Neighbourhoods

Busyness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invisible mutual support at the margins

Last night I was talking to a group of eight Somali men and one woman who are active in supporting members of their faith/ethnic-origin group locally. We started by talking about the range of more formal participative roles they play, and in the circumstances it's fair to say I was genuinely surprised - running youth activities, English classes, formal interpreting roles, organised volunteering with people with special needs, school governing roles, community centre committee, fire service volunteering and so on. And in much of this an integrating role was being played, working with other identifiable social groups.

If I hadn't been expecting quite so much at the formal end of the spectrum, in a seriously disadvantaged group in a meanly marginalised locality, I was more fascinated when we got on to informal support.

One man spoke about the number of calls and visits or encounters that he fields from other Somalis around. Broadly, these are requests for support, from people who are accustomed to an oral culture and a very different language, in the face of bureaucratic requirements - to do with school conditions, housing needs, what is this form about? why do I have to show my passport at the doctor's surgery? - that sort of thing.

Often these calls lead to the activist having to accompany the individual on a visit to an office and interpret, and can be very time-consuming. This voluntary role is compensating heavily for the inadequacy of the bureaucracies, for the shortfall in formal social provision. Nothing new there, this is a classic example of invisible mutual support, and to some extent of course it's healthy for social networks to be stimulated at the interface with services.

So I asked for a considered assessment of the number of such calls and visits in a typical day. We spent some time discussing it because I really wanted the figures to reflect reality and not be exaggerated for my benefit. Two people said about ten (often rising to fourteen or higher), one said about eight, others less. The total among these nine people (one of them a recent arrival to this country so less involved) was 39, and this was not of course a fully representative group.

When we've extrapolated from such figures to weekly, monthly, or annual estimates of internal community support in the struggle against poverty and marginalisation, there are old questions we need to be asking afresh.

Like, how much more do we expect people to do on their own behalf? What would it take for the state to remove the risk of this system collapsing from exhaustion, and to reduce the burden? Where precisely should that resource be invested? And how come all this effort seems not to make any difference over time?

Development dilemma

Should living standards be compromised in the face of urgent need to provide accommodation for homeless people?

An inspector has upheld an enforcement notice aimed at blocking the conversion of two houses in Leeds into six flats, finding that noise and disturbance for neighbours and poor living conditions are not justified by the need to find temporary accommodation for homeless people.

From Planning daily.

'What you already know about financial stuff'

Today was budget day in the UK, and a historic one.

I was in a community centre running a workshop with some young mums, and as so often, I found there was someone else's recent work left on the flipchart from a previous session.

Consensus, community, and cultural capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Lifetime neighbourhoods in recession: what about people?

A couple weeks ago I was at a debate organised by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) on the lifetime neighbourhoods agenda in the current economic climate. ILC have published a collection of essays to reassert the importance of this agenda, which is based on what in my view was one of the best government policy papers of recent years, written by Ed Harding.

The debate covered all the hardware stuff thoroughly - all the issues around building, planning, mixed use, transport connections and so on. Discussants understandably put a lot of effort into emphasising the need to keep a focus on quality environments. The mantra of 'the flight to quality' was served up for the converted to repeat, to strengthen our determination not to let present underfunding give rise to shoddy construction and uninhabitable townscapes in the future. Quite right too.

But we badly needed a perspective on local social relations to make these prospects of lifetime neighbourhoods seem worth realising. Understanding how to make mixed use neighbourhoods function in an ageing and diversifying society is already challenging us desperately. We don't invest properly in intergenerational work or community development, while continuing to plan new settlements apparently without thought for local amenities Will lifetime neighbourhoods be another agenda which gets stripped down simply to those things the accountants know how to measure? - bricks, heating, journeys...?

Well, maybe not. Absent on the day but present in the published volume, up pops JRF's John Low with a solid essay which I strongly recommend. He reminds us that there are good reasons to expect that deprived neighbourhoods will decline faster than more affluent ones and that 'housing solutions alone will not solve the multiple problems that beset our worst neighbourhoods'.

Of course financial cuts are threatened all over the public, voluntary and community sectors. But here, with my emphasis added, are three 'rays of hope' offered by John Low:

• Community empowerment has risen steadily up the agenda of all political parties, including a plethora of initiatives from the current administration in England. Especially in local authorities that have taken this seriously, good practice is reasonably well embedded and may prove harder to cut. Also, as suggested above, localised and affordable neighbourhood management approaches seem very much the best bet for ‘recession proofing’ deprived areas; and such initiatives need underpinning with good community work.

• Over the last 10-15 years independent voluntary and community sector bodies have increased their national profile and collective voice. This too may help to act as a brake on cuts. We should also not forget that many development trusts, churches, other faith groups, councils for voluntary service and schools are playing key roles in supporting neighbourhoods. Everything possible should be done in the present climate to sustain their work.

• Finally, although institutions are often criticised as having poor memories, the serious social disorders that broke out in the 80’s and 90’s in a number of very deprived areas will not have been forgotten. Nobody will want a repeat of these, and his fear could act as a strong disincentive to paring down services and funds, in such neighbourhoods, to the very bone: and as an encouragement, on the contrary, to retaining a range of low level but effective services in these areas.

