1 Social inclusion at different scales in the urban ...

Social inclusion at different scales in the urban environment: locating the community to empower Smith, S., Lindsay, S. & Bellaby, P. Pre-print version To appear in Urban Studies 47(9) Introduction In the UK “the neighbourhood is seen as the receptacle for many of the informal resources of the 'third way'”, with its emphasis on self-help and mutuality as (cheaper?) solutions to social exclusion (Forrest & Kearns, 2001, p. 2139). Area-based initiatives (ABIs) in the late 1990s such as the New Deal for Communities in England and Scottish Social Inclusion Partnerships (SIPs)1 were followed by national social inclusion strategies designed to make neighbourhoods the focus of mainstream policies (Lupton & Power, 2005). The same trend has been observed in other European countries such as the Netherlands (Vranken et al, 2002, p.49, Murie & Musterd 2004, p.1451). There is an assumption, moreover, that area-based initiatives should be about empowering communities, which is mirrored in a common assumption in community empowerment approaches to health promotion and digital inclusion that the communities they are empowering are territorially-based (Merzel & D'Afflitti, 2003, Gaved & Anderson, 2006). The view that urban neighbourhoods constitute natural power containers for 'community' can be dated to the early 20th century, when “the neighbourhood [as a planning concept] was intended to create a physical place that was coterminous with a sense of community” (Forrest & Kearns, 1999, p.24), and so encourage the types of close reciprocal relations that were held to be under threat in industrial cities. Neighbourhood units were conceived by architects and urban planners in North America and Europe with the aim of maximising opportunities for social interaction, encouraging the socialisation of children through relationships beyond the nuclear family, promoting practices of local democracy, ensuring the availability (on foot) of social and cultural facilities (especially schools), and achieving self-sufficiency in basic consumer services such as groceries (Schmeidler, 2001, p.145-8). With rising spatial mobility, connected above all with rising car ownership, earlier assumptions about the significance of neighbourhoodlevel social relations and social identity are questionable Neighbourhoods are no longer privileged scales for social networking to the extent that they arguably once were. Blokland therefore invites us to reconceptualise

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neighbourhood as a place invested with social power by social actors – a symbolic resource for the construction of community, like a “vat of shared memories ... [which] can be used, challenged or remembered to perpetuate and form communities” (2003, p.207). Nevertheless, neighbourhoods remain in a profound sense communities of being rather than becoming (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p.41), places where people “can experience some sense of 'being at home'” (Savage et al, 2005, p.12). They do not, as a rule, contain a transformatory project in the way that other types of community sometimes can (such as political and social movements or self-help groups). Communities of being are located – “one spot in space, one slot in time” - whereas communities of becoming are localised – “by rhythms which fold time and space in all kinds of untoward localisations” (Amin & Thrift, 2002, pp.41, 47). This paper assesses how place effects condition the achievement of community by considering places of different scales. It compares two areabased community empowerment initiatives in UK cities which had common social inclusion goals but operated at different scales (neighbourhood and city-wide) and in different domains (digital inclusion and health). In both cases technology appropriation was construed as the key intermediary variable in an empowerment process that sought to increase everyday individual and collective action capacity and self-efficacy rather than empower communities to influence formal decision-making. In one case recruitment proved considerably more difficult than in the other.2 It is argued that particular scales carry advantages and disadvantages for community empowerment, and that interventions would be more powerful if multi-scaled. Specifically, it is argued that neighbourhoods are particularly important settings for recruiting, mobilising or coordinating actors for a variety of social inclusion initiatives, forming and sustaining 'helping/coping' networks of social support (Frič, 2008) and nurturing a type of technology appropriation which can embed new technologies in existing social practices. More dynamic forms of community on a larger spatial scale may better facilitate social learning (understood as a transformatory project of becoming), create 'operational' social networks for joint problem-solving (Frič, 2008) and provide contexts in which technology is appropriated in creative or strategic ways, transforming social practice. Assumptions behind area-based initiatives (ABIs) Any claim to improve the targeting of social inequalities by targeting areabased communities rests on one (or both) of two assumptions: firstly, the assumption that 'place poverty' is distinct from 'people poverty' (Powell & Moon, 2001, p.48), in other words that there is variation in the degree to

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which places “provide a supportive context within which to accomplish the challenges of daily living” (Healey, 1998, p.69). This makes a strong case for tailored solutions to social problems and for involving local communities in order to tap into local knowledge about what defines the 'poverty' of a particular place. The second assumption behind ABIs is that territory can function as a coordinating and mobilising institution for various social actors (Vranken et al, 2002, p.42). By constructing an intermediate outcome of local community empowerment in pursuit of wider social policy goals, interventions can invoke processes such as informal social networking and peer group influence or community leadership and social entrepreneurship, utilising settings which facilitate such processes and working with key individuals or organisations who are trusted intermediaries (FreshMinds, 2007, p.82). They can thereby embed a programme more firmly in the socio-cultural practices of a community, which should in turn persuade more individuals to participate. Both assumptions underlie much of the UK Labour government's agenda on a range of social policy goals, encapsulated by the slogan 'new localism'. For example, the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 establishes a ‘duty to involve’ which applies to all English local authorities from 2009, and the White Paper on community empowerment recognises and advocates a “spectrum” of forms of engagement, “from individual acts of good neighbourliness through to taking on formal civic responsibility” (CLG, 2008, p.30). Part of the logic of these reforms – mirrored in Scotland and Wales – is to embed a neighbourhood-based community empowerment approach within mainstream local governance arrangements (Taylor, 2008). Other UK government policy documents on social inclusion, however, adopt the argument that “reaching some groups, particularly the most marginalised, will mean working with and supporting communities of interest and identity, rather than focusing entirely on geographical communities” (Home Office, 2004, p.13). Indeed some current policy concepts in the spheres of health ('health literacy'), the environment ('environmental citizenship') and social housing ('independent living') downplay the community dimension in favour a more individuated model for state-citizen relations. Even when an area-based approach is endorsed there is often a tension between the most appropriate scale for coordinating service delivery (i.e. cross-sectoral working among providers) and the scale that is ideal for promoting community involvement, with the latter typically much smaller than the former (ODPM, 2005, p.46). It could be argued that such tensions are normal, and policy should be capable of taking different contexts into account, acknowledging that multi-level governance implies overlapping 'partial citizenries' (Low, 2004).

