Edinburgh Council Want Poor Kids to Die

 I’m extremely angry. I’ve been ranting on Twitter; so I thought it might be an idea to write a blog post.

This time last year, across the world, people looked at their empty city streets and thought “this is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for to remake our cities for people, not cars”. In the UK, local councils sprung into action laying down new cycle paths and widening pavements. Us residents in Edinburgh got a bit restless though.

The Council here have been, slowly, trying to make the city’s streets better. Though they have good intentions, they still seem to get stuck with the road traffic engineers’ obsession with “flow” (the disastrous Picardy Place gyratory, that went from a “cyclist blender” to a horrific two-lane motor system) and the overly bureaucratic system (the Roseburn to Haymarket cycleway that’s been stuck in the statutory consultation system for over a decade). But the Council had been making some dramatic plans, including basically closing off the city centre to motor traffic.

Us Edinburgh residents wanted some of their more dramatic plans to come to fruition. Glasgow – the city that had a new motorway ploughed through the inner core a decade ago – was even laying out new infrastructure quicker than Edinburgh. Eventually the Scottish Government got a funding package together and in May cones started springing-up across the city to make the streets slightly better places to be with Spaces for People.

Where we used to live – in Leith – it was good. The road closures due to the tram works, combined with these measures, made the place really nice to walk around. However, I started to notice something was afoot. As the first wave of temporary measures were reviewed, I noticed our local measures – pavement widening on Great Junction Street – were slated for removal. It seemed that if you were a middle class shopper in Stockbridge and Morningside, then you deserved space to walk past a queue for the game butchers, or sourdough bakery, but if you were working class and wanted to walk past a butcher in Leith, then it didn’t matter if someone coughed the rona all over you.

However, we moved in November 2020 and that’s when I realised quite how egregious the inequalities in road safety provision in the city are. We now live in the north east of the city – Pilton to be precise. Our nearest Spaces for People provisions are the new cycle routes on Ferry Road and Crewe Road South. Both are really nice and I use them regularly, but essentially are just cones on existing paint.

We live just off Crewe Road North. It’s a lovely 1930s suburban avenue, surrounded by four-in-a-block housing, and mansion-style interwar tenements; a mixture of council tenants and owner-occupation. At the bottom of the hill there is a nice row of shops. The only pedestrian crossing is at the southern end of the road to control traffic onto Crewe Toll roundabout. Just across the road is social housing which is in the 20% most deprived neighbourhoods in the city.

Not long after moving in, I noticed how fast vehicles shot down Crewe Road. At the southern end, it narrows under the former railway bridge so the pavement is only one paving slab wide with a railing alongside. With the Kent variant of coronavirus surging through the city, if you wanted to socially distance, you had a choice of stepping into the road and risk facing-down a HGV travelling over 30mph; wait patiently for another pedestrian to pass; or don your mask, hold you breathe, and walk quickly while apologising profusely. We thought the traffic was going quite fast, especially since most of Edinburgh’s roads are now a 20mph limit. Surely this residential street had a 20mph limit? And then we spotted the 30 sign.

It got me angry. We’d been living in a very walkable neighbourhood, but now walking to our local shops was difficult because it felt very dangerous. I watched the terrified school crossing patrol officers for the local primary school tentatively step out into the road, just hoping that drivers would stop. I contacted one of my local councillors with my concerns – asking why the road wasn’t 20mph and had so few pedestrian crossings. It was passed onto the Council’s Road Safety Team. They replied that their last survey, in 2019, showed the average speed was 29 mph, so they didn’t feel a 20mph limit was warranted (a quick google shows that puts the kids at the local school at seven times the risk of being killed by a driver) and the same survey showed that very few pedestrian cross the road. I replied pointing out that this was no surprise – as a fit and healthy young man, I find it difficult to cross the road safely. The reply to that (which I eventually got after chasing) just fobbed me off into a bureaucratic process of the review of the 20mph limit that will happen some time in the future.

And then I started getting out-and-about in the city again. I noticed in Barnton, on a very quiet suburban road, where the house price is basically the phone number with a pound sign in front of it, there were some lovely Spaces for People cones out widening a very wide pavement. Meanwhile I was stepping out into the road to walk past people waiting for a bus. In the New Town, there was a quiet residential street which didn’t have a pavement on one side because that was where the shared private garden was, and in the early-nineteenth century you didn’t need pavements to save yourself from being killed by a Range Rover. I noticed there were some lovely Spaces for People cones marking out access to the private garden. Meanwhile, tenants of the Council’s housing don’t have safe access to the Council’s schools.

Frustrated by this visible inequity, I popped in an access to environmental information request, asking for details of how the Spaces for People provision was distributed across the city according to deprivation. It got rejected because the information was already in the public domain. The Council expected me to sit with a map of the hundreds of datazones in Edinburgh and plot on the Spaces for People provision myself. I have appealed this decision, pointing out they can do this with a couple of clicks of GIS.

And this all just leaves me angry. It has been known for decades that children in deprived neighbourhoods are far more likely to be killed by drivers. And I’m using active language because I loathe the passive language of driverless cars accidentally mowing down vulnerable pedestrians. It really feels like Edinburgh Council just do not care about the safety of residents in deprived neighbourhoods. Because our houses are worth less, so are our lives. My research has focused on middle class activism, so I know a lot of this is down to the active, able communities in these neighbourhoods campaigning for improvements. But it is also down to officers and councillors just not caring, or thinking, about deprived neighbourhoods. They should have actively suggested improvements in these neighbourhoods, not wait for residents (who are probably rather busy dealing with losing their jobs to worry) to respond to a consultation. Given this is a brilliant opportunity to make our roads safer temporarily, we should not be forced to have to wait until a review in the future to make our lives safer. Unless Edinburgh Council want poor kids to die.

Official stats, and how to publish them - a post with Taylor Swift

I’ve previously discussed on here how I found the portrayal of one particular set of government statistics – the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation – problematic. To summarise that argument – reporting, based on government press releases, called certain neighbourhoods “the poorest”, even though IMD does not measure poverty, is a relative measure, and most problematically, this added to the stigma of the neighbourhoods. I covered some of the impact of this in one of the papers I’m most proud of. So when I was contacted by the statisticians working on SIMD16 to come and have a chat with them about how they could present it in a better way, I leapt at the opportunity. When their report came out I was extremely impressed. You can download it here – it’s quite a big PDF. The things I particularly like were: 

• The very clear statement of what SIMD measures and how it works, and can be used, on page two 
• The case studies that demonstrate that living in a neighbourhood ranked as deprived by SIMD isn’t awful, and that it can help target resources for great things to happen 
• The very clear “do not use SIMD for” list on page six 
• The fact that nowhere does it say which is the “most” or “least” deprived neighbourhood. 

