Neighbourhoods

The one reason not to bother with lists about ‘community’

Kaid Benfield has written some good stuff, but this latest Atlantic piece – ‘What Are the 7 Keys to a Strong Community?’ - is perplexing. It’s based on this previous article by Scott Doyon.

Not long ago I had a little dig at the ritual of offering lists, so no more on that theme now. But there’s something more serious I want to get at here, which Kaid’s piece has helped me think about.

Without wanting to seem harsh, it comes across as naïve to start talking about ‘strong communities’ without acknowledging that the concept has, shall we say, negative aspects. You don’t have to spend time in Northern Ireland to appreciate that, I believe there are plenty of places in north America where the ‘communities’ are quite strong enough thank you. That has to be accommodated.

And when we talk about ‘community,’ strong or otherwise, we have to recognise that some people don’t want it, whether they are deemed to need it or not. And many more don’t want it thrust down their throats by policy makers or practitioners or neighbours. That too has to be accommodated.

The list offered in the article is curious in that, with the exception of the first item, it does not appear to have much to do with people:

1. Good governance
2. Walkable, connected, mixed-use character
3. Parks and gardens
4. Partnerships
5. Programming
6. Neighborhood-responsive schools
7. Tree culture.

Nor does it include anything about communication and information channels. Or people’s homes. Or disorder. Or traffic levels. (The answer may be that this is a placemaking approach to ‘community’ qua neighbourhood).

The idea of coming up with ‘seven keys to a strong community’ – or three, or twelve, or whatever number takes your fancy – seems charmingly nostalgic, as if we could just ignore some of the fundamentals of living in a highly networked, car-dependent, dispersed mass consuming global economy.

But the trick for the 21^st century is to describe and buttress an appreciation of ‘community’ that takes account of networked individualism, ethnic diversity, class fissures, high rates of mobility and increasing proportions of older people. Which reminds me, I wrote something like that towards the end of Neighbouring and older people:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

Over the years this blog has felt like a clumsy, perhaps unconvincing exercise in groping towards that understanding, based on an unsentimental belief in the importance and value of local social interaction and the informal communication that supports it.

So without resorting to off-putting journalistic devices, perhaps what I should be doing is working out how far that project’s got.

 

The advantages of moving from one kind of poverty to another

Can the quality of life of people in poverty be improved, without changing their economic circumstances?

Let’s talk millions. I was passed a paper from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner the other day that tells me there are 2.3 million children living in poverty in the UK. (The figure rises to 3.6 million if the After Housing Cost (AHC) measure is used).

About the same time, I read this article in Science which begins by telling us that:

‘Nearly 9 million people in the United States live in “extreme-poverty” neighborhoods in which at least 40% of residents have incomes below the federal poverty threshold.’

In both cases these are scary numbers of people in poverty. And we probably all assume that to help people who are in poverty, you really need to help increase their income and/or decrease their costs.

But the research reported in the Science article, based on a large scale experiment in the US, challenges that assumption by suggesting you can improve quality of life significantly by helping people to move out of ‘distressed neighbourhoods’ – without necessarily increasing their income.

Here’s the gist of the research. Between 1994 and 1998, a US programme called Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomly assigned vouchers to a large number of low-income public housing families living in high-poverty areas in five U.S. cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The vouchers enabled families to move to another area, and many chose to do so:

‘By far the most common reason applicants reported signing up for MTO was to get away from gangs and drugs, with around three quarters reporting this as one of their top two reasons for wanting to move.'

The researchers used ‘a comprehensive measure of people’s quality of life as they perceive it, using adult self-reports of subjective well-being (SWB)' and found ‘sizable positive effects‘:

‘moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term (10- to 15-year) improvements in adult physical and mental health and subjective well-being, despite not affecting economic self-sufficiency.’

In other words, a statistically significant and sustained change in reported sense of well-being (‘a measure that represents a comprehensive assessment by the participants themselves of the extent to which their lives have been affected‘) resulted from moving out of a challenging area, even though the families were still in poverty.

The researchers conclude:

‘The [MTO] program failed to produce detectable impacts on family income. But if the goal is the broader one of improving the well-being of poor families, then policies that seek to ameliorate the adverse effects of dangerous, distressed neighborhoods on poor families are worthy of careful consideration.‘

This could be politically tricky. Do we want our policy makers to assume that the misery of poverty can be ameliorated more readily by a programme of physically moving some families around, than by addressing economic inequalities?

I don’t think we want them deciding that poverty is a housing allocation problem which can be deemed to be the responsibility of social landlords. It’s great that we now have some evidence of the impact of living in unsafe and stressful environments; but we still need to see some action to transform such places, and to address the increasing problem of poverty itself.

 

Placekeeping: bringing quality of local social life into the mix

Social Life have just published a report developing a methodology to measure social sustainability in new housing developments:

‘The aim of this project is to create a practical and cost-effective way of measuring people’s quality of life and the strength of community.’

This could be significant because, as the report argues,

‘A new emphasis on social sustainability means thinking about placekeeping as well as placemaking. It requires us to recognise that some intangibles – the emotional relationships that people who live in and use a space develop – are as important as the hard infrastructure we deliver.’

(Be warned, at the moment some of the links say ‘download full publication’ but you may only get Part 1, which itself doesn’t appear to carry links to Parts 2 and 3. Part 1 gives the deceptive impression that it's a self-contained report).

The first part seeks to demonstrate how the methodology as it stands could be applied, in this case to new developments, three of them in London. Since residents presumably moved in at roughly the same time, have similar issues to discuss, and a similar drive to get to know people, you’d expect levels of neighbourliness and satisfaction to be reasonably high for the first few years at least. Plus they just invested emotional energy in the move, so folk are more likely to be upbeat about the place. The housing provider has to really mess up to get bad marks early on.

But the real point is the development and testing of a methodology that can bring the social quality of local life into the mix. The framework applied to the four localities has three ‘critical dimensions’:

• amenities and social infrastructure
• social and cultural life, and
• residents’ voice and influence.

A fourth dimension, change in the neighbourhood, will be assessed in due course using data from the 2011 Census. These dimensions are populated with 13 indicators comprised of a total of 45 questions, mostly taken from or adapted from established surveys. The findings for the four study areas are based mainly on nearly 600 face-to-face interviews in the four sites, with site surveys and some interviews with professionals/practitioners, and benchmarked against London and national comparative data.

The first thing that might strike you is that all the indicators, and indeed the three dimensions, are treated equally. This is not addressed in the main report but is covered in section 2:

‘It is probable that different questions have different significance in explaining social sustainability, and there is as yet no evidence available that provides any rationale for weighting.’

Weighting will have to wait. Fair enough.

This is enormously thorough, detailed work, and further refinement could make it very strong. We will all have our doubts about some of the questions used but there's no doubting the soundness of the overall approach. Whether or not it becomes a standard tool as we strive to become a nation of housebuilders, it all adds to the drive to embed the factors of local social quailty of life in decision-making processes.

 

Immigration, mutual protection and communal endeavour

I was just scanning an old (2004) copy of Urban design and came across this in a note by Alan Stones reporting a study tour to Transylvania:

The ‘Saxons’ (who were in fact Flemings and Luxemburgers as well as Germans) were invited by the Hungarian King Geza II to settle in Transylvania during the 12^th century in order to help stabilise its eastern borders… The immigrants rapidly established an agricultural and trading economy, together with a network of substantial towns and villages that have a typically Central-European look.

