“It could be that the neighbourhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change. If you’re trying to improve lives, maybe you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighborhood, in a systematic way, at a steady pace.”
—David Brooks
One of the signature facts of the internet age is that distance is not dead. Place matters as much as ever. The neighbourhood, in some ways, is small enough to be tangible for people, such that they can mobilise, yet big enough to implement policy schemes that can be significant enough to make a difference and spread. Empowered, active and participatory neighbourhoods, devolved power and resources can boost levels of civic engagement, help rebuild legitimacy, trust, make bureaucracies more responsive and develop deep sources of social and civic value. When done poorly they can lead to mistrust, growing inequality, failing public services and conflict.
The coronavirus pandemic has affected the work, family, health and personal lives of us all. For many, this has meant a turn towards community, to their local area – and to neighbourhood. Emerging evidence is confirming the efficacy of decentralised, local, people-led approach to health outcomes and more. The pandemic creates an opportunity to refocus attention on the quality of life at the neighbourhood scale. Emerging evidence and experiences are already making it clear we must revisit the crucial role of neighbourhoods as mixed-use, mixed-income and intergenerational spaces, ripe with resources and access to infrastructure for the transitions ahead. Despite the obvious need for rapid action to protect public health in this pandemic, we should note that the decisions we take today will stay with us for a long time. The neighbourhood scale offers a scale of analysis and action both big enough for transformation in action and small in enough to put neighbours and communities at the centre of what lies ahead for them.
Neighbourhoods shape routine and quality of daily life in multiple ways. They are the place where you can bump into someone, connect, organise, celebrate and more. However, it isn’t just about the day-to-day. In his recent book Palaces for People, Eric Klinenberg reiterates what we already know widely: that outcomes and life expectancy can vary greatly depending on the services and social infrastructure you find in your community.
Klinenberg gives the example of a lethal heatwave that struck Chicago in 1995. He asked how two adjacent poor neighbourhoods on the South Side, demographically similar and presumably equally vulnerable, could fare so differently in the disaster. He asks, why did elderly victims in the Englewood neighbourhood lose their lives at 10 times the rate of those in Aubern Gresham? The exploration goes deep into the differences in social capital, and the social infrastructure to enable that social capital to flourish. In the neighbourhood with few fatalities, people checked in on one another, knew where to go for help. In the other social isolation was the norm, with residents more often left to fend for themselves.
Crucially, these were not cultural or economic differences, but related to density of spaces, social infrastructure, shops and vacant units along streets, which either helped or harmed people in getting to know their neighbourhoods. This has been further reiterated in Local Trust’s recent research in comparing outcomes in economically similar areas, with large disparities in outcomes where this social fabric and civic life thrived, compared to where it didn’t. This isn’t just about buildings, but it is clear that convivial space, as well as a range of other interconnected factors, are not only a nice-to-have, but can be a case of life and death in times of crisis.
As Klinenberg observes “when hard infrastructure fails, it can be the softer, social infrastructure that determines our fate”.
Are our neighbourhoods resilient to the future that is emerging? We believe the neighbourhood to be an exciting, legitimate, creative and tangible unit of change, if designed with intention, care, generosity and our future structural risks at the forefront of our minds, building upon the long history of neighbourhood level work in the UK.
Inspiring examples of what the future could look like surround us, with just a few shown here:
These are just a few neighbourhood level local experiments forming part of a global movement. The future will be a portfolio of investment at a range of scales, and through the intentional design of these systems of intervention we can start to make real influence at the neighbourhood and city level. We know that investments such as this can act as community anchors, as local economic multipliers, and create value that is captured in a range of ways that often isn’t curricular. To do this we must upgrade our financial instruments to enable this inclusive, regenerative economy to flourish, something we explore in more detail in our regenerative business case.
CIVIC SQUARE | A Regenerative Business .pdf
There is a need for an entirely new class of platform organisation that can tackle the tangled complexity described previously. They need to be connected to a city-wide, national and global movement of communities working in this way to shift the dial on our imminent threats. Our experiences of growing civic systems labs and movements at Impact Hub Birmingham show us just how possible and tangible people being placed at the core of systems change is. This urgently calls for visible, open, and legitimate spaces that enable active participation.
Physical spaces act as places in which to convene change agents, citizens, nonprofits, corporations, small businesses, start-ups, and institutions, in which to host the voices of the community, and to match collective action with complex needs. Indeed, these spaces need to be shared institutions in themselves – a new type of civic asset that we have long referred to as Town Halls for the 21st century. We need to recognise that people are motivated by different things, depending on who they are and what they do. We have learnt that movements are not only built by the clarity of the mission itself, but also by the quality of the invitation to take part, and the conviviality of certain moments and places. People, driven by natural curiosity as well as by scepticism, will join in with emerging activities depending on how convincingly they are invited to take part and participate.
We need a next generation of platform organisations and convivial spaces in our neighbourhoods that create settings and events, as well as a broader culture that feels inclusive to all, forward-looking, well-organised, and authentic to allow for sense-making, joint exploration and building a culture of experimentation, as well as physically enabling it. Such spaces would fill some of the holes left by the high streets and our eroding public and community venues, and help to imagine new futures for our social infrastructure. For example, the R-URBAN project, set up by Parisian urbanist practice Atelier d’Architecture Autog.r. and with a London pilot hosted by Public Works, invites local people to be part of a radically sustainable future driven by key activities such as local food production, distributed renewable energy production, and closed-loop material flows.
This is by no means an easy proposition to undertake, particularly in the relatively deprived areas where the pilot runs. Therefore, the project has taken care to create physical settings for this that are as beautiful and aspirational as they are welcoming and low-threshold.
Far from spaces with a heavy-handed message, the R-URBAN pilot spaces have been crafted as a new type of urban commons: attractive because they offer useful resources, and because they are great to hang out in and meet. The broader message and invitation to participate is adopted gradually through the convivial feel of the terrace where you enjoy the day, the events and music nights that bring in people who otherwise may not have been interested. This in turn builds the legitimacy that a space and a movement needs in order to carry out its longer-term mission.
Examples can be found far and wide, with just a few given here. Connecting such examples up, spreading paradigm shifts, language, practices and learning, and influencing policy at the local and national level will be some of the steps towards a brighter future.
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