Going Local

Working in Communities and Neighbourhoods

John Pierson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134277162
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medicine
• Categoría: Health Care Delivery

Going Local explains how social work students and practitioners can develop approaches to neighbourhood work, to engage communities and neighbourhoods more purposefully and to work with citizens and other mainstream and community service providers to build the capacity of neighbourhoods to tackle social problems on their own. Each chapter includes objectives and key points, as well as case studies and activities where appropriate, and the topics discussed include:

• what we can learn from past social work practice
• principles, skills and tools to enhance local working
• joined up practice
• care and services for children, families, young people, older people and other vulnerable adults
• social cohesion and the role of practitioners in overcoming local religious and ethnic division.

Going Local will appeal to practitioners working in neighbourhood based services, and is essential reading for students of social work, youth and community work, and probation work.

CHAPTER 1
WORKING IN COMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBOURHOODS

OBJECTIVES By the end of this chapter you should: Understand why neighbourhoods and communities are essential arenas for practice Be familiar with definitions of ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ Know the research findings on ‘neighbourhood effects’ – how neighbourhoods impact on service outcomes and people’s well-being Be familiar with the major community and neighbourhood focus of government policies for public services Begin to think how social work and social care practice can adapt in order to engage communities and neighbourhoods.

DEFINING ‘NEIGHBOURHOOD’ AND ‘COMMUNITY’

Throughout this volume the terms ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ are sometimes used together, sometimes separately. The reason for this is partly pragmatic: both terms are widely used in policy documents issued by government and by research and social care practitioners. Although there are differences in emphasis and attributes at one level both concepts convey the same idea – that of a spatial environment, a bounded locality in which people may or may not feel some sense of affinity, attachment and recognition. Neither term is used in this volume in ways that assume the existence of rosy, street-level relationships in which neighbours are in and out of each other’s homes bringing good cheer and support. But as we shall see, while contemporary use of the terms ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘communities’ no longer evokes an earlier golden age that itself was overblown, the terms do have qualities and assets as spatial entities that social workers need to focus more clearly on: social networks, housing environments, institutions such as schools and places of worship, and community organisations.

‘Neighbourhood’

For most people ‘the neighbourhood’ means the small area immediately around where they live, while ‘neighbours’ are those who live in households nearby with whom social relations, by no means always close, are generally based on face-to-face contact. But in government policy and practitioner thinking about spatial environments ‘neighbourhood’ is generally used to denote far larger geographical areas than is commonly understood by most of us. There are several rules of thumb used to define neighbourhoods in this larger sense. Some of these are: an area mapped out by how far a person can walk in any direction in 15 minutes; an area defined by landmarks as recognised by most residents who live near them; common boundaries established by roads or housing tenure; political ward boundaries or areas with an historical identity such as parishes. These in turn often reflect population clusters and natural boundary points, street patterns, housing tenures, social networks – all important constituents of neighbourhood definition. The neighbourhoods referred to in this volume are often defined by a mixture of these and may embrace 3,000 or so households with perhaps as many as 6,000 residents.

Local communities were defined by urban sociologists early in the twentieth century, particularly in the US, as ‘natural areas’ that developed as a result of competition between businesses for land use and between population groups for affordable housing. A neighbourhood was a subsection of this – ‘a collection of both people and institutions occupying a spatially defined area influenced by ecological, cultural and sometimes political forces’ (Park 1916 cited by Sampson and Gannon-Rowley 2002:445). Suttles expanded Park’s definition to include imposed boundaries and argued that a local community is not a single entity but rather a hierarchy of progressively more inclusive residential groupings, within which neighbourhoods sit (Suttles 1972 cited by Sampson and Gannon-Rowley: 445).

BOX 1.1: DEFINITION OF ‘NEIGHBOURHOOD’ AND ‘COMMUNITY’ Neighbourhoods ‘are an ecological unit that are nested within successively larger communities. There is no one neighbourhood, but many neighbourhoods that vary in size and complexity depending on the social phenomenon of interest and the ecological structure of the larger community. This idea of embeddedness [emphasises] that the local neighbourhood is integrally

linked to, and dependent on, a larger whole. For these reasons, one can think of residential neighbourhoods as a “mosaic of overlapping boundaries…”’. (Sampson 1999:248) ‘Communities can be defined as a group of people sharing values and institutions; specifically, some social meaning as well as some organisational structure must connect the individuals to the community. One important component of a community is that it has a sphere that provides a method for production, distribution and consumption of goods and services’. (Bracht 1999:31)

‘Community’

The concept of ‘community’ has an even more complicated set of meanings; indeed, the concept of ‘neighbourhood’ evolved in policy parlance partly to replace the difficulties that the ubiquitous use of ‘community’ presented. As a term, ‘community’ emerged very much in opposition to ‘society’. It began to be used in something like the way we know it in the nineteenth century, when it came to signify the closer interpersonal relationships that were thought to exist between people in localities. It stood for the informal bonds and connections existing between people in opposition to the kinds of impersonal, alienated, instrumental relationships that characterised mass industrial society.

