Neighbourhoods

The Living School: Expulsion

This looks fascinating:

‘The first session of The Living School, a mobile project on questions of living together, will focus on the theme of The Expelled, and will include presentations by Jane Rendell and Irit Rogoff. They will consider the question of expulsion, eviction and displacement, giving a broader view onto the systematic upheaval of people. In addition, a participatory workshop called 'Gentrifiers Anonymous' will be led by the urban art collective zURBS, which will engage with the local neighbourhood and open up a dialogue between our own positionality and spatial politics.’ 

Unfortunately I only just found out about this and it takes place tomorrow – 12.00 – 18.00 in London, SE15 5DE.

More here about zURBS.

 

Engage with them and they will come

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

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

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

Usual apologies for the wretched quality of my hurried photography.

 

A Place for Everyone? Glasshouse Debate Series 2015-2016

The good folk at the Glasshouse have announced a new series of debates, ‘around the common elements in place that bring us together, the points of tension within them, and the role of the individual and the community.’

‘In partnership with the Open University and the Academy of Urbanism, we want to explore how we design and shape our environment today to create a place for everyone and what that means for concepts like shared assets and common good, alongside individual aspirations, ownership, diversity and, rights and responsibilities.’

Edinburgh / 21 October 2015
Place: designed for sharing?

Manchester / 11 November 2015
Place: the sum of parts?

Nottingham / 3 February 2016
Place: a shared responsibility?

London / 9 March 2016
Place: who belongs here?

 

This is a platform altercation (well almost)

Here’s a wee tale about responses to incivility in public space. I was on a train the other day – corridor carriages, seats facing – and sat almost opposite a young couple who were dozing, the young man rather slumped with his legs sticking out.

Some ticket inspectors came through, and then at the next stop a woman got on and the first I knew was to hear her cursing the young man: “tuck your legs in you silly sod! What am I supposed to do, jump over them!?” Etc. But she sat next to him even though there were other places available.

He apologised quietly and pulled himself up. She was still cursing. I stared at her dark glasses and suggested that if she took her glasses off she might be able to see well enough to notice that there is plenty of room to pass. I said that her remark was unfair. She said “I’ve got arthritis.” The young man kept saying “I’m sorry.”

Then one of the ticket inspectors appeared from beside the doors – I had not realised he was still with us – and suggested to the woman that she apologise. “I thought that was very rude,” he said. And she did.

 

Ephemerality – it’s here to stay

In time of shifting economic fortunes, the flexible use and re-use of space and buildings can play a valuable part in helping local businesses and other agencies to survive and flourish.

It sometimes seems as if ‘temporary use’ is a contemporary phenomenon associated with the 2008 economic recession. This may not be true, but there’s certainly been a significant recent emphasis on how planners can use redundant spaces and assets to help local economies and town centres resist the depression and thrive.

The spin-off benefits – often associated with arts, third sector organisations and community development – are not trivial either, as was illustrated in the Compendium for the Civic Economy for instance.

Now we have some research, recommendations and a charter to show our local planners and regen officials, thanks to the SEEDS project (‘Stimulating Enterprising Environments for Development and Sustainability’), a European Regional Development Fund initiative.

The argument is that temporary use and re-use should not be seen as a short-term sticking plaster solution, but has to be written into town and city planning if local economies are to grow and thrive; and this requires something of a mindset shift among planners and policy-makers. So it’s a bit like the old problem of formalising the informal – make ephemerality a permanent feature of policy and practice.

 

It’s only public space

Here’s an unfortunate article by Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian, describing Preston’s 1960s bus station as ‘majestic’ and deriding a new alternative design. No, it’s not a spoof.

Preston bus station is among the more unpleasant environments I’ve had to spend time in and I know I’m not alone in having had that experience. Through a link to one of Wainwright’s previous articles, I find a picture caption claiming that

‘Preston Bus Station is rightly recognised as one of the country’s most dramatic public buildings of its time.’

‘Rightly recognised’? Well it may be among the most dramatic, given much of the architecture we had to put up with from those years, but it’s not healthy to go on about it.

What we have here, I suspect, is another example of the Robin Hood Gardens phenomenon, where architects tell ordinary people that they have no taste. RHG was manifestly a disaster and a disgrace to civilisation, but architects were telling us to the death that it was some kind of masterpiece. There's a regrettable professional closed-ranks-refusal to accept that brutalism was a mistake. In a postscript on RHG I noted

‘What's most depressing about it though is that the louder the architects clamour, the less faith the rest of us can have that they will in future pay due account to what it's like to live there.’

It’s the old problem of architects seeing their output as objects defined by a mathematical aesthetic and not as occupied space that plays a part - often a huge part - in the everyday lives of people who (guess what?) can't afford penthouses and chauffeurs. People deserve public space that affords a sense of humanity. I don't understand why this is still such a problem.

 

Image from

Do we look out for children in our neighbourhoods?

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

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

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

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

 

Street craft

Here’s a real delight – a new book by Riika Kuittinen on street craft as a global art movement. It covers guerrilla gardening, yarnbombing, light graffiti, street sculpture and so on. Packed with uplifting inventiveness – like this example from the work of Mark Jenkins - it sends a very clear message about creativity in the public realm and the resilience of a democratic approach to art.

‘Street craft is interwoven with the unexpected, offering a prism through which the everyday environment can be perceived differently.’

These artworks are usually un-commissioned, seldom legal, ‘donated’ to the public on the streets, generally removed without trace once they have been documented for display on the world wide web. They are often playful, sometimes challenging, occasionally provocative. They offer what Kuittinen calls an ‘intimacy of experience’ while reflecting the ordinary universal context of the street.

Of course, the book is not riddled with examples of bad street craft, and yet such examples doubtless exist. But the ephemerality is the defense here: if we come across mediocrity on a local pavement, we’re not likely to be stuck with it – unlike so much municipally-funded public art.

So is this is an art movement (Kuittinen describes it as a 'fluid genre') that can resist the assimilators? Needless to say, wealthy people and trendy commercial enterprises want to own some of it (we think of Banksy’s stencils appearing at auction), completely missing the point. Am I being over-optimistic to suppose that street craft at its best will remain just out-of-reach of global capitalism and the high art industry?

