - to respond to a basic inner need for social interaction had gone awol.

Projects don't always work

Proboscis have published a report written by Giles Lane and myself about some work we carried out with a residents' organisation in Southall, west London, in 2006.

In the Conversations and Connections project we set out to explore how some of Proboscis' public authoring tools can be harnessed by a community organisation to stimulate connections between residents and thereby increase levels of participation at local level.

The report describes what we attempted and explores the reasons why the project did not succeed fully. The main reasons were the lack of consistent community development support on the estate, and the weakness of connections between the core group members and the majority of residents. This project illustrates the old principle that sorting the people issues can be harder than sorting technological issues.

The report refers back to the Common knowledge essay which I wrote about community development on the estate.

The project was funded by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, now the Ministry of Justice.

Smile and be counted

Last week the Guardian published a short article by Peter Singer, about a city-funded initiative in Port Phillip near Melbourne, where volunteers monitor the number of smiles between passers-by in the street. Signs are then placed to let pedestrians know when they are in, for instance, a 10 smiles per hour zone. Coupled with investment in street parties, this is all

'part of a larger programme attempting to measure changes in quality of life... The council wants Port Phillip to be a sustainable community, not merely in an environmental sense but also in terms of social equity, economic viability and cultural vitality.'

You'd think from reading some of the comments the article has solicited, that government was taking over responsibility for the control of facial muscles. It's not about 'state-enforced smiles' although of course it is inevitably part of the debate on the extent of the changing role of the state:

'The Port Phillip city government ... wants those who live in the community after the present generation have gone to have the same opportunities for a good quality of life. To protect that quality of life, it has to be able to measure all the varied aspects that contribute to it, and friendliness is one of them.'

Quite right and about time too: quality of life is not just about services and money, there's a debate about social capital been going on out there. In an age of high mobility, the perceived friendliness of a locality and anticipations of civility among strangers are related to all sorts of factors from the perception of individual safety to the potential for local economic stability. (On another theme, in theory it raises again the question of the desirability of using religious or other costume in order to hide the face; and the implications for our experience of the public realm).

It would be a mistake to see the Port Phillips 'smile in the street' exercise as an isolated initiative, and Singer makes clear that other activities such as the organisation of street parties belong in the same programme. A propos, Streets Alive's Chris Gittins sent me this comment:

'Smiling sounds easy but if you are strangers as neighbours where do you start? Well, a neighbours' street party is a good idea. Having met at least once over a BBQ people are more comfortable about smiling in the first place. This sort of Aussie politics is very welcome as UK politics is mostly about problem solving and not generating goodwill or prevention.'

One final thought: how long before a local authority in the UK tries something similar, and uses CCTV cameras instead of human beings, for the counting exercise?

Cohesion, immigration, and policy

Immigration minister Liam Byrne got headlines yesterday for his proposed new "managed migration" points system, and says that when one junior school in his constituency saw its population of children with English as a second language rise from 5% to 20% within a year, 'the task of boosting standards in some of the poorest communities gets harder.'

And so the practicalities of promoting cohesion, when diversity implies low social capital and instability, bring a keen focus to immigration policy. Byrne points to the speed of population change in some localities and notes:

'Here are a set of changes that have made Britain richer but which have deeply unsettled the country.'

Well good, at least we have some acknowledgement that diversity brings richness. But the notion of diversity in neighbourhoods seems to be readily equated with 'problem'. How can that be? Apparently 'laissez-faire migration' runs the risk of damaging communities. (Not half as much as laissez faire consumerism, I'm thinking).

Being surrounded with a mix of people from different backgrounds creates tensions at local level apparently. (Er, excuse me, not necessarily it doesn't). So we must only admit to our country the people who will make an identifiable economic contribution. (Er, there may be a bit missing from the sequence of this argument). If they say it often enough, to some people it will begin to sound true. To many it probably already does.

It's just possible that there could be other causes of tensions in neighbourhoods. Byrne's approach suggests another clash of government policies, with CLG in various ways (including through the Commission) rightly and consistently stimulating ways in which 'people from different backgrounds can get on well together,' through community cohesion measures, 'liveability' policies, civil renewal, community engagement, local governance and so on. Why would immigration policy makers claim to have the answer without reference to other measures where people are working collectively on these issues? Unless there's an election coming up and some right-wing votes to be lost.

Meanwhile, in what looks like a premeditated subversion of Byrne's theme, from last friday's Guardian comes Robina Qureshi's tale of how 'the arrival of asylum seekers in Glasgow's most deprived areas has given back a sense of community in a way no government initiative has ever done.' How so? Well, as most community workers know, nothing succeeds like adversity:

'Immigration snatch squads, escorted by police, have conducted a series of dawn raids on Scottish asylum families over the past few years. Finally, last October, local people gathered alongside asylum seekers early one morning in Kingsway in peaceful protest at the raids. At around 6.30am an immigration snatch squad turned up to take another family. Over 150 members of the community linked arms and demanded the squad cease immediately. After a 40-minute standoff, the chief of police announced there would be no raid. To this day, the community has been on constant vigil in the hours before dawn.'

And finally, on this theme, a huge round of applause for the Welcome to Your Library project, which 'connects public libraries with refugee communities,' and has won this year's 'Libraries Change Lives' Award. I've been a fan from the start and as a former judge for this award I know how well deserved it is.

Children's contentedness as a social indicator

Absorbing Analysis programme on BBC R4 by Andrew Brown this evening about 'Miserable children'. 'Something rather horrible does seem to be happening to childhood in Britain today' says Brown, following up on that Unicef report.