Critics of ‘community’ over the last thirty years have sought principally to demystify the concept and to ensure that the sense of togetherness that the word seemed to imply is submitted to careful analysis. An earlier generation of community studies had built up sociological models in which local working class residents shared the burdens and pleasures of living in close-knit terraced streets or mining towns and responded to the rhythms of the mass industrial age: the factory whistle, chapel, wakes, friendly societies and informal support networks among extended families and friends (see for example Young and Willmott 1963). Geographic proximity or locality was the overarching criterion, marking out communities as varied as the East End of London, middle class suburbs, working class districts of manufacturing towns, council housing estates, mining villages. All were relatively homogenous in ethnic and social class makeup with residents holding similar values regarding faith, individual behaviour, family norms and even political views.

Much contemporary analysis of community has moved in the other direction, arguing that there is no such thing as ‘the community’ in the sense of a single community of people occupying a single geographical space. To speak of such is to privilege the customs and values of a dominant group and to pretend that this one set of values, perspectives and opinions represents the views of all groups within that geographical area. Rather, this critique runs, there are many communities within any given geographical space, each based on different values, different ways of looking at life, and different definitions of well-being. Communities may be formed for example around faith, ethnicity, language, culture or more particularly around disability, sexual orientation and age.

There are also critics who argue that the very fabric of community is weakening. The diversity and mobility of resident populations, the thinning of social networks, the demise of the extended family and the decline in volunteerism have undermined all community orientations, making any policy and practice based on a community focus difficult to sustain. This critique is largely associated with postmodernist thinkers and sociologists who argue that an age of total individualism is upon us in which all social connection is suffering (Beck 1992; Bauman 2001). There are also important commentators who argue that it is supremely unfair and counterproductive to base an entire social policy on asking local ‘communities’ to tackle huge social problems such as exclusion or lack of public safety from their own eroded local resources (Rose 2000).

Other observers prefer to point to communities of interest, which may be locality based but may also exist across large distances. Communities of interest are the result of ties and networks across space and time. They consist of people who have one or more elements of life in common, whether tasks and responsibilities, values, politics, sexuality or faith. Virtually any common commitment or motivation can link some people with others and provide the basis for a community of interest. Churches and mosques are good examples: their members may be drawn from the immediate area in which they are located but equally they may be called from across a large metropolitan or even regional district.

Criticism of ‘community’ can go too far. Geographical communities and neighbourhoods are more than simply geographical space. They contain institutions such as schools, pre-school care and education sites, churches, mosques and synagogues, shops, health centres, local offices, libraries, sports facilities, public transport and community centres. Residents in any given area do live in proximity to each other and will have some sort of relationship, whether supportive, indifferent or even antagonistic. Geographical communities generate associations of many different kinds – horticultural clubs, tenants’ and residents’ groups, football teams, PTAs and support groups. They embrace a range ...

Índice

• the social work skills series
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• ACTIVITIES
• BOXES
• CASE STUDIES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 WORKING IN COMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBOURHOODS
• CHAPTER 2 UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY PRACTICE
• CHAPTER 3 COLLABORATION AND PARTNERSHIP: DELIVERING JOINED-UP SERVICES IN NEIGHBOURHOODS AND COMMUNITIES
• CHAPTER 4 ENGAGING COMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBOURHOODS
• CHAPTER 5 NEIGHBOURHOOD SERVICES FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES
• CHAPTER 6 MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR: COMMUNITY-BASED SERVICES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
• CHAPTER 7 COMMUNITIES THAT CARE: DIGNITY AND WELL-BEING FOR OLDER PEOPLE
• CHAPTER 8 BRINGING COMMUNITIES TOGETHER: OVERCOMING FAITH AND ETHNIC DIVIDES
• CHAPTER 9 DISCUSSION ON THE ACTIVITIES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX