Regeneration Game

Steve Broome, director of research at the RSA, asks how we can gain a better understanding of community networks and capitalise on a predicted upturn in the overall stock of social capital during the current economic downturn.

The decline in membership of and trust in some of our older institutions is well documented. With the reduction in the number of us joining political parties, churches and trade unions is a corresponding loss of traditional stocks of social capital. To some extent, this is being replaced by more individualistic forms of social capital such as single issue campaigns (environmental groups, for example). These replace face-to-face social contact with less tangible connections and commitments, such as direct debits and virtual networks. The form of this change varies, however: Australia and the US, with the UK seemingly following, are experiencing what David Halpern, director of research at the Institute for Government, calls ‘egoistic individualism’ and its consequent fragmenting effect on society. Other countries, such as Sweden, are seeing what Bo Rothstein, professor of political science at Gothenburg University, calls ‘solidaristic individualism’. This constructively allows for individual expression that maintains social ties. In this model, people support each other while recognising their differences, and expect support back for their own individual interests and objectives. But even here, there is a sense that these looser social connections may not allow for collaboration towards shared goals as easily as traditional forms of organising and acting together.

So one problem appears to be not individualism per se, but the particular form it takes and the level to which it dominates. Experimental research by Austrian economist Ernst Fehr suggests that, in fact, most people are ‘conditional altruists’: they will cooperate if they believe others will reciprocate, which connects to Rothstein’s concept of solidaristic individualism. But of course, populations are diverse and contain their share of ‘egoists’, who tend not to prioritise collaboration and strongly influence the likelihood of others cooperating. Analytical sociologist Peter Hedstrom shows that, with just 5% of a population acting as ‘egoists’, social interaction effects between them and conditional altruists can lower the rate of overall cooperation in a network by about 40%. He therefore suggests we should always see our outcomes as the product of individual actions taking place in social networks.

The RSA subscribes to this network analysis. Based on this, and ideas presented to us by Fellows, we are now working to develop more integrated and sophisticated ways of understanding social change and addressing social issues. Over the next year, we will be working to better understand the impact of networks on social outcomes at the individual and neighbourhood level and how we might encourage and enrich them for social progress.

A new approach to community regeneration

The design of area-based initiatives over the past few decades, from City Challenge through the Single Regeneration Budget, culminating in New Deal for Communities (NDC), has increasingly put communities at the heart of the regeneration process. Partnership approaches to social change involve what cultural theorists would see as the three active modes for social relations: the hierarchical, the individualistic and the egalitarian. Indeed, these different modes of operating are a characteristic feature of NDC research, problem solving and decision-making. It is a model that our own action research will build on.

Here I should come clean about my own bias: before joining the RSA I worked on an NDC programme for four years and am often asked if this approach has been a success. It is of course notoriously difficult to evaluate programmes of this kind given their complexity and the amount of external noise that obscures cause and effect. Nonetheless, I believe we can draw several top-line conclusions.

Firstly, there are many successes. NDCs are peppered with innovations. New Cross Gate Trust, for example, where we will be launching our first Connected Communities action research project, established itself as a restorative justice neighbourhood, developed new models of speech and language therapy embedded in schools, and pioneered community-led planning and design processes. Shoreditch Trust’s Acorn House Restaurant illustrates NDCs’ comprehensive approach, combining high-quality sustainable design, a healthy living menu, accredited training places for local residents, and profits that are recycled back into community regeneration.

Through capital schemes such as mixed-use healthy-living centres, NDCs have also constructed asset bases that provide both badly needed facilities and revenue streams through which local Trusts can continue regeneration once grant funding expires. Part of NDC’s raison d’être was to experiment with new approaches, but innovation has been strengthened by analysis and creative problem-solving that tries to make better use of local understanding, and by the sharing of risks between different partners through collaborative and transparent decision-making and governance (see box below).

Longitudinal data on the impact of NDCs shows absolute improvements on 80% of key performance indicators, including community safety, employment, education, health, and physical environment. In some cases, however, particularly around increasing the employment rate, improvements have been small (Ipsos-MORI, 2008). Overall, though, thousands of people have had their lives and opportunities bettered through various training, employment and health initiatives.

This is not to say there are not problems with the NDC model. It has suffered from the difficulties that have dogged the community-centred approach for years: unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved; shallow and unrepresentative local engagement; and burnout of the small core of community activists.

But here I want to focus on one seemingly perverse finding to emerge from recent data: at an aggregate level, it appears that some indicators of social capital have declined relative to other similarly deprived neighbourhoods. Given NDCs’ comprehensive approach, and the research evidence on the importance of social capital in affecting economic performance, crime, health and education – all NDC priorities – this is a challenging finding.

One possible explanation lies in how we think about communities. Much of the approach is contained within specific Area-Based Initiatives (ABIs) – publicly funded pilot programmes targeting areas of social or economic disadvantage. These aim to improve the quality of life of residents across multiple outcomes, including employment, skills development, health and crime. In an overcrowded regeneration landscape cluttered with programmes and agencies, there is a danger of initiative and participation fatigue and a perception that resident interaction requires some form of ‘professional’ public or third-sector brokerage. In parachuting into local communities, ABIs often do not have enough time and resources to understand and pay sufficient regard to existing social networks and how their communities function. With no ‘Year Zero’ to develop this understanding and an immediate pressure to spend money to annual budget cycles, there are tendencies to build new infrastructure and delivery arrangements on top of the old. These are then marginalised and retreat to more closed networks, where group members look to themselves rather than the wider community.

Some area-based initiatives with tightly defined and protected geographical boundaries can reinforce isolation and fail to facilitate the bridges across social and economic divides that have been shown to positively affect economic performance. Social networks can be further eroded through the competition for funding between local stakeholders, unrealistically high expectations and high levels of population churn that often characterise target neighbourhoods. The proportion of residents who have lived in New Cross Gate for less than a year, for example, is about 25% higher than the national average.

Despite this, community empowerment and engagement pushes on, with a firm emphasis on civic participation. Of course, we need to reinvigorate interest and participation in representative democracy, and to explore the potential of things like ward assemblies, participatory budgeting and community Dragons’ Den-style pilots, but the approach needs widening and our understanding of the relationship between social networks and community improvements deepening. Local authority boundaries and shared residential areas afford some common ties, but there are many other connections between people. Those not willing to engage in the local safer neighbourhood forum, for example, may take part in social clubs, have children at the local school, share communal gardens and so on. Despite cynicism and resistance to formally organised means of addressing social problems, ‘disengaged’ people have social ties within their communities through a variety of channels.

This is important because research shows networks to have dynamic qualities through which a range of emotional states, conditions and influence spread and cluster in quite specific ways. For example, we know that obesity, smoking and some measures of ‘happiness’ spread through components of networks, but only so far and with varying strength and longevity according to the type of social connection. In the case of happiness, the degree to which people are central to their own social networks, and have direct and indirect social ties, all influence an individual’s happiness. Our knowledge of network properties is increasing rapidly: the number of studies published on various aspects of social networks has roughly tripled in the past five years across the social sciences, bringing new opportunities for thinking about community regeneration.

Once communities are conceived and mapped as networks, it becomes possible to better identify various types of social and economic exclusion. It also opens a new spectrum of existing potential delivery mechanisms that can affect social change and can foster the kind of qualities the notion of an RSA Connected Community might display and recognise in itself: altruism, trust, kindness and collaboration, as well as the more formal expressions of civic participation. Our own exploratory research hints that the process of visualising networks through participatory methods – getting people to map their own community connections, for example – can in itself increase the strength of connections in local communities (see box below).

If we are right and are able to develop distinct methods that deliver a double win through process and outcome, this suggests the potential for more cost-effective interventions. With current economic and environmental pressures, and the consequences for private development and retail led models of regeneration, developing people-centric network approaches is more pressing than ever. The move to greater personalisation of public services is already beginning to seek to understand individuals’ social networks and to help end-users use them in delivering bespoke care and support.

Connected Communities, a new RSA action research programme for 2009-10, will explore this potential and extend the utility of what we know about social capital and networks – and how they evolve – to plan for and foster the kind of sustainable communities we want to live in. This will aid our understanding of the conditions under which a new spirit of collectivism may emerge – one that is organic, spontaneous and bottom up. Our programme will include working with communities to visualise and map social networks (with contextualising data from surveys and the physical environment) and then co-produce social capital strategies to regenerate neighbourhoods in inclusive and efficient ways.

Robert Putnam, in his seminal work on social capital, Bowling Alone, conjectured that a resurgence in civic participation might follow from “a palpable national crisis, like war or depression or natural disaster”. In these recessionary times, we might therefore look forward to an upturn in the overall stock of social capital. As free-market, individualistic approaches and attitudes are being condemned, so more egalitarian thinking is advocated. However, more exclusive, problematic forms of social capital are emerging too: economic protectionism and wildcat strikes over foreign labour being recent cases in point.

We may have an opportunity to foster social capital in the economic downturn, but we will need to take care to try to foster the right form.

Get involved

For more information on this project, please visit the RSA Connected Communities Page
If you wish to contribute, please visit the RSA Networks Platform