Then in 1241 the Mongol hordes of Batu Khan swept across the country, destroying all in their path. When they departed, as swiftly as they had come, the Saxons response was not only to rebuild even more solidly, but to turn their village churches into fortified citadels within which the population and their livestock could take refuge. These walled and towered enclosures still stand today as monuments to communal endeavour. The Saxon villages themselves were laid out as regular plots along a main street, with each homestead comprising a house on the street frontage separated by a garden and entrance from its neighbour, and a smallholding behind.

Image of The fortified church of Biertan (via).

 

In the nabe-or-hood: an etymological excursion

‘the kids can’t get ice cream

cause the market burned down

and the newspaper sleeping bags

blow down the lane

and that goddam flatbed’s

got me pinned in again’

Tom Waits, ‘In the neighbourhood’ [Swordfish trombones] 1982.

There are nuanced ways of describing where you live, which may well reflect class differences – people who live on gated estates don’t call it an estate, they call it ‘community’. What does the American use of ‘nabe’ rather than ‘hood’ tell us?

Henry Grabar explores the history of the terms in yesterday’s Atlantic, uncovering for instance a 1922 reference to a ‘nabe gym’ as well as the more regular ‘nabe theatres.’ ‘Nabe’ predated what he calls ‘the back-end shortening of neighbourhood,’ which began with a Chicago gang in the 1960s.

It seems use of ‘nabe’ increased significantly in the 1990s, generally in connection with ‘wealthy and gentrified’ localities – places that were definitely not seen as ‘hoods’.

Discussing the origin of ‘hood’, Grabar observes that, to some,

the original sense seems to be lost, and perhaps irrelevant, rubbed away by time and frequent use. To others, no doubt, calling an up-and-came neighborhood a ‘hood’ imparts a coveted sense of black authenticity.

Perhaps if the differences between black hoods (remember the use of the word ‘ghetto’?) and white enclaves had been less pronounced in the US, this might have become a case of assimilation and we would have seen trendy gated estates referred to as hoods. Grabar senses that

the word ‘hood’ seems to be gentrifying nearly as fast as its brick and mortar counterparts.

The article is a useful reminder to pay attention to street culture for its linguistic innovation and power to reflect social contrasts. That doesn’t mean a kind of ‘no pressure’ irony attached to Plan B – yes, some of us might dare to harbour expectations of what the writer-rapper can achieve after ill Manors, but please, no assimilation.

Grabar concludes that

hood and nabe may be converging, but they don’t mean the same thing yet. The nabe… is a place you try to live. The hood is still a place you try to leave.

By way of a footnote, and to add a little European perspective on this excursion, here’s a wee curiosity about the etymology of ‘neighbour’ and ‘neighbourhood’. Although the former is clearly quite ancient – Chambers’ etymological mentions Old High German, Old English West Saxon, Old Icelandic and so on – the first recording of ‘neighbourhood’ meaning ‘vicinity’ or ‘environs’ (meaning an approximate place irrespective of residents) does not arise until 1577.

Of course, ‘neighbour’ implies a consequent neighbourhood, and the etymology reinforces it. The word neighbour (neah-gbur) meaning ‘near-dweller’ - or, in some interpretations, the person who tills the near (next) field - is etymologically linked to the word ‘borough’ (burh, burg), a bounded place of dwelling, which in turn has links to the meaning of stronghold, fort, mound (‘barrow’) etc. There’s even a slightly far-fetched link (Italian, borghetto) with the word ghetto.

Ah OK, maybe I should get out into the vicinity more.

 

Are London households being priced out of affordable homes?

Guest post by Kate Kennett. Kate writes for Affinity Sutton, a housing association that provides affordable homes through schemes such as part buy part rent mortgages. 

New figures from Shelter reveal worrying statistics that price families out of entering the property market in London. For most households the disparity between take home wage and cost of living is preventing them from saving up the equity to purchase a home, for others it’s the increased interests from overseas buyers pushing up the price.

These new figures revealed that for households to be comfortably renting a two bedroom home the total household income, before tax, needs to be £52,000. However the reality is that the average household takes home less than £35,000 in London. Furthermore in eight London boroughs, Shelter found that households would need to earn on average more than £60,000 before tax; this includes the boroughs of Islington and Tower Hamlets.

Nearly one in four families in London is now in private rental accommodation - a 70 per cent increase in private renting in the capital over the last two years, pushing up rental costs due to demand. This demand of private rental properties has helped inflate the price of rent in 2011 by 7 per cent, almost double the rate of inflation of the London average wage.

The spike in private renting is driven by the lack of affordable home ownership in London as well as overseas buyer interest and the long council waiting list for rented accommodation forcing more people to rent private properties, even if that rent is well above the affordable rent rate. This leaves many households at risk, with little money left over for other essentials such as food and clothing.

Overall Great Britain has some of the highest costs of housing in the EU, the third highest housing cost overburden rate with one in 6 people overburdened by living costs associated with the home. 

Whilst traditional avenues of home ownership are on the decline, housing association projects such as a shared ownership scheme or part buy part rent mortgages are playing a more significant role in preventing families being priced out of England’s capital.

The G15, the largest group of independent housing associations in London, are hoping to ease this burden on families by providing around six in 10 of the new affordable homes in London over the next four years, helping to ease the demand on the private rental market.

Some of the houses will be available for shared ownership schemes, whereby 25 per cent to 75 per cent of the property is available to purchase at market value and a subsidised rent on the remaining share of the property until the property is bought outright. A part buy part rent mortgage is typically a 5 per cent deposit on the share of property bought. Part buy part rent mortgage schemes help families build up the equity to outright own the property they are renting.

Inspire a generation?

Most of the country may have Olympic fever and people of unxpected shapes and sizes are starting a little exercise in neighbourhoods everywhere, but on an estate in Plymouth residents have received a letter from their housing association asking:

‘Please can you ensure that your children do not play football, ride bikes or scooters or skateboards in the parking areas or in the pedestrian areas around Alberta Close or Seven Trees Court.’

Yes the letter refers to pedestrian areas but a spokeswoman says ‘It’s about kids not being on wheeled toys where there are cars.’ I guess you can’t trust pedestrian areas any more.

Hopefully the housing association will heed some of the criticism, and creative things will result. But what interests me is, where does this negative attitude towards children come from? How do we allow it to persist?

Via CYP Now

 

Which is worse, unplayable streets, or no front gardens?

We have smaller households and more cars between us all (1.14 per household: some of my neighbours appear to be collecting them). A new report from the RAC Foundation shows that

‘the average car is parked at home for about 80% of the time, parked elsewhere for about 16.5% of the time, and only actually used for the remaining 3.5%.’

Each requires a parking slot at each end of each journey. Where should we put them all? Apparently about 80 per cent of Britain’s 26 million dwellings were built with a front plot. That’s nearly 21 million properties. The press release says that

‘Almost a third of these plots have been turned into hardstanding. This means seven million front gardens now contain concrete and cars rather than flowers and grass.’

But 25 per cent of vehicles are still parked on-street overnight, and this rises to a choking 60 per cent at the highest densities.

I don’t know how far it’s been heeded, but the government introduced guidance on the permeable surfacing of front gardens in 2008, noting:

‘From 1 October 2008 the permitted development rights that allow householders to pave their front garden with hardstanding without planning permission have changed in order to reduce the impact of this type of development on flooding and on pollution of watercourses.’

Recent research confirms that car use is rather more susceptible to policy influence than car ownership. But when the choice is reduced to having no front gardens or having unplayable streets, maybe it’s time for a behaviour change approach to this peculiar cultural obsession.

Previously:

Front gardens

More on front gardens

The right to an impermeable front garden?