Perceptions

Here's Junior, who told me about braille nail painting and sign language on T-shirts.

Junior grew up in a violent home and was going nowhere, which in his case meant 26 years in and out of prison. He's passionate about finding practical ways of integrating able-bodied and disabled perspectives, which is how he got into sign-painting, T-shirt design and nail painting with a focus on different languages, alphabets and fonts (including Moon). He showed me some of his designs, including a T-shirt for Deaf Rave.

I've never met such a passionate educationalist outside the education system (however broadly defined). Talking about the various phases of his life (but not his own disability) -

"All of it is education," he said. "You jump from one education to the next."

And later -

"Homelessness has been such an education for me. It's the people that you meet."

And on managing a football team of people with various disabilities:

"Every aspect of it was educational."

We talked at length about the importance of identifying patterns in our surroundings and in behaviours, and then knowing how to deal with what we learn. Junior is finding ways of using clothing and fashion to help young people understand the impact of their behaviour and to explore issues of exclusion. Braille nail painting is just one small, curious component in his thinking about how we can present conversation pieces to each other, and start learning.

When Junior gets a website organised, I'll post about it here.

Coming round

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new class equality duty?

According to Regen.net, 10 Downing Street is considering a duty on public bodies to address inequalities created by class divides. The suggestion was put forward today by Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Obviously there will be raging debates in arriving at definitions and distinctions, but this could be radical policy-making in action. Class-related issues like parental occupation and postcode are stronger predictors of life chances than race and gender.

Against the digital divide industry: of champions and charters

Yesterday I found meself in the second half of a consultation meeting in Birmingham about the government's 'digital inclusion plan.'

I tiptoed into a breakout session that felt painfully like going back ten years in time. People with jobs and desks, some in suits and ties, were talking about social exclusion as if it was a broken-down truck that needed shifting out of the way.

I was hearing suggestions that had been dealt with in so many exercises from the mid-nineties on, many of which I took part in, offering lessons that policy-makers persistently overlook even though they funded them. I touched gently on some of those issues recently.

The first Blair government was to be applauded for the directness with which knotty issues of social exclusion were confronted, and by 2002 I thought there was clarity of understanding of the complexities of exclusion, especially around network poverty and low cultural capital.

But by 2004 it became clear that a digital divide industry had become firmly established, stimulated to some degree by a few well-intentioned consultants, but most vigorously by those who had an interest in expanding their market by ensuring that the focus remained on the technology, not on exclusion. It's difficult to know how much damage those people have done, but it's not trivial.

This morally and intellectually suspect appetite was misguidedly fed by government under various headings containing the word 'digital,' and long before I moved on from Citizens Online earlier this year I had been asking (much to the irritation of my fellow trustees I fear) why we had not made much impact on exclusion in spite of all the dosh sloshing around.

So there I sat yesterday with the answer to that question very apparent. People talked about a 'digital inclusion charter' and the role of a 'high profile digital inclusion champion', flagged up in my view utterly pointlessly for this Government of Celebritisation by the minister for same. (Apparently in all seriousness, people were suggesting what are known as 'television personalities' for the role).

Here's my view, FWIW. If there is to be a 'digital inclusion champion' it should be someone who experiences exclusion. The role should not be about 'digital': it's a social agenda (how obvious is that, how basic do we have to make these points?)

Before there is such a thing as a charter, a diverse group of people who experience exclusion needs to be brought together, empowered, supported and skilled as necessary, but not prescribed. And perhaps one of the first things they might consider is whether or not a charter is an appropriate use of time and energy. Celebritising the exercise is only worthy of contempt.

There's going to be a lot more poverty around in the next ten years and it's profoundly depressing to think that the government has just got as far as talking about an Action Plan and a Charter for Digital Inclusion. The previous generation got further, guys.

What would a digitally inclusive society look like? We won't get near answering that until we look up from the debates about fibre and twitter and champions, and engage in a mature and meaningful way with people who experience exclusion.

Social inclusion and digital inclusion through community centres

I came up with this model of social inclusion through community centres while I was doing some work on social impact for UK Online last year.

It's based on the experience of workers using ICT and other resources to support residents in Shipley, West Yorkshire, and on interviews with residents themselves. The main point that it leads on to is that the ICT can fit more or less anywhere in the process, as a very significant accelerator; but it is not the fundamental requirement nor the main focus unless the individual makes it so.

I'm reminded of this by a recent flurry of interest in how to shape provision of ICT in low-income areas.

I first went to Shipley in about 1999, to find out about their pioneering online project which took ISDN connections from Shipley College into community centres to support basic skills courses. It was, and still is, high quality community-based learning, with sensitive support provided by committed and highly experienced community workers.

Around that time I was on one of the government's 'Policy Action Teams' ('PAT15' on 'access to IT') and the Shipley project was among a chosen few round the country which helped us understand the role of the technologies in the quality of life of people who experience exclusion. What they offered gave texture because we engaged local people to talk to us about it at their pace and in their terms.