 

An image of our times

This man’s pointed finger could be a gesture drawing his companion’s attention to the passing Google vehicle. To me, it looks more like a sharp accusation pointed at Google for the sense of intrusion he feels.

The chevrons, contrasting with the wheelchair by implying freedom of movement in all directions; and the blurred faces – a dull concession to the tatty notion of ‘privacy in public’ that some of us grew up with – emphasise the layers of symbolism in this image.

And there’s another. The location is on a seafront in southern England, where in previous centuries members of ‘society’ would have promenaded at certain times in order to ‘be seen’.

 

 

What is the tone of the neighbourhood?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Sign of the times - commercial pavement chalking

I came across this quick-and-dirty advert outside a high street pub.

In view of previous reports on the criminality of pavement chalking, is this form of communication permissible in commercial terms during recession? I'm sure the current government would approve of the enterprise.

Previously:

• Pavement chalking anarchy again
• Pavement chalking: this time seen in a positive light
• Pavement chalking epidemic?
• Footnote on pavement chalking
• 'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'

 

 

Town centre crier

A quick heads-UP for Julian Dobson's book, out now. How to save our town centres, published by Policy Press,

"delves below the surface of empty buildings and ‘shop local’ campaigns to focus on the real issues: how the relationship between people and places is changing, how business is done and who benefits, and how the use and ownership of land affects us all."

Knowing Julian it will be insightful, original, very well-informed, and well-written.

 

 

How to Save Our Town Centres, published by Policy Press in February 2015, delves below the surface of empty buildings and ‘shop local’ campaigns to focus on the real issues: how the relationship between people and places is changing, how business is done and who benefits, and how the use and ownership of land affects us all. - See more at: http://urbanpollinators.co.uk/?page_id=2266&utm_source=Urban+Pollinators+news&utm_campaign=4bdd58a5ee-Urban_Pollinators_news_February_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d00dd5095c-4bdd58a5ee-231844673#sthash.Ap82JYXI.dpuf

How to Save Our Town Centres, published by Policy Press in February 2015, delves below the surface of empty buildings and ‘shop local’ campaigns to focus on the real issues: how the relationship between people and places is changing, how business is done and who benefits, and how the use and ownership of land affects us all. - See more at: http://urbanpollinators.co.uk/?page_id=2266&utm_source=Urban+Pollinators+news&utm_campaign=4bdd58a5ee-Urban_Pollinators_news_February_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d00dd5095c-4bdd58a5ee-231844673#sthash.Ap82JYXI.dpuf

How to Save Our Town Centres, published by Policy Press in February 2015, delves below the surface of empty buildings and ‘shop local’ campaigns to focus on the real issues: how the relationship between people and places is changing, how business is done and who benefits, and how the use and ownership of land affects us all. - See more at: http://urbanpollinators.co.uk/?page_id=2266&utm_source=Urban+Pollinators+news&utm_campaign=4bdd58a5ee-Urban_Pollinators_news_February_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d00dd5095c-4bdd58a5ee-231844673#sthash.Ap82JYXI.dpuf

Concrete Heart Land

If you happen to be in or around east London on Tuesday, you might find this interesting:

Steven Ball and Laura Oldfield Ford will present their individual responses to the social cleansing of the Heygate Estate through the screening of Steven Ball and Rastko Novaković’s film ‘Concrete Heart Land’, and the presentation of drawings and a live reading of texts produced by Laura Oldfield Ford.

6pm on Tuesday 27 January 2015

Film and Drama Studio

Arts 2 Building (first floor)

Queen Mary University of London

Mile End Road

London E1 4NS

Laura Oldfield Ford is a London-based artist and writer concerned with issues surrounding contemporary political protest, urbanism, architecture and memory. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007 she has become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. She is the author of Savage Messiah.

Concrete Heart Land,  a film by Steven Ball and Rastko Novaković, exposes the social cleansing of the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London. It marks the moment that the estate was finally lost as social housing to make way for an unjust 'regeneration' scheme.

(Via [email protected])

 

 

Re-playing NIMBYism

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

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

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

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

 

Confronting ‘awful neighborhood apps’

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

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

More here on the BBC site.

 

 

The commonwealth shames

Not much has been made of the quiet irony that the city of Glasgow will host the Commonwealth Games a few weeks before the country’s citizens vote for independence in September. This is surprising given the inescapable imperial connotations of the event and the rich vein of ironic defiance that seems to define the Scottish people.

Until today, the organising body entertained seriously a proposal that the opening ceremony for those games should include the live demolition of the ‘Red Road flats’. We were told that this act was planned

both as commemoration of a part of Glasgow's social history as well as a statement of the city's regeneration.

If the proposal seems truly crass, so does the sense that those in question provoked the spirit of defiance and under-estimated the response. Today it was announced that the plans have been cancelled ‘because of safety and security concerns’. I’d describe the defiance of the organisers in this case as unworthy. It shouldn’t have required 15,000 signatures to a petition: a modicum of common sense would have done.

My question is about how such a manifestly disrespectful and insensitive idea could have got as far as the agenda of the sub-committee of any sub-committee tasked with planning the event, let alone approved. How do we come to have people in public office who think the idea of watching homes being demolished is consistent with the celebration of international sporting endeavour?

Perhaps the adoration of spectacle has got out of control. The spectacularisation of culture is not a trivial issue: many commentators have bemoaned the demise of subtlety and nuance in popular culture over the past couple of decades, as various media emphasise ‘impact’ above forms of culture that more modestly stimulate reflection.

And we’re talking about places where people have lived. Surely in very few circumstances, even in the most blatantly necessary cases – think Fred West or Ian Huntley, if you must - can the destruction of a home be free of sadness. The notion of home is resonant with symbolism and with shared, long-lasting meaning: loss of home is always poignant and disturbing.

It is a matter of deep shame for those concerned that they did not pause to reflect on this, but instead were somehow seduced by infantile imagined delight in the spectacle of falling totems, cascading breeze blocks and apocalyptic dust clouds.

 

Blue-sea thinking

A few years ago I took part in a city visioning project in Peterborough, in the low-lying east of England. In a 3D modelling exercise, some of us were putting homes on stilts. I recall that it had to be pointed out to one or two local stakeholders that by 2030, they will probably be under water. (Image via).

The lesson was that this hadn’t been taken on - although recent months of flooding will by now have helped to spread awareness among all but the most bone-headed and selfish (naming no names, some of which are here).

I was reminded of this while flicking through the Guardian’s article and images about floating cities. These places already exist, after a fashion – enormous cruise ships for the flitting unlocated wealthy, who apparently would rather keep circumnavigating the globe than pay taxes to a state – but not yet in the sense envisaged by a few architects, planners and utopians such as the Seasteading Institute.

Either way, in the promo material the sea is nearly always crystal clear and flat. Incidentally, I don't take much interest in films, but I'd appreciate it if someone could direct me to an apocalyptic post-flood movie I saw part of once, which had memorable lines like 'They did something bad, the ancestors, didn't they?' You bet they did.

This is fascinating stuff, and I’m all for an ambitious dose of what amounts to blue-sea thinking, every so often. It’s easy to drift off into some unrealistic scenarios though. Here’s the Seasteading take on the personal advantages of living in a floating village, for example:

‘Personal Freedom - People will soon be able to live in floating cities, and enjoy the freedom of the high seas. As the last unclaimed territory on the earth, the ocean provides the ability to live peacefully without the encyclopedia of laws and tangle of bureaucracies present on land. Seasteaders will be able to start fresh, live with minimal regulation, and explore a bold experiment with personal freedom.’

You might need Californian contact lenses to see things that way, but to me that’s just a cue to think more closely about the nature of neighbouring in contexts where people may not have much choice in the kind of floating neighbourhood they have to inhabit.

What kind of scale are we talking about? What kind of neighbourhood might it be, for instance, if you can’t just get up and walk across some notional blurred boundary into the next one? What are the governance implications? What kinds of social network might we come to depend on?

And who will occupy the physical high ground?

 

C2DE? Postcodes and social class

Postcodes are commonly associated with the lottery of poor service provision, but not so much with being common.

I learn from a BBC magazine article by Jon Kelly today that many people are preoccupied with postcodes and dissatisfied with their own. Is this more a cause of class divisions, or an effect?

If we didn’t already live in a highly stratified society, maybe these arbitrary strings of letters and numbers would be a matter of universal indifference and do no more than serve their function of distinguishing one place from another. But I think it’s more likely that the very act of ‘distinguishing one place from another’ implies hierarchical arrangement for many people, and the prospect of superiority and inferiority, in a way that our culture likes to reinforce.

Kelly reports that ‘aggrieved groups who feel their postcode somehow doesn't reflect their sense of place are campaigning for change’ – I didn’t realise you could – and doing so with ‘a separatist zeal’.

It strikes me that you have to ‘come out’ as a snob in order to organise or participate in a campaign of this sort. You can’t just mumble behind the net curtains, you have to make public statements about yourself in relation to others; and you have to make those statements with other people and to other people.

It’s this readiness to accept being identified as a snob – almost as if it were something to be proud of – that I find most curious. Is our age uncharacteristic in this sense, or is this a phenomenon universal across history and geography? (Is there a social anthropologist in the house?) (And what's their address?)

 

 

Estate agents and community development

It can be hard to find a good word to say about estate agents. This morning I had a conversation about their role (or potential role) as sponsors for neighbourhood online networks. There are examples around and you can see why it works for all parties.

But whoever heard of an estate agent who says they will invest their profits into community development?

Say hello to Urban Patchwork:

‘We believe that all estate agents should be run as social enterprises, where, after running costs and people’s salaries, all profits are pumped back into the local communities where they operate. This would mean that estate agents would contribute positively to empowering the less well-off in their area, instead of contributing to pricing people out of their own communities. People would also want to use them because they would know their money is benefiting their community as a whole, helping to create a more collective and diverse environment in which to live.’

It’s curious how without thought we come to accept certain kinds of service as belonging in the private sector, and others as being in the public sector. But there are some examples that force us to reflect. Most people probably think the fire service, for instance, is rightly a public service; but its origins are in the private sector (insurance). Many people might suppose that the lifeboat system is publicly-funded, and perhaps it should be, but it’s entirely charitable.

The great thing about the social enterprise movement is that it stimulates fresh thinking on these sorts of questions without getting tangled in the ridiculous anti-public ideology of the right. Why shouldn’t the work of estate agents be seen as a community service?

I’m really impressed.

 

The waters recede

The recent extensive flooding in England was not too bad around where I live, but still it has highighted the ways nature will take revenge when abused: sometimes with violence, sometimes with subtlety.

Here, the canal level seems to have raised quantities of plastic junk and then left it on display as the waters receded, as if to say, 'Excuse me, you dropped something'.

 

 

Design for parking in new build developments

Here's a new resource that should help tidy up our streets and possibly even make neighbourhood street play more commonplace:

'Space To Park is a user-generated resource of best practice for those seeking parking solutions in new build residential development. This website showcases a series of developments and sets up a constructive discussion about what works and where, from the point of view of users, designers and other experts.'

 

Local democracy in action

The bells of St Mary’s church in Ashwell chime every fifteen minutes, day and night. I can imagine that must be fun. But it is said that we don’t like to complain in this country, and maybe you can see why.

Understandably a few residents have asked for the mechanism to be disabled some of the time. Tsk, moaning minnies. The ‘Save the Bells’ campaigners – I’m not making this up – are determined to resist such prissy disregard for tradition, and will turn litigious if their precious din is threatened. Just ask ‘chimes campaigner’ Chris Pack:

"If we have a referendum that asks people if they wish the bells to remain as they are and that referendum is overwhelming, we have the support there and it is captured legally."

He added legal advice would also be sought to overturn any decision which turned the bells off.

Ah, democracy in action eh? If there is some advantage in subjecting residents to routine chiming throughout the night, it is not revealed to us and I’m unable to guess. It would be interesting to reflect on what these campaigners might do with their time, energy and determination if there were pro-social causes for them to adopt.

 

Whatever happened to that programme about community?

I missed this when first broadcast back in December, but R4 are now repeating three programmes under the heading ‘Whatever happened to community?’