The programme includes much wisdom from Penelope Leach, Richard Layard, Hugh Cunningham and others; including Layard's reflections on the research finding (which I covered here) that just 43% of children in English schools say they find other children in their classes 'kind and helpful' compared with 70% or more
in Scandinavia:

I link this to the fact that levels of trust in the society as a whole have been falling very much in the US and in Britain. I attribute this to the philosophy and individualism that your job in life is to be as successful as you can compared with other people.  That’s obviously a formula that can’t produce more happiness in society because it’s impossible for more people to be more successful compared with other people...

Audio.

Transcript.

Stocktaking Europe's well-being

A few weeks ago the European Commission launched an open-ended consultation based on an impressive-looking paper by Roger Liddle and Fréderic Lerais, Europe's social reality.

The paper looks at common patterns in the contrasting experiences of member states and at how 'social changes can be assessed against benchmarks of well-being.'

It then attempts to open a debate about some of the key factors that contribute to well-being – such as economic opportunity, the changing nature of work, the challenges of the ageing society, demography and new patterns of family life, poverty and inequality, the barriers to good health and social mobility, quality of life, crime and anti-social behaviour, and diversity and multiculturalism.

So the Commission is seeking views on the implications of social trends and the identification and
assessment of the factors contributing to well-being in Europe. The first thing that strikes me from a quick-scan of the paper is that perhaps there could be more emphasis on the decline in, and restoration of, forms of collective behaviour.

Press release.

Neighbourhoods, parenting and children

I first heard Jacqueline Barnes talking about her research into families, parenting and neighbourhoods about three years ago and I couldn't understand why the whole world didn't know about it. I've referred to it a few times here (eg) and now it's time to welcome the book -
Down our way: the relevance of neighbourhoods for parenting and child development. It's published by Wiley and also available via Amazon.

The study threw up findings about informal social control which I've discussed in the past, but I maybe wasn't expecting the interesting focus in chapter six on the importance of local friends:

Many newcomers found that it was not easy to develop local friendships and without those it was a challenge to become involved with local campaigns or local schools.

I'm also fascinated by the question raised in chapter 9 - 'Is it better to belong to the neighbourhood?' about the tensions affecting involvement, withdrawal indoors, or moving away.

The challenge is to include in local activism those parents who feel particularly alienated from their community... Neighbourhoods that offer safe streets allow parents to walk around and chat to other local residents in informal ways could facilitate network development, which in turn is likely to strengthen their sense of belonging, and neighbourhood cohesion. Local authorities will need to develop coordinated strategies that offer more chances for local neighbourhood engagement from the most disenfranchised (no easy task) in conjunction with improving the physical environment.

If your pocket money won't stretch to buying a copy and you can't wait til Christmas, make sure your library gets it for you.

"You can come back mate" - workshops with street reps

Running exploratory workshops with local residents tends to be less predictable than it usually is working with professionals, and it can be risky. But it's what I enjoy most and find most rewarding. I've just been in Shipley with my colleague Sarah Clow (pic, R) running one focus group on neighbourliness with older people, and two workshops for a new 'Street Reps' initiative. In a few hours of listening you can get a pretty thorough immersion in local issues in a low income area, and we did.

The basic idea of street reps (sometimes called street champions) is usually to give services keen and willing pairs of eyes and ears in the neighbourhoods, to alert them to issues that need attention. Much of the language is classically top-down (as in 'we will appoint you; you will do this' - one example begins talking almost straight away about 'professional standards') and suggests that some authorities have not done much thinking about it and start from their own preoccupations rather than the residents'.

It fascinates me, because the task is really to work out, for each individual and more generally for each network of reps, a role definition which is sufficiently formal for the authorities but sufficiently informal and flexible to make sense in the everyday life of the neighbourhood. (Since it's essential that the reps are volunteers, we can expect that some authorities will have to give weight on this particular see-saw. And in the grander scheme of things, this is exactly the kind of initiative which, in forcing the responsibilisation of citizens, will in turn, necessarily, reduce the public services obsession with performance measurement and thus could presage the demise of New Labour Managerialism. So that's a pretty good reason for getting on with it).

Our work is being funded by a grant from Bradford's Neighbourhood Management Team. To their great credit, they are not necessarily happy just waiting for local people to volunteer for a pre-defined role which saves them money while helping to meet service delivery targets. They've asked us to work with residents to define the role in their own terms (not as easy as it sounds). Additionally, without denying the role of street reps as 'Disorder Alarms', we're looking to emphasise the development and support of local social networks through neighbourliness; and for reps to promote positive initiatives like street parties or planting, not just passing on complaints or bad news. We'll also be looking, softly softly, for opportunities to introduce and exploit mobile online technologies.

Having served a modest, intermittent apprenticeship with games maestro Drew Mackie and participation guvnor David Wilcox over the years (see Useful Games) I know enough to know I needed to fictionalise things in order to get discussion away from the immediate gripes. What we came up with was more of a workshop exercise than a game - working in groups to invent and explore issues requiring attention for spring, summer, autumn and winter, identifying immediate and longer term actions, working out responsibilities, resource and support needs and so on - but for several people the experience seems to have been totally novel and refreshing.

At the end one of the participants said that if she'd been told beforehand that she'd be doing this - meaning, having to think things up herself and writing ideas down on a flip-chart - she would never have come. But she'd had a good time and enthused: "You can come back mate." Which, in the understated vernacular of community action, I think constitutes emphatic endorsement. And that gives us a buzz, cos there's plenty still to do.

Designing-out aspiration: the history of council estates

At last a moment to put in a plug for Lynsey Hanley's Estates, an engagingly personal exploration of the history and experience of council housing. Hanley comes across as a lot more patient than I would be in explaining the politics and decision-making that gave rise to what have been called 'social concentration camps' and the succession of estates where desolation was designed-in.