Now the government has released several reports about 'digital inclusion' and the social impact of their strategic promotion of the technologies, and it makes a curious impression. The two I've looked at have clearly been expensive exercises, and together they provide an important new impetus to the agenda, acknowledging that the relation between social exclusion and digital exclusion is subtle and complex. But neither report seems to add much to what was known six or seven years ago.

For example, Ipsos MORI were commissioned for a research study on digital inclusion and social impact, and their report notes among the conclusions:

• Partnerships with local community groups and organisations were key in reaching the target audiences and delivering holistic provision addressing multiple issues

• Working with hard to reach audiences involves long-term relationships with partners and individuals

• Taking technology out to local, familiar and safe environments was essential to reach new audiences

• The flexibility to adapt the curriculum to participants' needs and interests was vital in engaging and holding their interest

• Informal peer to peer learning and formal volunteering were key to the sustainability of the projects, and to the progression and self-esteem of participants.

All very valuable points. All put across clearly in the early work carried out under the aegis of PAT 15, before 2002. In those days we didn't have the budget for large-scale systematic studies (I think the first report was done for £2,500) but we compensated by sounding-out our findings across the community sector.

And while the MORI report includes much-needed quantitative material, some of it is crying out for clarification. For example, Figure 12 ('Social interaction') includes responses to this question:

Which of these do you do ‘often’?
'Meet up with new friends' (38%)

There's no explanation of what is meant by meeting up with new friends. Call me old-fashoined, but surely you can't do that very often, because after a while they won't be 'new' friends anymore. But hey, I'm not an expensive consultancy company offering survey analysis, so what would I know (apart from the probability that MORI are not going to be proud of this hurried-looking document).

The second report, Community perspectives on digital inclusion, is wholly qualitative. It summarises 'insights and experiences from community and third sector organisations involved in initiatives aimed at opening up digital technologies to excluded communities.'

The categorisation of 'excluded communities' (not just the language) feels clumsy and insensitive. The framework is clear here though and the scope more ambitious. But again the refusal to build on what was known in the past is apparent. Take for example this recommendation for working with low-income households:

'fuse IT training with literacy classes and have skilled teachers who can teach both.'

In Shipley, they've been doing that for more or less ten years, word should have spread by now. 

Does this matter? Well, ask yourself what it's like if you lived somewhere like that. Researchers came in several years ago using public money, talked to you at length, went away, wrote a report to government, and nothing happened. I and others worked hard to get the findings onto the desks of officials and into policy. The college staff and community workers carried on slogging away doing outrageous hours trying to help people get connected and learn stuff and sort out their lives. They were often successful, but successes were followed by another cohort of tangled identities mingling-in. (And, going back to the graphic at the top of this post, the hardest thing was getting them through the door - many never made it).

Then another bunch of researchers start asking things - this time with more clout but less understanding of what are the personal and social forces that bring you to this community centre in this locality at this time. How much faith would you put in the general process of public policy and the specific intentions of the 'Digital Inclusion Strategy'?

Previously: Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

Nanny's job

For an uneducated practitioner I read a lot of academic stuff, and for a while now I've been brewing some thoughts about academic commentary on various knotty social policy themes.

I can think of one or two papers on anti-social behaviour policies for instance which come across as ethically high-minded, without recognising the sheer bloody awkwardness of life on difficult estates and the need for some kind of policy framework to give people a chance of a decent life. Scholarly objectivity implies detachment, but sometimes at the cost of insight and pertinence.

Those thoughts may yet emerge elsewhere, but meanwhile I'm very glad I didn't miss this... In this week's Society Guardian, the ever-reliable Stewart Dakers offers a poised reflection on the relation between the protecting state and the status quo, 'which has historically exempted the strong from any but voluntary changes to their behaviour on behalf of the weak'.

'Nanny does make a difference, and it is on the mean streets of the real estate that you can see it happening. This is where humane civilisation is truly evolving, where the realities of cultural diversity, of social cohesion, of human tolerance are lived out. This is where the excluded get in, where immigrants find shelter, strangers establish themselves, the socially incompetent look for sanctuary, the economically disabled begin recovery, the cognitively and psychologically challenged get their breath back. But it would not happen without nanny.'

'Nanny's job is to ensure that the different are accommodated, the vulnerable protected, the incompetent supported... We need nanny and her rules to moderate the appetites of the powerful, to make sure that the front runners do not lose touch with the back markers. It's known as social justice.'

Of youth clubs and ASBOs

Here's Rowenna Davis in today's Guardian -

'For many young people, simply raising their heads in the community is grounds for a thwack. In the last year we have seen a wave of policies penalising young people before they've committed an offence. Mosquitoes [sound-emitting surveillance devices] are punishing young people simply for "hanging around" public spaces. Blanket curfews are being imposed for youths on estates in Cornwall. Stop and search policies are on the increase, and they've even started in schools.'

I link back to last week's 'news' that there are more ASBOs issued in places where fewer youth clubs exist, covered here by the Guardian.

(I have to break off to make the point that if you ever want to know how the internet will come to a halt, this will be a good example: the research on which this news was based is variously described as being the joint responsibility of Clubs for Young People, UK Youth, and the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group at Sheffield University. Not one of these agencies appears to refer to the research on their sites. No press release could I find this evening, one week on, nothing. The SASI site is frankly an embarassment, look away now, please, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have given you the link. But hey, what's a little national publicity for your organisation these days, just cos people might want to know more?)