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The two cases compared The two cases compared are the West Johnstone Digital Inclusion Project (DIP), based in Renfrewshire, Scotland, and Hearts of Salford (HoS), based in Greater Manchester, England. The former was identified as an example of good practice in community empowerment and the targeting of socially excluded groups (HMIE, 2003); the latter involved a similar intervention in a different organisational and community context, with different target groups. They both constitute ABIs, and implicitly share assumptions about place poverty and the coordinating and mobilising function of territory, but there are also fundamental differences between them. DIP focused on the community at large, HoS on heart patients – a special interest group; DIP on digital exclusion (treating lack of access and non-use as sources of social disadvantage in themselves), HoS on whether e-learning with peer support improves self-efficacy in management of coronary heart disease. For the purposes of this paper, however, the crucial difference between them concerns the scale of intervention: in DIP a neighbourhood of about 2,000 people, in HoS a city of over 200,000 people. The comparison we draw here concerns scale and community structure, and their impact on the social breadth of recruitment; due to their fundamental differences it would not be appropriate to compare the outcomes of the programmes for individuals, even if this were possible. Having compared recruitment, however, we go on to show how the different approaches to learning adopted by the two projects could complement each other in a multi-scaled intervention. West Johnstone is an early post-war peripheral estate consisting overwhelmingly of socially rented housing (comprising mostly low-rise 'four in a block' properties), a type of neighbourhood generally considered among the most problematic of urban environments in contemporary European cities (Murie & Musterd, 2004, Dekker & Van Kempen, 2004). Salford has concentrations of extreme deprivation in both the inner city and some peripheral estates, and the social housing sector remains much larger than other English cities (Salford PCT, 2005), but the urban fringe contains some of the most attractive residential neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester (Salford City Council, 2004). Potential participants in both projects were presented with a seemingly attractive offer (a free PC and broadband Internet access), which also demanded a substantial commitment on their part (the actual or perceived conditionality of the offer), as summarised in table 1. DIP was local authority-led and prioritised a population defined as socially excluded according to predetermined criteria (see Table 1 – 'Priority population') within a smaller neighbourhood setting (although it was actually defined administratively to be co-terminous with the West Johnstone SIP area). HoS was University-led and city-wide, aimed at older people with heart disease. Although recruitment prioritised deprived

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areas of the city (according to the 2000 Index of Multiple Deprivation), recruiting the most deprived individuals was not critical to the study which, as a randomised control trial, depends for its validity on randomisation of the intervention and comparability of case and control groups. Nevertheless, observable differences between the individuals who came forward and those who did not, and numbers of people recruited in relation to numbers eligible, are instructive indicators about the strengths and weaknesses of particular recruitment strategies, and thus indirectly about the (exclusionary) ways in which community is (re)constructed in ABIs that aim to facilitate 'community empowerment'. Social inclusion is operationalised as participation in the programmes themselves. Since this is a dependent variable, which has the character of a threshold (a binary variable), it is an unambiguous measure (Friedrichs et al, 2003, p.802). It is, of course, no more than a prerequisite for empowerment, but it is also arguably a more useful outcome to track than some of those more commonly used to evaluate ABIs (such as individuals entering employment) because it represents a lower threshold, and thus picks up more individual 'success stories', so promising to tell us more about the mechanisms through which hard-to-reach groups can be included. [TABLE 1 HERE] Profile of the samples [TABLE 2 HERE] Ideally we would wish to compare how closely the recruited population reflected the eligible or priority population. Data on the latter, however, are unavailable for HoS (because no records have been compiled at PCT level that detail the demographics of those people on the CHD register). Table 2 simply illustrates that the recruited population can in both cases be regarded as 'deprived' or 'at risk of social exclusion', albeit in different respects. Low labour market participation characterises both samples, as does poor health, obviously far more so in HoS. The recruited sample in HoS is, by definition, older than a random population sample, and therefore at risk of social exclusion in certain respects (notably in terms of use of ICT). There are, however, fewer people with no formal qualifications than would be expected, which contrasts sharply with the DIP sample. In addition to education, Table 2 also shows contrasting figures for prior computer ownership and Internet connectedness. Participants in HoS are on a par with the UK average for their age group in terms of prior Internet access at home, which is surprising given the relative deprivation of Salford