We learn that the author herself 'escaped' from such an estate to accumulate otherwise-inconceivable sacksfull of intellectual and social capital by going to university, but there's no sense of confused guilt or pride. She writes with great clarity about the tangled issue of social class and the 'wall in the head' that characterises the experience of growing up on a council estate:

The wall in the head is just that - a state of mind - but it would not be so strong, or so seemingly insurmountable, were it not for the real walls that serve to strengthen it. Coexisting with the state of mind is a state of economics, a state of health and a state of education, a state of government policy and a state of segregation by class.

She's maybe a little harsh on tower blocks - when they work, with proper maintenance and sensible allocations policies, there are many people who greatly appreciate living in towers; and I suspect she could be harsher on the current 'sustainable communities' building plans, where some of the classic errors like forgetting to provide local amenities seem to be being replicated. But this is a strikingly real book illuminated throughout, refreshingly, by personal experience.

As it happens, sometime after I started reading Estates I found out that I'll be sharing a platform with Lynsey at this year's Swindon Festival of Literature, on the evening of Thursday 10 May - it should be fun.

Social capital, ethnicity, and cohesion

I sometimes think we're a society that snacks voraciously on weak ties, and when it comes to strong ties, the appetite has gone. But (to hold the analogy for as long as I dare) the nutritional benefits of each may not be comparable.

OK, forget that. I've just been scanning some papers dated December and announced today by the Family and Parenting Institute, on social capital and transnational families. There are three research papers described in this summary, and they seem to clarify the significance of, and continued need for, bonding capital among ethnic groupings:

The research found that the minority ethnic communities studied utilised bonding strategies within their families and communities which then provided them with the support and resources to participate more fully in the wider spheres of education, employment and building intimate relationships and friendships.

Although the research acknowledges that being part of a close-knit community can sometimes have negative implications for individuals, the social capital afforded by the solidarity and reciprocity of those communities provided a secure base from which to bridge into the wider community. So far from encouraging increasing social segregation, the adherence to socially accepted norms of their ethnic communities created a resilience that allowed greater involvement in societal life in general. [Emphasis added]

The research also highlighted that the reciprocity within the ethnic groupings studied 'encourages a greater sense of caring for members of the community that need more support.'

The bonding contexts include family events, cultural rituals and community groups. The bonding networks represent a ‘survival strategy’ as a response to issues arising from social exclusion and marginality, providing support for participation in education, employment and forming intimate friendships in other groups and communities.

All the papers are available from the FPI site here.

The practice of neighbouring

A week ago at a seminar I was lamenting the inadequacies of research on neighbouring, largely because we only have data from a few case studies (I think there may be many more undiscovered), from specific surveys with questions of dubious worth such as 'how many of your neighbours do you know by name?' and from large national datasets which lack, er, granularity shall we say.

Since when, my attention has been drawn to a paper by Margarethe Kusenbach published in Symbolic interaction last year (29(3)), on 'Patterns of neighboring: practicing neighboring in the public realm'.

Thanks to Keith Hampton for the nod on this: Keith warned me that it is 'one of the best neighborhood articles I have seen of late' and I'm not going to argue with that. Kusenbach does two key things: she provides us with valuable insights from scarce material from ethnographic observations in two Los Angeles neighbourhoods, and she puts this in a framework of 'four normative principles of neighboring' - friendly recognition, parochial helpfulness, proactive intervention, and embracing and contesting diversity.

The paper is important because at last we have an academic placing emphasis on neighbourly greetings which 'tend to be superficial and do not take much effort'. I no longer feel like quite such a lone obsessive. At the same time, Kusenbach places stress on the notion of 'rules' of neighbouring, for example to do with reciprocity. Personally I suspect it might be better to talk in terms of 'codes' rather than 'rules', at least until we've got a bit further in appreciating the voluntary and essentially informal nature of contemporary neighbouring.

(Incidentally, there's one particular curiosity about the paper, in that the literature review almost completely overlooks European sources (the Dutch, Scandinavian and UK traditions in this field, especially Philip Abrams, do not feature: my information-work background makes me wonder impishly if the research team forgot that we spell some words differently...)

Some of these niceties - especially the notion of neighbouring 'rules' - were floating around in my head yesterday because I was running a workshop for Age Concern England, based on a background paper I had circulated. I woke up this morning realising that we'd had fifteen of us discussing neighbourliness for four hours, which itself deserves mention.

Before I get to grips with the flipchart sheets, two things were particularly striking. The first was how easily our discussion kept slipping into issues of care, family networks, and the nuances of friendship and acquaintance. I'd like to think that this reflects my decision to take an ecological approach to neighbourliness within the context of social support generally, but maybe it's just reality poking through all the time.

The second was that the issue of local social relations, with its baggage of respect, civility, care, consideration, participation, responsibilisation and so forth, is clearly of swelling social policy significance. Agencies like Age Concern are right to try and get in front of the issues as governments are increasingly turning their attention to influencing the ways in which people behave.

As for the notion of 'rules', the group was emphatic about seeing neighbouring as a code of informal voluntary behaviours, so I wonder if this highlights another cultural difference between the UK and the US. And we hardly discussed notions of respect for privacy because it's undoubtedly taken for granted as one of the central pillars of neighbouring.

My thanks go to the enthusiastic group representing various Age Concerns who shared their ideas and experience yesterday. It's not yet clear what products will result from the project, but there's likely to be some form of guidance for local Age Concerns and perhaps a more general document reviewing the theme.

