Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Neighbourhoods that work

There have been many studies in the UK about neighbourhoods that do not work. This report, by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, attempts to redress the balance by presenting a study of Bournville, a neighbourhood that works.

Title: Neighbourhoods that work
Author: Rick Groves, Alan Middleton, Alan Murie and Kevin Broughton
Series: JRF Findings, 733
Number of pages: 4
Date published: July 2003

This study, by researchers at the universities of Birmingham and Central England, obtains information from six neighbourhoods comprising of the Bournville Village Trust in Birmingham. The study finds that:

• Neighbourhoods with a high proportion of social rented housing and neighbourhoods with mixed tenure can be successful and can provide areas of housing choice. Integrated forms of tenure mix are the most effective but do not necessarily ensure successful neighbourhoods.

• Successful neighbourhoods have problems nonetheless, and face challenges associated with absorbing change - for example, related to demographic change and conflict.

• The popularity and sustainability of Bournville is based upon the successful application of several key principles:
  - a high quality natural environment 
  - an imaginative and coherent overall planning framework 
  - the high architectural quality of the built environment 
  - a socially mixed community 
  - a sustained estate management capacity 
  - the positive involvement of the community in the management of the neighbourhood.

• As a charity, Bournville has not been obliged to sell properties under the Right to Buy, and this has enabled it to retain attractive homes for rent and to achieve a significant mix of tenures.

• The collective value of social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks for people to help each other ('social capital') is an important dimension of neighbourhoods and their resources. It is closely related to both housing dynamics and economic wellbeing. This has implications for strategies to strengthen and build social capital.

• Neighbourhoods permanently change, but the experience of change and the tensions it creates differ for people of different ages and length of residence. This impacts unevenly across neighbourhoods developed at different times. Residential turnover is slow and ethnic heterogeneity is low.

• Two problems in Bournville are a lack of facilities for young people, who experience a form of exclusion and are perceived as a threat by some older people, and the low turnover of population, which is likely to create future tension.

Analysis

In recent years, several debates have focused on deprived neighbourhoods in British cities. There has been a renewed interest in area-based and neighbourhood-based policy interventions. Alongside these initiatives there is a long-running concern with trends affecting social housing and with large housing estates. A significant type is large housing estates built for rent. These areas have increasingly been seen as dysfunctional and as contributing to the problems experienced by households and individuals.

These were the issues underlying this study of Bournville - a popular residential suburb in Birmingham that clearly works. Bournville contains a series of neighbourhoods that differ in character and work in different ways and extent. Not everything is determined by the quality of the neighbourhood. People's employment and wealth are associated with their work and their skills and qualifications.

Bournville has up to 40 per cent of its housing in the social rented sector and yet it is an area of high design and environmental standards, with a very stable community and high levels of satisfaction with local services. Bournville is a high demand, popular residential suburb with neighbourhoods that work and achieve high levels of satisfaction, but it is not without a range of problems. Significantly, however, these problems do not upset the balance of advantage currently associated with the various neighbourhoods.

Personal experience, expectations and aspirations will differ. The implication of this is that people of different ages invariably perceive the same activities differently. People's perceptions also change because of the length of time they have lived in an area. Long-standing residents are much more likely to have experience of change and 'narratives of decline'. New residents are more likely to evaluate their new surroundings in comparison to the place they have just left, and their narratives are much less likely to refer to change within Bournville. The status of residents also varies in that they have different expectations and resources to accommodate change.

Such is the attractiveness of Bournville, however, that residential turnover is slow. In the most desirable parts, it is very slow - in both the rented and owned sectors. Whilst Bournville is a high demand, popular residential area, it also has a range of problems associated with crime and the fear of crime, young people, anti-social behaviour, vandalism, traffic, litter and tidiness.

View Neighbourhoods that work: A study of the Bournville estate, Birmingham by Rick Groves, Alan Middleton, Alan Murie and Kevin Broughton, is published for the Foundation by The Policy Press (ISBN 1 86134 538 0, price £14.95).

Last update: Tuesday, August 26, 2008