The research is welcome and we need to be able to point to it. But I ask meself why it still requires the efforts of these three agencies (if there's truth in the rumour of their involvement) to make this feebly obvious point about provision for young people? Simon Antrobus, into whose blog I occasionally dip, and I hope it resumes soon, says here that

'it's important that we lead a discussion on what turns a community facility into a world class provision where young people can have fun, learn and grow as individuals.'

Discussion, good. Provision, even better. I'm not too bothered about 'world class provision', that's just Blair-talk.

But where in all this is our esteemed government, whose minister spoke thirteen months ago about 'plans for a good youth centre in every neighbourhood'? Leading the applause and chipping in with some funding? Well, according to Children and young people now, the project for youth centres is being championed by someone called David Blunkett MP. The name has a familiar ring. Could that possibly be the same David Blunkett who was the godfather of the ASBO? Prime the mosquitos.

Previously: Youth centres: are we allowed to ask questions?

Rural social justice

According to a forthcoming State of the Countryside report, in rural areas, the ratio between the lowest 25 per cent of annual incomes and equivalent house prices is almost one to ten.

Welcome, the Rural Social Justice Coalition, to help do something about it.

'Hard to reach'?

Increasingly I seem to be hearing people blurting righteous objection to the phrase 'hard to reach.' Perhaps it's time to look at this a little more closely.

The misuse of the term seems likely to give offense, but why exactly? Harriet Baldwin from English Partnerships, commenting at a BURA seminar the other day, got her audience smiling by describing how residents in a neighbourhood where she happened to be working told her it was she, not they, who was hard to reach - you have a secretary, you have an answer-phone, you have voicemail, you have email, but we can't speak to you. You're hard to reach. We're not. We live here, this is where you'll find us.

Indeed. But this does not mean that there are not people who are hard to reach. It means that it is a mistake to refer to certain residents - most residents, especially those who are community activists - by that term. And it doesn't help to misuse the term to refer to people just because it requires a bit of an effort to make contact.

I think there are people who are 'hard to reach' and who can be described as such. There are people who are isolated, not known even to their neighbours or to agencies, often suffering from illness or problems with their mental health, perhaps moving accommodation frequently or occasionally living homeless. There are people who live secretly in conditions of brutal oppression and violence. How easy to reach were the offspring of Josef Fritzl?

If we deny that some people are hard to reach, are we not calling into question the rationale for the services designed to help them? If it is argued that the term is patronising, where does that leave you if you have to design and deliver services for people in great need, irrespective of their receptivity to that service?

It matters to me that the society I live in can be compassionate towards people in need, and will make collective effort to extend resources to them so that their quality of life might be improved on their terms. I'm not sure that it helps to deny that there can be relative difficulties in getting those services to them. Maybe we need to be a little more scrupulous in our use of language.

What Robin Hood did for the poor

There's a short BBC news piece by David Sillito about growing disagreements over the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in east London - yer classic slab estate, or a masterpiece of twentieth century design? As David says:

It's a familiar process, blowing up the sixties' and seventies' mistakes.

Cut to Lord Rogers taking the chance to tell us how marvellous the architecture is. More here on the campaign to get it listed. Hang on, what's it like to live there? According to Sillito 80% of the residents don't think it should be saved.

Here's an alternative take on the architects in question, the Smithsons:

Robin Hood Gardens, a 213-home council housing complex in East London, gave them the chance to practise what they preached on a grand scale. It was disastrous. The brutalist concrete structure turned out to be defective, but the social aspects were worse: Robin Hood Gardens became a hotbed of crime. The Smithsons were exposed as both arrogant and fallible.

I'm not qualified to conclude what would be best here, but I want to just note the way in which the architects' arguments tend not to give primacy to the question of what it's like to live there. There seems to have been thirty-five years of accumulated misery for a lot of people, but that's not necessarily part of the equation. The terms of the debate about Robin Hood Gardens, for the professionals, risk putting housing as artwork (or perhaps prescribed lifestyle as artwork) right in your face, non-negotiable. Which is interesting because the lifestyle prescription was problematic precisely because so little of it was negotiable.

Here's a flavour of the recognition for the building (from):

As a crucial part of the very small built oeuvre of Alison and Peter Smithson, it is hardly impossible (sic) to overestimate its value, esp. with regard to the international debate on modern architecture in those years.

We're invited to help save this building because of its iconic aesthetic status, according to standards largely independent of the quality of everyday low-income life. Maybe there could be an argument for such detachment, but it gets clouded by the economics of social policy. I guess the folk at CABE work all the time where these tensions are crackling.

And the trouble is that as soon as you see Peter Smithson mouthing about it as 'an exemplar of a new mode of urban organisation' (in a spooky clip reminiscent of Peter Cook) you know you're up against that fundamentally stupid human habit of telling other people how they should live and using some system to try it out on them. (Stupid in the sense of repeating an approach that has failed in the past). Modern architecture was fatally corroded by insistent rhetoric (still echoing) about brutalism, which sought to deny variety.