The team that did SIMD were nominated for a UK Civil Service Award, which they won!

Here’s @PermSecScot congratulating member of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations team-winners of #csawards Use of Evidence award. Her pride is plain to see! pic.twitter.com/1uYo8ULhiB

— Suzannah Brecknell (@SuzannahCSW) November 23, 2017

I was incredibly pleased on their behalf, because they really deserve it.

via GIPHY

And, they’ve only gone and done it again – not won an award, but produced a report that is staggeringly good.

via GIPHY

It’s a report on a set of experimental statistics that have used new questions on material deprivation asked in the Scottish Household Survey to create a local poverty measure. Have a look at it here. It is soooooo good. 

Again, they’ve combined qualitative data with the presentation of the statistics to make the reality of lived experience come to life, but in a non-stigmatising way, for example on page six “Mary” describes how: 

“My kettle blew up, so I went and got a kettle off my catalogue. Cause I wouldn’t have been able to afford to just go and buy a kettle. And I didn’t want to say to anybody, ‘I can’t afford a kettle.’ Ken, people are coming in for a cup of tea and that, and ‘oh my kettle’s blew up, and I can’t afford another one’” 

An absolutely brilliant way to describe what material poverty means. 

And it gets better. There are bar charts throughout which show a percentage with confidence intervals. Rather than getting bogged down with complex descriptions of confidence intervals and statistical significance, the charts are simply labelled “The bars show measurement uncertainty. Where two bars overlap, there may not be a real difference between the two groups”. I mean!!!!!!

via GIPHY

AND AND AND it gets even better. Not only do they have CI’s clearly labelled, they then go onto interpret them for you. Each chart has a very clear description of “What the data says” and “What the data doesn’t say” to ensure that people don’t misunderstand the charts.

via GIPHY

And the data is really interesting. I just wish all official statistics documents were published this well, with this much thought put into their presentation.

via GIPHY

With thanks to the Taylor Swift Open Data Institute.

Universalism or targeted services?

I was at a couple of really interesting seminars today in my Faculty (of Social Sciences). The morning one was by Naomi Eisenstadt, Anti-Poverty Adviser to the Scottish Government, with a very impressive CV of involvement in a number of UK policy initiatives. At lunchtime I listened to Prof Anna Vignole discuss her research on graduate outcomes. Both have had widespread news coverage, for very different reasons (see here and here). What linked them both was an interest in how inequalities are replicated and what we can do about them.

I want to particularly focus on Ms Eisenstadt’s talk because of the questions she raised, and has raised to the Scottish Government, regarding universalism vs. targeting of services. On the Left, we’re supposed to hate targeted services for a number of reasons. As my mum was taught on her Social Administration degree in the 1960s, services for the poor are poor services; middle class service-users drive up the general quality of services.* Also, targeted services tend to be stigmatising, such as being “on benefits”.

However, Ms Eisenstadt argued that, given the specific challenges many people face, we do need targeted services. She used the example of Sure Start, which she was heavily involved in. One of the critiques of Sure Start was it was used by middle-class parents, so it failed as it was not targeted enough. Ms Eisenstadt turned this on its head by pointing out its massive success was a policy targeted at the poorest was so successful it attracted the richest.

In my own field, this is sort of how I’d envisage a successful neighbourhoods policy (as I argue in a roundabout way in this article). We would still have concentrations of social housing in specific neighbourhoods, but all the ancillary services would be so good and so tailored that people either wouldn’t think the neighbourhoods were any different, or would actually aspire to live in them.

The trouble is with this, and a point Ms Eisenstadt made very well, is that the sort of progressive expenditure needed to deliver this change is politically very difficult to achieve (as she found in her dealings with the Scottish Government). It’s far easier for politicians to blame poor people and seek behavioural solutions. In the case of neighbourhoods policy for me, it’s blaming poor people for being untidy, rather than actually providing a street-sweeping service that is adequate.

The other problem, that was equally well put, was that policies to change behaviour are very difficult to implement and expensive - it's very hard to tell someone to be a better parent. Policies to redistribute income work and are quite easy to do. I'd add that policies such as better street sweeping, or more teachers in schools and more spending per-pupil in deprived areas, is also a lot easier to do.

This fitted quite well into what Prof Vignoles was saying over lunchtime because of the universalism of higher education provision in Scotland. This is lauded as a great “progressive” policy in Scotland, even though the evidence is fairly consistent that Scotland is not doing as well in getting pupils from schools in deprived neighbourhoods into university, and that the policy disproportionately benefits the wealthier end of the middle classes.

The research raises further questions that need to be considered in Scottish policy debate. As the BBC fairly accurately summarised, the research shows that if you’ve done an arts degree your earning potential is low. If you’ve studied economics you’ll be minted. Higher education seems very bad at closing gaps between people however, so if you’re poor and do economics, you’ll become better-off, but not as well off as someone who was wealthy. In Scotland, if we want higher education to maximise economic growth, and individual outcomes, then we should probably spend a lot more SFC grant on economics and leave the arts to wrack and ruin. The trouble is, students really want to do arts subjects. So, if we did alter investment in subjects in this way, arts subjects could end up with ludicrously high entry requirements (high demand for places, few places to be had) and economics could end up welcoming all-comers for the opposite reason.

Both presentations left with a sense of our failure to discuss – or as academics to enable a discussion – as to what sort of outcomes we want our public services to deliver and how. We have our national outcomes in Scotland like “We have tackled the significant inequalities in Scottish society” but we’ve not said what a more equal society would look like, or more importantly the shape of public services to deliver that. 

* on this point,Ms Eisenstadt made a wonderfully well observed point that when people experiencing poverty get a good service that helps them, they are eternally grateful. The middle classes don't think twice about it as they feel entitled to good services.