Easy guide to social capital

One reason why social capital may have disappeared from the language of policy in the last couple of years could be to do with its semantic awkwardness. But this hasn't put some people off. Thanks to Karen Dent of Community Foundation for drawing my attention to a recent 'easy guide to social capital' which, it says, 'is targeted at the grassroot level.'

It explains social capital, discusses why it is important and how it can benefit communities, and gives some ideas of ways that you can get connected and act collectively. It also includes a list of resources of other information and support on social capital.

The guide is published by the North East Social Capital Forum and is available here.

Celebrating community centres and their workers

I'm a community-centre junkie, and today I've been back to my all-time favourite. Except it wasn't there.

The old community centre at Windhill in Shipley, West Yorkshire, was genuinely ramshackle. It was a fairly large set of pre-fab units which originated, I believe, at Heathrow Airport (a poignantly non-local locale) and, as a charitable donation, was flat-packed up the motorway decades ago to be reconstructed for the benefit of local people. On a wet day it felt like you could poke a finger through the walls.

I've run and participated in a few workshops there over the years, but mostly just been privileged to listen in admiration to accounts of what went on. Serious energies put into funding bids have resulted in a classy new building. This is a low-income area with some grim deprivation around, and it's reassuring for residents to see something of quality emerge in their midst, something on which a bit of money has been spent.

And I understood today a very clear message: that the buzzy sense of welcome and engagement, of valuing everyone, of ownership and commitment which characterised the old building, is just as unmistakable in the new one. The community workers - Alison Swisczowski and Kath Quinn (pictured above eight years ago) and their colleagues - just make it like that, cos that's what they do. I'd like to live in a society which recognises and values that.

Social networks in neighbourhoods

Here's good news. Folk at the Young Foundation have been tinkering with their website, and out pops something I wasn't aware of - a new programme of work using (at last) social network analysis at local level:

"The Young Foundation is working with the Centre for Collaborative Excellence...

(I know, stop sniggering, someone tell them if they want to celebrate excellence, to start with a name that doesn't provoke thigh-slapping derision)

"...to develop innovative social network mapping projects in neighbourhoods. The projects aim to improve community engagement and empowerment and improve local service delivery, by mapping networks of relationships between residents, service providers, public agencies and local authorities."

It's probably not fair to assume we'll see the customary over-emphasis on service delivery, let's wait and see in hungry anticipation. More here (but nothing specific yet).

Why invest in community arts?

Comparing JRF's limited funding of community arts to the huge sums given to New Deal for Communities' projects and physical regeneration schemes, Lord Best says that in his experience arts projects give quicker and more powerful outcomes.

This comes from an article on the value of community arts projects by Holly Sutton in Regen and renewal.

Social capital madam? What kind would you like?

Western societies face a crisis of difference, of learning to live with the Other. Do we need one-size-fits-all social capital, or culturally-flexible social capital?

If like me you read Putnam's Bowling alone some years ago and were never quite happy about it's patriotic chummy motherhood all-things-wise-and-wonderful tone, but never got round to analysing why - here's what we need to clarify our thinking: Diverse communities: the problem with social capital, by Barbara Arneil, published last year.

There are so many important points in this book that I would encourage even those who will find its bone-dry style and slight repetitiveness a bit off-putting, to stick with it.

Essentially Arneil challenges the concept of a homogeneous civic culture which suffuses Putnam's thesis, and she does so in a scholarly and systematic manner. As she says at the outset:

Putnam uses many different kinds of data to prove, empirically, that social capital is in decline while simultaneously making the normative argument that this pattern of decline is a bad thing.

She clarifies what you would expect, which is that from the point of view of certain social groups, over the past several generations, the weakening of the normative centre has been accompanied by a strengthening of rights and an invaluable broad raising of awareness of diversity. Which is a good thing. (I recall a conversation with Steve Downs in Washington DC some years ago when he lamented the fact that the 'European' concept of social exclusion had no currency in the USA: if only, I thought as I read this book).

The golden age of social capital in the USA was of course a period of cruel and sometimes devastating exclusion for many: as with the close-knit communities of pre-war England, it arose under dubious social conditions which we should be relieved to have overcome. Social capital within marginalised groups (Arneil tracks the development of minority ethnic groupings and women) has undoubtedly flourished since then and been exploited. If the model of a cohesive society which Putnam calls for is for a moment thought to be desirable, we must recognise that, as Arneil puts it, a robust civic culture ‘can also represent a powerfully constraining, disciplining or exclusionary force for those groups of people who deviate from the given norms, along religious, ethnic, cultural or gendered lines.’

In the end, Arneil's message (albeit transmitted in a somewhat subdued style, which partly explains why it took me so long to blog this) is more positive than Putnam's because she places genuine social value on the recognition and strengthening of minorities; and she refuses to accept that a white masculine christian capitalist definition of the good society is necessarily what we should all be striving for. Her prose won't have you purring with delight but the thoroughness of her approach will stand us all in good stead for a long time, I think.

Reasons to be made cheerful

There's a debate going on about the extent to which governments can or should try to influence our behaviour. Of course they probably always have tried to ('Your country needs you' posters; don't drink and drive; get a smoke alarm; eat more healthy food; stop smoking, etc etc). But my feeling is that we ain't seen nothing yet.

A while ago I was wondering aloud what happened to social capital in policy: it seems it's turned into wellbeing. The Sunday Times had this article the other day, about a report to the Whitehall Wellbeing Working Group, which suggests that the attempt to quantify a personal “sense of wellbeing” is part of a move by all the main political parties to go beyond purely financial measures of wellbeing in setting goals for policy.

Well anyway, it claims that people who take the time to chat over the fence to their neighbours tend to be happier. I suspect it might even help if the conversation is a good collaborative moan, as long as it's not a fierce argument, eg about the government's Happiness policy. I can think of some people who, if told that the government wants them to be happier, would react with a flat refusal.