Local democratic participation and parking

 

Hastings: scaffold and grim churches

Someone once described Brighton as the kind of town that is helping the police with their enquiries. The same or truer might be said of Hastings, a little further along the coast.

I’ve been staying a few days in St Leonard’s, a whispering-close co-conspirator of Hastings which behaves very much as Hove does to Brighton – with a slight sense of musty superiority that is cracked and peeling when you get close up.

Hastings has that delightful blend of the seedy discreditable and miss-handled style (clichéd as ‘faded elegance’) that rewards the curious. The wobbly terrain helps to spring surprises around corners and over crests. There are splendid, wretched old shop fronts and facades and front doors crying out for restoration, and a colourful sense of artistic optimism in stalls and studios between the charity shops and mini-marts.

But what has struck me most on this visit has been the most dominant feature of the built environment – the numerous dismal and ugly churches – and the rash of scaffolding.

Scaffolding seems to be the main industry in Hastings. As I look out the window from this flat I can see the confused geometry of standards, ledgers, ladders and crossbraces imprisoning seven separate properties, and two more from the back.

So many buildings here are four, five, six storeys high, and the coastal weather scours them relentlessly. But I’ve never noticed so much scaffolding before nor had so much cause to wonder about its effect. How does it feel to live in a neighbourhood with such a sense of ongoing maintenance?

In some places the frameworks seem to have settled in for the long term, with rust gripping the clips and guano accumulating on the boards. Is it more realistic to live like that, with a lasting symbolism of the ephemeral against your windows? Is there an architecture of permanent upkeep that I have been missing?

The churches are far more depressing. The range of architecturally inexcusable lumpy hulks across the town is remarkable. It must present a problem for the planners to develop any kind of vision, because for each church, tabernacle, or chapel, I suppose there will be a handful of defendants determined fiercely to protect their spiritual home for eternity and somehow keep it open, perhaps claiming a social role which the architects had forsaken. But the cumulative effect is to sour the conversation that the town is trying to have.

 

Community engagement and trust in government

A couple of years ago I was told a story about residents in a rural farming area who objected to plans for a wind farm, got very organised and vocal, and saw off the proposals.

My first reaction was to reach for the old quote from the days of Thatcherism – ‘you wonder if the middle ages will ever come to an end.’

Then more practically I reflected on the apparent likelihood that while the objection was presented as an argument against wind power – and it’s hard to sustain that argument for long – it was really an objection to surrendering certain rights to land and its value.

It seems that, while this farming-based network was sufficiently well-armed with hayforks and tradition to stomp up to the city hall and stop proceedings, they hadn’t worked out that the same community energy could generate collective income from the process and retain ownership. Oh, and generate renewable energy at the same time – although in this case that doesn’t seem to have been a consideration.

I was reminded of this by the news (via Planning daily) that the House of Commons science and technology committee says that giving communities more ownership of local energy infrastructure by offering shares in projects 'could be conducive to building trust and acceptance'.

You don't say? But there’s a catch. Here in one paragraph from the summary is how far the committee has come and, towards the end, where it’s headed:

‘Community benefits are an important way of building trust and negotiations can enable the public to feel a greater sense of control, choice over and ownership of energy projects. We encourage the further use of current community engagement processes led by energy companies, working with local government and the public, for building trust around nuclear new build proposals.’

What a falling off was there. You can get precisely the same effect with the next paragraph:

‘We were impressed by a citizen partnership model being developed in Germany for wind farms and suggest that enabling communities to feel more ownership of local energy infrastructure by offering shares in projects could be conducive to building trust and acceptance. Partnership models could form part of community benefits discussions for new nuclear build and other energy infrastructure.’

Well, if your government favours nuclear energy, would you rather have policy to promote it without community engagement, or policy that required it?

But it is hard to read this without suspecting that they want the phrases ‘community engagement processes’ and ‘community benefits discussions’ to mean ‘coercion’. We want people to have a say in deciding on what we want them to decide on.

The problem is that the closer that policy gets to ordinary people, the more barriers to trust it seems to have to build. In my lifetime I have witnessed how, first, people lost trust in government as detached-authority which did not see the need to consult; then how, more recently, government that consulted without engagement lost more trust where it had expected to gain it; and now I fear we are beginning to see how government adopting spurious ‘engagement processes’ will further drain the depleted reservoirs of public trust to critical levels.

 

Paint your street

Here’s one way to ‘make drivers move more slowly and expect pedestrians.’ From City Repair in Portland, Oregon. Brilliant. Take a few minutes to watch the video, which includes this quote:

‘One lady said she’s lived in the neighborhood for forty years, I had never even seen her before… I’ve lived here about 20 years.’

Via (of course).

 

Are there any community garden horror stories?

Last week, in a session I helped to organise at the Millenium Library in Norwich, Fran Ellington from the Grapes Hill Community Garden Group got me wondering if there are any negative issues at all with community gardens.

Of course, there can be instances of grumpy disinterest or even, as Fran told me, someone who resolutely tries to create obstacles. And there can be thefts or vandalism, usually overcome.

But hearing about what has been achieved in a project that stimulates social interaction, has inexpensive health benefits, is broadly intergenerational and intercultural, is not time-limited and never finished, and which improves the visual appeal of a neighbourhood, you really get the sense that success is more probable than in most other sorts of community initiative.

This is not to minimise the enormous effort, energy and people-skills needed to achieve something like this. But, I’m curious, are there any horror stories about community garden initiatives?

Meanwhile, the Social Life project asks, Should every development have a community garden? I wonder: supposing every development just left a neglected or ‘confused’ eyesore space, whose presence inspires or infuriates residents to do stuff themselves… That’s a sort-of ‘built-in-adversity’ principle of community development, and it isn’t always going to work. What counts, as was clear from Fran Ellington’s experience and that of so many others recently, is reducing the bureaucratic constraints and the negative culture in authorities that stops people from getting sufficient momentum when they have an idea.

Pavement chalking anarchy again

Oh dear, three year old Emerson has been chalking on the sidewalk (pavement to UK readers). Usually her drawings are of hearts and flowers, deemed by some neighbours to be 'distracting and offensive blights on their community'. It sounds like deliberate provocation.

Welcome to the neighbourhood of Stapleton in Denver. The homeowner's association says that

'anything that offends, disturbs or interferes with the peaceful enjoyment isn’t allowed on shared spaces... Neighbors have been complaining about chalk drawings like Emerson's.'

They sound a pleasant bunch don't they? Perhaps the sort of folk of whom Richard Sennett wrote, possibly before some of them were born, that they have

'so little tolerance for disorder in their own lives, and hav[e] shut themselves off so that they have little experience of disorder as well...'

Via Atlantic Cities.

Previously:

Pavement chalking: this time seen in a positive light

'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'

Pavement chalking epidemic?

Footnote on pavement chalking

 

 

Quality housing for homeless people

At first I felt quite stunned by this remarkable article in The Atlantic Cities the other day. Sometimes it’s good to be silenced by what some people can achieve.

The Skid Row Housing Trust develops, manages and operates homes for the homeless of Los Angeles. Increasingly, the trust is building its own developments. Buildings that do not look like the image of social housing that mostly we’ve learned to accept. The trust has got to the point where sought-after architects are working in partnership with them, with striking results.

Staff member Theresa Hwang is quoted in the article as saying:

‘Architecture really helps sometimes by showing it's not a 'homeless project,' it's not a shelter. It’s an apartment building.’

 

Seven ways to disrupt your public space

I distrust numbered lists of ‘rules’ or ‘laws’. In community practice and social policy we ought to have grown out of cheap commercial advertising techniques.