Giles Fraser, recently appointed priest in the parish that includes the Heygate and Aylesbury estates in south London, sallies forth in search of a few questions and possibly some answers.

Slipping from labelled urban to fabled rural, he solicits views from some insightful folk along the way, including David Goodhart for example. Scale and diversity were the main themes of the first episode, which you can catch for a few more days here, with the remainder in the next couple of weeks.

As these programmes go, I thought it was pretty good. At least we got an unequivocal statement from a resident about how the architects and planners had got things plain wrong. This is not trivial when you think how determined architects can be to defend their mistakes. There was also some brief reference to the experience of community over the centuries, and there is plenty to be gained from a more thorough look in that direction, as Emily Cockayne for instance has shown.

Scanning the blurb about the forthcoming programmes though, I saw no reference to gated communities. Given the attention paid so far to ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ community, inclusion implying exclusion, and so forth, it would be a curious omission not to use gating and locking and ‘secured by design’ as a lens for further insight: especially if the last programme is to bring us back to the reality of those huge built estates from which we are still learning.

I'm also starting to wonder about the widespread assumption that neighbouring in recent decades has been changed fundamentally by the proportion of residents who are at home during the day - the decline of the housewife. I think there is something in this argument, but maybe after an interim period, diverse others are now more likely to be at home, so is it time to test the theory with some thorough research? Perhaps the Royal Mail have some data that could be used?

Thanks Martin for the heads up.

 

What do we mean by overcrowding?

The Building and Social Housing Foundation has published the results of research using focus groups, investigating public understandings of space in the home and overcrowding.

The research explored how a minimum space standard might be meaningfully described. Among the conclusions was the assertion that

‘Every home should allow space for all members of the household to eat together or for a small number of friends or family members to visit.’

There was widespread agreement across the focus groups that different types of household would have different needs in terms of health and development, social interaction and essential items. The focus groups explored these issues by developing a list of space requirements for three case study households:

 

• Couple with two young children
• Couple over 60
• Single working-age man without children.

Participants were asked to agree the furniture and other possessions, activities and levels of privacy needed in the home.

According to the focus group discussions, ‘a couple with one child require a minimum of 65 m² of usable floor area. In England, 14 per cent of families with children live in homes smaller than this.’

 

Minimum standards for neighbourhoods?

‘Neighbourhood pressures are building once again,’ says this new report by Ed Cox and colleagues at Ippr North. The subject is neighbourhood change in Britain (by which, as far as I can tell, they mean England).

The report argues that the objectives for neighbourhood policy should be:

• to ensure that all neighbourhoods are able to generate jobs and wealth themselves, or are connected to economic opportunities in the wider area;
• to ameliorate the worst effects of wider economic trends, and ensure minimum standards of neighbourhood quality and service provision;
• to bring about the radical transformation of those neighbourhoods that have become caught in costly spirals of decline.

The last one is as important as it ever was, and more urgent now. The first objective has of course been hideously and pointlessly made harder and more complex by the systematic weakening of local government.

The second objective, concerning minimum standards, is to be welcomed in my view, if we can stop politicians slipping gleefully into the grotesque folly of League Table Mentalities and Target Obsession Disorder. Curiously, there is no reference to the lifetime neighbourhoods movement, although in supporting that, the ILC-UK put forward the argument that poor design of neighbourhoods should be grounds for rejection at the planning stage. Pioneering work on ‘minimum acceptable place standards’, is apparently, imminent.

Meanwhile, the ippr report calls for a regular ‘state of the neighbourhoods report’ combining statistical data with information 'uploaded by neighbourhoods themselves'. I think I first started peddling this idea in 2005, at a time when there was a sympathetic government which could have afforded to try it: so don’t hold your breath.

The report argues that the principal means of narrowing the gaps between neighbourhoods is through ‘economic growth combined with measures to ensure that the proceeds of growth are better shared.’ I can’t be the only one wishing the word ‘stability’ was used here instead of ‘growth’.

This is going to be a very useful report in terms of documenting knowledge, with a discussion of objective measures of the pressures on neighbourhoods, and summaries of the recent history of neighbourhood policy and theories of neighbourhood change. It includes a fascinating comparative table on ‘old versus new neighbourhoods approaches’.

But I can’t find that little extra something that would make the report stand out. There are several mentions of ‘social innovation’ – but these feel under-informed and would benefit hugely from an appreciation of the movement encapsulated in the Compendium of the Civic Economy. For example – given the acknowledged point that the nature of the private rented sector is a nasty cause of problems at the neighbourhood level - how about a call for a social entrepreneurial approach to re-inventing that sector?

 

Re-feudalising the country includes selling off common land (and hiding Cromwell)

What’s this about common land? Jane Merrick in the Indy this morning tells us that there are 3,870 registered ‘village greens’ in England and Wales, covering 8,770 acres. Apparently that's less than half the size of the family estate of Richard Benyon MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Natural Environment, Water and Rural Affairs. Merrick writes:

‘We don't take up that much land, we commoners. Our families don't need 20,000 acres to take the dog for a walk, or let the kids kick a football.’

And without a hint of irony, it seems – these rich posh people tend to have a substantial intelligence gap in that department - Mr Benyon has said: ‘Towns across the country have been held back from getting the developments they want through misuse of the village green system.’ (Nothing then about damage to the country from misuse of the hereditary and political systems?) The Open Spaces Society response is here and the straightforward dishonesty of the department’s line is exposed here.

File under Tory Arrogance. But take it more seriously. This is about their systematic attack on what is public and on the rights we have in common. It goes alongside the wanton, evidence-free and often costly decimation of the community sector, social support, public libraries and the postal service – things we own. Further down in her column, Merrick notes the irony in the fact that:

‘a new 10ft-high iron perimeter fence has been erected along the main public access area of the House of Commons. From the pavement, you can no longer see the statue of Oliver Cromwell which stands near St Stephen's Entrance.’

It’s a brazen stroke of sinister symbolism. Parliamentary democracy is bankrupt and the statue has been sequestered - by parliament! Perhaps the fence should be stormed for that reason - which in some eyes, in an added irony, would justify its installation.