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on all socio-economic indicators3. Owning a computer and having the Internet may, paradoxically, have increased the chances of someone applying to the Hearts of Salford project, while sufferers of heart disease without computers may have been less inclined to apply. In West Johnstone more non-computer owning households were persuaded to try out ICT. Note that the rate of home Internet access increases by over 15 percentage points in families with dependent children (ONS, 2007), which is the dominant household type among DIP participants. In this light the figure of just 15.7% for DIP participants implies severe relative 'deprivation' in digital connectedness. It should be noted that two additional factors, not present in DIP, may have limited the reach of HoS: the restrictions and delays imposed by the medical ethics approval process, and a potentially significant psychological barrier to participation, which concerns attitudes not to technology but to health. Some non-participants, that is, declined the offer because they 'did not want to dwell on their illness'. These issues are covered in another paper (Bellaby, Lindsay, Smith & Bell 2006). The following sections describe how the recruitment process was affected by settings- and scale-based factors. Settings for recruitment to each project West Johnstone Recruitment for DIP took place in streets and public places, in semi-private places such as closes, gardens and doorsteps, and in the private spaces of people's homes (mostly terraced housing, but some high-rise flats also). The process typically began with doorstep encounters with outreach workers, but the message was reinforced through repeated casual encounters in multiple settings with other community members almost exclusively through the medium of face-to-face communication: 'banter' on the street or in the Post Office created a snowballing of recruitment through a 'peer group thing'4 (West Johnstone outreach worker). 18 months into the project, more people from DIP households (34%) said they also used a computer at a friend's or relative's house than the equivalent figure for a representative sample of British adults with home Internet access (23%) (ONS, 2007, p.8), implying a stronger social context for adoption and use of ICT, thus supporting the findings of Crang et al (2006). In interviews, a number of residents argued that DIP actually reaches beyond the 300 households who benefited directly because members of other households in the neighbourhood also use the computers when visiting. It was not clear whether the use of computers is incidental or the main purpose of these visits, but there was a perception that DIP homes were actually semi-public access points: resources to be shared at least among pre-existing localised social networks, especially those mediated by children.

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The Community Learning Centre (CLC) – which was co-located with one of the two primary schools in the neighbourhood (hence an important meetingpoint for the many parents of young children on the estate) – was becoming a hub for social networking and relationship-building, even during the recruitment phase. Meetings were held there to explain what the loan agreement for the computer entailed: this initiated group discussions, defusing the 'seriousness' of the process, alleviating fears, and starting the familiarisation of community members with project staff. New ICT courses were arranged even before most PCs had been installed. At all events, childcare was routinely provided at the CLC because one of the priority groups was single mothers; this attracted people initially more interested in accessing the childcare than in ICT. Project members (all nearby residents) dominated the introductory computer classes there, which helped overcome a fear of learning among socially excluded adults, since class members were familiar to one another. Salford In Salford few participants had kin living in their immediate vicinity (although many have family in Salford or the Greater Manchester agglomeration), and thus while many do draw upon support from family (and provide childcare support for grandchildren), it was common to hear reservations about not wanting to ‘bother’ children who lived some distance away and led busy lives to ask for help using their computer or the Internet. Neighbours are sometimes cited as providers of informal support (especially the children of neighbours), but no one recalled discussing the prospect of applying to the project with neighbours (who were unlikely to be eligible themselves) in the manner found in West Johnstone. Information about the project circulated instead through more dispersed friendship and kinship networks and via professional intermediaries such as cardiac nurses and exercise class leaders, but this was specialised communication, addressed to specific individuals, not ‘banter’ between peers. The most important settings in which recruitment to DIP took place – the home (or doorstep) and a range of community-based settings including the CLC as well as streets and gardens – were either inaccessible or inapplicable to HoS. Despite using a centrally-located ICT learning centre for two taster events, the programme did not connect into the institutional context for most participants' lives at the neighbourhood level. The virtual space of the project's online discussion forums was to be the setting for peer-to-peer interaction in HoS, but this could not be utilised for recruitment.

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Place and scale in the two settings West Johnstone The 'locatedness' of the project appears to have been the key to successful recruitment. At the micro-scale at which DIP operated no general advertising was necessary or perhaps appropriate to reach the recruitment target for the priority population. This neighbourhood, moreover, had a natural physical hub for adult learning and community organisation – the CLC. However, even in a neighbourhood of this small size, there were some divisions: usage of the CLC dropped off sharply outside one named part of the estate towards two other distinct areas which are located on the other side of a railway line: the footbridge is perceived as a potentially dangerous place after dark by many residents, and social stigmatisation operates even at the micro-scale, discouraging some residents from frequenting a facility in a certain location. This underlines the fragility of the empowerment approach and the difficulty of identifying a scale of action which respects the boundaries of any uncontested 'natural' community5. Nevertheless, the establishment of the CLC as a focal point in the neighbourhood was aided by a deliberate emphasis on open access; it was the structure of wider public space on the estate that reduced its perceived accessibility for some. The small scale of the neighbourhood also facilitated intensive outreach, employing people with good local knowledge to act as spotters and referrers (targeting people according to need), organic intellectuals (translating concepts like 'digital inclusion', 'lifelong learning' and 'ICT' into words that evoked opportunities rather than fear or incomprehension) and social entrepreneurs (tailoring the offer to everyday life contexts).6 Salford The vastly greater size of Salford compared to West Johnstone meant that snowballing effects through informal social networks, and through spontaneous social interaction at natural community hubs, occurred to a lesser extent and belatedly. Even extensive general advertising proved to be a poor substitute for the kind of informal social networking that occurred during recruitment for DIP. Word did spread through face-to-face social networks in Salford, because many participants do still inhabit social worlds in which co-located peer groups play an important socialising role, but these do not necessarily operate at the same scale as the intervention. Therefore the process was more sporadic and took much longer. Operation on a much larger scale, together with more restrictive data protection procedures (because participants were initially identified through GPs' patient records), prevented the kinds of outreach which worked so effectively in West Johnstone. Discussion

