The Future of Community

Martin Earnshaw and Austin Williams, Alastair Donald, Edited by Dave Clements

Description

We are constantly being told that communities are under threat, that we are losing a 'sense of community'. This book finds that the notion of community in Britain is actually threatened by the very thing intended to protect it; relentless government and third party interventions bent on imposing their own forms of social cohesion on the population.



There is no doubt that modern societies, underpinned by a ruthlessly competitive and individualistic economic system, have undermined ties of family, solidarity and commonality. However, when an idea of community is articulated it is almost invariably along conservative and reactionary lines - with unelected spokespersons unquestionably accepted as 'community leaders', and with formal contractual relationships taking the place of 'traditional' social order. The short, punchy articles in this book criticise attempts by the state and other agencies to correct the so-called collapse of communities.



This book is for students and citizens looking to get beyond the hysterical rhetoric of the government and media to find out about the real communities of the 21st century.
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Who needs Community Anyway? - Austin Williams

Part I: In Search of Community

1. Faking Civil Society - Dave Clements

2. A Green Unpleasant Land - Alastair Donald

3. Public Space: Designing-in Community' - Richard Williams

Part II: Constructing Communities

4. New New Urbanism - Austin Williams

5. Density Versus Sprawl - Karl Sharro

6. Salvation by Brick? The Life and Death of British Communities - by Penny Lewis

Part III: Communities in Flux

7. Strictly Personal: The Working Class confined to Community - Andrew Calcutt

8. Virtual Communities versus Political Realities - Martyn Perks

9. Minorities, Multiculturalism and the Metropolitan Experience - Neil Davenport

10. From Little Italy to Big America - Elizabetta Gasparoni -Abraham

11. Rio on Galway: Immigration on Ireland - Suzy Dean

Part IV: Undermining Communities

12. Communities on the Couch - Martin Earnshaw

13. Youthful Misbehaviour or Adult Traumas? - Stuart Waiton

14. Parish Pump Politics - Dave Clements

Conclusion: A Death Greatly Exaggerated - Alastair Donald

Notes on Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Urban

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 octobre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644082
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Future of Community

Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated

Edited by Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw and Austin Williams

PLUTO PRESS www.plutobooks.com

First published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw and Austin Williams 2008

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2817 1 978 0 7453 2816 4

Hardback Paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. The paper may contain up to 70% post consumer waste.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii

Introduction: Who Needs Community Anyway? Austin Williams

Part I: In Search of Community  1. Faking Civil Society  Dave Clements  2. A Green Unpleasant Land  Alastair Donald  3. Public Space: Designing-in Community  Richard Williams

Part II: Constructing Communities  4. New New Urbanism  Austin Williams  5. Density Versus Sprawl  Karl Sharro  6. Salvation by Brick? The Life and Death of British Communities  Penny Lewis

Part III: Communities in Flux  7. Strictly Personal: The Working Class Conned to Community  Andrew Calcutt

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The Future of Community

 8. Virtual Communities Versus Political Realities  Martyn Perks  9. Minorities, Multiculturalism and the Metropolitan Experience  Neil Davenport 10. From Little Italy to Big America  Elisabetta GasparoniAbraham 11. Rio on Galway: Immigration and Ireland  Suzy Dean

Part IV: Undermining Communities

12. Communities on the Couch  Martin Earnshaw 13. Youthful Misbehaviour or Adult Traumas?  Stuart Waiton 14. ParishPumpPolitics  Dave Clements

Conclusion: A Death Greatly Exaggerated Alastair Donald

Contributors191 Index194

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Acknowledgements

This book has its origins in the Future of Community Festival organised by the Future Cities Project and these essays have been developed from that early work. Our thanks go to the individual authors of these essays and to the speakers, contributors and participants at the Future of Community Festival with special thanks to Tricia Austin, Peter Cleak and Despina Hadjilouca of Central St Martins and Deirdre Malynn of the Cochrane Theatre without whose help the debate would never have taken place. Thanks to Frank Furedi, James Panton and Alan Hudson for their critical comments during the books early stages. We are indebted to Patrick Hayes, Richard Reynolds, Stephen Rowland, Michael Owens, Mark Charmer, Pete Smith, Astrid Kirchner, Shirley Lawes, Justine Brian, Rob Lyons, Jenny Davey, Joe Kaplinsky, Kumiko Shimizu and Maisie Rowe who in various ways made this project possible. Finally, we thank our publishers at Pluto Press.

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Introduction: Who Needs Community Anyway?