ABI n* – return of the ABI

I did my doctoral research on area-based initiatives, or ABIs. Even when I was doing the research the writing was on the wall for them – the focus of my research had been the former Scottish Executive Community Regeneration Fund administered through Single Outcome Agreements. This ceased to be just as I was going into the field following the first SNP victory in 2007, so it ended up being about the “ending” of meaningful regeneration for residents. Following the 2010 election and the coalition government it looked like any form of regeneration was off the cards under the excuse of “austerity”. I’ve co-edited a book – After Regeneration­ – that argues this very point. My research had turned to broader questions of inequality in our cities, particularly what the increasing focus on community engagement and involvement in service delivery might mean for inequalities in service delivery.

And then David Cameron goes and announces a new ABI on the Andrew Marr show. Thanks. I’m back in business; or am I? First of all, as many have pointed out, the amount of funding for this ABI is pitifully small. It’s the same as the former Community Regeneration Fund in Scotland spent in one year – and that was in 2006 when the money was worth more and in a country ten times smaller. But it looks like it’s just enough money to prompt a private-sector to “regenerate” some of the neighbourhoods concerned; to remove the risk of having to get rid of pesky tenants or asbestos. This is the continuation of the processes happening in numerous estates in London that do not deserve the title of “regeneration”. It is state-funded removal of low-income households from our cities.

Secondly – as any human geographer, economic geographer, planner or policy analyst worth their salt will point out, ABIs don’t work; or at least they’re very bad at doing what David Cameron thinks they are good at. In terms of the causes of neighbourhood deprivation, I can’t bang on about this enough. Saying deprived neighbourhoods cause deprivation is like calling a bucket you have filled with apples an apple tree. Deprived neighbourhoods exist because, either, we put all our social housing in one place (something Scotland is particularly good at doing and is repeating), or wider macro-economic forces mean that a neighbourhood is a risky investment proposition so property values and rents fall, so it becomes somewhere where households with a low income end up living. There is some evidence in some circumstances that “neighbourhood effects” exist – that is, living with lots of other people in poverty decreases your chances of escaping poverty. But that evidence is very scant, and as Tom Slater highlights, it is macro-economic processes, still, that cause the concentrations of deprivation in the first place.

So, ABIs don’t work because they misidentify the policy problem – they look to solve a problem in neighbourhoods that isn’t there. They also don’t work because, well we just know they don’t work. As this blog from the RSA highlights, the biggest ABI ever, the New Deal for Communities, achieved some change in some indicators, and some of this was caused by broader processes of gentrification in London. As a lot of evaluations of ABIs have shown, and was picked up in my own research, ABIs are very good at changing physical things in neighbourhoods – building new housing, refurbishing housing, building new schools, doctors surgeries, libraries etc. But these rarely cause long term change in the outcomes for the residents. That occurs through enhancing services in the neighbourhoods – more resources for schools; public health interventions; employability projects – and the gains from these often leak out of the neighbourhood and cease pretty shortly after the ABI has ended.

But, as has been recognised from the 1990s, politicians like ABIs because it makes it looks like they’re doing something about something. Also, communities often like ABIs and the physical renewal they produce because it makes them feel like something is being done about something. And, much as I criticise ABIs, I do agree with the broader premise of them that if you invest in deprived neighbourhoods they will get better. The trouble with ABIs is the “boot-strap” approach – that this is a one-time fix. It is not, and the investment needs to continue in perpetuity. I would welcome a return to a proper regeneration policy as England had until the Treasury Sub-National Review: prioritised neighbourhood spending delivered through local authorities, nested within city-wide economic policies, nested within regional policies that sought to encourage economic development and rebalance growth. If you slapped a layer of national planning on top of that it would have been grand. You also probably would’ve been called a Communist.

Cameron’s regeneration policy is not this. As a piece coming out in the journal I’m on the editorial team of, Local Government Studies, highlights, the ending of the Revenue Support Grant for local authorities in England is leading us in into terrifying and uncharted territory. Local authorities, or the wider city region authorities being created, will be entirely responsible for raising their own revenue, no matter how flimsy their tax base is. As Michael Lord Heseltine laughably suggested on BBC Radio 4’s PM last October when this was announced, the idea is that if a local authority like Sunderland wants the tax base of Westminster, then it just has to drop its taxes to attract in new business and households. If only urban policy was as simple as it is in Sim City.

Under the guise of localism, this government is locking the UK into a framework of the spatial distribution of economic growth last seen for a brief period in the UK between 1848 and 1870 – when the Corn Laws stopped artificially supporting the agricultural economy of the south and before central government grants to local government started. When central government expenditure does have a spatial impact it is the inverse of what might be considered progressive: the cuts to welfare benefits, as analysed by CRESR which massively effect the north of England, Scotland and Wales; the infrastructure expenditure as analysed by CRESC which massively benefits the south of England and London; the billions cut from the budgets of the most deprived local authorities, as analysed by research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. By 2020, I’d be interested to know if there was any country that did less fiscal work spatially redistributing the benefits of economic development than the UK.

So, David Cameron has launched an ABI. To say he’s launched a regeneration policy is an insult to the thousands of people who have created and implemented regeneration policies since 1968. Given the pitiful sums involved, I doubt we can even call it state-led gentrification. But in broader policy changes this government is creating a tidal wave that will lead to the UK being a massively spatially unequal country. Deprived neighbourhoods will be like baby turtles being tossed around on the massive outflows of capital from towns and regions. This expenditure will distract a shark from eating them for a few seconds; it definitely isn’t a life line.

* I’d give the title a number, but there’s been so many ABIs over the years I couldn’t possibly count them.  

Community empowerment - optimism?

So, we have a Community Empowerment ACT now in Scotland. And the Scottish Government are very proud of it too, as Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment Marco Biagi writes. They should be proud too. Scotland has a long history of community empowerment. The minister highlights the example of community land buy-outs. I find the example of community-based housing associations more impressive – they are predominantly urban and commonly created by people in quite marginalised, deprived neighbourhoods being supported respectfully.* They’ve also managed to avoid the pitfalls of legislation such as this, such as the Localism Act’s “Right to Challenge” which is actually a right to have your services privatised due to European Union procurement rules.

I’m also quite impressed by the Scottish Government trying to use the engagement in political issues that emerged with last year’s referendum to try and deepen democracy and democratic engagement in Scotland.

However, I have two problems with the Act that means I cannot share the Minister’s optimism (not that I’d expect a Minister to be critical of their own Act, you understand). Firstly, unsurprisingly, given my interests, is the issue of possible injustices. As my colleague Prof. Annette Hastings said in her submission and oral evidence to the committee scrutinising the original bill, without adequate community learning and development support it is going to be the most affluent and able communities that will be able to take most advantage of these provisions – they could widen inequality not challenge it (as argued in this paper which you can download for FREE).