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The importance of neighbourhood This comparative account was prompted by a sense that recruitment in Hearts of Salford was hampered by a lack of direct contact with the 'target group' or a lack of effective intermediation, whereas the effective recruitment processes deployed by the Digital Inclusion Project were made possible by the grounding of the community in a clearly demarcated territory – a recognisable neighbourhood – which is the setting for everyday encounters and peer groups. Assumptions about the significance of neighbourhood as a natural scale of action for community capacity building were implicit in the 'theory of change' which project staff in West Johnstone had assimilated. Prompted to imagine a hypothetical initiative rolled out across Renfrewshire, and targeting a community of interest (such as young, socially-excluded people) rather than a small-scale place-based community, outreach workers were sceptical about its chances of success, partly because they felt that outreach could not be as effective on a larger scale, and partly because the opportunities for casual face-to-face interaction among participants (the 'peer group thing') would be reduced. Immersed in a community development philosophy, they saw the value of “arenas and key networkers” for social inclusion (Healey, 1998, p.66), but their response also reveals a belief in the importance of more informal processes of social interaction, such as neighbouring. Neighbouring, Blokland observes, is one of the few types of social relation that is difficult to categorise in Weberian terms as a rational or non-rational, instrumental or sociable, relation: it assumes different (often multiple) meanings among different groups of neighbours (2003, p.13) and at different points in time. In its instrumental form, neighbouring, by facilitating “innumerable, outwardly almost insignificant, fleeting and ephemeral” interactions (Robertson et al, 2008, p.101) can provide a generalised sense of security for residents and an easily accessible communication network for transmitting knowledge about opportunities and threats (Harris, 2006). In its sociable form, neighbouring is manifest in territorially-based peer groups, whose “members meet according to set routines several times a week. They spend a lot of time with each other, in most cases for the sole purpose of keeping each other company (Blokland, 2003, p.51).”7 HoS, for reasons outlined, was largely unable to invoke the sociability of peer groups or the instrumental communication networks among neighbours to make contact with potential participants. Communication was essentially vertical, between representatives of a higher education institution and members of the public, with initial contact mediated by a GP, also an authority figure. DIP, on the other hand, was publicised via instrumental forms of neighbouring (exchanges during

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chance encounters, informal referrals to project workers) and was socialised via peer groups, in an informal, almost incidental, but very public manner. The existence of peer groups, especially among women, was very evident during participant observation at the CLC, where people spent considerable amounts of time together at regular times on an almost daily basis, often perpetuating associations established at school. Such social networks may be relatively impenetrable from the outside, given that ties to a peer group are time-consuming and permit little occasion for forming new contacts (Blokland, 2003, p.76), but precisely because of this 'encapsulation', knowledge is unlikely to be socialised in communities based around peer groups without access to these channels. A study of a deprived London estate found “spatially based, age-segmented social structures” to be an increasingly important source of informal labour market opportunities (Smith, 2005, p.208), while recommendations on widening participation in both community planning and cultural activities among older people and low-income groups stress the effectiveness of 'horizontal' growth from existing groups and activities, and word-of-mouth recommendations among peers (Dewar et al, 2004, pp.40-1, FreshMinds, 2007, p.88). Peer groups are one of the means by which communication is located in time and space. More instrumental forms of interaction during activities like accompanying children to and from schools and playgrounds, or walking dogs - routinise encounters in specific locations at specific times. The concept of locatedness is counterposed here to that of localisation. Both processes may facilitate collective action, but in different ways. Ito (1999) argues persuasively that, since defining locality is a social achievement, then even aspatial activities that result in a materialisation of identity (for example, in the form of the website that hosts an online community) can be thought of in terms of (network) locality. Localisations often represent a means of solving the collective action problem by 'size manipulation' to increase the perceived significance of participation for the individual (Rydin & Pennington, 2000). In the case of the older peoples' online community, SeniorNet, however, the localising process was socially exclusive, not only because Internet access is socially patterned, but also because it was an intentional community based on selective affiliations. This applies, to a certain extent, to HoS, not because participants wished to distance themselves socially from others, but because selective social distinctions were introduced by the design of the project, the media through which potential participants were addressed, or the assumptions made about participants' likely motivations for adopting technology. A more socially inclusive recruitment process, it is argued here, was made possible in the case of DIP by its locatedness. This term denotes not spatialities as social achievements, but the consequences of sheer