One of my lasting early memories was of going round some east end estates with my dad, delivering christmas parcels for Stepney Old People's Welfare Trust: I didn't know it at the time but I glimpsed a moment in the exhaustion of working class culture. The ghostly poverty that brushed against me was very modern in its disconnectedness, which I suppose is why we were there, being hesitantly philanthropic. At a relatively tender age I knew about not imposing, about what I now call 'allowing people', but I didn't realise the architecture was the supreme imposition, the supreme way of not allowing. What I think I did understand vaguely was to do with people's right to be different within their commonality. And the way we built in those days was unmistakably trying to deny that right.

Platform 2: VSO meets community action

I think this looks like a really good scheme. It's partly about community cohesion, partly social inclusion, partly good old-fashioned volunteering:

A new Government-backed global volunteering scheme is being launched for 18 to 25 year-olds. 'Platform2' will offer young adults from less advantaged backgrounds the opportunity to live, work and learn about life in poorer countries while making a real difference to peoples lives.

Volunteers will spend 10 weeks overseas. On return to UK they will go on weekends away to prepare personal activity plans of how they want to raise awareness in the UK.

This scheme aims to give young British adults who wouldn't normally have an opportunity the chance to make a valuable contribution to the lives of people overseas who are blighted by poverty.

By living and working with people from very different backgrounds, facing very different challenges, they will learn new skills and help unlock the potential within them to become better global citizens. And on return they'll be applying what they've learned to activities in their own local communities.

BBC coverage.

DFID news page.

What makes a good childhood?

The Children's Society has set up an inquiry into what makes a good childhood and is collecting 'cherished early memories' in order to build a picture of what a good childhood should look like.

We are gathering hundreds and thousands of childhood memories... This will help us understand how to make childhood better today.

The memories exercise is likely to capture lots of mini narratives of decline, but perhaps there'll be a useful research resource, and some interesting questions of how the material gets analysed.

The inquiry seems like a useful idea, and it will do us good to examine what we mean by 'good' and 'better' and so on. If childhood was somehow 'better' in the recalled past, the value of the inquiry will be in the way it distils the truths and examines them in the wholly different social, economic and technological context. This is certainly the sense in which I think it's valuable to consider older people's descriptions of neighbourliness in their childhoods - not in terms of the accuracy of the reminiscence but in terms of the values (in this case collective values) described.

And maybe we should have an equivalent exercise for old age, based on Age Concern's 'ageing well' campaign - instead of 'cherished early memories,' how about 'cherished late anticipations'? Or should there be a site where the recently bereaved put forward views on whether their older relative or friend had a 'good' old age, and what was good about it?

Previously:

Children's contentedness as a social indicator.

Disrespecting childhoods.

Rule of thumb about word of mouth

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

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

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

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

Families in cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Update: it's here.

Consulting older people

On the question of consultation with older people, to paraphrase Gandhi, I think it would be a good idea. I've just found out about some interesting work that Urban Buzz funded in the London Borough of Lewisham as part of the Thames gateway development, which resulted in the publication of a toolkit and guidelines for consultation with older people, prepared by The Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths.

It's a thorough and welcome document and appears to try and cover everything about the process they went through, which included field trips and mental maps of the neighbourhoods. It's important because the sense that many older people remain inexcusably excluded from consultative processes is widespread. But some of the tone leaves me a wee bit bothered. Like this:

'It is important that you present your project in a way that makes it relevant to them.'

Radical stuff eh? There's more.

'Incorporate older people’s knowledge in the planning process, by consulting them if an area is going to be changed. Make use of their old photos, listen to them talk about the history about the spaces.'

'Free lunches and refreshments should be provided to offer something for their time and effort.'

So long as the points get made, what am I bothered about? Well, I'm uncomfortable thinking that I live in a society where it's really necessary to make such points. It implies that there are people charged with 'consultation' for whom such things are not fundamentally obvious. But maybe the authors are right, maybe it does have to be pointed out. Many people are emerging from an embedded non-consultative authoritative culture and this is strange stuff for them. <Shudder>

If I were being picky, and it's not unheard-of, I'd have added a section suggesting that people doing consultation didn't feel the need constantly to refer to one another as Dr, Professor, 'professional' or 'expert.' The entire document is suffused with a sense of the implied superior status of such people, and of councillors, over older residents. It reinforces my desire to keep pushing for a neighbourhood-mapping process designed by older people themselves.

Online game about being a refugee

UNHCR has just launched the English language version of an online game created to increase students' awareness and knowledge about refugee situations, by putting them in the position of a refugee.

In Against all odds, the player is interrogated, hears the sound of guards' footsteps approaching, and senses the urgency in finding safety while racing against the clock.

Press release. Via Welcome to Your Library digest.

Out in the open

Many neighbourhoods in England experience occasional or persistent tensions due to the lack of adequate and appropriate sites for Romany gypsies and Irish travellers.