This is all part of the determined re-feudalisation of the country, although of course as the increasingly perverse climate-change-deniers with ministerial responsibility for Mr Benyon’s department are trying to make sure, before long there may not be much environment left for the peasants to work on. And there will be fences around the whole of Westminster, like a vast medieval castle.

 

£50,000 per day of public money

The Beeb has this piece about a Belfast roundabout that costs £50,000 per day of public money. Well no, it doesn’t really – nothing to do with the roundabout, the money is for the policing of the immediate neighbourhood, because the junction marks an inflammatory boundary between loyalist and republican areas.

But it’s useful and valid for this huge cost to be publicised. It’s taxpayers’ money used to deter persistent violence in local areas. We’ve known about the massive human cost for a long time: it will be interesting if the novelty of knowing more about the financial cost has some impact in bringing about a lasting solution.

Envisaging the 'sidewalk-free' neighbourhood

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

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

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

Troublesome neighbours?

And what if your neighbours are elephants?

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social benefits of buses

Margaret Thatcher infamously announced that anyone over 30 who travelled by bus was a failure. Curiously, the government that believes in her eternal reverence has just released three documents constituting a study of the social benefits of bus travel (the reports are dated March but published today).

 ‘Social benefit’ is defined in narrow terms as follows -

‘...the value bus users enjoy from accessing particular services that they would not otherwise have had easy access to’.

Further, the value arrived at only applies to travellers ‘who would choose to not make the trip if bus was not available,’ so again it’s rather limited. But it’s a start, and the significance of the study is clearly that it acknowledges that society has a place for a service that is ‘public’.

It doesn't have to be about measuring the value of a chummy chat about the weather with a complete stranger as you're bumping along. But it might be handy to work out a way of assessing the value of being among fellow citizens in the public realm - and the costs that might be associated with the absence of that experience in certain lifestyles - because that seems to be dangerously under-valued at present.

Previously: On the buses

Dealing with the territorial barmy

Parking has been in the news I see. The other day the government announced plans to allow households to rent out a single parking space on their driveways without first seeking planning permission, ‘provided there is no public nuisance to neighbours, or other substantive concerns.’ On the same day, some poor soul died in a punch-up over a disabled parking space at a supermarket.

Meanwhile I’ve been on me hols, and I took this picture. Not being much of a holiday person – let alone a poolside lounger – I don’t know if its’ message is familiar to others:

'we hereby inform that our pool attendant will collect the towels standing in the loungers that are reserved but no occupied.'

But it does suggest an exquisite parable of territory-based relations with the not-quite-anonymous symbolic claiming of unoccupied space; and an intervention from authorities who undoubtedly will not be able to police their own decree.

There’s a study to be done, of the extent to which the people who use towels to claim poolside loungers behave in a similar way when it comes to parking spaces. I weep for their stunted, shrivelled mentalities.

Eyes on the street?

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

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

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

 

 

What’s in it for you?

I remember a television news item some years ago which demonstrated how vulnerable some people are through leaving information about themselves in their rubbish bins. And if you’re not given to thinking much about what you dispose of and how, then I daresay you’re more likely to be vulnerable.

But even if you do take care to detach linkable traces of your identity from your garbage, it must be slightly discomforting if you find someone rifling through your bin.

Rhodri Morgan, writing in the Indy the other day, describes the experience in terms of privacy:

‘On their third or fourth visit, I realised my discomfort was a privacy thing; I wondered what the contents of my bin might reveal about me.’

The point being that although in theory you have renounced ownership of the material, by placing it in a publicly funded collection service - and the council owns the bin - it still represents a concentration of sources of possible information about you.

And perhaps the age of the golden dustman, portrayed so wonderfully by Dickens in Our mutual friend, is coming round again. But I’d rather live in a society where people didn’t feel the need to rummage through rubbish.

 

Community development theory to be completely rewritten: it turns out, 'the softer sides of place matter'

Here’s a curiosity. In a guest blog post on PPS, one Katherine Loflin explains that ‘I often see tearful reactions in my audiences.’ It could be laughter awkwardly disguised.

At the top of the post we’re offered a picture of the author as demure wanna-be-a-celebrity-pussy-cat-model. Stop laughing at the back there. She says she’s been a community practitioner all her life. But has not learned enough to avoid prefacing her name with ‘Dr’ on an ordinary blog post: is that likely to intimidate the peasants I wonder? I can imagine what kind of reception Dr Katharine might get on some English estates where community action is taken seriously, and Putnam’s opinion on her dissertation won’t count for anything.

In case you suspect this stuff might not be academically robust, we get an early reassurance:

‘We had no preconceived notions about what we would discover. Today, I think that fact contributes to the power of the findings.’

Oh you bet. And we’re all gagging to hear about the findings that 'for many seemed counter-intuitive—even radical at times' and how the brave author recovered from the shock of their significance.

Wait, stop rolling about on the floor, pull yourselves together, there’s more. You have to have a list of no more than nine items, even when you present findings of such astonishing galaxy-reconfiguring significance as Dr Katharine has to offer, findings which she wants you to know are ‘so groundbreaking and surprising’. Yup, the Knight Foundation and Gallup have funded this work and it will send shock waves through the community development world.

You have to have a list. No list, no credibility, those are the conditions. Dr Katharine has nine ‘key lessons’ and I bet you can’t wait to hear some of them. Oh, you can? OK.

Among the gems you might miss, I admired the following:

‘We have seen places in the findings where attachment increased even when the local economy worsened.’

‘The best ideas often come from the residents themselves, who are really the true keepers of the soul of their community.’

‘The most powerful path to change for people and places is to leverage strengths to address challenges.’

You need a PhD to really grasp the nuances, so don’t worry too much if it’s beyond you. I too feel inferior, we all do.

We’re also told that attachment is not the same as engagement. I could repeat that stunning insight; or you could read the sentence again and learn it by heart.

And then comes THE total dismiss-anyone-delivery, the fierce 95mph inswinging leg-cutting yorker (I’m using slightly obscure cricket terminology because I can’t resist, sorry) - apparently the killer academically-researched finding is that ‘the softer sides of place matter’.