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geographical friction. Poor people, for example, tend to experience a disproportionate friction of time and space for structural reasons: they are more likely to be unemployed; if they work, they tend to work more locally; and whether or not they work, they tend to have a higher percentage of local social ties (Davies, 2004, p.24). Locatedness is thus a constraint, which may be experienced negatively. Nevertheless the occurrence of regular interactions in public space can make collective action – usually of a defensive type – seem more rational (Davies, 2004: 35). Neighbourhoods can therefore be described as located if residents' mobility is relatively constrained. Communication can be described as located the more that it focuses on generalities rather than specialised or intimate concerns: Harris, for example, describes how non-intrusive neighbouring (the variants that he terms 'passively positive', 'passively supportive' and 'interactive and supportive') functions by reducing the richness of information transmitted, which helps to provide a more universally-accessible communication network (2006, p.57). Located communication, in its generality, is likely to be more inclusive since there is less freedom to choose not to participate. This argument does not rely on the existence of a “collectively imposed and socially controlling moral order” in neighbourhoods (Crow et al, 2002, p.143), but nor does it apply automatically in neighbourhoods simply by virtue of their scale: it depends on the regularisation of social action and activity spaces such that certain places and institutions are difficult to avoid in one's daily life. For example, a park in a residential area, may (if well-used) be considered 'located' by virtue of the fact that the interested pubic is easily identifiable, and people's use of the park can easily be monitored. Research in Brighton and Torbay found that collective action involved greater numbers of less committed individuals in the case of green space issues than in the case of air and beach quality issues in the same cities. The locatedness of the green space issue enabled highly targeted outreach (knocking on doors of immediate residents) and persistent peer influence, thus mobilising the “dense iterative social situations” that occur in the parks themselves to create the social capital necessary for collective action of a defensive type (Pennington & Rydin, 2000). Frequent and durable interactions between two actors make cooperation more likely by 'enlarging the shadow of the future' of their relationship (Axelrod, 1990, pp.129-30). By locatedness we thus refer to certain ‘collateral experiences’ engendered by sharing the same living space (Carroll & Rosson, 2003).8 Locatedness promotes public familiarity, which is said to exist in a neighbourhood if residents make high use of certain key, universally accessible spaces, where regularly recurring transactions take place, and where the resultant visibility of the lives of others provides residents with

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sufficient superficial knowledge to establish social distinctions. People are therefore familiar with one another, where familiarity is a quality mid-way between anonymity and intimacy. Although public familiarity has declined over time in most neighbourhoods owing to a combination of technological changes, rising affluence, increasing mobility, economic restructuring and the expansion of the welfare state, leading to less intensive neighbourhood use and reduced functional interdependence (Wellman, 2001), some changes have affected deprived neighbourhoods to a lesser extent than more affluent areas. For example, self-service supermarkets can destroy some of the principal settings for public familiarity by pushing local shops out of business (Blokland, 2003, pp.113,116-7), but – in common with peripheral housing estates in many European cities (Dekker & Van Kempen, 2004) – supermarkets have not set up close to West Johnstone, so local shops (one of which is a food co-op run by residents, another a computer repair business started by one of DIP's beneficiaries) continue to perform an important space for 'gossip' (non-specialised information-sharing). The use of many public spaces is often higher in deprived areas simply because “cars are less present” (because ownership is lower, but also because peripheral estates were usually designed – in keeping with the principles of neighbourhood units – so as not to permit through-traffic) (Madanipour, 2004, p.276). This is evident in West Johnstone on a summer evening, when the streets become playgrounds for children and teenagers, and village squares for adults, who can be seen sitting or standing chatting outside. Public familiarity is also promoted by social homogeneity and stability. Homogeneity is understood here as similarity of life stage and lifestyle, both of which increase the likelihood that residents will have similar activity spaces. Therefore, even if they do not share the same values, regular encounters mean that “life involves coping with the ways of others” to a greater degree than in less homogeneous areas (Fischer, 1982, p.86). The fact that 'the ways of others' are more likely to resemble one's own nonetheless reduces the risk of conflict over the use of public spaces, which can prompt many residents to withdraw from these spaces in socially mixed neighbourhoods (Madanipour, 2004, p.271). Hence some evidence suggests that facilities like schools and community centres are more readily established as community focal points in socially homogeneous areas (Rogers & Robinson, 2004, p.27). This may be less a matter of feeling more comfortable 'among one's own kind' than of social presence, a property of socially homogeneous neighbourhoods which is invoked, for example, when neighbours rely on one another (without having to ask) to keep an eye on children playing in the street (Bourke, 1994, p.154). Under such conditions, even socially isolated individuals, with very limited involvement in intentional networks, can take advantage of public familiarity to determine their social position in relation to others and thus to 'belong' to a territorial

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community and partake in its rituals (Blokland, 2003). Stability produces a similar effect: in a 'regenerating' London neighbourhood characterised by high residential turnover, social networks enabled active individuals to 'bridge' to a wide range of informational and practical resources, but involvement demanded considerable agency, of which only some were capable, whereas in a nearby 'traditional' working-class neighbourhood, with strong kinship networks and lower turnover, Cattell (2001) found a more inclusive pattern of social networking. In fact, social networks of a 'helping/coping' kind have been found even on newly-built housing estates among residents with common needs and social status (Dekker & Van Kempen, 2004, Musil, 2002, pp.294-5, Mattina, 2008), whereas socially-mixed neighbourhoods are often mixed only “in a statistical sense” (Atkinson & Kintrea, 2003), with “quite strong evidence to show that interaction between residents from different tenures and income groups in mixed areas is limited.” (Tunstall & Fenton, 2006) Social capital can be present in mixed neighbourhoods but unable to 'flow' easily across social boundaries if relationships between residents from different social classes are not embedded in norms of reciprocity or if public familiarity is low (Blokland, 2002). To summarise, what worked in West Johnstone may be specific to a certain type of lower-class urban 'village', socially relatively homogeneous with a stable population9, endowed with facilities that are open to the whole community, where neighbouring is still an important source of instrumental social support, peer groups are an important form of sociability, and intensive regularised neighbourhood use – encouraged by the enclosed character of the physical environment and the survival of institutions that locate social relations – creates the conditions for public familiarity. Although this may seem to imply a highly restrictive set of preconditions for a community empowerment approach, Forrest & Kearns, summarising the findings of a study of eight deprived urban communities in England, concluded that “in poor neighbourhoods there is ample evidence of strong bonds of reciprocity, of powerful feelings of attachment and commitment ... To the extent that dense webs of relationships, trust and familiarity constitute an important dimension of social capital these areas have rich resources to draw on.” (1999, p.22). ABIs themselves, moreover, can institutionalise a certain scale of action as a political arena, further 'naturalising' the neighbourhood as a territorial community (Meegan & Mitchell, 2001, p.2188, Forrest & Kearns, 1999, pp.32-3). In West Johnstone, a close coincidence between place as constituted by social and cultural history, everyday activity spaces and the place-shaping spatialities of the 'new localism' (the fact that the DIP was ‘wrapped up’ in a wider set of interventions designed to strengthen neighbourhood governance