Cohesion and communication

There's a short summary here of initiatives to promote communication in the interests of community cohesion in the Dutch town of Zaanstad, following unrest after the death of Theo van Gogh.

The tension was wisely problematised as: 'How do the residents of Zaanstad communicate with each other?'

A multi-racial project group set up ten projects, several of them apparently driven by young people, and the summary claims among the results that:

• Solidarity at district and urban levels has been reinforced; and   
• Residents are themselves responsible for the atmosphere and good relations in the city and the districts.

The report is as yet only available in Dutch, as far as I can see. (From European Urban Knowledge Network).

The respectable and the rough in low-income neighbourhoods

I came across an article by Paul Watt in the December issue of the International journal of urban and regional research, which is well-worth tracking down if you're interested in research that genuinely tries to make sense of what housing estate residents are saying about their environments and everyday lives.

Watt interviewd 29 residents in the London Borough of Camden and sifted out interesting insights into how people make social distinctions under constraining economic conditions, and explores how those distinctions relate to images of place. His account illustrates sensitively how people tend to place others around them on a scale of respectability and roughness.

The low-status others and problem tenants constituted an amorphous group who were condemned both for their sheer presence as well as for their behaviour. The latter included a widespread array of activities ranging from violence, drinking and drug taking, to noise, vandalism, graffiti and playing football, as well as failing to maintain the appearance of the dwellings.

The research also seems to suggest that racism is often subordinate to the respectable/rough distinction: racist discourse is not denied, but contextualised in this framework. What's enormously valuable in this article is the way in which the author scrapes away some of the structural grime that has clogged up the ethos and processes of neighbouring.

He shows how maintaining 'respectability' has become more and more difficult in unstable economic conditions and in neighbourhoods where 'knowing exactly who is respectable, or rough, is increasingly problematic.'

The paradoxical result is that expressing a social distinction between themselves and the low-status others around them, via emphasizing their own respectability, has become increasingly ‘necessary’ within the contemporary working-class habitus at the same time that the material basis for such a distinction has markedly narrowed.

I started to wonder if this has implications for the greater formalisation of cultural capital. It certainly points to the need for more effort to appreciate diverse forms thereof, which is perhaps what the community cohesion agenda amounts to. The residents who see themselves as struggling to maintain respectability in such a context, as Watt points out, lack any dominant form of cultural capital such as educational qualifications by which to legitimate their self-avowed status.

But there are more urgent indicators here for practitioners, to do with housing allocation and estate management in particular. The fact that the research was carried out before 2000 serves in my mind to emphasise that neighbourhood management in this country was disgracefully overdue and has been not so much a glorious policy success as blazingly obvious.

The erosion of public welfare services was routinely regarded as both signifying and causing deteriorating neighbourhood social relations. In addition to the widely criticized paucity of council housing provision, an emphasis was placed upon the communal areas of the estates, including their deteriorating physical appearance, the erosion of support services such as caretakers, as well as the limited facilities for children and young people.

At about the same time (I discover from some notes I found on my hard disk over christmas) a community development worker from another London borough was telling me:

Instability of communities is a problem... We’re not in control of much that happens in our borough because of the power of the private sector. We have 17,000 people on the housing list. On some estates, one third of people are on anti-depressants. One third of children are taking their lessons in their second language… Within the council, everyone is following different government departments’ requirements and from time to time there is conflict.

Watt, P. (2006). “Respectability, roughness and 'race': neighbourhood place images and the making of working-class social distinctions in London.” International journal of urban and regional research, 30(4), December: 776-796.

The inconsistency of neighbouring

A friend was telling me today about a conversation with a neighbour, who she reckoned has lived in her street for well over ten years. The question she was asked was something like 'have you seen so-and-so over the road? I haven't seen her for a while.' The lady in question had died some three years previously, unbeknown to the questioner.

For my friend, who grew up in a rural area, a bit of adjustment was necessary, because this couldn't have happened in her village. But she lives now in a northern English city. I'm not surprised and probably most people who think about neighbourliness in contemporary society wouldn't be surprised, which suggests that this sort of disconnection between neighbours is far from exceptional.

My friend works full time all week and is often out of the country, yet she had known about the neighbour's death. The story highlights an inconsistency about neighbouring in urban areas, an unpredictability, which is related to risk and which is accentuated by comparing it with the relative consistency of neighbourhoods in rural areas.

Put simply, when humans move into unfamiliar areas, like any social animal, they do so at risk of being unwelcome, and we prepare for such risk by being ready to put up shutters, to close in on ourselves. In complex urban societies there are a lot of people moving into unfamiliar areas, among unfamiliar others, so there are lots of people ready to put up the shutters on engaging with those around them - especially when the connections we need for sociability can often be sustained remotely and through our work or travel, and when we don't have to collaborate with those around us for basic needs like food and energy.

We have lots of ways of closing others out of our worlds - gates, curtains, personal sound systems, mobile phones, and cars especially - and too few ways of giving connections a chance.

I went on from that conversation to a meeting which included consideration of an outline research proposal on the role of celebration in 'building stronger community ties'. I'm a fraction clearer now about why that's a good idea.

The local post office: a brand in jeopardy

Among the forces affecting post offices, there seem to have been some specific policy decisions. The other day the government indirectly invited me to renew my TV licence, pointing out that I could no longer do so at my local post office, but instead at a handful of local commercial outlets. OK, I did it online, eschewing a walk up to the village, some fresh air, making any contribution to my local economy, or any chance of serendipitous encounters with neighbours.