And apart from anything else I feel patronised by the implication that I am so stupid, these ideas that someone wants to sell me have to be reduced to a list I can carry round in my wallet and check furtively while I’m in the post office queue. (You bet my lips move while I'm reading it). Somewhere I have a draft of the Five Reasons Not to Bother With Silly Lists of Rules.

Having said that, ahem, yes I accept there’s often useful stuff to be gleaned, even wisdom, as in this case over on the Placemaking Blog:

1. Identify and eliminate your place’s persistent visitor pain points
2. Dramatically reduce complexity
3. Cut costs 90 percent or more: think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper
4. Make stupid places smart
5. Teach your stakeholders to talk
6. Be utterly inclusive
7. Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.

 

 

Locally grown

Local food webs are networks of links between people who buy, sell, produce and supply food in an area. ‘Local’ in this context refers to food grown or produced within 30 miles of where it was bought.

The CPRE has been working on a 5-year project England-wide and has come up with a purposeful, thorough and very readable report, with a range of case studies and guidance.

The report considers the scale and economic importance of local food webs in terms of jobs supported, turnover of outlets and supply chain businesses, and also their social and environmental importance.

The social consequences of local food provision are not given a great deal of treatment although they can be tracked elsewhere (e.g.). There’s a section on ‘Informal support to the community’ which notes, for example, the importance of deliveries as an extension of other local support provided by suppliers:

‘[We] often provide informal support, help out regular customers with problems, sometimes home visits, help carry heavy shopping. [We] serve as the hub of the community in many ways and offer first aid.’

The point is that someone has taken an authoritative approach to collecting the evidence, making the role of these food networks visible, and nudging policy-makers nationally and locally ‘to put in place the right framework so they can be nurtured and expand.’

Neighbourhood shopping parades

Localism is beginning to take account of the plight of many local economies, and at last we have a policy paper on the subject of ‘neighbourhood shopping parades,’ backed up by research carried out by GENECON. Let’s at least give credit to this government for putting some energy into this, and hope it contributes to a genuine holistic commitment to neighbourhoods.

Both documents offer definitions, but basically it’s about between five and 40 shops in one or more continuous rows, with a mainly local customer base and a high proportion of independent small or micro-businesses.

Mercifully, we're spared the rhetoric about such shopping parades being 'the heart of the community' (a claim routinely made for pubs, churches, libraries, post offices, parks etc etc). Local shops tend to be flexible and adaptable, and generate loyalty as part of or in addition to their social role - which itself is gradually and begrudgingly being recognised in policy: if policy had been more enlightened in this respect in recent years we might not have had all that nonsense over post offices).

Julian Dobson reports that Mary Portas popped into a meeting he helped organise recently about the future of high streets, asserting that 'social capital creates economic capital'. No, it may not be news to anyone (Jane Jacobs hammered the point 50 years ago) but it does often matter to have people in positions of influence restating such points to build momentum.

Local shops offer opportunities for entrepreneurs and new businesses, and for ‘interesting and innovative use’ of empty shops. And they provide opportunities

‘for other businesses to locate in parades that might normally be expected to be elsewhere, but are drawn to local parades for the convenience, the sense of a business community and attractive rents.’

In both papers, happily, it’s recognised that there isn’t necessarily any contradiction between a parade of thriving local shops and the increasing amount of time most of us spend online. Indeed as my colleague Hugh Flouch has been arguing for some time, the potential integration of local online with neighbourhood trade is rich and there to be developed.

At the same time, it’s important not to overlook the agonies that some local traders cause for residents sometimes. I remember a work colleague, years ago, wretchedly suffering interrupted nights and threats because of an anti-social taxi company. Smelly food, noisy crack-of-dawn deliveries, penetrating bright flashing lights, car oil or trash on the pavements – there may be lots of reasons why it makes sense to ensure community involvement in the management of neighbourhood shopping parades as entities.

In the strategy paper, there’s a section on councils working collectively with local traders in their interests and, by extension in most cases, those of local people. To be fair, I know many officers have always tried to do so, but may have been overwhelmed by powerful forces working in the opposite direction. Hopefully, that’s what might be changing now.

 

Parkscore

Parkscore, just launched in the US, seems like a sensible use of broad statistical measures to contribute to, rather than (as we tend to do in the UK) denigrate public realm management.

The system assesses parks simply according to their size (median size, and size as percentage of city area); service and investment - the per-resident spending on the park and number of playgrounds per 10,000 residents; and access (simply, percentage of city population living within a ten minute walk).

It’s published by the Trust for Public Land and news-blogged here.

Obviously it’s very limited. For instance, at least in the UK, a lot of pocket parks have social values way beyond their scale or level of investment. And there’s no attempt to incorporate any kind of user experience in the methodology, because that sort of data is expensive to accumulate and verify. I fancy Jane Jacobs might have harrumphed a little - although of course she paid a lot of attention to economics just as TPL seem to do in their work.

I quite like it as far as it goes, but as always it illustrates the danger of publishing an oversimplified methodology as a ‘score’ and issuing league tables. Will it do more good than harm?

(Via Urban Portal)

Woof woof wifi

How to incentivise considerate dog ownership...

Are dog owners going to be more inclined to scoop up after their pooches, if doing so generates free wifi in the park?

In Mexico City they’re giving it a try. The more substantial the deposit, the more minutes everyone gets. Do watch the video.

 

 

 

 

 

Yarnbooks

I'm a bit late catching up with this, but I think it's a delightful example of yarnbombing (via). As with other forms of guerilla art, it seems to work best when it draws attention to an inadequate built environment, with subtlety, humour and harmlessness. It looks like this one does the job.

 

See also: 51 victims of knitted (and crocheted) graffiti

 

The curious phenomenon of littering by waste bins

Does it seem odd to you that some fellow-citizens are sufficiently conscientious about their recyclable waste to take it all off to the neighbourhood recycling containers; but then they just dump it on the pavement? There was an example recorded in some detail over on the Kings Cross site recently (thanks Will):

‘Once in the morning I caught one man who also had just dumped his waste in spite of an empty container, and when I showed him that the container was in fact empty, he shrug his shoulders and walked apologetically off (leaving his waste though put). On this and on other occasions I have just taken other people’s rubbish and put it inside the container. It seems a task impossible to some.’

This contrasts nicely with a similar case that I reported in chapter 4 of Respect in the neighbourhood a few years ago, thanks to a picture sent to me by my Belgian friend Jan Steyaert. It shows a standard bottle-recycling facility in Antwerp, with the ubiquitous blue plastic bag on the ground alongside. At the front of the container someone has placed a board with a message painted on it, which reads in Dutch ‘vetzak verboden te storten.’ The English translation is: ‘Don’t leave litter you slimebag.’ (Subsequently I have thought that a better translation would be ‘you fat slob’). The language chosen by our Kings Cross correspondent is quite different. His note read

‘please insert the waste into the container out of neighbourly respect.’

In the book, considering alternative communication options for the person who painted the vetzak message on the board, at the end of a short list I added:

‘In a connected, networked neighbourhood, a comment posted online might have broadened awareness of the problem and produced a collective response.’

I suspect there may be other examples beyond Kings Cross and I’d be pleased to be told about them.

So this phenomenon of almost but not quite properly disposing of litter, what’s it about? Perhaps if you’re carrying stuff in the other hand, you might not easily be able to open the container. Perhaps you dread the stench on opening; or you don’t want to risk getting dirty hands from touching the handle or lid, if you’re off somewhere posh. Maybe you're confused about the separation of different kinds of waste so you'd rather it stays hidden in a single bag. Or you can't quite bring yourself to conform completely. Or you might think it’s easier for the operatives, as I believe they are called, to pick your stuff up from the floor rather than use the technology designed for the purpose. I’m struggling to think of any convincing explanations here.

Ok let’s suppose that some people are less comfortably acquainted with the idea of a public realm and public norms of behaviour, than others are. They have a relatively low level of Public Realm Awareness (PRA) – not close to zero, like the dickhead financier I mentioned recently, but low enough to appear a bit inconsiderate at times.

They know they have to take out their waste, but they don’t know how the system works, the system of behaviour in public. There’s stuff on the ground, and alongside it, theirs looks inconspicuous, and that’s simpler, so down it goes. It becomes part of an apparent routine process. I suppose one could argue that this behaviour, as far as it goes, is consistent with the public realm, not working against it.

The inconvenience can be absorbed, if such behaviour does not become too common. This might matter more than you think, given that we currently have a government which is keen to see a reduction in general PRA, being ideologically opposed to the notion of anything being ‘public’ in the first place. By reducing the public realm as much as it can, the government very seriously risks increasing the proportion of the population with low PRA. The technical term for this set of policies is 'stupid'.

 

Civic journalism, no messing

'Back in those days,' croaked Grandpa Harris, 'there was tales about something called multimedia, we'd never heard of the internet but people in huddled meetings would whisper about the political potential of 'self-publishing' and whatnot...'

In parallel gatherings, no doubt some educational and psychological theorists were muttering about the general contraction of attention spans.

Now try Alan Stanton's latest 14 second civic-epic on an all-too-familiar neighbourhood blight. And if you can take it, Disgusting II: the close up.

 

Pubs and taverns

According to the Lost Pubs Project, in the UK pubs are currently closing at an accelerating rate of 50 each week. While there's been a fair amount of froth around parliament (eg), acknowledging the implications and condemning the tied pub model, there doesn't seem to have been much to challenge the trend.

Apparently something similar has been happening in Chicago. This article suggests the problem is mainly down to the sheer bureaucratic awkwardness of getting a license. One commentator complains:

"Getting a new tavern license issued in a residential neighborhood is brutal. It's virtually impossible."

The problem sweetly illustrates the extent to which social value, publicness and local economies are intertwined. Perhaps policy makers everywhere could appreciate and value the role of pubs in stimulating local social capital, as well as their role in the local economy. Here's a start: Scott Martin who owns Simon's Tavern in Andersonville, Chicago, says that when he bought the place 17 years ago, he found a shoebox containing $80,000 in IOUs.

Previously:
More on local pubs
Why pubs need the CIA

High street blues

The government-led approach to regeneration through competitions and 'challenges' is becoming a flood-threatening piss-take. When I heard about the 'Portas pilots' - a scheme for twelve towns to bid to become 'areas with the vision and enthusiasm to breathe new life into what should be the beating heart of their communities' according to Grant Shapps - forget the dreadful rhetoric, I must have misread the amount available.

Not unreasonably, I feel. One million pounds each might have been meaningful, but not between the lot. If politicians and central government officials want to complain about the use local government officers make of their time, it's worth asking them (a) why they spend their own time coming up with incontestably crap schemes like this, and (b) do they or do they not expect a lot of officials to spend time developing bids that ultimately will not be successful?

Once upon a time we had policy and strategy on social issues, now we have 'innovation', 'challenges' and 'pilots'. Here's David Marlow's take on the government approach, from Regen & Renewal:

'the pattern of their approach to economic development has now been clear for some time. In default of a coherent strategy, they come up with an ad hoc announcement, with derisory funding, to give the appearance of leadership.'

 

Local democratic participation and parking

I sometimes wonder whether, in late medieval cities, there were disputes about where people left their carts. Car parking is a major issue in contemporary neighbourhoods, and inconsiderate parking infuriates people. Maybe some kinds of personality just get sparked by the very idea of public space, and always have done.

I’m not known for defending car drivers, but when you have situations where residents cannot get their own cars out of their driveways because others have left their vehicles in the way for long periods of time, you have to ask whether there’s a problem understanding that others have a right of access to public space.

A week ago I designed and ran a consultative process for a public meeting about car parking, in a large village on the outskirts of Sheffield. The material I had to work with included a lot of written remarks in open questions from an online survey, many of which suggested solutions and many of which consisted of repeated annoyance at inconsiderate drivers.

The process I came up with may have helped move things on. One reason is that most participants apparently were expecting a conventional public meeting in which councillors said something from the front, were shouted at by a few worked-up voices from the rows, and nothing much changed as a consequence. There were no rows (in either pronunciation) – the chairs were set around tables, people had the chance to shape their own agenda (and therefore found it hard to complain if the meeting did not discuss what they wanted discussed); they had the opportunity to augment and comment, in groups, on every live proposition as it was passed round, using pre-formatted sheets which included a street map; and they had the chance to vote, at the end, on preferred options to address the parking problem. There was no disruption. It was local participative democracy in action.

What was striking for me was the genuine sense of novelty among the participants, which I’m still absorbing. The sceptical might argue that just because some southerner comes in with an arty-farty creative approach, it doesn’t mean anything will change as a consequence. That remains to be seen. But I sensed from various comments afterwards that some people were grateful for a completely fresh experience of genuinely participative local democracy, which was, well, revelatory to them. That’s change, in itself.

The car resembles the traditional meeting as symbolic of communication confusion: it helps us to share some information (like status, power or detachment); in a car you can say ‘we’ve been through’ somewhere much as the conventional meeting ‘goes through’ an agenda. And cars really mess up interaction, and all the unseen benefits that go with interaction.

 

Pavements, litter and decoration

Pavements (sidewalks to some) are littered more easily than they can be inscribed, but the former can provoke the latter.

Be warned: using chalk to broadcast a message may seem harmless, but previous posts on this blog (see links below) have shown this not to be the case. Some people may more readily take offence at pavement chalking than dog mess or random chewing gum.

The image below is of artist Ben Wilson who paints on pieces of discarded gum. Apparently he was arrested, something British cops like to do if someone seems a bit strange to them. BBC video here.

 

 

 

 

Previously:

Pavement chalking: this time seen in a positive light

'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'

Pavement chalking epidemic?

Footnote on pavement chalking

Floor targets

Just trying to be sociable

"Previous research suggests that U.S. residents may use holiday decorations on their home's exterior to communicate friendliness and cohesiveness with neighbors. In the present research, we examine whether strangers (naive raters) can accurately identify the more friendly residents, and what aspects of the homes' exteriors contribute to their impressions. We also examine the possibility that residents who decorate for Christmas but who have few friends on the block may be using the decorations and other cues as a way of communicating their accessibility to neighbors. Participants rated residents based only on photographs of their home and front yard. Stimulus homes had been preselected to represent the four cells of a two by two factorial design crossing the presence/absence of Christmas decorations with the resident's self-rated social contact with neighbors (low/high). As expected, a main effect for the decorated factor indicated that raters used Christmas decorations as a cue that the residents were friendly and cohesive. Decoration interacted with sociability in a complex but interpretable way. In the absence of Christmas decorations, raters accurately distinguished between the homes of sociable and nonsociable residents; in open ended comments, they attributed their impressions to the relatively more 'open' and 'lived in' look of the sociable residents' homes. When Christmas decorations were present, raters actually attributed greater sociability to the nonsociable residents, citing a more open appearance as the basis for their judgments. The results support the idea that residents can use their home's exterior to communicate attachment and possibly to integrate themselves into a neighborhood's social activities."

Werner, C et al (1989), Inferences about homeowners' sociability: impact of Christmas decorations and other cues. Journal of environmental psychology, 9, 279-296.