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structures) amplified the sense in which the neighbourhood was a meaningful space for community participation. This in turn may have prompted residents to feel that if agencies are making an effort it is worthwhile doing likewise (Richardson, 2006, p.39). A further dimension to the comparison: types of learning Our discussion so far has been limited to the recruitment stage for the two projects. The outcomes of the recruitment process cannot be construed as sufficient measures of community empowerment through technology appropriation. Our principal concern has been to highlight the social exclusions which can occur at the recruitment stage. Yet greater social inclusiveness in the neighbourhood-based DIP than the city-wide HoS may have come at the cost of imposing limits on the level of community empowerment through technology appropriation that could be achieved. In this section we offer a descriptive comparison of some of the subsequent programme elements of the two interventions. In conclusion we ask whether a greater degree of empowerment might be achievable by combining the two distinct approaches to learning that the projects exemplify. Both projects presented participants with opportunities for formal and informal learning in an interactive, group context. Learning is one of the mechanisms through which neighbourhood effects on social action transpire, because peer groups constitute communities of practice that perpetuate certain learning models (Friedrichs et al, 2003, p.802). West Johnstone CLC can be seen as the setting for the developmental cycles of several communities of practice, in which learning resources were rendered transparent to newcomers (in particular through the ways in which more experienced users could be observed using computers), together with everyday opportunities for legitimate peripheral participation in social practices (Lave & Wenger, 2001). Induction of newcomers was aided by an atmosphere, layout and timetable conducive to socialising, which has been found to be critical in stimulating the wider use of other cultural facilities by lower socio-economic groups (FreshMinds, 2007, p.61). In a dispersed community founded on a common but specialised role (such as heart disease patient), opportunities for situated learning are far less accessible. On the other hand, some forms of learning may benefit from precisely the kinds of place/space-dissolving potentials commonly attributed to ICT, which are associated with weak and specialised rather than strong and multiplex ties. Prompted, during a focus group, to imagine the unlikely possibility that an immediate neighbour happened to be one of their discussion partners in the online forum, some HoS participants said they may have felt uncomfortable discussing 'private' health matters. The urban

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scale of the project provided a certain anonymity, not in a literal sense (participants knew each other's names and had face-to-face meetings) but in the possibility of a certain discursive style, characteristic of a more open public sphere, which may not have been so easily attained within the 'closed community' of a neighbourhood. HoS sought to engender changes in the habitus of individuals, on the assumption that one's habitus can be the cause of unhealthy behaviours (that social and cultural capital can constrain as well as empower). Bourdieu also uses habitus in an active sense: an actor's inscription in a social space endows her with categories of perception that enable her to make distinctions (e.g. between good and bad) (Bourdieu, 1998, pp.8-9). Thus habitus can provide the repertoire for actors to readjust to new situations. The design of HoS assumed that participants' own cultural resources (their prior learning experiences) would contain ample 'redundant capacities' to enable them to react creatively to the critical health situation in which they found themselves following the onset of chronic illness. Searching these dormant repertoires might be more successful if performed as a collective endeavour among a group of people who have two things in common: their immediate situation (a health crisis, which may have awakened an awareness of the need for behavioural change); and similar life experiences (given by age, social class and regional identity). This would help cement an 'operational' social network in which the emphasis was on solving personal problems through knowledge transfer rather than embedding the network in deep-rooted solidarities. We therefore facilitated, via an online discussion forum, the interchange of experiential knowledge about living with chronic illness in ways that we supposed might equip participants to question both their own assumptions and some medical orthodoxies, in keeping with a social model of health promotion (see Lindsay, Smith & Bellaby, 2008). Situating this learning process at the scale of an urban area rather than a neighbourhood meant that there should be common place-based bonds among participants, but they would be weaker than in DIP. This could be advantageous for “coping with new or changing environments”, since it might permit a more open-ended 'searching' of an actor's past repertoire for alternative paths of development (Lowndes, 2005, p.300). In both DIP and HoS the intervention was firstly intended to support the adoption of what was for many of the priority population an unfamiliar technology: strong ties and face-to-face interaction can be important here, where a comfortable fit between field and habitus, reinforced through peerto-peer interaction, is likely to produce a more compelling proposition than an opportunity to expose oneself to new cultural fields that may implicitly challenge one's prior values and beliefs. The setting and scale of DIP were