This year's Building and Social Housing Foundation consultation report is on the theme of providing accommodation, promoting understanding and recognising the rights of gypsies and travellers. In 2006, it says here, 21 per cent of gypsies and travellers had no legal place to park their caravan. (Although we're also told that estimates of the numbers of gypsies and travellers in Britain vary widely, with nothing like a definitive answer; so take that as 21% of roughly 100%).

Out in the open - full text download and summary available .

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 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.

'Wrong turning, dead end'

I see the Howard League has published a work by a police officer which is critical of ASBOs. The book, by Chief Superintendent Neil Wain, argues that:

• ASBOs fail to prevent further crime and anti-social behaviour among offenders
• Leaflets naming and shaming those who receive ASBOs could endanger vulnerable children by publishing their contact details, while also risking vigilante attacks, cases of mistaken identity and turning offenders into the resident scapegoat
• Many ASBO conditions actually encourage crime by preventing offenders from getting help from their families or going to work in a normal day job
• Offenders receiving ASBOs are given little or no support to get back on the straight and narrow.

As I wrote about a year ago, it's very questionable whether the government's anti-social behaviour policy, central to the Respect Agenda, is contributing to the promotion of respect.

It's interesting that the author works under the aegis of Greater Manchester Police Force, famous for its ASBO appetite. A year or two ago I heard a presentation about 'respect' from a representative of that city's coordinated response to anti-social behaviour and it gave me the creeps.

The washing of hair

Here's something told me by a community worker recently. She went with some local women from a low-income neighbourhood on a residential trip, where some of them encountered shampoo for the first time and didn't know what it was, or what to do with it. They always use washing-up liquid.

I've never before considered shampoo in terms of cultural capital, although I've reflected often enough on the role of hairdressers in social capital. It did strike me that there may be many 'heavy-users' of shampoo who don't know what washing up liquid is.

Defiance

I was being shown round a struggling estate in the midlands recently, with depressing amounts of the housing boarded-up, and came across these two examples of defiance.

In a bungalow designed for older people, someone struggles to keep up standards, with net curtains and a plant-pot outside. How does it feel to have heavy steel shutters right next door and a sign saying 'Danger - Live wires'?

Here's another, perhaps more masculine, approach: the fence, the gate (even the postman is excluded), the surveillance camera, the alarm system. Next door is boarded-up. There's a hanging basket but it seems to be empty. It all says, I live here and you're not gonna drag me down with you.

A youth centre in every neighbourhood?

If like me you found the Respect agenda and its media coverage uncomfortably closely associated with young people, it's time for a rethink. That agenda is now being subsumed under the responsibilities of the Department for children, schools and families, the 'children's ministry'.

But Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian urges us not to be sceptical, regarding this as 'one of the best changes' in the brief for Ed Balls, the minister in question.

As the emphasis shifts from punishment to prevention, expect a breath of fresh air. Balls says: "Respect goes both ways - respect by young people for others goes together with respect for them by the wider community." He talks enthusiastically about plans for a good youth centre in every neighbourhood, started up with £150m taken from defunct bank accounts.

I don't know anything about these defunct bank accounts, although I can think of another budget, a small matter of £20bn, from which a fraction might have been handy.

But I do think that a youth facility in every neighbourhood - and a 'good' one at that - is far closer to common sense than a single nuclear submarine farting around somewhere in the ocean.

Curiously enough, I was in a workshop about neighbourhood care for older people the other day, where there was discussion about funding for quality neighbourhood schemes like the one in Brighton and Hove. Asked why there seemed to be no government funding, one of the members of the scheme said with quiet irony, 'I think it's all gone to Trident.'

And if I'm sceptical about anything at the moment, it's the government's ability to include older people in its agenda. In the meantime, with regard to the future of the Respect agenda and policy for young people, I'll trust Polly's optimism.

Home improvement: women on housing estates

Yesterday I was at a really cracking event organised by the London Women and Planning Forum, on 'Home improvement: women on housing estates.' There were presentations by Lynsey Hanley, Rebecca Tunstall and Jess Steele - which frankly ought to have been a good enough line-up to attract many more than the 30 or so of us who took part in an informative and absorbing discussion. (Where was everyone?)

Lynsey Hanley offered a presentation on 'estates and women's mental health' based on her book, Estates. She talked in passing about 'the wall in the head' - the idea that once you're there, on an estate such as that where she grew up, you’re not expected to leave. With sensitive reference to family and social history she talked about how, after the war, the class system was reinforced through housing policy.

Lynsey also spoke about how the estate on the edge of Birmingham had no clear identity. It wasn't a town, it was described by planners as a township, but people who live there describe it as an ‘estate', a term which has a lot of negative connotations. She talked about the 'siege mentality,' the negative sense of community, and the lack of available 'talking therapies' for women, describing their experience with the sense of being cast away and cut off.

Becky Tunstall reported on her research into 25 years on twenty estates (which I also covered previously). There's a huge amount of detail in the research to which I can't do justice, but her conclusions seemed to be that improvements in the conditions of our least popular estates were more down to basic housing (allocations) policy than to regeneration policy, and to the national context of an upbeat economy, rather than to estate-based factors.