But, if you don’t know that argument you’ve not been paying enough attention to my stellar academic career, or this blog, so I don’t want to over-rehearse it again. I want to suggest another reason why I don’t share the optimism of the Minister. I just don’t think people are that bothered. It should also be noted that the Scottish Government listened to the concerns of people about the risks around equity and changed the Bill substantially.

I often find myself at events about participation, occasionally asked to speak (though Oliver Escobar is quite rightly Scotland’s go-to man on that count at the moment), and whenever I do I ask the other folk if they ever attend their local community council, PTA, neighbourhood partnership/committee etc. etc. Invariably, these people who are imploring Scotland to be more participatory and deliberative don’t attend such events because they’re too busy and not interested. I honestly say, from spending 15 months of doctoral fieldwork going to such meetings (the endless debate about a grant to a local Budgerigar fanciers organisation was a particular highlight – community budgeting is the future) you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming to such events.

Even if these organisations were given substantial budgets and power over local service areas, I still wouldn’t be bothered to get involved – I want my local services delivered well without me having to tell the local authority that I’d quite like clean streets, good local schools, and enough activities and youth work to prevent youth anti-social behaviour. Why should I attend a meeting to get good local outcomes if we know how to deliver those outcomes?

And this is where I think the Government have made a bit of an error of identification. I was a presiding officer on 5 May and, it is true that representative democracy has been invigorated in Scotland. Unlike every single other election I’ve worked, I had no time to stop and relax really – there was a constant stream through the doors. In my constituency there was a massive swing to the SNP, but the Labour candidate actually increased his number of votes compared to 2010. Everyone was voting more, because it’s easy.

The sort of participatory democracy the Scottish Government wants to create through the Community Empowerment Act isn’t that easy to get involved with. It requires giving up time and effort. It also involves thinking about issues in a very complex way. I’m a policy scholar – I get paid to think about these things. Most folk don’t.

The Scottish Government are attempting this participatory approach in their new National Conversation on a Fairer Scotland – my colleague Prof Paul Cairney has written well about this. I saw a tweet from the Scottish Government official account the other day:

West Dunbartonshire residents say that housing, education, job opportunities and community are key to a #fairerscotland. Do you agree?

— scotgovfairer (@scotgovfairer) August 6, 2015

And I was just thinking, well? Yes? What about these things? Can we have a policy discussion about these? How about evicting older people who are under-occupying massive homes and distorting the housing market? What kind of jobs do we want to create? Those that match the skills of the labour market now, or plan for the future? These are just a handful of the litany of difficult policy questions that spring to mind when you immediately start to think about what a “Fairer Scotland” might be. And heaven forfend that you might suggest some of these debates might cause conflict and rancour and people might disagree! In the New Progressive Scotland we just need to talk more (but not to persuade people, just to listen to them) and hug a bit more. 

Getting mass participatory democracy to discuss such issues is just utopianism, and I say that even though I’ve dabbled in Habermas. For me, Habermas and the political theory of Iris Marion Young are yardsticks, not blueprints.

To be a little bit more critical, I do have to put the ScotCEA into the same category of policies in Scotland that blurring accountability (Paul Cairney again and again). For me, the broader community empowerment agenda has to be seen as part of Cruikshank’s will to empower. Quite often I’ve heard people say that we need participation so people can meet outcomes. I’m sure this is commonly meant in a positive, co-producing way. But I believe it is also about dumping responsibility onto communities – want the council to do something about the closed primary school in your neighbourhood that’s being vandalised and is an eyesore then you should get together and buy it yourself! What? You don’t have enough money? Well, you’re not empowered enough then, are you.

* I used Richard Sennett’s idea of respect in an age of inequality, I used it in my doctoral thesis to argue in favour of a social democratic regeneration policy.

I attended a community action event

Some organisations I'm involved with in various ways, primarily through research (namely: WHALE Arts, Prospect Community Housing Association and SCORE Scotland, along with the City of Edinburgh Council) organised a community action event in Wester Hailes on Saturday and I went along. It used Open Space - a technique I'd never seen before, but that I was very impressed by. Here are my random thoughts on the event in no particular order.

It was diverse! As I said to many people on the day, it was the most ethnically diverse room I've been in since I moved to Scotland. The 2011 census showed that only four per cent of Scotland's population is from a Black Minority Ethnic background (BME), which means most events in Scotland are as white a ream of photocopier paper. Also, SCORE brought along their youth club, so it was diverse in ages too.

A lot of issues that really matter to people were discussed: the kids complained about being bullied on buses or of being made to carry out religious worship that was not part of their faith; BME people spoke about racial harassment and intimidation; people spoke about massive delays in getting an appointment at the GP; people spoke about cyclist/pedestrian/motor vehicle conflict; people spoke about dog shit; they spoke about dog shit some more; they also spoke about youth anti-social behaviour.

Cultural differences: the cultural differences also became apparent, in two key ways. Firstly, as Pinkster and Droogleever found in the Netherlands, there were different cultural expectations of parenting among new-migrant communities (often from a Muslim or Evangelical Christian background) and the white working class community that was leading to tensions around youth anti-social behaviour. What was seen as "kids being kids" by some people was seen as appalling behaviour and disobedience by others. 

Also, the new migrants were clearly quite committed to the neighbourhood and wanted to make a difference by doing things. However, a lot of the longer-term activists had seen the same issues repeatedly over 30-40 years, seen many solutions thrown at them and were a bit world weary: "we've talked about this all before and nothing's been done" was a common refrain. I'll be writing a journal article on this it was such an interesting dynamic.

People found their own solutions: a brilliant example of this was a group that spoke about what could be done with a particularly bad local problem around legal highs. They agreed three actions: to work more closely with Police Scotland and the Council (fair enough) but also to organise a petition to give to the local shop telling them to stop selling legal highs; and a wee lad was also going to make some posters about the dangers of legal highs. This was asset-based community development working very well.

Evidence: related to my previous very sweary post, in just about every bit of discussion, or problem raised, I could put my fingers on a piece of academic, or good quality, evidence that would either illuminate the problem or provide a very practical solution. At the end of the day when the agenda was turned into a set of action points, I could have gone down the list and said "this is what the evidence says, this is what you should spend your resources on to do something about this". There is a crying need for universities and the academics in them to be providing this sort of knowledge for local communities and local authorities, not just using them as research objects. 