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well-suited to this informal type of learning, which could begin at the recruitment stage during doorstep encounters between outreach workers, acting as social entrepreneurs, and potential applicants. HoS sought to facilitate learning that would lead to identity transformation (the breaking of old habits with regard to self-care), implying a more advanced stage in a process of technology appropriation (Proulx, 2005). Here, weak ties and virtual communication may be functional, bridging to symbolic resources that could eventually allow people to reimagine the 'local' and the personal, creatively incorporating technology into social practice. People who are only well connected to peers may be less likely to participate in activities which group norms mark as 'not for the likes of us'. Bourdieu uses this phrase to capture the consequences of a passive, differentiated notion of habitus, under the influence of which actors adjust their behaviour to produce a comfortable habitus-field fit (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p.130). But fields are always fields of power, in which conflicts between groups contain the potential for maladaptation and readjustment of habitus, as actors shift position within a field, for example by accumulating cultural capital. The transformatory social learning involved in HoS represented such a cultural politics because it stimulated participants, individually and collectively, to adopt the position of 'empowered patients', challenging the more passive role assigned to patients in the traditional medical field to which people of their generation would have been accustomed. Berger & Luckmann likewise argue that resocialisation is facilitated by intense interaction with new significant others (1967, pp.176-7), ideally, however, with access to a common language such as a regional or class dialect (ibid., p.173). The analysis suggests that it would be productive to combine both approaches in a two-phase intervention, appealing first to 'passive' and then to 'active' habitus; first to peer- or kin-based social networks and then to social networks based around convergent interests incorporating new communication partners: first locating community to facilitate inclusive but defensive collective action through 'helping/coping' networks; and then relocalising community to facilitate collective action in 'operational' networks that are change- or problem-oriented. Conclusions Considering the city as a space of democracy, Low (2004) urges us to avoid fetishising any one scale as the ideal site for fostering civic participation. In a similar vein, Crang et al criticise the way that “community [development or empowerment] programmes tend to define community using a localist definition of close dense ties.” (2007, pp.2411-2). Yet it is also recognised how differences in scale affect the affordances of ICT for social ties and

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actions (Crang et al, 2007, Davies, 2004) and the types of solidarities formed within the urban environment (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Thus scale, without being fetishised, needs to be understood as a vital source of contextuality when considering community empowerment and technology appropriation. Since some social and cultural distinctions remain spatially fixed, and neighbourhoods, even when viewed as social constructs, continue to represent places where people want to feel at home (to achieve an acceptable fit between field and habitus), researchers and policy-makers are well advised to treat neighbourhoods seriously if they seek to maximise participation. For instance, participation in community regeneration planning benefited from devolution to ultra-local forums at the sub-ward level in the Welsh Communities First programme (Adamson & Bromiley, 2008). ICT use itself is strongly socially mediated and tends to develop as a collective, collaborative activity in deprived neighbourhoods (Crang et al, 2006), and if neighbourhoods are the units which are often 'sorted' (commodified) by increasingly informationalised public and private services (Graham, 2002), collective responses arguably also need to be developed at the same scale. This makes a strong case for place-based solutions to social exclusion which start from existing small-scale cultures of practice. Yet the structural limits of endogenous empowerment approaches are welldocumented (Meredyth et al, 2006, Powell & Moon, 2001, p.46, Forrest & Kearns, 2001, p.2141), so following “an initial period of committed localism” to facilitate the capacity-building required to re-insert local economies into wider economic flows on terms that enable local people to benefit (McCormick & West, 1998, p.216), further action is required. In an analogous way, strategies for encouraging initial adoption of ICT by excluded groups may be more effective if they emphasise the congruence of new technologies with existing social practices of everyday life, but it has been argued that a more complete appropriation occurs only when ICT use stimulates innovations in social practice and a consciousness of the possibility for social repositioning (Proulx, 2005).10 Since technology is socially constructed, different affordances of a device will be revealed to an actor through their participation in different communities at different scales. Treating an actor as both a neighbour and a member of a city-wide patient support network (and in potentially innumerable further social roles) necessitates that we comprehend the appropriation of technology as a dynamic multi-dimensional process. Acknowledging these partial citizenries, it is the 'personal communities' of individual actors – in which “both dense, bounded groups and sparse, unbounded networks exist simultaneously” (Wellman, 2001, p.24) – that become both the object and the medium of empowerment.

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Our findings are suggestive of possible responses to the challenges faced in a number of policy areas where engaging and empowering citizens has become both a means and an end. Neighbourhood governance faces challenges that flow from the limitations of scale, including the risk of depoliticisation (Blondiaux, 2005), a tendency for defensive rather than transformative kinds of collective action, and the danger of unacceptable trade-offs between local self-determination and distributive equity or uniform standards. There are also concerns that (territorial) community empowerment approaches may end up keeping people poor by acting as a brake on individual geographical and social mobility. DIP was a durable and solidaristic 'helping/coping' network, using the institutions of neighbourhood and neighbouring to “support community via low-level activities that bring people casually together” (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p.149). It successfully recruited a high proportion of its sociallyexcluded target population, but it is limited insofar as it fails to articulate with the 'remediations' of socio-technical networks occurring through ICTbased urban change at a larger scale (Crang et al, 2007). HoS was an instrumentally-oriented, less durable 'operational' network, functioning at an urban scale to provide a different kind of support to disadvantaged individuals. Patient empowerment interventions like HoS can transform the lives of the individuals they reach, but they face a collective action problem because the nascent communities of interest they seek to mobilise are not embedded in relationships as insistent as those that are based upon located public familiarity. They typically overcome this by 'size manipulation' to localise community, but this in turn produces a different kind of equity challenge insofar as expert patient-type interventions and self-help groups tend not to reach socially-excluded individuals, since mobilising social support and control in sparsely-knit networks requires activity (Wellman, 2001). Thus they are open to the criticism that they have reneged on community health and collective efficacy in favour of individual responsibility and self-efficacy. The paper has attempted to show that technology appropriation can facilitate community empowerment, but there are limitations if the process targets a single community at a single scale. This is both because the level of appropriation by the individual is likely to be deeper and more transformative when a new technology is encountered in multiple community contexts, and because ICT can help interconnect communities at different scales. The argument for multi-scaled intervention design echoes calls for combining people- and place-based social inclusion strategies and for incorporating help for disadvantaged neighbourhoods into city-wide