I was speaking to an old lady about the proposed closures and she said candidly that for her, the problem is she gets confused about things - bills, payment methods, dates due and so on. There's no substitute for having one place where you can go, see someone regularly who knows you as a local person, and is able to offer explanation and advice on a basis of trust. From the point of view of this lady, hardly unique, the proposed closures are quite scary.

As far as my mother was concerned, the two guys at her local PO contributed significantly to her quality of life in her last few years and were part of the loose infrastructure that enabled her to stay relatively indpendent. They 'looked after' her in the sense that they gave her recognition, confidence at the counter, and took an interest in her welfare. This can be and is done sometimes by commercial outlets, but not with the kind of consistency we need.

Age Concern research shows that 99% of older people in rural areas consider their local post office a ‘lifeline’. The local post office is a brand in jeopardy, illustrating how public value is in jeopardy. Its further weakening would leave the remainder of our local informal infrastructure (pubs, libraries, parks and so on) under even greater pressure, perhaps too much.

Post offices and social value

Today we have the news that between "about 2,500 and 3,000 post offices - most in rural areas - face phased closure." Royal Mail hints at a whopping 10,000 possible closures. The government, for its part, "recognises the wider social role of the Post Office in communities" according to the Guardian and other sources.

The public subsidy is apparently already substantial - well, probably, if we knew how to measure 'substantial'. Some millions of pounds sterling are in one side of the balance: what's in the other scale?

Sorry, the scale only measures pounds, not social experience. It depends on how as a society we value social interaction, especially the value of purpose and contact for those who may feel themselves to be on the periphery. I think that locally-applicable policies affecting the availability of amenities and resources like this should be risk-assessed for the extent to which they might damage informal social networks. (What do you mean we can't do that? Has it been tried? No, because the language - 'gossip,' community,' 'contact' - is not regarded as legitimate. So can we change the language, please.)

It also depends on what other (formally measurable) contributions to the local economy might be made by post offices. And here's a report published by the New Economics Foundation just the other day, on the economic contribution of post offices in urban areas based on a study in Manchester.

• For every £10 earned in income, the post office generates £16.20 for its local economy – including £6.20 in direct spending on local goods and services.
• Based on in-depth analysis of Manchester post offices, this means that each post office contributes in the region of £310,000 to the local economy each year, of which £120,000 is direct spending on local goods and services.
• In addition, nef’s analysis reveals that each post office saves small businesses in their direct vicinity in the region of £270,000 each year.

Social capital is unfortunately unpopular at the moment, but this may become a bit of a social policy crisis because the voice of economic management seems to be saying, 'the level of public subsidy is unsustainable'. So we need some creative reinvention of the role of individual post offices within the network, some recognition of their wider economic impact, and more than just stamp-licking lip-service for the value of the social role. Qualitative evidence from nef’s survey

emphasises the vital and overlooked social services role played by Post Offices.  This evidence supports previous research which found that half of the subpostmasters in disadvantaged areas keep an eye out for between 20 and 50 vulnerable customers.

And here's a comment from the BBC news forum to illustrate the impact of a closure:

We lost our local post office which was within walking distance two years ago... It has definitely impacted on our community here - at the old post office we used to go there to do other things and catch up on the local gossip. We can't do that now.

The BBC has a page on 'How to set up a community-run post office' here.

Online social connections

The Beeb reports here on recent US research into social connections, among 'members of online communities' (not precisely sure what that means) or 'online networkers' (ditto).

Among the findings, apparently:

'40% of net-users were using the web to stay in contact with people, and 37.7% believed the internet was enabling them to communicate more with friends and family.'

Am I the only one to think those figures are strangely low, especially for one of the most connected countries in the world? They're presented as if they're significant, but they're kind of underwhleming.

Refugee integration and community cohesion

Community Development Foundation have just published a report by Alison Navarro on research into community development practice that contributes to community cohesion through the integration of asylum seekers and refugees.

'The research found that community development work was often undertaken in specialist organisations or by workers with specific responsibilities for working with asylum seekers and refugees. It found little evidence that mainstream community development practitioners worked with asylum seekers and refugees as part and parcel of their everyday working life. Attempts to explain this were related to the perceived lack of experience and expertise by generic workers and suggestions that the most appropriate way to integrate asylum seekers and refugees was to provide specialist services.'

'Nevertheless, the research also found that the range of interventions to assist with refugee integration and community cohesion were largely in tune with community development interventions in other settings including regeneration programmes, work with interest groups and area based work.'

The report is available here.

Neighbourliness, informality, and informal social control

The past few weeks have seen the publication of three documents which together, in my view, contribute significantly to the arguments around neighbourliness, informality, and informal social control:

• a pamphlet by Samuel Jones on conversation, Talk us into it, published by Demos
• a JRF report on Neighbourhood security and urban change by Martin Innes and Vanessa Jones (Findings. Report)
• Respect_in_the_neighbourhood , edited by meself and published by Russell House.

Samuel Jones's argument resonates on a drum that various people (like Alison Gilchrist, Susie Hay, David Wilcox, Geoff Mulgan, me in my small corner, and others) have been banging for a while now - there ain't enough of the right kind of conversations happening in the public realm.

His main point is not that people are talking about public affairs less, but that they are engaging less frequently in the means by which their conversation can become public.

The resources that drive the public realm have been channelled to more personal interests, 'draining social capital and bankrupting the public sphere.' So we've hit a crisis which requires us to 'refresh our public realm in ways acclimatised to the new means by which we pursue our personalised preference and our more particular ways of seeking information.'