 

The social life of pop up spaces

More ideas like this please, as described on the Placemaking blog - the New York City Department of Transportation has been partnering with local restaurants to install pop-up cafés in parking spaces. They offer a short time-lapse video of the use of one such space.

It raises a few creative questions. In what sort of locality would this work best? Obviously not town centre, but given the apparent expense and need for sponsorship, it's unlikely to happen in low-income areas or on peripheral estates. Probably it's best suited just off the suburban high street.

But could a sponsoring agency - perhaps a housing association with many suitable sites - have the portable hardware available for rent and delivered to estates at low cost, and the rest done by tenants' associations?

And what other legitimate uses can be squeezed into the idea without distorting it? Could you have a creche for some of the time? Could you have a volunteer bureau occupy a table there for an hour or two? Suggestions please.

 

Safe neighbourhoods: the role of design

Anyone who thought agencies like CABE were a waste of public money should look away now. In their current status as part of the Design Council, using material generated in their previous independence, CABE have produced a set of clear, directive briefing papers on Creating safe places to live through design. They are well worth spending time on.

There are six case studies augmented by a summary of lessons learned. The summary hits four main issues:

• Parking and problems associated with parking are 'a major source of neighbour disputes, anti-social behaviour and in some cases criminal damage and assault'. Issues discussed include paying attention to where visitors are likely to park.

• Design quality… Specific elements that need extra design input are:

'Corner properties – they are at greater risk of crime and need careful resolution to ensure they provide overlooking to both streets.
Avoiding situations that expose rear access to dwellings – all dwellings should be the right way around with fronts and backs resolved properly for every dwelling.
Ensure the movement network passes to the front (or if necessary overlooked sides) [of] dwellings rather than to the rear and is logical, fitting in with wider movement routes.'

• Management and maintenance strategies – noting problems resulting from the rise of buy-to-let properties owned by absentee landlords.

• Gating - 'strong perimeter security through gating is not a panacea for good design within a development. The highest crime scheme in the research was the only one that was gated.'

The image below comes from the case study of the gated estate. Never mind the fencing and gating, the door appears to have been designed so that we can all keep prison life firmly in mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(And what is that slit at the bottom of the door? Designed to make anyone delivering post bend down unnecessarily? Or is it a squat cat flap? Time to leave I think).

 

 

Pavements are for people

I recently mentioned the Living Streets campaign against pavement parking. By coincidence, clearing out some old papers, I just came across this little gem. It's 25 years old and appears to have been part of a national campaign, the leaflet being distributed with vehicle licensing documents. After that, everyone pretty much gave up I think.

Picture this

Thanks to a fascinating academic meeting this week about ‘researching contemporary communities,’ I was directed to this striking image based on shopkeepers’ countries of origin. It comes from an ethnographic study of the Walworth Road in south London, carried out by Suzanne Hall, an architect. The illustration is dated 2006. It neatly captures what Doreen Massey meant by a ‘global sense of place’.

I like this particularly because of the immediacy of the story it tells. Rather like Donald Appleyard’s famous (1981) drawings of local social interactions on ‘light traffic street’ and ‘heavy traffic street,’ you get the message straight away, and it confirms what you are already likely to know, so it’s more reassuring than thought-provoking or challenging.

 

Space in the home

BSHF have started some interesting-looking research into what constitutes a ‘decent’ amount of domestic space.

‘A range of different standards are used by central and local government to measure aspects of space in the home, like overcrowding and under occupation.  There is also a range of space standards available as guides for new housing development. But the assumptions behind these standards are not always clear. And there is little information on what the general public thinks is acceptable when it comes to space in the home, and what not.’  

 

Pavement parking: time for windscreen stickers?

As a pedestrian and experienced buggy-pusher living in an outer urban area that has a high car population, I'm pleased to see this: the good folk at Living Streets are cranking up their campaign against pavement parking.

I know parking options are a problem for a lot of people - inadequate housing supply often means several people in the same household who depend on their car (or think they do) for work, living in houses not designed for multiple car ownership. But there are two far worse problems I suspect - unnecessary use which suggests possible unnecessary ownership, and downright inconsiderate parking.

Because authorities have been so slow to crack down on the habit, it is seen as acceptable. What effect will the campaign have?

I suggest it needs universally available stickers issued to all buggy-pushers, wheelchair users and pedestrians with mobility problems, with a legend saying 'please show more consideration to pavement users'. The stickers could be applied to the windscreen and should not be too easy to remove: it should take at least as long for an inconsiderate driver to remove the sticker as it does for a buggy-pusher to wait for a safe moment to go into the road, around the vehicle and regain the safety of the pavement.

Another option of course would be a website with geo-located and time-stamped images - and forget that stuff about blanking out the registration plates.

 

Local open spaces

The National Housing Federation have published a new guide on Greener neighbourhoods:

This publication sets out ideas for developing partnerships and improving green spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of communities now and in the future. It presents a number of ways in which housing green space can be used and managed to facilitate local involvement and increase resident satisfaction.

The guide includes a useful short summary of a detailed literature review, Living green: evidence to support the provision of green space around social housing, carried out by Helen Woolley and Alison Somerset-Ward from the Department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield. At the time of writing I was not able to find it online.

 

Helping young people locate themselves

The other day I had the chance to tag along with what might have looked like just a bunch of loosely-supervised youngsters wandering about in the countryside. It happened to be one of the most impressive social inclusion projects I've ever seen.

On this particular day they were geocaching near the River Yare and finding out how the woodlands are managed, how the river is used, how lanes have changed over centuries, and so on.

There were half a dozen young people in care, aged between about 13 and 19 - at least one of them in a residential home, the others having varied histories with foster carers. Through the youth council and the museums service they were involved in a week-long programme of events exploring how the Norfolk countryside has changed as a consequence or cause of social change.

The project began last Monday with the participants viewing a series of dioramas at Norwich Museum, which represent recognisable Norfolk scenes. None of the dioramas features any human beings. One of them shows the wildlife on the marshland around the coast at Blakeney, a village which has grown around a number of cottages built from the local flint.

Visiting Blakeney themselves, the young people spent time reflecting on the kinds of people who would have lived there in the past, their livelihoods based on fishing; and on the kinds of people who live there now (the house prices are an indicator of the now-classic scenario in which less-affluent local people who have looked after their local environment for centuries are abruptly priced out of their area). I understand that there is little or no fishing based in Blakeney now, but there is a tourist industry based on seal-watching from nearby Blakeney Point. There are insights here about human involvement in the changing environment, which were readily absorbed and discussed by the young participants through the week.

Another of the dioramas features a 'loke', which is a regional term for a country lane enclosed on both sides by vegetation. Lokes would have been used heavily over the centuries, often marking parish boundaries, and might well have sunk gradually below the level of adjacent fields.

While I was there on Thursday, two or three geocaches were traced in lokes, and I was struck by the young people's appetite for knowledge about wildlife and landscape even while a series of treasure-hunting games was being played. When I was their age, me and my mates would have been relentless in our determination to disrupt the entire process, and I for one would have learned nothing.

All the same, I found the ease with which they mastered global positioning technology too much of a contrast with the difficulties these young people have faced and will continue to face in locating themselves. Unlike their settled peers, they are ceaselessly navigating through many uncertainties.

The subtle excellence of this project is worth dwelling on, at the start of national adoption week. They're still too rare, but you can find initiatives like this in the public sector - it might be through sports and leisure, museums, libraries, youth services or wherever - often with little recognition and against excessive management constraints. It takes exceptional people working in partnership with other committed individuals, all well beyond the call of duty, to bend those constraints and pull off this kind of programme. The benefits to the young people are almost tangible, but try telling that to the politicians and accountants.

