on urban communities

Yesterday was the launch of another Demos publication on the task of re-energising civic participation, Start with People. I attended the launch seminar, with DCMS Minister David Lammy MP, which Kevin Harris has written about.

I made the suggestion that there seems to be a growing gulf between many people's view of what constitute acceptable forms of community and cultural participation, and the Government's legal stipulation of what is permissable. For instance, the use of soft drugs, boot-legged goods, pirated content, informal or black markets, and participation in types of 'anti-social activity' are growing, while the law desparately tries to stamp them out. New surveillance and policing techniques move further towards micro-disciplinary activities (bus lane cameras; ASBOs; zero-tolerance on grafiti; stipulations of what parks are 'for'), making the law more and more of an inconvenience, and less and less of a moral force. All the while, those promoting what David Lammy called 'pro-social activities' preach the benefits of participation and community, while leaving it implicit as to what happens when such spontaneity strays from a predefined moral path.

Thinking more about this, I wonder if the following thesis might carry. The Government wants to promote three separate goods, but unfortunately it can only have two of them: urban renaissance, active communities, and law and order. The viable combinations might look as follows:

• Urban renaissance/law and order: this is effectively the Giulliani strategy, in which the middle classes were attracted back into lower Manhattan through zero tolerance policing, and a stamping out of the forms of community and participation that previously made them unappealing. Lower East Side Manhattan looks as urban as it ever  has, in terms of its architecture, in fact it is now a pastiche of an urban ghetto thanks to the Strokes fans dressing like hobos. But it has been socially cleansed, and it is hard to conceive of it sustaining meaningful social capital, in the sense of sustained networks on which the local economy and neighbourhood depend. A more depressing example would be gated communities themselves (e.g. Limehouse, East London).
• Law and order/active communities: this is suburbanisation, the flight from the inner city in favour of neighbourhoods that are safe and welcoming. The communities may not be all that 'active', given that there is little at stake in how the networks operate. Financial security is largely assured, and the networks that do operate are there to uphold security, property prices and prevent change (i.e. nimbyism).
• Urban renaissance/active communities: it would be silly to suggest that urban communities have inbuilt criminal tendencies, but it is plausible to suggest, I think, that for a 'community' to exist inside a 'city', it has to develop its own operating rationale that is out of step with the established social rules. After all, there are some urban theorists (such as Sennett, in The Fall of Public Man) who view the concept of community as positively anti-urban. Urban sociology, which began in Chicago and from where the concept of 'social capital' developed, has focused heavily on how immigrant communities sustain themselves in far larger, multicultural connurbations. Where, for instance, Irish, Chinese, Polish and Ukrainian communities all attempt to survive in adjacent neighbourhoods, social capital would become a support mechanism through which identities could be sustained, and labour markets and products managed in the interests of the community. For a community to be genuinely active inside a city, it does so through creating its own set of norms and rules, otherwise no trust or respect is possible at all. 'The Law' represents a set of norms and rules for tens of millions of people, not for a community of a few thousand. Urban communities are not inevitably criminal, but nor can they survive (or indeed have any purpose at all) if they are not allowed to create their own informal systems of governance and trade.

New Labour can have two of the three. It cannot have all three, but certainly won't tolerate the third combination above.

Comments

[Kevin Harris]

Nicely put. Is there a study of the Giuliani effect that looks at diversity/homogenisation, I wonder?

I've often thought that the problem I have with new labour is that it tries to make us believe that elitism and socialism can go together.

[Phil Edwards]

This is interesting, but I think you need to push a bit harder on 'active communities'. The example you give of a 'law and order'/A.C. combination is suggestively tenuous (The communities may not be all that 'active', given that there is little at stake in how the networks operate). In the first and last parts of the post, in fact, you're tending towards a definition of the A.C. which is actually incompatible with 'law and order' (another term that urgently needs unpacking - "diffuse social control"?).

In practice, I don't think there's much ambiguity. New Labour are all about the Giuliani (or Bluewater) option, commerce-friendly 'urban revival' underpinned by 'law and order'. The question is whether anything recognisable as an 'active community' policy can sit alongside (and moderate) those two imperatives - or whether the A.C. vision is actually antithetical to one (or both) of them, in which case it can't rise above the level of window-dressing.

[Hana Loftus]

I think you're absolutely correct - a sanitised version of what an active community might be is really a contradiction in terms - especially as (I feel) communities are confident enough about what it considers to be its own moral/ethical boundaries for action and will ignore the 'legality' or otherwise (flash mobs, warehouse parties, informal market trading being classic examples.)

The question is of course whether there is a method of policing that is also more participatory and can deal with these fringe activities without condoning crimes that are truly unacceptable. The self-policing of internet communities is perhaps interesting in this regard. And I think your point about 'what parks are "for"' is one of the most crucial aspects of how we view, and design, our public spaces - for inclusivity and provocation pace Jane Jacobs/Richard Sennett, or for exclusivity and blandness pace (I would argue) New Urbanism.