Learning from the Local: Developing Innovation and Good Practice in Neighbourhood Work
Final report:The Newtown Neighbourhood Project launched its final report at a conference Learning from the Local: Developing Innovation and Good Practice in Neighbourhood Work at Goldsmiths on April 15th 2008. The day event was well attended by academics, graduate students, practitioners and policy-makers.
There were four sessions. The first was entitled “Cohesive neighbourhoods or diverse neighbourhoods?” and chaired by Kalwant Bhopal of Southampton University. Michael Keith spoke as a member of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, looking at the three principles of the Commission: a shared future, visible fairness and an ethics of hospitality, and the Commission’s attempt to avoid “sleep walking into simplification”, in a way that some of Trevor Phillips’ and Ted Cantle’s interventions might have. Michael also set the scene for a discussion of localism in policy interventions, and its clear benefits, but also the disadvantages associated with the way the local can exclude, the danger of the neighbourhood as a new Bantustan, and the loss of a politics organised around the right to the city.
Professor Roger Hewitt, of the Centre for Urban and Community Research and author of White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism, spoke about some of his research in Kent and London, drawing on three anecdotes that demonstrated (a) the danger of “the transcendent truth of the liberal worldview” that comes into play when researchers assume they know better than the communities they study, (b) the futility of community research when researchers’ (and funders’) priorities mismatch with local priorities, and (c) the political complexity of the context of social research, which sometimes conspires to render it redundant.
Professor Marjorie Mayo of the Centre for Lifelong Learning and Community Engagement, spoke about the JRF-funded Fluid Communities/Solid structures project, highlighting issues such as the gaps between the “community engagement” agenda and the “community cohesion” agenda, the continuing importance of class in structuring both, and the positive potential of the ethic of visible fairness in helping to find a way through this maze.
Sue Lelliott of Real Strategies Ltd spoke on the Newtown Neighbourhood Project, giving an overview of the work, and highlighting some of its findings around social cohesion, such as the importance of starting with a focus on common ground and a shared future in neighbourhoods, as a way to make space for open, honest and safe local debates around unfairness, inequality, difference and exclusion.
The discussion raised the question of how to move beyond the stereotyped old language of “whiteness” versus “otherness” in the context of today’s much more complex “superdiverse” communities.
The second session was on “Neighbourhood Planning, Neighbourhood Management and Neighbourhood Know How”, chaired by Eamonn Dillon of West Kent Extra. Gail Weston of Hyde Housing spoke about on Neighbourhood Management models, looking at the roll of engagement and consultation in community planning and the importance of identifying residents’ own priorities, illustrating this with examples from Hyde’s practice in London. Genette Allen of West Kent Housing described the Neighbourhood Know How model, developed by the Newtown Neighbourhood Project, and building on earlier work by Real Strategies and CUCR in Kent and South London. Genette described the two stage process involved in Neighbourhood Know How: a period of intensive community research, where identifying local priorities is used as a community development tool, leading to an action phase. Genette outlined the six principles of Neighbourhood Know How: a courteous and community development ethos; harnessing residents’ own knowledge of their area; using engaging methods; a commitment to effecting real change – sustaining resident momentum and partnerships with agencies to do so; managing lead partnership publicity and local PR; and sustainability.
Discussion focused on who has the right to speak and act for residents, the question of whether RSLs are part of the private sector or part of the third sector (and the different values that spring from these conceptions), and the tension between RSLs’ income-generating aims and social aims.
After lunch, there was a session on “Working with people of Gypsy/Traveller origins in Neighbourhoods”. Dr Kalwant Bhopal (a member of the Newtown project’s Advisory Group) spoke about her work with Travellers and the role that gatekeepers play in such research, with those who “hold the keys” to Gypsy communities positioned as both insiders and outsiders in the community and thus rendered both powerful and powerless by research. Kalwant spoke about how this dynamic also plays out amongst academics studying Gypsy/Traveller communities. Dr Margaret Greenfields of Bucks University spoke about her research in these communities. Among her themes were the importance of verbal networks and “rumour mills”, how the “culture shock” of being housed persists across generations amongst housed Travellers, and the value of peer research as an empowering strategy for working with Gypsy/Traveller communities. On this point, Margaret described her methodology of using community interviewers (not all literate), accrediting and valuing their work, paying them, and putting them face to face with clients.
Debbie Humphry of Real Strategies spoke about the Gypsy/Traveller dimension of the on Newtown Neighbourhood Project. She described visual methodologies used to elicit data from young participants in particular on issues such as identity, showing how the participants moved in and out of different identities for various complex reasons. She drew out the implications of this for the cohesion debates raised at the start of the conference, showing how peer research (e.g. on local demography) can be used to gain a local understanding of fairness in allocation. However, she also cautioned against “sleepwalking into simplification” in the way the cohesion agenda is disseminated, sometimes slipping into an assimilationist model of integration which coerces minorities into mainstream culture – e.g. Travellers into houses, with the negative effects Margaret described.
During the discussion, a member of the Southwark Travellers Action Group raised the issue of what is done with the sorts of knowledge generated by such research projects, and who it is turned into action to address issues faced by Gypsies. This set the scene for the final session on “Participatory and Action Research in (and about) Neighbourhoods”, which brought together some of the practice questions developed through the day. Geraldine Blake, of Links UK, who worked with CUCR on the Local Knowledge for Local Solutions project which fed into the Neighbourhood Know How model, described some of Links UK’s peer research work in Newham. She spelled out reasons to do participatory research: because residents often know best, because everyone has the potential to be a researcher, because research and policy should always be with and never for communities, and because peer researchers can build trust with participants in ways outsiders often can’t. She described the shift in the last 5-10 years: now the value and validity of such research is far less frequently questioned.
Ben Gidley and Alison Rooke of CUCR, in the final presentation, returned to the principles laid out by Genette in the morning. Alison spoke about engaging methods, as simultaneously modes of resident/civic engagement and modes of data-gathering, creating (in the urban theorist Henri Lefebvre’s terms) both a space of representation – a space of imagination and identity formation – where residents as citizens can tell their stories and a “representation of space” through which residents can reflect together and create a shared narrative. She gave examples of the power of the visual as evidence, for example in maps created by young people on one CUCR project that showed their constrained space.
The discussion looked at the role of academics and “authorities” in this field, with Ben drawing on Les Back’s contention (echoing sociologist C Wright Mills) that residents are not always the experts in their own lives, and that the task of sociology is to help place private troubles in the space of public issues – a task that is not just intellectual but also always ethical and political.