I’m exhausted, I can’t take any more in. The ‘softer sides’ – why, of course, why didn’t we think of it? All these years.

At first I thought it was an April Fool spoof: the date is given as 11 April so a deliberate misprint could be part of it, albeit somewhat elaborate. If not, let's just regret that PPS's credibility has taken a knock. The article seems to be semi-sincere in that way that so many Americans have perfected and which I deeply regret I cannot match. Enjoy.

Thanks to the NANM newswire for the heads up.

 

Pavement chalking anarchy… possibly

Here we go again with the ‘criminality’ of chalking on pavements… or do we?

The BBC, Mail, Telegraph, Indy and other sources report that a ten year old girl was reprimanded by passing police officers for chalking a hopscotch grid on the pavement. Tsk.

I’ve commented on a few examples before, but they’ve always been confirmed. Lots of people have jumped on the copper-bashing bandwagon in this instance but it’s worth noting that the force so far has not accepted any involvement:

‘We cannot currently trace any car being in the area at the time.’

Let's wait and see shall we. Rain may not wash this one away so quickly.

Previously:

• Pavement chalking anarchy again
• Pavement chalking: this time seen in a positive light
• Pavement chalking epidemic?
• Footnote on pavement chalking
• 'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'

Neglected space

‘Confused spaces’, ‘neglected spaces’, ‘spaces of uncertainty’… various terms are used and they can often tell us a bit about the limits of the planner’s role.

I came across this striking example in Watford the other day.

 

The two pictures are taken from opposite sides. The curved wall defines a spiral path down to a subway, condemning a near-triangular space above, without purpose. A sheet of corrugated plastic roofing betrays someone’s desperate, but perhaps comparatively sheltered, bedding place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Villages evolve, don't they?’

The debate about urban design will surely always be with us. John Harris had a rather inconclusive piece in the Guardian on Saturday about some of those new squeaky-clean housing developments and the culture they represent – aspirational, artificial, organic…?

‘The pristine, faux-traditional houses are the same as those you see all over the country, offering the promise of "traditional living with modern comforts."’

And so he asks,

‘If you use the word "village" and learn from the planning mistakes of the past, can you quickly build a community from scratch?’

Although he doesn’t really get face to face with the question, there are several delightful insights, including this one from Terri Clarke, a resident of Fairford Leys:

"It's referred to as a village, but it's an estate," Terri insists. "The fact that it was all built at the same time means it's an estate. Villages evolve, don't they?"

Thank you Terri.

I’ve been round a few such places (including Poundbury, which is hardly typical) and a few things have struck me.

• The architecture is invariably an improvement on what was left us by the architects and planners of the 1960s and 1970s. And there is more likely to be a mix of renovated and new build of different sizes with social and private housing.
• The developers’ contribution to local amenities almost always lags behind and the eventual level of provision is probably seldom adequate.
• The public realm matters everywhere. The article quotes architect John Simpson, emphasising in these new developments ‘a public realm, rather than just leftover space, which is what you get on housing estates.’ So who was responsible for designing housing estates without a public realm? Why?
• People reflect readily on their neighbourhood, but snobbery around words like ‘estate’ and ‘village’ surfaces quite easily. These snobberies can get institutionalised in the regulation of residents through terms and conditions, with some of the least rational forms emerging. Thus one of the residents quoted in the article says she’s ‘not allowed solar panels’. The version of ‘heritage’ espoused by her residents’ association presumably excludes the idea of future generations inheriting an inhabitable planet.
• These estates have often achieved a subtle, possibly unnoticed, control over vehicle traffic, so that kids can play in the street. If the residents’ association allows that sort of thing, of course.
• Some people are clearly suspicious of the ‘prissy’ over-prescribed environment, and readily contrast it to some notion of ‘community’ which entertains a degree of lively disorder. Others appear to have a fear of disorder (which itself can seem like a psychological disorder at times) and will invest heavily in the local politics of protection: for them, ‘community’ is characterised by peace and predictability. Maybe we can’t build for all sorts and shouldn't try.

To return to the question posed: ‘can you quickly build a community from scratch?’ There's a superficial answer, which is that in some circumstances you can of course: it helps to have an identifiable shared adversity.

But the question begs too many others. For instance, it privileges the notion of ‘community’ as something that people should be expected to value over good quality housing and a safe, unpolluted environment. Not everyone does, and why should they? As was the case with the urban villages movement in the 1990s, we should not be surprised if some people are suspicious of the antiseptic notion of community that is on offer.

It also ignores the historical fact that many residential areas have evolved without any trace of the wishy-washy organic community that mythology predicts and celebrates. Why does 'community' emerge here but not there? Maybe we should agonise a bit less over the C word, and invest more in designing more civilised places to live, using basic principles including the provision of public space and community resources, with a properly funded local government to back it up and help maintain and sustain it.

 

‘This is a private conversation!’ When we need an official to intervene

I'm enchanted to discover that there is such a thing as the National Campaign for Courtesy. I bet they get some spam. Their chair has been praising the actions of a train driver who made an announcement rebuking a noisy mobile phone user.

The assumption is that ‘the announcement was made because another passenger complained to a guard’. This was a commuter train, and the first class carriage, so perhaps it was neither the first nor predictably the last occasion when the complainant encountered this individual behaving in this way.

Let's pass over the widely-held expectations that people who travel first class either (a) tend to be more civil towards one another than mere plebs, and/or (b) tend to be more assertive about their own importance and rights… It’s more instructive to think about how the story raises a central question in social relations: what is the point at which behaviour perceived as anti-social or uncivil, requires an intermediary?

Should the complainant have spoken first to the phone user? (And in the circumstances, would non-verbal communication, ironically, have done the job?) Some people would say they should have done so. I might have tried that myself, with a smile and gestures towards the ears or a finger to pursed lips.

In the neighbourhood context, where a comparable disagreement arises over noise, the advice is generally to try to speak to and reason with the offender first. Central and local authority websites, housing association guidance, consumer advice materials (e.g.), they all usually recommend that initially a personal, conciliatory approach should be tried.

The story raises a few issues about appropriate behaviour in the public realm and between neighbours. For a start, one-off instances of discourteous behaviour in the public realm are not the same as repeated cases. If you know your journey will soon be over and you are not likely to see the individual again, you may just choose to sit it out.

