The Decline and Rise of Neighbourhoods: The Importance of Neighbourhood Governance

Abstract

There is a substantial literature on the explanation of neighbourhood change. Most of this literature concentrates on identifying factors and developments behind processes of decline. This paper reviews the literature, focusing on the identification of patterns of neighbourhood change, and argues that the concept of neighbourhood governance is a missing link in attempts to explain these patterns. Including neighbourhood governance in the explanations of neighbourhood change and decline will produce better explanatory models and, finally, a better view about what is actually steering neighbourhood change.

Key Words:

• Neighbourhood
• governance
• neighbourhood change
• neighbourhood decline

Notes

1. In addition, there has been a burgeoning literature on community participation designed to address these problems but, as shown below, this has not necessarily involved participation in governance and, where it has, the governance in which such participation occurs has not necessarily been neighbourhood governance.

2. Recent research on neighbourhood governance in Britain (Somerville & Haines, 2008) indicates a huge variety, not only of neighbourhood governance bodies themselves (e.g. parish and town councils, neighbourhood management bodies, community-based housing organisations and community associations and forums) but also of activities performed by these different bodies.

3. Neighbourhood management involves shaping but not necessarily representing of the neighbourhood. The definition by Lowndes and Sullivan, on the other hand, includes forms of representation but not necessarily of the neighbourhood.

4. For another example, see Schuerman and Kobrin (1986). Here, changes in neighbourhoods from low-crime to high-crime status are also explained in terms of a combination of ecological (demographic change, such as population decline, an increase in the proportion of unrelated residents, and an increase in residential mobility), institutional (shifts in land use, such as an increase in renting or in apartment dwellings) and sub-cultural (changes in the socio-economic status of residents, such as more unskilled and more unemployed, and in explicit subculture variables such as an increase in black and minority ethnic households) factors. However, this is little different from an ecological approach, because the institutional and sub-cultural factors are themselves presented as quasi-ecological, i.e. as involving succession, invasion, filtering, etc.

5. This finding is strongly echoed in Robertson et al. (2008), who concluded that three neighbourhoods in Stirling, Scotland, had retained their relative social status over a period of centuries.

6. In contrast, ecological and behavioural approaches focus only on the activities within a neighbourhood, and attempt to identify patterns to those activities.

7. See, for example, Power (1997), on so-called mass housing estates across Europe. For reviews of case studies of the effects of economic change on neighbourhoods and communities, see Crow and Allan (1994) and Day (2006).

8. One problem with the collective efficacy approach is that it assumes that the community is basically composed of ‘good citizens’. As Bottoms and Wiles (2002, p. 644) point out, however, some criminal gangs can be collectively efficacious but the results are not necessarily desirable for the community as a whole. For example, in Walklate and Evans (1999), the Salford Firm in Oldtown policed local criminal incidents by giving culprits a ‘smacking’ (physical chastisement) and by intimidating ‘grasses’ (people who complained to the police about the Firm's actions). More generally, differences and divisions within communities can mean that a high level of population turnover (working against collective efficacy) can co-exist with a stable community of residents (working in favour of collective efficacy) (Hancock, 2001, p. 188). Case studies of different housing estates suggest that such a situation may not be uncommon (Reynolds, 1986; Page, 2000). Such empirical considerations suggest that theories of social capital and collective efficacy, while potentially very useful in drawing attention to the agency dimension of neighbourhood change, may, like previous ecological and behavioural concepts, suffer from a certain circularity and lack of explanatory ‘bite’ (e.g. neighbourhood improvement is caused by collective efficacy, while collective efficacy is whatever results in neighbourhood improvement or at least prevents neighbourhood deterioration).

9. We are, of course, far from being the first to point out the lack of governance structures and processes within neighbourhoods and the significance of this lack for community development. For example, Taylor (1995, 2000, 2003, 2007) has long argued that such institutions need to be in place if disadvantaged neighbourhoods are to be turned around. What has so far been missing from Taylor's analysis, however, is a clear identification of what kinds of bodies might count as neighbourhood governance ones, i.e. as both shapers of neighbourhood place and representers of the neighbourhood as a whole. In general, the literature on community participation is strong on normative questions but lacks clear analytical focus on the issue of neighbourhood governance.

10. Much of this, of course, is not neighbourhood governance as we have defined it but neighbourhood management or else it is little more than national governance implanted into selected neighbourhoods. A discussion of this point, however, would take us beyond the scope of this article.

11. The deeper reasons for this badly need to be explored but instead attention now seems to be in the process of shifting to ‘citizen-centred governance’ (Barnes et al., 2008). This sees governance misleadingly in terms of delivering public services rather than shaping and representing places or communities, and risks blurring the differences between modes of governance as defined by Kooiman. Politics seem conspicuous by their absence. This is not to deny that the governance of public services (particularly housing) is very important for neighbourhood change (see earlier discussion of behavioural and structural approaches) but it should not be confused with the governance of neighbourhoods themselves.