I tried to keep my input to a minimum as I don't live in Wester Hailes, but I suggested that there should be more, very cheap, experimental interventions run in the neighborhood to try and make some of the little quality of life changes that are required. You're not going to cure poverty, but you might make your immediate neighbourhood a wee bit better. The whole Open Space event could easily be joined up with a community budgeting initiative like £eith Decides. 

And, in the spirit of my last blog post (warning, contains copious swearing) I also put my money where my mouth was yesterday and spent a tenner on some random bits and bobs and dabbled in some guerrilla gardening in my local park, including doing a wee litter pick. I might do some guerrilla maintenance next - repainting the play equipment.

What really impressed me about Open Space was its openness. It is specifically designed to be very agenda-less and open up debate and discussion and move people towards practical solutions to problems very quickly. It was far better than anything involving agendas and Post-It notes I'd been to before. Sadly, very few people from local public services were there - three people in total. No local teachers or neighbourhood workers. If the City of Edinburgh Council is going to have 21st Century Public Servants(PDF) then they need to be working with communities at events such as this.

Is the right-to-buy a bad thing?

The housing world is frothing with vituperative arguments - and quite rightly so - at the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto today and the pledge to extend the right-to-buy to housing association homes. Now, we all know that the original right-to-buy was a Bad Thing. I don't disagree with this assessment that wildly: it reduced the supply of affordable rented homes; it led to the residualisation of social housing as a tenure of last resort; and it led to spatial segregation as the best housing was bought at substantial discount and was now out-of-reach of many lower income households. Finally, and for me most problematically, it left local authorities with an enormous burden of historic debt and no income stream to pay it off. I'm on the board of a housing association with properties with the preserved right-to-buy and I see the impact of this once-in-a-while when one of these properties is purchased and our balance sheet takes a small hit. The mess that local authority housing revenue accounts were left in by the right-to-buy doesn't bear thinking about.

But, was the right-to-buy a Bad Thing in its entirety? I'd say we need some caution and nuance here - and we can end up with a much more radical policy. First of all, to be clear, the right-to-buy was not an invention of the Thatcher government. Local authorities since the 1950s had been building homes for purchase. In Tucker's cracking book Honourable Estates he gives the example of local authorities where you knew the Conservatives, or "Progressives" had won the local election because the "To Let" signs on the shiny new homes they'd built were replaced by "For Sale" signs. My uncle and aunt bought such a property, built by the LCC with a cheap mortgage through the Public Works Loan Board, in Harold Wood in Essex in the 1960s. Further, I can't put my finger on a source for this just right now, but as I understand it the right-to-buy in this format was extended in the 1970s. But the key here is an implementation detail - under these schemes the debt that the local authority had incurred through the construction was paid off by the purchaser. The discounts that have left local authorities strapped for cash since 1981 were not in place.

Further, in my research, and I've spoken to others who have found the same, in deprived neighbourhoods the right-to-buy is actually quite important for long-term residents in two ways. Firstly, it means that if their family wish to remain close by, but become homeowners, they can purchase property, often resold RTB properties. Secondly, for many long-term, committed residents people exercising the RTB is a very positive symbol - it means that their neighbourhood is now good enough that people are willing to invest a substantial amount of their money in property. Of course, the stigma towards such neighbourhoods should not be there in the first place and is exacerbated by the RTB and associated residualisation, but this is where we are and I cannot discount the evidence from the interviewees in my research. Also, that the RTB is being scrapped in Scotland has led to a surge in people taking advantage of it does suggest it's still a popular policy with individual tenants.

So, if we dare to say the RTB is not necessarily a Bad Thing what do we do about it? Well, from a more radical but pragmatic standpoint, I'd say we should do two things: firstly, the discount should be properly calculated as that bit of debt remaining, once maintenance costs have been factored in through depreciation, that the housing authority still has. This might actually mean the RTB is removed from some properties as this is incalculable. Secondly, if individuals can have the right to take property of one institution, then they should have the right to take it off all institutions - that is the RTB should be extended to the tenants in all private property. As the infamous (on twitter) loveandgarbage pointed out, the only person to do this was a (very) Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland in 1997.

This, for me, is the more radical way to deal with the RTB and would also open up new, exciting forms of property ownership in a collective way if tenants in blocks of flats could collectively exercise the RTB. But, of course, as Alex Marsh has excellently exposed, the Conservative policy for the RTB is not thought-free. It is radical, but it is radical in terms of an attack on the neediest in society. It is a radical attack on the state and the idea that some people might be dependent on others for help. It is not a radical way to change housing policy or delivering new social housing. But then, that is also why the Conservatives are proposing to change inheritance tax making wealth even more poorly taxed in the UK. But that's a whole other blog post.

Top five posts of 2014

So, I'm watching Mary Poppins on the telly so I thought I'd jump on a bandwagon and do a quick post of my most popular posts of 2014. In fact the top two for 2014 are the number two and three for most hits this blog has received ever. My rant about the sheer stupidity of 2013's Niceway Code 'I am not a horse' still holds the record for most hits at 1664, although my top post of 2014 (see below) overtook it briefly in November.

Anyway, in reverse order we have:
5. Why the Improvement Service is Wrong on This One - where yet again, I felt I had to make some pretty basic statements about how to interpret indices of multiple deprivation.

4. Why I am not a Planner nor Proud of Planning - where I gave up on the planning profession because the outcomes I see in terms of development are just so poor and decision-making is just dominated by a desire to see development happen no matter what the cost.

3. Making Peace with Cambridge - a very personal post, reflecting on student mental health, social class, and my own experience of attending an elite university. 

2. Why I'm a Swithering Yes Voter - where I outlined some of the reasons why I voted Yes in the referendum for Scottish Independence.

1. Scotland Decides - where, two months later, after I'd voted Yes, I eventually got sick of the nationalist campaign and ranted about how ridiculous the whole thing was. I now wish I'd voted no (and really want to know how many people there are out there like me). I'm very glad this has managed to get (substantially) more hits than my Yes post. 

Suffice to say that this blog gets most traffic when I don't blog about my research. The only reason why the fifth most popular post got so many hits was because it was responding to a piece in Holyrood magazine and the journalist was kind enough to retweet it and engage me in twitter chat about it. At this rate I might as well give up on here and stick to A Lidl Bit of Middle Class Pleasure.