I was struck by Becky's identification of a 'dilution of decentralisation' on these estates, from estate offices to area offices - ie previously there was a move to provide highly localised services in a selection of estates, whereas now the trend is to provide such services area-wide but more comprehensively.

Jess Steele, now Head of Consultancy at the Development Trusts Association, made some big points about community action and community development on housing estates, stressing how the relationship of poor women with the state is particular, very intense and often fraught.

Her main point was about the need to recognise that estates house concentrations of claimaints, and she called for their needs to be linked to the creation of work in the 'phantom economy' of everyday local tasks ('mini-jobs' like low-level care and support, shopping, cleaning, school crossings, basic warden roles and so on) which are not part of the standard labour market. (Some of this of course is estate management with added social care, as practised very succesfully for example at Pembroke Street in Devonport). Jess wants a system of ‘community allowance’ which would allow people to do these jobs under contract to community organisations without losing their benefit entitlement.

Each of the speakers referred to the importance of community action on estates and women’s dominant role in that. Becky for instance, reviewing the twenty estates covered in her research with Alice Coulter, said that ‘community activity has been extremely important in the way these estates have developed’. While we touched on the question of whether or not practitioners have learned from the mistakes of the past, it was striking that there is a huge gap between the significance of community action and its influence on policy. Will that really change, in our looming age of localism?

Another major theme to emerge was a widely-shared scepticism about planned mixed tenure as a policy. Becky Tunstall, who is currently researching this theme, confirmed that there is no evidence to suggest that it ‘works’. (Hopefully, her research will clarify what we mean when we say it works or doesn’t). (LSE have a lunchtime seminar on this theme coming up, London 6 July 2007, with Susan Popkin from the Urban Institute, Washington DC: for details 020 7955 6562, a.tamas(at)lse.ac.uk).

This is essentially about living with difference, and I note that the theme is touched on, without a great sense of authority, in the recent report of the Integration and Cohesion Commission:

Cohesive and integrated communities are more easily achieved where there is a mix of housing types and tenures, and where people are able to move between tenure types and between sizes of home as they move through life and face different personal demands. (para 8.30)

I keep returning to this question of living with difference because it feels like an iceberg social problem and we’re on a collision course. That doesn't mean I'm into rearranging deckchairs when I say I look forward to future events organised by the forum: I'm told current plans include seminars on art in public places; and gardens.

Demographic mix matters more than income or tenure mix

Recent research on population change at neighbourhood level suggests that the most important factor driving turnover is the demographic mix of an area, particularly the proportion of the population who are young adults or very young children.

Using neighbourhood level data covering England and Scotland from the 2001 census, the researchers show a tendency for young adults (aged 19-29) to move into deprived areas on balance and for other age groups to move away, especially households containing 30- to 44-year-olds and those under the age of 18.

Among other things, this suggests that deprived areas are home to more than their share of people making the transition from living with parents to living on their own.

They suggest that policies designed to achieve stable or ‘sustainable’ communities may need to pay greater attention to promoting demographic mix as much as income or tenure mix.

Indeed, policies to promote income or tenure mix could potentially undermine stability if they target single people and couples, perhaps through the development of starter homes.

The analysis also shows that:

• deprived areas do not have a general problem of instability; turnover levels are only slightly above average
• deprived areas do not generally see significant net out-migration of less deprived individuals; there are flows in both directions and these are nearly in balance
• an average of around 50% of migrants move to/from non-deprived areas each year.

The report, Population turnover and area deprivation by Nick Bailey and Mark Livingston, was published last month JRF and Policy Press.

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.

"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.

Make Space youth review

I missed this, and can't tell by how much, but the interim report of the Make Space Youth Review has been published.

They get nul points for issuing a press release with no date and a report in an unmanipulable pdf format. I would have liked to quote some of it here. In particular, a well-made point about how young people feel isolated and alienated in their own neighbourhoods, with little say over what goes on. The consistent sense of lack of belonging of young people to their own neighbourhood, reported in this review, is deeply worrying.

The review also passes on criticism of 'an overwhelming orientation towards adults - from use of public space and buildings to leisure and recreational services.' Nine key features are proposed for a new government commitment and vision for young people.

The pic is of a made-over Tony Blair.

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.

Kids these days

Last night, not late, in a restaurant I observed a boy of about three or four sat at a dinner table with his parents. The moment the child was sat down, a laptop was placed in front of him with some animated feature for instant distraction. Next time I looked round, the scene that I had anticipated was being enacted: dad was on the mobile phone, a call that lasted at least ten minutes, the toddler had a dummy stuck in his mouth, just in case he was so rash as to want to try and communicate, and mum studied the wallpaper.

Oh look, here's Libby Brooks in today's Guardian:

New Labour has pandered to popular prejudice with its antisocial behaviour agenda, as well as legitimising adult avoidance of collective involvement in the socialisation of children. Additionally, over recent decades this country has become infected with a culture of individualism and materialism that has proved disastrous for children and parents. The values of parenting are in direct opposition to those that currently dominate society - the modern absolutes of autonomy, freedom and selfhood. [Emphasis added]

This is à propos of that Unicef report - which apparently demonstrates how cruddy British people are at relating to and looking after their children.

