We are reportedly facing a ‘summer of rage’ as the economic downturn starts to bite and social tensions escalate. In response, the public sector is showing renewed interest in the issue of community cohesion and, in particular, the perceived need for each local area to ’map their community’.
The approach is consistent with a wider public sector fashion for ’mapping and gapping‘. It’s an approach that looks like good sense and has real logic behind it. How can we act if we do not know what’s needed? The results can, however, be counter-productive and dangerous.
When you categorise, you generalise and simplify. By categorising me as White British, for instance, you assume two things: that this classification is ’true‘, and that it has some utility. But there is more diversity within ethnic groups than between them. We are all more similar than we realise. As a result, the utility of the classification is limited. The socio-economic needs and behaviours of working class British Bangladeshi Muslims are not so very different from their white working class counterparts. By using ethnic classification, we promote the idea that there is something inherently different between those groups; we allow and encourage the concept of ’otherness‘ to creep into our thinking; we close the door to the very thing, cohesion, we are trying to encourage.
We happily and liberally use the word ’community‘ (‘Muslim community‘, ’gay community‘) and assume that other people live within and are defined by these groupings – but how many of us would want to be wholly defined on the same basis?
Though, generally speaking, it is important to understand before you act, we need to ask – Whose understanding? Whose action? Mapping and gapping happens at the ’strategic level‘, in meeting rooms, perpetuating the rituals of scientific management. Here, ’understanding‘ is interpreted as statistics. It positions analytical ability above personal experience, numerical and verbal reasoning above human empathy, advantaging one class of person above the others. It disallows involvement and passion in favour of detachment and economies of scale. It keeps the spending decisions in the hands of the removed.
There are other forms of understanding. The individual ’unemployed black man’ has a name, a family, a home, a history. He has a character and a set of circumstances which cannot be contained within the label. He is, as we all are, mysterious and complex. He can only really be understood, as much as any of us can be, personally. As a human, his needs are many, and most of them can only be met by the people around him, not by public sector service provision. If he does need help from the public purse, the people who help must have the space and flexibility to shape their support to a deeper understanding of his specific needs. The understanding of his needs, and the response to them, are personal and contained within a relationship between him and the person(s) helping.
These forms of understanding should not be in conflict. It is necessary to use a macro level analytical understanding in order to help target our personal level understanding. But, on its own, mapping results in simplistic interventions that fail to address the issues; it perpetuates dependency by ’doing to‘ rather than ’working with‘; and it casts some of us as victims and some of us as gods: not a good route to cohesion.
The mapping approach invariably uses location (ward, neighbourhood, Super Output Area) as the key reference point for service design; it ensures that resources are allocated to geographies rather than people, leading to the gentrification of an area and the dispersal of the most needy away from a place in which they can no longer afford to live. It does not lead to greater links between people of different backgrounds, but potentially strengthens divisions, particularly of class.
All categorisations impose a judgment on the world and inevitably shape the resultant intervention. Since the only long-term answer to real and sustained cohesion is to increase the love, respect, or warmth people feel for one another, informal information is the most important ’data’ received and acted on locally by the people and officers who belong to a neighbourhood. Centralised command and control models are part of the problem; they have a limited part to play in the solution.