As in previous work where I've been talking to young people looked after, I was struck by their easy readiness to talk among themselves (even though in most cases they had not met before) about the experience of being looked after. Much of the time they feel so different to other kids and cannot share that experience, so these occasions are particularly valuable, liked cached treasure.

It was enchanting to listen in on a conversation about globalisation and capitalism as we took our lunch on benches in a church porch (in modest reference to the protest outside St Paul's). And it's striking how sensitive they are to how others might be feeling. Mainly towards the other youngsters around them, but also to the adults. As soon as I joined them in the minibus I was offered sweets and as we wandered round I was twice asked by one lad I'd barely met 'You alright Kevin?' Yes, I most definitely was. I don't earn much doing what I do, but I have some extraordinary privileges.

Obesity? Diabetes? Move to a better neighbourhood

We know that neighbourhood characteristics influence health but we don't know quite how or how much. Here's a study which used a random lottery to give selected low income families a voucher to move to a less-impoverished neighbourhood. Apparently it shows that

'low-income women with children who move from high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods experience notable long-term improvements in some aspects of their health, namely reductions in diabetes and extreme obesity.'

Yes I think so too, it would be a good idea to start eradicating neighbourhoods characterised by extreme poverty in the first place. I can see how doing that might reduce poor health and therefore costs to the taxpayer.

It would be nice not to need studies like this, but in the meantime it's important to have the evidence. And I like the idea of the randomised study.

 

Locally global

Facebook fans amongst customers of a furniture store in Belgium are allowed exclusive use of a number of parking places at the company's stores. Will those who can't find a space go home and sign up, or go elsewhere for their stuff?

I guess the idea could become quite interesting if it gets generalised to local traders in a specific place; or if it were adopted in the public sector - a leisure centre for instance?

Right now, I'm curious to know whether the basic point is appreciated by all the prats who argued a few years ago that digital technologies meant the death of distance and that the local was no longer relevant.

 

Keeping an eye on surveillance

"CCTV usually achieves very little on its own, it needs to be part of more comprehensive security planning; it works much better in access-managed areas along with a guardianship presence, community support and a response capacity.

Policing, security and crime prevention are social relationships and if these are characterised mainly by division, mistrust and inequality, CCTV surveillance technologies are likely to exacerbate social problems and tensions."

Peter Squires, University of Brighton, in a European Urban Knowledge Network interview.

Running on the roof

'This particular interviewee explains in detail her love of running, and describes the geography of her neighbourhood, distinguished by a letterbox at the end of the road. Such are the gendered and social constraints imposed by other residents of the refugee camp, however, in a place where there is little privacy, that she is forced to run round and round the flat roof of her building instead of down the road, with her husband measuring out the distance in recognisable terms. 'Have I reached the post-box yet?' she reports herself asking, imagining that she is in fact running along the road outside her house, an activity forbidden to her because she is a woman.'

K.H.Adler, in 'Gendering histories of homes and homecomings', in this volume, referring to a video art project by Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal called Roofs: public private open spaces in the camp. According to this note the project was 'produced in a refugee camp in Hebron on the West Bank in cooperation with UNRWA [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency] and the University of Stuttgart.'

The image is from the Occupied Palestine blog.

 

Street art Bristol

Nelson Street in Bristol recently hosted an international festival of street art, with some huge works which must have been stunning from street level.

I always wonder a little about the flows of assimilation in initiatives of this kind. But in this case it feels like there is an honest distance between street art and graffiti. I don't see that the fundamentally anarchic, challenging nature of graffiti is really compromised.

What strikes me though in the material I've looked at is the absence of the voice of the residents of Nelson Street itself.

Short film here.

Parking solution

From Passive-Aggressive.

(Thanks Small!)

Odd names and ordinariness

It's hard not to be pessimistic about the fate of new-built neighbourhoods, just as it's hard to believe that any good will come of this olympics folly; but let's hope those in the Olympic Park will start out unlabelled.

Five neighbourhoods covering about 8,000 new homes have now been named as Chobham Manor, East Wick, Marshgate Wharf, Sweetwater and Pudding Mill. Not bad I reckon. Curious that all the winning nominators were male.

Among the comments on the BBC article, I liked this one:

'The choice of names suggests a welcome confidence in who we are as Brits; frankly Dickensian, underwhelmed by "progress", oddly charming (or charmingly odd), and rooted in the history of ordinariness.'

 

 

Stranger out there

As our society's long-awaited public crisis of privacy finally sets the politicians' alarms off, here are some thoughts on how the mixing up of private and public can cause odd behaviour. 

I was driving home from a conference this afternoon around 6pm, the roads busy of course, came up a hill in a single line of traffic and there was a car stopped on a corner near the top, drivers having to slow and take turns to pass. I stopped in front and got out, quickly learning what I have come to expect - the lady had been there for 'an hour' and no-one had stopped to help her.

I'm not the sort of person to be suspicious of the story I heard and had no reason to disbeleive it. Her father had died the night before, she'd panicked out of the house with an uncharged mobile phone and an empty petrol tank, and from the hospital was now on her way to see her mum

Two kids (and a hamster) in the back and no buggy, so although she had an empty petrol can, she couldn't walk to get it filled. I sorted that easily enough in less than fifteen minutes and they were on their away. So there I was a short while later back in the traffic now busier, with time to think about the possible stats.

Let's suppose the lady exaggerated how long she'd been stuck there, perhaps it was thirty minutes, not an hour. There had to be a minimum of 15 vehicles per minute going past in the direction of travel (and a comparable number in the opposite direction). Even if only a few contained more than one passenger, that's at the very least 500 hundred people - and probably coming on for 2,000 - who saw her, without stopping to help. I could have guessed it, but she told me and I witnessed one example - lots of drivers tooted their horns in annoyance and at least one shouted abuse. She was in their way and may have slowed them down slightly, and being very important people they had stuff to do.

Some human beings behave so oddly when they get in cars, I suppose because it's sharply defined private space in the public realm and that confuses relationships.

 

 

The assault on the public

When I was in France recently I was a bit shocked at the prevalence of private beaches, in a country which I had thought took liberté and égalité seriously.

Perhaps it will get as bad in the UK before long. I vaguely recall, but cannot find evidence of, an early Thatcher attempt or threat to sell stretches of the British coastline.

And I've been wondering, what will it take eventually to spark a serious debate about the nature of 'public' in this country?

The government's determined assault on what is public encompasses a scary disinterest in formal care services for vulnerable people; spiteful bullying contempt (especially from here) for local-elected bodies almost by definition; the washing of hands on policy for public libraries; the idea of selling off nature reserves; and the outrageous attempt to sell off publicly-owned woodland.

And we have a London borough apparently serious about charging children to use an adventure playground. That should get rid of the riff-raff. I daresay there are plenty of similar examples, as the Haves seek to drive home their advantage and accentuate what Geoff Mulgan described as the 'evident imbalance between private affluence and public poverty.'

The other day I was in a London square where I was told that you weren't allowed there if you were wearing overalls. Presumably if a worker is needed to fix something, he or she has to be brought in behind screens or under cover of darkness: the leisure of the wealthy should not be spoiled by the risk of catching sight of hoi-polloi. It was, presumably, pseudo-public space - privately owned, the developer having extracted from the local authority pretty much whatever they wanted in return for providing pavements and conditional access. Bless them, the London Assembly recently published a report which

'identifies a number of concerns relating to the shift in the ownership and management of public spaces from local authorities to developers, and recommends solutions.'