This post is not about #IndyRef

#Yes Scotland in Leith pic.twitter.com/TWBg7PxUYG
— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) September 8, 2014

Well, the above tweet has got 36 RTs at the time I write this, so it gives an impression of what the ferment of the #IndyRef debate on social media is like at the moment. Therefore, I'm not optimistic that a blog post about my recent paper will have much success. But here goes...

Most of my research and writing outputs to date have been on urban policy and urban regeneration with a distinct interpretive policy analysis approach (here, here and here) with some dabbling in discourse analysis (here and here) and most recently in my work on middle class community activism with Prof Annette Hastings (here, here and here). My most recent paper is dabbling into the world of urban sociology a bit more, published in Housing Studies.

In this post I want to shamelessly promote my writing by producing a synopsis of the paper, but also reflect a bit more on the process of peer review, as I am wont to do. The paper comes out of the AHRC Connected Communities project, led by Prof Chris Speed at Edinburgh Uni that was involved in called Ladders to the Cloud, along with RCAHMS and community partner organisations in Wester Hailes. You’ll have probably heard about this project before because of the totem pole that was partly a result of it.

The paper essentially takes further the analysis and argument made in blog posts for the social history blog From There to Here, here and here. If you look at the comments on the photos on the From There to Here Facebook page, I argue, you see residents and former residents of Wester Hailes collaboratively writing stories. There’s two main formats: “Do you remember this?”, “Yes, it was X in Y”; or “Is that you and X”, “Yes and that’s X we were doing Y”. These stories add a little more evidence as to how working class people understand their sense of home and place.

In the first version of the paper I focused on two aspects of sense of place in particular – firstly, coming out of the coproduced fieldwork and my research background, was how these stories resisted widespread stigma to Wester Hailes and reframed the neighbourhood in a positive light. Secondly, I drew on the concepts of selective and elective belonging to explore how committed these commenters were to their neighbourhood, or former neighbourhood.

The very positive, useful and extremely in-depth comments from the peer reviewers also allowed me to bring in a broader literature on working class sense of home from Chris Allen among others. This massively improved the paper, though due to work commitments at the time, it did delay the process of producing the revisions.

The process of peer review was very good indeed (although a little bit lengthy, but hey-ho). The original paper focused much more on the aspects of stigma, but also tried to bring in the broad literature on social capital, social class and community activism. I sort of knew it wasn’t working, but thought the paper was ready for peer review. The reviewers comments made me realise this part of the argument really wasn’t working and I just dropped it and focused on a much slimmer argument.  And luckily, mashing together the chopped stuff with some stuff from this paper that was rejected by a journal with some quite staggeringly bad comments, has left me with another paper ready(ish) to go to a community development journal.

However, what was most surprising was the paper went from “Reject and resubmit” to “accepted” following one set of revisions. I was absolutely gob-smacked. The last time this happened was with my first ever paper from my MSc dissertation. Anyway, I can’t complain as reading through the paper to correct my proofs, it isn’t half bad, if I say so myself. Also, unlike some reviewers (me not included) my reviewers focused on improving the broad sweep of the argument being made, rather than providing corrections line-by-line. As a result when I submitted corrections I’d almost run out of my 50 spaces manuscript central would allow me.

Anyway, I hope you do read the paper and enjoy it. To summarise the argument, it is:

• If we look at historic, naturally shared narratives of working class belonging then they are complex and nuanced with various degrees of selectiveness to their belonging; 
• Facebook sites can be a really good source for “natural” talk about neighbourhoods and belonging;
• Facebook is media and the content of it shapes responses - beware the algorithms.

Tada! As ever, copies available if you drop me an email.

Bulldoze Belgravia

I've rewritten my "Demolish Morningside" argument as "Bulldoze Belgravia" for the Conversation. The piece got edited down a lot as the Conversation like things to be 800 words long and readable. I'm not that fussed as the general argument got made.

However, one wee argument was lost and that this. In the section about Moving to Opportunity and housing vouchers versus subsidising bricks and mortar I originally made the point that devolution is providing an interesting experiment on this. In 2017 the right-to-buy is going to be ended for all social housing tenants in Scotland, meaning Scotland is very firmly saying we want the subsidy in housing to go into the homes themselves and their low rents, not directly to tenants. England, on the other hand, is sort of going the other way. Despite the benefits cap, it still seems that subsidy will be directed to tenants, especially with affordable rents in England being laughably not affordable to anyone. So essentially, we'll have an interesting natural experiment on our hands to test which system produces better outcomes for tenants, housing markets and the wider economy. 

It's not the only natural experiment like this that's emerging - the other interesting one I was reminded of at an event on Tuesday is the Curriculum For Excellence vs. Govian ideological bullshit in education policy.

That is unless Labour do win the 2015 election and reintroduce rent and rate rebates at as local authority, as seemingly is being suggested. Or we vote yes in September. 

And now I could get onto why policy evaluation and analysis is so difficult....

Plus ca change?

Just re-read Gilding the Ghetto, the angry critical report of the Community Development Projects published in 1977. Far too much of it rings true today (click the links for contemporary policy in Scotland):

"Despite being urged to 'cover new ground' the various projects embody the now very familiar thinking: self-help, participation, surveys of needs, mechanisms for reducing dependence on the welfare services, assistance to socially handicapped families, pre-school compensatory education and coordination of services".

Socio-economic inequality, poverty and place

This blogpost on elearning made me giggle this afternoon. And it's rather apposite as in this post I'm sharing some of my teaching materials and was wondering how to frame them - as "MOOCish" "SPOCish"...None of that; it's just a set of notes.

My postgrad courses are delivered as distance learning and so I spent a big chunk of my first year in the job writing extensive notes of rather dubious quality. Every year I go back to them to update and refresh them (this year I discovered a large section of text I left last year that just said "blah blah blah blah blah"). Every year, rather than cringe, I'm pleasantly surprised with how not-atrocious they are. So, here you go, the first tranche I'm willing to make more public - my notes on socio-economic inequality, poverty and place. All errors and omissions mine and I'm happy to accept that. This covers two lectures I deliver as part of a wider course called Social Sustainability. Once you've read them, if you pay us a lot of money, you can do the assessment and get the credit as part of one of our postgraduate programmes.