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Table 1. Comparison of the two projects Digital Inclusion Project The offer

Hearts of Salford

Computer, printer, desk and chair, Computer, printer, 1 year's broadband 3 years' broadband Internet access Internet access

Conditionality Requirement to undertake some centre-based learning and contribute to Council website; equipment on loan from Council, participants liable for its security

Requirement to access and share health information and participate in surveys and focus groups; consent to recording of contributions to online discussion forums; equipment on loan

Location

Renfrewshire, pop. 170,000. Salford, pop. 216,000. 12th most Pockets of severe deprivation in an deprived local authority out of 354 in otherwise ‘average’ local England, with pockets of affluence, authority, though picture worse for picture worse for health; 36 out of 144 health; 8 of 214 data zones (3.7%) Super Output Areas (25.0%) among among the 5% most deprived in the 5% most deprived in England. Scotland, including the research setting.

Priority population

Residents of one 5% deprivation zone (area 32 ha, pop. 2,180), an 'outer city' public housing scheme 6km from Paisley. Priority to families with children, single parents, older people, disabled, people with learning difficulties, unemployed and volunteers. 300 households recruited (target met)

Marketing and Leafleting of all households, then outreach by community peers recruitment hired as sessional staff; targeting strategy of other settings such as Post Office on benefits day, stopping people on the street, meetings at Learning Centre; referrals from schools; no general advertising. Duration 2 months Reach

Response rate: leafleting phase 4.4%, outreach phase 28.4%

People in Salford (area 9580 ha, pop. 216,000) with heart disease aged 50-74 (approx. 6,000); random allocation to experimental and control groups; initial plan to target the most deprived wards until quota filled. In reality only 107 participants recruited from whole of Salford (target 360) Eligible individuals identified through GP-held CHD registers, sent application pack through post; extensive advertising in local press, TV and radio; leaflets distributed through pharmacies, Salford Heart Care*, community workers in various fields; taster sessions at community computing centre and at University. Duration 10 months Response rate: 1.8% - 10%**

* A local support group in the voluntary sector. ** As it is impossible to know how many people heard about the project through the mass

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media, only minimum and maximum response rates can be calculated. The minimum rate assumes all 6,000 eligible heart patients in Salford were informed; the maximum rate assumes only those who were sent information packs were informed.

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Table 2. Comparative statistics for participants in the projects and the respective areas DIP Johnstone West HoS Salford UK participants ward* (2001 participants (2001 census (National Statistics (April 2004 census unless (2006 survey, unless stated Omnibus Survey survey, n=102) stated n=108) otherwise) 2006) otherwise) 29.8% 54.1% (16-74 14.8% 36.7% (50-74 Employed year-olds) year-olds) 66.7% 44.5% (16-74 30.6% 61.8% % (50-74 No formal year-olds) year-olds) qualifications 12.9% 10.5% (16-74 26.0% 16.0% ( 50-74 Permanently year-olds) year-olds) sick/disabled 15.7% 43.5% 65% of all Already had households and 44% computer of over-55s 14.0% 36.1% 55% of all Already had households and 38% home Internet of over-55s access * Figures unavailable for the West Johnstone SIP area (pop. 2,180) which covers about half of the Johnstone West ward (pop. 4,502).

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Endnotes 1

SIPs were the main vehicle for area renewal and social justice policy in Scotland during the 1990s and early 2000s, subsequently integrated into the Community Planning framework. Not all SIPs were neighbourhood-focused: some were so-called thematic partnerships, but even they had a regional rather than national coverage. 2 The first author's involvement with both projects prompted a good deal of puzzlement and reflection on this, providing the motivation for this paper. 3 Figures for Internet access in Salford were not available, but the north-west region has a level of connectedness about 3% lower than the UK as a whole (ONS, 2007). 4 Quotations are from interviews with outreach workers conducted in September 2006 or from interviews and focus groups with residents held during six months' observation conducted by the first author in and around the West Johnstone CLC during spring and summer 2004. 5 Atkinson & Kintrea (2000) found that contestation with respect to community facilities could also occur between tenants and home owners on mixed-tenancy estates, with the latter feeling they were ‘not for them’. No such distinction was evident in West Johnstone with respect to the CLC. 6 For a fuller description of the role of outreach workers see Smith, Lindsay & Bellaby, 2008. 7 Sociability has been used by some authors to include “instrumental as well as non-instrumental means of motivating people” (Misztal, 2000, p.81). Here it is used in the narrower Simmelian sense, where “the actual life-conditioned motivations of sociation are of no significance to sociability ... [whose] aim is nothing but the success of the sociable moment and, at most, a memory of it.” (Simmel, 1950, pp.44-5) 8 The meaning of this term is well-illustrated by giving a counter-example: in some gated communities one could say that collateral experiences have been designed out, as far as possible, in order to enable residents to pursue unhindered privatised lifestyles. 9 There is an over-representation of young families with children in West Johnstone compared with Renfrewshire, while many families can trace their roots back to the original inhabitants of the post-war scheme. 10 In both case studies the acquisition of an Internet-connected PC (the 'decision' stage of technology adoption in Rogers' diffusion model) may have preceded the 'persuasion' stage (when an actor becomes convinced of its utility). This is not uncommon for older people, who often acquire ICT as gifts from their children, but it is an inversion of the normal sequence for younger people (Caradec & Eve, 2002).

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