What strikes me is that, while we've had commentators who have challenged the report's methodology and currency of  data, there are few voices if any to deny the overall message for the UK, which seems to be this: the way we regard, refer to, treat and support children in this country is a disgrace and has been for a long time.

I too might find minor fault with the report (indeed the authors make various caveats as they go along). I'm not sure for instance about the way the index for children's relationships has been constructed to include such a strong emphasis on percentage of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies. But the study uses children’s own answers to survey questions and the findings on 11, 13 and 15 year-olds who report finding their peers ‘kind and helpful’ are, in the case of the UK (less than 45%), devastating.

This is not to say that there are not many super young people growing up who are a pleasure to meet and talk to, with strong supportive networks and a confident outlook: they're the fortunate ones who've escaped the relentless, systematised dumbing and drubbing and confidence erosion, through policy, media, education system and culture.

This is an issue of exclusion. Too many young people in this country are excluded from any kind of sustained supportive context - which is not just the responsibility of parents (the key target of the JKG, the Jerked Knee of Government) but of what I call the 'four sources' of support: family, friends, neighbours, and formal services. For any individual in our society of whatever age, where one of those four sources is insufficient, it ought to be relatively easy for the vacuum to be filled by one of the others: but what happens too often now I suspect, with young people and older people especially, is that there are serious shortfalls in the first three sources, and formal services are over-stretched (and not always appropriate anyway).

So, to return to my vignette and to suggest that it is not entirely an isolated instance - what contribution can social policy really make here? The way parents behave towards their children is largely out of the direct reach of government, but not at all out of the reach of its influence. Government can and should contribute to the shaping of the culture of everyday life. I think respect for others (obviously including children, it shouldn't be necessary to say that) is a fundamental issue, and it's ironic that the government has identified it as such, but gone about addressing it in such a perverse way. After their initial flapping away of this report as methodologically flawed, it will be interesting to see what kind of sincere governmental response, after ten years in power, is forthcoming.

Refugee inclusion

The Welsh Assembly Government has published a Refugee Inclusion Strategy, for which the consultation ends 3 February 2007. There is also a literature review.

(Via John Vincent's invaluable Welcome to Your Library newsletter).

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.

'Soft renewal' and transformative change

A few days ago I was muttering about the way that policy attention has begun to shift focus from physical regeneration to behaviour and relationships. Now here's a new JRF report, Respect and renewal, on the Partnership Initiative for Communities (PICs) programme written by David Page which says it upfront:

Professionals underestimated the importance of social issues and were more focused on physical regeneration. Residents perceived social factors – crime and fear of crime, poor life chances for their children, and the consequences of poverty – as the main ones affecting their quality of life, not physical degeneration.

The Findings summary doesn't mention community development, but it's clear from a scan of the report that CD along with various other professional interventions such as youth work (if you're lucky) and neighbourhood wardens can together make a significant difference when it comes to 'soft renewal techniques'.

Much of the rationale behind the renewal work studied here relates to the work of William Julius Wilson and to broken windows theory. The report doesn't really deal with the notion of respect, but it does relate the findings to the government's theme of that name. And it accords success to some initiatives such as neighbourhood wardens, reassurance policing, neighbourhood management and minor architectural adjustments.

Page argues that the projects demonstrated that all of the issues affecting residents on the estates could be tackled.

'The challenge lies in tackling them all at the same time, and in sustaining that effort for long enough to make a real difference to the life chances of residents and their children.'

So are we taking the wrong approach to transformation? Are our expectations based on the wrong model of 'fixing problems'?

Upgrading of the physical environment only needs to be done once in a while: once the roofs, or windows, are ‘fixed’ they stay fixed for a good many years. But social regeneration is a different kind of problem. A key concern of current regeneration policy is why, in social terms, some of the same estates and neighbourhoods that were supposed to have been fixed in previous rounds of regeneration projects, turn out to need fixing time and time again.

There is no sign of transformative change yet on any of the PICs estates. The evidence from the PICs research suggests instead that the relationship between effort and achievement is not geometric but linear: that larger changes require bigger inputs, and that estates in which there is a high concentration of workless households and households living on low incomes will need consistent, long lasting attention and higher levels of investment to make a real difference to the quality of life of their residents...

It may be more realistic to think of incremental, rather than transformative, change in our most deprived neighbourhoods, and to expect this to take place over a longer time.

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.

Barriers to social exclusion

In the days when I was scrapping around the fringes of government policy scrummages on social inclusion, I used to get worked up about events which discussed the plight of people who experience exclusion, in their absence. It was always an achievement just to cross the conceptual gain line before being tackled.

Now look at this: an organisation called Westminster Briefing has set up a one-day conference entitled Tackling Social Exclusion Through Partnership: Removing the Barriers. It will explore the government's next steps 'in its drive to tackle the root causes of deep–seated disadvantage.' So naturally one looks to see how much it will cost to be there, and one sees, £295.

I don't think the ref's on our side, never mind a level playing field. 'Delegates will be drawn from all those involved in tackling the social exclusion agenda,' it says. Have they no sense of irony, these people? (Pssst: it's not the agenda that needs tackling, it's widespread practices of exclusion).