/edit: and given the first tranche of notes seemed to have been welcomed, here's another set of notes, this time on "policy responses" i.e. regeneration

Emerging thoughts on social networks, place and poverty

I’ve been very fortunate to have been awarded a research project by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, as part of their anti-poverty strategy, to investigate the evidence around social networks and poverty. In our expression of interest we stated our aims as:

• Review recent international evidence (defined as from the last five years) on the links between social capital and place and household outcomes, particularly in deprived neighbourhoods;
• Review recent UK statistical and international evidence on the links between equalities characteristics, place and social capital to provide a more nuanced account of the intersection between social capital, neighbourhood and community, and other individual characteristics and their impact on life chances.
• Review recent evidence from grey literature and evaluations on the success of policy interventions in developing social capital to alleviate or tackle poverty;
• Review recent evidence on the capacity of online social networking to develop social capital and any specific barriers to digital inclusion people experiencing poverty may have.

I’ve been working on the first and third aims and just thought I’d write-out my ideas so far to clear my head. 

The first bullet point is the crux of the work for me as, being a planner, I’m approaching this from a spatial perspective. So I’m particularly interested as to whether there is a neighbourhood effect on social networks for people experiencing poverty. To explain, a neighbourhood effect, is the effect that living around other people the same, or different, has on an individual’s outcomes. To sum it up even more simply, it’s the theory that it is worse to be poor in a poor neighbourhood than in a mixed neighbourhood, because characteristics of that neighbourhood mean your experience of poverty will be worse, and your chances of leaving poverty will be lowered.

This is a very controversial view, especially because it toes the line on the questionable “cultures of poverty” and underclass arguments that emerged into UK policy discourses with Charles Murray’s work in the 1990s. Tom Slater has written a strident critique of the work here, highlighting how the focus should really be on why do people experiencing poverty ending living in deprived neighbourhoods that are ill-served by markets and public services. I and all the other neighbourhood effects scholars I know would broadly agree with this too, but there’s still something about the neighbourhood that has to be of interest. It’s very telling that the JRF themselves use this stock photo to represent poverty, even though everyone knows the majority of poor people don’t live in poor neighbourhoods.

Poverty?

This has become particularly clear with a literature search I’ve carried out. I was only focusing on literature in the last five years, but searched Web of Knowledge for combinations of “social capital”, “social networks”, “poverty” and “low income”. It was striking how the vast majority of the results focused on communities of propinquity – the neighbourhood or similar spatial units. The other striking thing was how the vast majority (I’d say 80%) of the studies focused on the links between social networks and poor health and wellbeing. These were discounted from our review as the outcome the studies tended to mention was health and wellbeing, not poverty or social networks (although, of course, causation is a complex web here).

So, what do I know now I’ve done quite a bit of reading? Well, I found George Galster’s seven possible pathways of neighbourhood effects to be useful to start as a theoretical framework and have narrowed this down to three possible pathways by which place, poverty and social networks might be linked:

•           Socialisation – norms and role models, essentially.
•           Threshold socialisation – that norms and thresholds have to reach a certain level to have an impact
•           Social networks – direct social contact may have an impact on opportunities to get on, or improve a neighbourhood.

I’ve included the first two, which are very closely linked, because they kept coming up in the research. It’s mainly because it’s very difficult to measure social networks in quantitative neighbourhood effects studies because of lack of data, so you end up researching social norms, really. But in a number of papers a link is made between social norms and sociability. For example, this interesting Dutch paper highlights how parents of children in deprived neighbourhoods cut their children off from local social networks to protect them from negative socialisation.

The socialisation stuff is also useful because of this bit of logic. The negative socialisation thesis, even though there is scant and mixed evidence for it, is used by policy-makers to justify “mixed communities” policies; basically knock down deprived neighbourhoods and introduce tenure mix. It makes your indicators look good, just ask Glasgow.

Now, the thing here is homophilly – not sure how you pronounce it, but it reads like a word meaning someone who really likes Philadelphia. Basically the theory that people like to be around, and socialise, with people like themselves. And it looks like it’s true. So no matter if you mix poor people with wealthier people, chances are they are not going to meet and talk to one another, except maybe at the school gate. There’s also the pragmatic reality of modern neighbourliness; as one respondent quoted in this research said:

“it has taken us two and a half years to get to know our neighbours . . . and we know our neighbour across the driveway very well because he is not very nice.”

So, even if we live around people and know them, it’s not as if we’ll necessarily get along anyway. Also coming up in the literature a lot is the fact that support networks in deprived neighbourhoods are vital for helping people get-by, particularly within kin. People will have smaller networks, but they will be able to rely on them less.

All-in-all, however, I’m already moving to a view that focusing on social networks within an anti-poverty strategy is not really worthwhile, as there’s plenty bigger fish to fry, particularly around maximising income. But we'll see. Still got a lot more to read...

Demolish Morningside!

That was the controversial title of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe show I was involved in, the fantastic Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas organised by Beltane Public Engagement Network. Yes folks, after my most popular blog post ever on cycling and the Niceway Code (1244 hits so far...) we're back to me blogging about academia, which I know you all love...

So, what was the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas? Well, it was a range of academics speaking for an hour in the afternoon on a range of subjects to a paying audience. In our case, it was me, Professor Richard Williams of Edinburgh College of Art and the wonderful compère skills of stand-up Susan Morrison.

I've uploaded a sound recording of it to SoundCloud for you to listen to:



I've got some videos that have been given to me as well, including one where I explode with rage about the way Forth Ports have treated Leith and Edinburgh - I'm told this was quite the moment in the show!

Basically, the premise of my argument was one I've kind of rehearsed here - that we're more than happy to demolish deprived neighbourhoods and disrupt the lives of vulnerable working class people to delivering "mixed communities" but we'd never dream of doing the same to affluent neighbourhoods, like Morningside. Indeed, Edinburgh Council's accidental introduction of Moving to Opportunity when homeless people were housed in private-rented housing through a contract with a company, led to widespread opposition to the hoi polloi being moved into nice areas (often quite rightly, as the tenancies were not managed properly and there were many incidents of distressing anti-social behaviour).

Myself and Richard only spoke for about 15 minutes in total and then we moved onto discussion with the very informed audience. This was very interesting indeed it also allowed me to progress my argument a bit more - particularly introducing the complicated idea of "neighbourhood affects" and highlighting the complexity of understanding them in a Scottish context; and also my main argument that rather than demolishing neighbourhoods, maybe we should invest in them and deliver very good public services in them? That way we can move away from the situation where local authorities think that this is a good way to manage green space in a deprived neighbourhood:*

Two quick reflections on the experience. Firstly, the discussion ended up containing a lot of statistics and a lot of complex ideas. What was really impressive for me was the depth of this discussion. The audience members were very good at providing critical insights, particularly to the stats, highlighting for example, how Edinburgh's population stats are skewed because of the city's boundary and because people are increasingly living in West Lothian, Falkirk and Fife due to housing affordability issues.