But last month's BBC programme about the street without services suggested to me that there is a lot to be done before people will join up the evidence of these various little skirmishes and recognise them as a war. How late is too late?

 

 

Mosaic tree of neighbourliness

A Berlin-based artist, Britta Lipka, has started a participation project to plant a mosaic 'tree of good neighborliness' in an urban public space. Don't be put off by the rhetoric of good intentions, I don't see why lots of people should not send pieces for the mosaic if they match Britta's design. It's not so much about neighbourliness as about widespread participation in prosocial symbols in the public realm, but why not? This project uses the internet and physical objects to involve potentially numerous contributors to public art. I look forward to seeing (evidence of) the results.

 

The sound and the fury

This time last week I was wandering about a town in the south of France, prospecting for somewhere to run the next day. I crossed a likely-looking bit of scruffy, half-finished park and resilient wasteland outside a new estate.

Music grew louder. By a gap in a fence on a dusty track I came upon a lad standing astride his bike. The speakers were attached to the handlebar, impressively loud really. He wasn't peddling, then suddenly he was peddling and the music was replaced by a torrent of complaint from a woman with a leash and a dog.

My french is not adequate to have followed the detail of her argument, but I wasn't going to take issue. The boy had left an empty biscuit packet on the ground. I couldn't tell if this was a one-off or a routine scenario they went through, but I was fairly sure it was territorial. I took the litter to the bin (the stench when I lifted the lid nearly took me out) while she gave me to understand her determination to accost the young man should she track him down.

The woman's volume remained high as she set off in pursuit. I pottered on wondering unfairly about the likelihood that she cleans up after her dog.

 

 

Public space: overseas thoughts from back home

Having referenced Hugh Schofield's thoughts recently on 'the fact French and other European societies are more socially-minded,' I spent most of the past week in southern France. I'm just unpacking and found a few loose thoughts about public space. I'm certainly not in a position to imply any conclusions about cultural differences, these are just reflections.

When I first went to France, it must have been about 1967, I remember commenting on the constant background sound of emergency sirens in urban areas. I'd make the same observation now, it's so dominant. Who knows, there may just be some connection to the extraordinary French appetite for minor road collisions: there were four within metres of me at various times over four days.

So it's a relief to observe that the French seem far less likely than the English to use their mobile phones while driving. I saw only one instance. In terms of offensive behaviour in public space, using a mobile while driving displays stark disrespect: it says unambiguously, 'my conversation is more important than your safety'. That's one reason why it's depressing to be returning to the British public realm.

Public space in England is mcuh more information-intensive. In France there are fewer advertisements and signs - in train stations for instance, which can be remarkably dull - and on the trains and buses there are far fewer announcements. If you get on an inter-city train in the UK you are bombarded with announcements, about your ticket validity, destinations and bacons burgers, along with concerted attempts to catch you out and criminalise you. When you look out the window at a station, all sorts of information competes for your attention. Perhaps it mirrors the difference in food cultures. In France, the public realm doesn't rush you.

And the more restrained approach to information provision may have subtle social consequences. If you need to know something, you ask - that is to say, you engage with others around you. Perhaps we have here an instance of Kev's Automatic Door Principle, which notes that there are distinct advantages to using technology to open doors for us: especially for people who use wheelchairs, also of course if you are overloaded with luggage; but automatic doors do not have to be held open for the lady with the stick just behind you, or for that bloke with the buggy just approaching. This is technology confiscating tiny social interactions. Information overload in the UK could be doing something similar.

Uninvited encounters on the street seem far less frequent in France. If I walk through a town in England I know I will be accosted by people thrusting pieces of paper at me, people asking me for money or opinions or time. It could be argued that this is an acceptable part of the bustle of the urban public realm. I did note however that on the one occasion last week when I was offered a leaflet in the street, the lady said 'Bonjour m'sieur' as she held it out: that reflects a fundamentally more respectful attitude to the Other's retractable right to privacy in public.

What else? Smoking and dog shit. Smoking seems still to be far more prevalent than it is in England, a phenomenon that continues to surprise me. Given that it's a great way of trashing your taste buds, how explain its popularity in a nation of people who pride themselves on taking food seriously?

It seemed to me that there is far less obesity in France. If nothing else, that helps make sure there's enough public space for everyone. But then I wasn't always looking around me because it really is necessary to keep an eye on where you walk. The ubiquitous ladies with lapdogs, they're probably the experts at negotiating the pavements.

Just as we've taken a regulatory approach to smoking in the UK, we also use the law against dog-owners who allow mess. Apparently not in France. Maybe it's just another of many apparent contradictions in the French 'vive la similarité' love-hate relationship with regulation and universal standards.

But having been away from France for some years, what struck me afresh was the sense of generalised respect in the public realm. When you go into a shop, you say bonjour, and merci au'voir when you leave. When you sit down on a train or get into a lift, likewise you acknowledge the Other. This was emphasised with perfect clarity for me on the train home, as a loud party of Brits got on at Avignon, oblivious to the way they disrupted others' space. I'm inclined to agree with Schofield, the French really are more socially-minded, and there are things we should be thinking about.

 

Local online network supports co-production: 'we don't expect to have to do this on a regular basis'

Hugh Flouch and I have been doing a routine for some time now talking about the way local online networks help residents to co-produce the quality of their local environment. Now here's a little gem of an example, from Harringay Online, the site which Hugh set up four years ago.

On April 18 at 14.13 Darrell Osbawn posted the following message:

'Fairlands Park is in a bit of a state. The Council knows about it and is organising some staff to come and empty the bins etc. However, there is a lot of small litter spread across the grass areas and rocks/sticks all over the play areas which the Council probably won't get. Is anyone interested in meeting at the park sometime in the next few days to spend an hour of so to help sweep the play areas and pick up the loose rubbish? If so, please send me a PM on here and we can organise a time to meet and clean.'

Less than two days later, thanks partly to the way social media helps people to organise informally, eight residents had turned out, filled ten bags of rubbish, notified the council to pick them up, and the job was done. Follow up is here.

Note the observation:

'We don't expect to have to do this on a regular basis. It was only necessary because the Council has/had not emptied the bins for 2 weeks.'

Subsequently it has been noted that due to recent public sector funding cuts the Parks Hygiene Team has been reduced from 15 to 5 persons; and the question raised:

'How can a borough be covered by 5 people, bins & litter picking?'

Neighbourhood environment clearly affects neighbourliness

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

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

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

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

Strikingly, the results were unchanged

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

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

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

What chance of some policy on second homes?

Shelter reminds us that 'there is a drastic shortage of housing in England'. There are approximately 252,000 second homes in England, and 288,000 long term private empty homes. Second homes are largely concentrated in attractive rural and coastal locations (including Cornwall and the south west, Norfolk, and Cumbria) plus the City of London. Beyond this regional trend, they are very much localised, with properties clustered in particular villages or neighbourhoods.

Shelter have published a new policy briefing which notes that evidence is mixed as to the impact that second homes have on local communities and housing markets, but

'Local authorities have limited tools available to mitigate any negative impacts.'

The paper notes that private empty homes could make a contribution to meeting housing need:

However, they are not spatially concentrated in the areas of greatest housing need and local authorities face challenges both in getting empty homes back into use and preventing homes from falling empty.

Among the recommendations:

• Council tax subsidies for empty and second home owners, which reward underuse of stock, should be abolished
• Councils should be allowed to charge higher rates of tax for unused stock and use the revenue raised to fund housing development.

Hands up who expects this government to grab this one with all four hands?