Austin Williams

Nowadays, politicians and pundits alike accept that societal ties have loosened and that consequently there is less cohesion in society. Since Putnam started the ball rolling, many commentators have accepted that there is a widespread ‘sense of civic malaise’ (Putnam 2001) arising from the unravelling of local social bonds and have highlighted the dangers that such societal fragmentation implies. While police chiefs suggest that ‘communities are under siege from a hardcore of antisocial, under-age drinkers’ (Bannerman and Ford 2007) the decline of community can be blamed on everything from the arrival of Starbucks (Daily Mail2006) and Tesco (Winterson 2007) to the use of the motor car (Lunts 2003) or the aeroplane (Russell 2008). Whatever one’s particular choice of causes for community’s decline, since the turn of the new millennium there has been a growing recognition in political and academic circles that there is a fracturing of trust and cooperation in people’s everyday interactions with each other. However, nowadays, not only are we concerned about the erosion of communities but we are prone to paranoia about complete societal collapse

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(Diamond 2005), or even about the end of civilisation as we know it (Homer-Dixon 2006, Lovelock 2006). Journalist Melanie Phillips, for instance, suggests that the ‘collapse of social order is a spiritual sickness’ (Phillips 2005). ‘Disillusionment’ and ‘disenfranchisement’ are the new buzzwords for our beleaguered inner cities, socially strained townscapes, and isolated and abandoned villages. Dystopia is in the air. Stories of teenage violence on the streets are elevated to the top of the political agenda alongside reports of community fragmentation, family breakdown, the decline in social mores, racial tension and a general lack of trust in social interaction. Newspaper reports dwell on the problematic nature of interpersonal relations, from the enforced isolation of private car journeys to the decline and fall of the corner shop. The so-called crises in local communities, virtual communities or ethnic communities are frequently discussed in economic, cultural and legalistic terms, but are increasingly given a psychological or pathological explanation. The UNICEF report in early 2007, which concluded that British children are the most disadvantaged in the developed world (UNICEF 2007), was taken as further evidence of society’s loss of direction and reinforced a sense of political failure to tackle longstanding social problems. Related to this sense of failure is the perceived irrelevance of the political parties and a palpable sense of scepticism from the public at large. With such a wealth of opinion on the nature and causes of these community issues, the government and its army of quangos show no lack of imagination about what to do about them. From anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) to promoting local identity; from constraints on urban sprawl to positive discrimination; from segregation to integration;

Who Needs Community Anyway?

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all of these discussions have at their core the idea that society needs to be reconstituted through rebuilding community, creating ‘active’ citizens and encouraging participation. The Community Service Volunteers’ ‘Make A Difference Day’, for example, is hoping to persuade more people to help rekindle community spirit by putting together ‘how-to’ guides for potential volunteers, with suggestions such as baking fair-trade cookies and delivering them to older neighbours. Another guide, entitledHow to Knit Your Family Together, shows people how families can knit blankets as a way of spending time together. While millions of pounds are spent on this kind of tosh, unsurprisingly there seems to be little sign of public enthusiasm for it. The problem is that while the desire for people to be engaged members of their communities is a sensible one – especially among commentators and policy makers – the laboured ‘engagement strategies’ on offer are rather limited and patronising. Formal targets for greater participation are seldom accompanied by questions about what one is participatingin, while official volunteering initiatives seem less about good will, and more about raising the volunteer’s self-esteem. Participation is everything; content, nothing. Grassroots or genuinely organic community associations are often treated with suspicion, or ‘channelled’ by the imposition of third party intervention, often aimed at changing or directing people’s behaviour. So, it seems that the parameters of the discussion are set: by popular acknowledgement, community is either under threat or has collapsed already and most commentators want to reinstate it. The debate, such that it is, revolves around how best to do this. In America, Barack Obama wants to play a part in ‘constructing communities’ while Hillary Clinton

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is worried about ‘fractured communities’. Back in Britain, Gordon Brown insists that immigrants should perform community work before being granted citizenship, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested that sharia law would improve community relations. The only thing that links these examples is the sense of cultural desperation and political trepidation felt by the speaker and the establishment bodies that they represent. For despite an apparent consensus that rebuilding communities is an essential aim for twenty- first-century politics, with hundreds of technical agencies trying to implement it, there are no clear ideas about what they are doing … or even what ‘community’ really means. For example, UK Communities Secretary Hazel Blears has announced a £50 million, ten-point action plan to promote community cohesion. It includes a Citizenship Survey to assess and define the problem that it was set up to address; and a cohesion web-based ‘one-stop shop’ where you can develop ‘cohesion policies or respond to cohesion issues’. It will include ‘new cohesion impact tests … a useful tool for “cohesion proofing” policies’ (DCLG 2008). I’m sure that I am not alone in holding out little hope for the clarity of purpose in Blears’s bureaucratic approach to social problems. In this way, ‘building community’ has become a fetishistic issue for all tiers of government. It is just one of those management objectives that has to be ticked off. One local authority has identified the ‘importance of the Community based Community Cohesion agenda and the role that Community Associations play in the Community’ (Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council 2005). The Labour government encourages ‘building the capacity of communities and community based organisations to deliver the informal, flexible services communities need and to engage in delivering