Secondly, the audience response was quite amazing. We had an audience of 32, only 11 of whom were our friends and family (including my mum and my partner). Somebody came up to me at the end and suggested I should run for office. I declined politely as I think my role is best served in the academy. And, if I can do more things like this, then maybe I'll start to change how some people think. One of my mum's friends said to her afterwards that it was the best festival show he had seen that day, and the discussion and ideas that were being bounced around left him thinking for the rest of the day and distracted him from the concert he was seeing. 

So, in a little way, we were helping to create a bit of a Habermasian discourse. Of course, because we had the power imbued upon us as being "academics" it did not meet the conditions of the perfect public sphere. But the audience definitely didn't hold back from being engaged in the debate! And I can't tell you how nervous I was beforehand. I've heard that Immanuel Kant was never paid, but left a bucket at the exit to the lecture theatre for students' contributions. This experience felt very much like that! 

All in all, I'm very glad I did it.

* a bit of background here, this is what the City of Edinburgh Council have been doing in Wester Hailes, a neighbourhood I work closely with. They basically tarmaced over areas of grass and shrubbery they couldn't be bothered maintaining. The Council say this was due to "community demands", but from what I hear the community demanded the spaces be tidied up and they were offered the opportunity to get some tarmac. It gets me so angry. The evidence is that this will literally shorten the lives of the people living around these areas. In terms of partnership working, I think the Council should be expected to fund local primary care for the increase in prescriptions of anti-depressants that will result. Further, the grass and plants are already growing through the tarmac and the trees are dying because they don't get enough water. And not to mention the increased flood risk. And this, after Scottish Enterprise spent hundreds in the 1990s putting in the landscaping in the first place! Luckily, the community is equally as angry and in some other neighbourhoods in Wester Hailes these areas are becoming community gardens.

What's regeneration all about?

I find myself quoting my favourite quote about regeneration again so I thought I'd put it up here:


‘…community participation should not be seen as a pre-requisite for the delivery of decent services. People living either in poor or more affluent areas are entitled to both quality services and an acceptable living environment. We should not accept a situation where people living in more deprived communities have to go to countless meetings or engage in endless arguments with decision makers simply to receive a level of service that other people take for granted.’
(Scottish Social Inclusion Network Strategy Action Team, 1999: 23)

Ferguslie is NOT the most deprived neighbourhood in Scotland

Ferguslie Park is. And even that statement is not right. No news outlet I’ve seen so far could be bothered to go to Ferguslie Park and speak to some of the amazing projects doing really good work in the neighbourhood or even take a photo of the nice homes provided by Ferguslie Park Housing Association and the new primary school.  The Daily Record bothered to use a Google Street View image. STV and the BBC couldn’t even be bothered doing that much, just using library images. The BBC one is particularly crass. No homes in Ferguslie Park look like this, and the woman in the foreground is just horribly stigmatising - the sort of "The Scheme" bullshit that drives the debate on this issue. 

This whole story depresses me because this is the second time “Ferguslie Park” has been the “most deprived” neighbourhood in Scotland. The last time was 2006. It’s not the entire neighbourhood. As Alasdair Rae’s fantastic Google Mapping of the SIMD 2012 shows, it’s one datazone. The ranking of this datazone in the SIMD has gone from 1 in 2006, to 2 in 2009, and now back to 1. Switch on the satellite view on the Google map and have a look at the stats behind the ranking you’ll see part of the reason why - the datazone is depopulated. It’s part of a continuing story of disinvestment, low demand and poor housing management decisions that have characterised Ferguslie Park since it was built. As the Community Development Project in the neighbourhood in the 1970s concluded, this slum clearance housing was “cuts housing neglected before it was built”.

One thing I have to make clear, I think SIMD is a fantastic tool and I welcome the Scottish Government’s continued investment in it. What angers me is this sort of reporting of “Ferguslie” being the most deprived and Craiglockhart the least deprived. It’s just inaccurate. For a start, it’s Ferguslie PARK (it was the park land of the Coats’ mansion which backed onto their Ferguslie Mill). It’s not the entire neighbourhood, it’s one datazone. If you want to give it a name, call it Candren. The index is relative, so as one community activist put it to me (I paraphrase here): “we only came out bottom because they knocked down places in Glasgow worse than us”. And Craiglockhart is not the least deprived. It’s a deprivation index, not an affluence index, so once you get up to the top of the index it’s essentially meaningless (also, see Alasdair Rae's fantastic "what does it all mean" page).

What really angers me is that this sort of reporting feeds into the stigma which helps keep Ferguslie Park a deprived neighbourhood; which isolates its residents and lowers their life chances. As I pointed out in this paper(£*) the stigma towards Ferguslie Park is so great that it is likely that any regeneration programme will be termed unsuccessful. The “feckless feegies” as the other residents of Paisley call them, don’t “deserve” the community centre, new housing and other facilities they have – the real successes of the regeneration programme. If the neighbourhood is misnamed the “most deprived” in Scotland then this is similarly just typical of those “feckless feegies”.

As far as I’m concerned we need to make Craiglockhart the problem neighbourhood. Why does this neighbourhood of horrendous new build flats and bungalows have so few unemployed people – that’s really weird. Why do they have such high educational qualifications – surely some of them have messed around at school at some point in their lives? Why is there so little social housing? Why are there only three children of school age? (and why aren’t those stats anonymised?) Why are there so many young men? Frankly, I think they need to knock down Craiglockhart and start again. Yuppies don’t deserve such nice housing.

There's a very funny book from many moons ago called Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. The politically correct version of Snow White is "Snow White and the Seven Towering Giants" not because the dwarves were, but because they had "towering" personalities. Much as this is satire, it is this change in language that we need to see if we are going to tackle neighbourhood deprivation in a constructive way. If you're looking for bonding social capital, then I can assure you, Ferguslie Park has bucket loads of that compared to Craiglockhart.

* as ever, my paper is behind an academic paywall. I won't get into a debate on open access. If you want a copy of my paper please contact me by Twitter or email and I'll happily send you a copy. In the New Year the University online depository goes live and you'll be able to get a green open access version.