And community space is not the same as public space. If you live next door to someone whose behaviour you find uncivil or antisocial, your response might not be the same as it would be in a public venue, a park or square, or on public transport, or a non-local online forum, from which you can usually escape - whether or not you feel you have a strong sense of co-ownership of that space.

What’s more, you can’t always count on your fellow citizens to back you up if you do complain. People may not sympathise with your sense of injustice; or if they do, there may be other reasons why they feel unwilling to express any kind of support, which might leave you, finally, heavily dependent on whatever official intervention society has on offer. At its worst, this diminution of social capital can be exaggerated to the point that it puts enormous pressure on those official roles, until they in turn become defensive and cannot cope: think Northern Ireland, for instance, or even the Amsterdam of Anne Frank.

So I have sympathy for the train passenger who chose to refer to the train ‘guard’ (the term used in the report) or ‘steward’ (as we might call them now); as I do for the victims of neighbours from hell who cannot bring themselves to communicate with their tormentors but reach directly for some official intervention. A civil society recognises that humans can still be pretty rugged and occasionally we need officials, accountable to democratic bodies, to keep us from reverting to savagery.

And on the subject of train phone conversations, this seems like a good moment to share one of my favourite anecdotes from the literature, reported ten years ago:

‘A young woman is talking on the cell phone, apparently to her boyfriend, with whom she is in something of a crisis. Her voice projects in far-from dulcet tones. Most of the passengers take up a physical and postural stance of busying themselves with other foci of attention… busy doing “not overhearing this conversation”… Except for one passenger. And when the protagonist of this tale has her eyes intersect this fellow-passenger’s gaze, she calls out in outraged protest, ‘Do you mind?! This is a private conversation!’

Schegloff, E.A., 'Beginnings in the telephone', in Perpetual contact, Cambridge, 2002, p285-286.

 

 

Art, ownership and irony: graffiti in the neighbourhood

Lots of interesting comment from local people about the disappearance of that Banksy from their neighbourhood, raising ironic questions of ownership and value – Harringay Online; Bowes and Bounds Connected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Towers or not, could we please have decent housing? (And get on with it)

There doesn’t seem to be much chance of the economy being stimulated to get the badly needed house-building underway (most cabinet ministers have got enough for the time being), so it’s a good time to give the housing industry something to do. The Policy Exchange calls for the widespread demolition of tower blocks.

I’ve spoken to quite a few people who love living the high life, but if the PX findings from their recent study are accurate, then there are clearly too many children and young people cooped up in box flats too far from the outdoors. They claim that:

• 52,000 households with children who are social renters live on the third floor or above (40,000 of which are in London)
• 20,000 households with children who are social renters live on the fifth floor or above (16,000 of which are in London).

The argument may need a little more nuanced understanding. The press release says that:

‘Studies have shown that residents of high-rise blocks or large estates suffer from more stress, mental health difficulties, neurosis and marriage breakdowns’

- and it’s worth asking about the extent to which these dysfunctions might be caused by, exacerbated by, or coincidental to, the housing conditions. Do they occur to a statistically significant extent in well-designed, well-built, well-maintained towers?

Meanwhile, we seem to be witnessing an increase in the construction of highly secure high-rise buildings for the wealthy. Is a pattern going to emerge, the posh with their heads in the clouds and the plebs brought down to earth? 

Perhaps we need to emphasise that design and build quality really must be part of the argument. It’s all very well calling for low rise, but maybe this image can serve as a reminder that bad low rise can be problematic.

It would help to breathe life back into the archived CABE (decommissioned by the present government in 2011), because this was their business. It seems to me to be hard for the present government to escape the charge that they have squandered previous progress on decent homes standards.

 

Anti-locality: the tube map

Publicity about the 150^th anniversary of the London underground has drawn me back to Harry Beck’s famous 1933 map (1931 draft here) which abandoned the insistence on geographical accuracy in favour of ease of interpretation and use. This Atlantic article shows the evolution of the map over the century and a half, clearly confirming the paradigm shift that he accomplished (more here).

It’s refreshing to talk about 150 years of urban history without being drawn into talking about ‘how everything’s changed’. The tube map has changed little in the 80 years since Beck’s was adopted, but we can use the previous maps to try to imagine the current level of complexity if it had not been.

The fact that his contribution was unsolicited and took two years to be accepted is a wee lesson on sources of creativity for managers everywhere, although largely wasted on most of them of course.

More useful perhaps is the opportunity it gives us to reflect on how universally-applied maps relate to the physical reality perceived around us. Beck’s reconfiguration of this reality is not always helpful. For instance, people unfamiliar with London might well get on at Charing Cross to travel to Embankment; and emerging into the light discover themselves within one or two hundred metres of the point at which they went underground, having travelled three sides of a buried vertical square.

The point Beck’s map highlights for me is that underground there are few landmarks, and our bearings are vulnerable at best. Here we are extraordinarily dependent on the information supplied to us by signage and which we cannot confirm or augment except by correspondence with our fellow human beings, all strangers.

As an environment it is thus an exquisite anti-locality (I won’t say non-place). The first sense in which you are here, by which you locate yourself, is because of a huge layered construct of information. You are not at Holland Park or Parsons Green or Chalk Farm, you are somewhere unrecognisable way below the surface, or believe yourself to be.

Having good reason to trust the information that you may or may not have absorbed, you let yourself be guided through tunnels and up moving stairways where you sense light and cross into the world you can confirm as Holland Park or Parsons Green or Chalk Farm. There you re-adopt your sense of being-in-place, intact and in perfect working order. What a marvel.

Safety and the militarisation of schools

A couple of months ago I had to deliver something to a primary school during the day in term time. It wasn't as much of a security challenge as I had feared, which may reflect a degree of comparative enlightenment at the school in question; or perhaps it was in a low-risk area; or that my expectations have been affected negatively by the 'Secured by Design' movement. I certainly dislike the tendency to militarise our schools and see it as consistent with a culture of private car use and the development of gated communities.