Compare this from the introduction to the Respect book:

'The challenge is to replenish society’s depleted stock of skills in engaging and recognising the legitimate interests of others, of learning to challenge behaviour within a shared understanding; to hone our readiness to show consideration to others, whether we know them or not. It’s not that we don’t do this: it’s just that we tend to avoid doing it with those with whom we have little in common. It’s as if - conditioned to the taciturnity of the supermarket checkout rather than the inevitable greetings of the corner shop - we have abandoned the practice of conducting trivial interactions, because they don’t matter to us. But they do matter, and we need somehow to rediscover the vernacular of mundane encounters.'

The Respect book emphasises the importance of informality in terms of neighbourly relations, social capital, and the occupation of public space. There are numerous resonances with the Demos pamphlet: for example in our exploration and explanation of the tensions between local social relations and personal social networks, or in the way we probe the effects of the privatisation of social life. The book has two quite striking research chapters, two practitioners' chapters, a discussion of the notion of respect, an analysis of contemporary neighbouring, a comparative review of UK, Dutch and Flemish policy, and a discussion of the role of policy in local social relations. It argues that there is a profound and enduring connection between neighbouring, civility and a broader understanding of democratic participation.

As you would expect, much of the book is concerned with informal social control, which is a key theme in the study by Innes and Jones. Their research looked at how crime, physical disorder and antisocial behaviour shape the ways that places change over time.

The researchers consider how residents' perceptions of safety and security are affected by crime and disorder, fear of crime, and attempts to control unsocial behaviour. They stress that the connections between formal and informal social control at the neighbourhood level are 'crucial'. Among the arguments put forward, here's one that chimes clearly with views expressed on this blog and in the final chapter of Respect in the neighbourhood:

'In most neighbourhoods interventions that foster resilience and stimulate recovery at the neighbourhood level are more likely to improve quality of life than efforts that target "problem" individuals.'

I'm not sure precisely what these commonalities represent, but they do seem to confirm that there's a growing movement which, in opposition to the widespread over-emphasis on things formal and countable, is calling for greater recognition to be paid to the importance of informal engagement, to 'the vernacular of mundane encounters' - before it's too late.

Non-religious enlightenment

I've thought about religion a bit lately. I've watched bemused as the government, also apparently bemused, fuddled its policy on faith schools. I've listened to broadcasts where muslim representatives have totally failed to recognise a civil dimension to 'customs' expected of believers. Under moral obligation of a sort I recently attended a wedding in which the confrontational christian evangelism was grotesque and tasteless. And of course I've been pondering the place of all this in social cohesion great and small.

And then I was on my way back from somewhere the other day, Damascus it might have been, when I heard a quote from the late great Linda Smith which gave me a marvellous sense of relief from this stress:

'I'm not religious at all,' she said. 'I tend to get on with most people.'

Strengthening the cultural conversation

Just in case you were mulling over your submission to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, here's inspiration. A sound chapter called 'Cities for everyone: a vision for mixed and inclusive communities' by Chris Holmes, just published in a Policy Exchange booklet called Living for the city: a new agenda for green cities.

Chris is a former director of Shelter and wrote the handy recent JRF summary on mixed tenure and mixed income neighbourhoods.

In this chapter he offers a clear summary of issues to do with diversity, equalities and cohesion, expressing the 'need to strengthen the cultural conversation' and laying out the argument that socially mixed neighbourhoods can be successful. It's heavily based on housing issues but on page 108 there's as good a summary of what is meant by an 'inclusive community' as you're likely to get.

Integrated and cohesive communities

What might a community which is both integrated and cohesive look like?

The Commission on Integration and Cohesion has begun its work with the publication of a consultative document that includes a series of questions for national and local organisations, and for individuals.

The closing date for responses is 19 January 2007. The commission's report will be published in June 2007.

Play and social capital

Play matters in neighbourhoods because some people spend most of their time locally while they’re growing up. Unfortunately the way our neighbourhoods tend to be structured, play doesn’t just happen. Where it does, it works socially by providing a non-threatening environment for adults as well as children to interact.

The Neighbourhood Play Toolkit (available via) was developed between 2002 and 2004 with five local projects exploring community development and play. It’s published by the National Children’s Bureau. Alongside, JRF have published a report by Haki Kapasi and a Findings summary on issues raised in the process of local people developing play spaces and resources. Play was used as a focus for creative energies and collective endeavour.

It’s argued that the more successful projects had clarity of vision, established effective partnerships at the outset, and ‘strong champions and facilitators.’ The report also notes how play contributes to personal development, and the significance of affirmation as progress is made.

Respect in the neighbourhood

I've uploaded a flier for the Respect in the neighbourhood book, here . It's due on 22 November.

Youth Music and respect

'A new national music programme to tackle antisocial behaviour and raise aspiration and respect was launched today by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and music charity Youth Music.' Press release.

When something like this flounces into your mailbox tarted up in government rhetoric there's an immediate temptation to take the piss. That's not the fault of the project though, which looks pretty good to me. It's just that in the past we would never have had to point out that such activity contributes to pro-social behaviour and respect.

The programme will get young people involved in making music and provide 1:1 and group mentoring sessions with peers, musicians and the music industry.

It will run across 14 English regions:   Birmingham; Bradford; Bristol; Camden; Hackney; Kingston-upon-Hull; Leeds; Liverpool; Manchester; Newham; Nottingham; Sandwell; Southwark; Tower Hamlets.

The Music Mentoring Programme will include:

1:1 mentoring of young people by local adults (including a diverse range of musicians involved in different types of music making)
Small group tutoring sessions on specific topics relating to music making, progression routes in music industry etc.
1:1 tuition for children and young people by older teens, and
Specialist input by established, well known musicians and others successfully employed in creative and cultural industries.

Youth Music works alongside the formal and community-based sectors to support music-making and training. Find out more.