Fences are a bog standard example of the human inclination to outsource social responsibilities to technology. If you can minimise the supervision of children by constraining their movement, it allows you to get on with other things. But then, wait, other people might be able to reach them: so you have to add a camera or two. And then what? According to the National Rifle Association, that respected forum of balanced humanitarian reflection, in every school you'd need 'a good guy with a gun.'

Today there's a new set of papers from those excellent folk at the new economics foundation (nef) on the need to revisit what we mean by 'prevention' with a view to coming up with a positive sense of prevention across social policy. One of the papers, by Anna Minton and Jody Aked, takes aim at the effect of Secured by Design principles on schools. They make the point that there is a significant impact in low income neighbourhoods:

'Schools, in particular, have become high security environments, emphasizing gating, high fences and CCTV. Because Secured by Design requirements for schools and public buildings are based on an audit of local crime risk, higher crime areas, which correlate with higher deprivation scores, are now characterised by public buildings... with a militarised feel to them.'

The papers are welcome but I fear too conceptual and theoretical to ensure the sort of debate that is needed. And the time may not be ideal for the encouragement of more open thinking about the Other. I hope I'm wrong about that.

Dig this

Steve Wheen does pothole gardening, sending a message about creativity, style and scale in harsh and impersonal townscapes. The BBC have this video of his seasonal offering. Enjoy.

 

This could be the start of something sensible (updated)

In Scotland, proposals for a law banning parking on pavements.

Future generations will wonder why it took us so long.

Footnote: I just came across this recent letter to a Canadian newspaper which notes un-neighbourly complaints concerning residents who park their cars facing in the wrong direction. It seems that by having a bye-law which accommodates such complaints,some residents are using an intermediary (the city council) to get at their neighbours.

Pic Martin Dudley).

No home-like place (updated)

Do some reflecting. Spend a little time with the poignant work of Climbing the Wall, especially ‘Some kind of life’, a series of patient, dignified film records made with people who do not have their own homes:

‘Stories challenging assumptions about what constitutes home and how people understand their own sense of belonging.’

Footnote 12 Dec - Teresa Cairns (from Climbing the Wall) has written to me:

'Our most recent film production, 'No Place Like Home', deals with the difficult transitions people face when they come off 'the street'. It is featured by the Community Channel as part of their week of films exploring homelessness in Britain today, until Sunday 16th Dec:

http://www.communitychannel.org/featured/no-place-like-home/

We would love feedback if you manage to catch it - broadcast tomorrow evening at 21.30, then Sunday at 22.30.'

 

The right to shelter: some positive words about squatting

I don’t need much reminding that I live in a brutal, primitive society, one which has imprisoned a young man for sheltering in an empty house. I'm also now keenly aware that the influential Centre for Social Justice does not see unequal access to housing as one of ‘the root causes of poverty and social breakdown in the UK’.

Yesterday The Guardian published a broad ranging article by Steve Rose, on squatters. Here are three quick points:

(i) Rose notes that

‘What the squatting dispute boils down to is a split between those who consider private property to be sacred, and those who would prioritise the right to shelter.’

Indeed, and it’s a no-brainer if ever I saw one.

(ii) I suspect there might have been more about the constructive role of squatters in patching up buildings and thereby saving resources:

‘In Dutch there is a word krakers – literally "crackers" – to describe the type of constructive squatter who fixes up damaged buildings. "Squatters quietly restore house" is a story that rarely makes the papers, although in the 70s in Amsterdam, hundreds of squatters moved into and repaired dilapidated buildings in the historic Nieuwmarkt area, and fought to save the neighbourhood from large-scale demolition and redevelopment. It was the beginning of a successful conservation movement in the city.’

(iii) It’s not a great reflection on our society that people have to squat, but perhaps we should celebrate what they do as an example of collective resilience (this of course is partly why squatters are anathema to the Haves):

‘In the broader sense, what ties together these disparate instances of squatting is human beings' capacity to organise and provide for themselves.’ Rose quotes Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow cities: a billion squatters:

"Wherever you go in the developing world, and, I would argue with most of the squatters in the UK and the US, you're talking about a notable act of self reliance by people facing a system that does not provide housing they can afford," says Neuwirth. "This is something we should be saluting, rather than looking at it as some kind of horrific, criminal approach."

Previously: 'Your logic is a dog.' Systematically increasing exclusion

 

Urban density and the green environment

At the end of this article about urban density and NIMBYism, Kaid Benfield suddenly strikes right at an issue that has long bothered me. When developers win their ways with the density card, the local green environment usually doesn’t stand much chance. I think that has knock-on effects in terms of sociability and health which remain largely unrecognised.

Benfield writes:

‘if we designed density so that it brought more, not less, nature into communities, density could become far more appealing and popular. And I would particularly urge that the nature we integrate into development – plantings, water, trees, open space, green roofs, living walls, and so forth – be designed to serve multiple purposes simultaneously. A menu of choices for multitasking might include, for example, green infrastructure to catch and filter stormwater, places of play for kids and respite for adults, plantings that maximize the absorption of carbon dioxide while releasing oxygen for cleaner and fresher air, green spaces that reduce the heat island effect, and/or signature public spaces to create a sense of place.’ 

I’d add that I think we need to be sharper at getting quickly from having a few examples of good practice to ensuring the dominance of such an approach as standard practice.

The pic above I took in Luton, England, about three years ago, from a rolling bus.

 

 

Against gentrification: the Siege of the Elephant

Southwark Notes Archive Group are currently inviting folks to contribute to ‘The Siege of the Elephant,’ a one-day convergence against the gentrification of Elephant and Castle and surrounding area in London. The event aims to bring together local communities, activists, campaign and amenity group members and traders, as well as academics, students, researchers and members of campaign groups involved in similar regeneration/gentrification struggles in other areas of London.

London, Saturday 17 November 2012

Further information

Proposed themes for the day:

• How does gentrification work and what are its causes and effects in
  Elephant and Castle?

• How can we resist or alter the dynamics of gentrification?

Southwark Notes Archive Group ‘have also been organising regular anti-gentrification walks, printing postcards, posters, maps and comics, and keeping active on within various groups and campaigns in the ongoing struggle whilst keeping an eye on the history (the mistakes and successes) and the big picture (globalisation, financialisation and all that!)’