Young people and anti-social behaviour again: against structure

Suddenly it's yoof crime and violence again. The youth justice system, as if we didn't know it, is 'in crisis.' Elsewhere in government there is a creative and positive approach to issues to do with arson and young people.

Never thought about it much? Nor me, in spite of a clear recollection of the power of Peter Shaffer's Equus which I saw back in the seventies... According to this press release, children and young people on the lowest incomes are sixteen times more likely to die in a house fire and 31 times more likely to suffer from an arson attack. So one hopes the DCLG's proactive initiative, acknowledging the link between youth crime and arson, has a chance of making a difference.

And while I'm writing this, having been unable to get there, ippr are having a gig at the House of Commons to pump some momentum into youth policy, launching their report Freedom’s orphans: raising youth in a changing world. The press release unpromisingly introduces the word ‘paedophobia’ in its title (which helps explain why I missed it first time round) but we learn that 'British adults are less likely than those in other European countries to intervene to stop teenagers committing anti social behaviour.'

Right, we're on familiar territory. The inclination to intervene and the fear of retaliation were the key themes of the seminar I organised back in January which sparked the chapters by Jacqueline Barnes and Liz Richardson in Respect in the neighbourhood, which will be published next month. The book is really about informal social control at local level.

There have been a few surveys (including I recall this one by a certain security company, with slightly unconvincing methodology) but we can expect the ippr work to be authoritative. The press release offers enticing sample statistics about readiness to intervene. I hope when I see the report I'll find some exploration of the possibility that what young people themselves tend to fear most on the streets is not adults, it's other young people.

It seems important, and overdue, for someone influential to at last come out and show clearly that there are social shifts to explain changes in the relationships between young people and those around them, for which young people are not necessarily to blame. But had I been there, I might have raised a point, which was put to me most clearly by our publisher Geoffrey Mann (who's been working in this field far longer than I and long enough to remember Equus I'm sure), to ask who is challenging the policy insistence on structured activities?

Not ippr: their report claims 'that participation in structured youth activities is better for young people than unstructured youth clubs,' and recommends 'that every secondary school pupil (from 11-16 years old) should participate in at least two hours a week of structured and purposeful extracurricular activities.'

Most youth workers and others providing various types of informal education are not against structured activities, far from it. It's a question of balance. As I understand it, there's plenty of evidence and anecdote, from youth work and the youth justice field, that unstructured time with young people is absolutely crucial, as a precursor to structured activity such as sport, drama, or volunteering; as a precursor to the provision of advice, information and counselling; and as something very important in its own right, largely because of the value young people attach to the relationships that they build up with trusted non-judgmental adults who let them be themselves and who listen.

The theme of informality, and the resistance to the formalisers and managerialists, is a familiar one on this blog, so I'll take up this cause without hesitation. After all, much the same point can be made about community involvement and participation: in particular, people who experience exclusion often won't feel comfortable being thrust into a formal participatory role, and will need less formal, escapable fringe involvement before they are willing to commit. I can remember trying to make precisely this point, fruitlessly, on a cross-departmental government task force on citizen participation a couple of years ago, sigh. Unfortunately those who govern us have a strong instinctive resistance to informality.

Hospitality in the neighbourhood

I've just had a couple of workmen fitting a new front door. This has been a six-coffee job (so far, not yet finished) for the guy who's done most of the work. So I asked him if he measured jobs by the number of coffees they take to get done.

No, says he: two days ago was the worst, they worked at five different properties and didn't once get offered anything.

Well, there's a longitudinal and comparative study to be done of neighbourhoods' hospitality measured by the simple courtesy of offering visiting workmen and women a drink. Not sure the research funders will be happy with the sugar and biscuit budget though, that might need commercial sponsorship.

Community self-help

Road closed near Karakol, in the east of Kyrgyzstan. A tree had to come down, so everyone got together on a given day. The telephone wire was taken down, the tree felled, and we came along halfway through the process. An engineer was around to re-establish telecomms. Those who helped out will get a share of the timber for building and fuel.

'Ashar is a pre-Soviet form of collective voluntary work, in which groups of people were mobilised to provide assistance for family and neighbours... The origins of ashar are not clear, but one source suggests that it was practised by nomadic peoples.' (Lucy Earle, article in Central Asian survey, Sep 2005).

Market sociability

I was standing in the Osh market in Bishkek (not to be confused, as if you would, with the even more awesome bazaar in Osh) with fellow-traveller Eric Arnold, admiring the colourful buzz, when he told me a story about a visit he paid to a market in Ghana some years ago.

He'd wanted to buy some eggs and found a woman at a stall who had a single box left to sell. However, she seemed reluctant to sell the eggs, and to his frustration he was unable to persuade her to let him buy them.

The explanation, he learned afterwards, was that once she had sold everything, she would be expected to return home and might thus miss out on some of the gossip and sociability of the market; so her tactic was to decline all offers for as long as possible. It sounds like domestic life in this case could not compare with the appeal of the market.

And I return home to find that this story aligns neatly with JRF's publication of a fully-stocked report on Markets as social spaces (part of their Public Spaces research series - more to follow):

'The study underlines markets' potential role as significant sites of social interaction and mixing, as well as in enabling the building and strengthening of social ties and social inclusion in communities. The lack of policy and strategy for markets at national level needs to be addressed, and their place in community development and local regeneration policies strengthened.'

I'm reminded that there's an absorbing chapter about Chicago's Maxwell Street market, in a Ray Oldenburg volume here:

Balkin, S. and B. Mier (2001). Maxwell Street, Chicago, Illinois. In: Celebrating the third place: inspiring stories about the great good places at the heart of our communities. New York, Marlowe: 193-207.