Transcript Mary Corcoran

PROF CORCORAN:  Thank you very much, great pleasure to be here today.  Quite daunting to follow George's fantastic talk, which I never thought toilets could be so interesting! So thank you George.

I suppose in a way you gave me a good segue, because you stopped at the point where I begin, which is to talk about ordinary homes, ordinary places, and really those in the context of community, I was thinking when I thought about your wonderful title for your conference, about the notion of liveability.

Because in a way what ordinary homes and ordinary places means is livable homes and livable places.  So I thought I would talk today about the L factor, the liveability factor and how we create liveable neighbourhoods, communities and homes in the 21st century.

So I really wanted to start with a quote from my colleague, Tony Fahey, with whom I've collaborated on a number of neighbourhood studies, and Tony's quote there where he says "the nature of an individual's relationship with others in their household, their community and beyond, as well as institutions and policies, are fundamental influences on quality of life."  And that's really what I think George has been talking about, the kind of policies, etcetera, that are available and how we use them to improve quality of life.

And in a way what we're all trying to do is to promote social cohesion and minimise social polarisation, whether we're talking about people with disabilities or other kinds of social exclusions.  But that really means that we have to enhance the capacity of people to participate fully in the life of the society.

And while we do have a fairly well developed literature about the notion of well‑being and quality of life, very little attention has been given to this concept of liveability, it's not really all that developed.  And when I use the term really, what I'm thinking about is really going back to a guy called Kevin Lynch, who wrote in Australia in the 1970s.

Some people tried to develop his work and argued that for example neighbourhood liveability is really about connections, which I think is the point that George finished on, continuity and openness.

So places, really for places to be liveable they have to accommodate people, support their well‑being and enable them to pursue their own individual aspirations and goals, and that's really what all of us want in life.

Now more recently Venhoven has observed that liveability is also associated with having close networks, strong social norms and voluntary activity.

Perhaps in a way it's easier to say what the opposite of liveability is, because what Venhoven says is it's social fragmentation, things falling apart if we can't actually accomplish or achieve liveability.

Okay so what I really want to talk about is draw on some of my own sociological research to provide, perhaps a little bit of insight into what are some of the factors or the ingredients that tend to make places liveable and that also make homes liveable for people.

So I'm going to talk about three different things, one, the affiliated suburb, secondly the notion of the enduring community and thirdly the meaning of home.

Those three things really have evolved from three different studies that I have been involved in.

So the affiliated suburb really is taking some of the learning from, is a study that myself and some colleagues did on suburban living in the greater Dublin area, which was published way back in 2010.

In 2014 a study came out which looked at liveability in the context of social housing neighbourhoods in Ireland, that was a kind of ten‑year review study of seven housing estates, and I'll say a little about the findings from that.

And the most recent piece of work is a collaboration I have been involved in with an artist, Mary Burke, in Tallaght west, where Mary photographed and painted portraits of ten homes in Tallaght west, and the other Mary, that's me, I did interviews with the families to try and get a sense from them of the meaning of home in their everyday lives.

So I'm just going to draw on some of the insights of the people that we consulted across those three studies to try to address this issue of liveability.

So one of the reasons that we studied suburbia is because an awful lot of things were being said about suburbia in the media, particularly in the first decade of the 21st century, so there was a huge boom in suburban development, notable journalists such as Frank McDonald in the Irish Times holding his nose at the idea of anybody ever wanting to dream of living in a suburb, an outpost at some distance from Dublin.

So there was essentially in the literature this idea that suburbs are either alienated deserts where nobody speaks to each other or valleys of the squinting windows, they are a new form of village life.  And we want to test that hypothesis by exploring four suburban areas quite different in terms of the stage of the development in the early 2000s.

So we looked at Leixlip, Lucan, Mullingar and Rathoath in Meath.  The idea of the book was to really find out from people who lived there, what was the nature of their quality of life, how did they gauge the liveability of the places where they had ended up?

Now what we found really was that ‑‑ and really the title of the book underlines our conclusions, that these suburban estates were not disaffiliated, in fact they were very connected places where people connected with each other in many different ways.

So that was really quite a positive that came out of the research.  So what we tried to do really in the analysis was to identify what are the key factors that makes a place such as a new suburban community work?

And really it has to produce a form of communality or community.  So people don't have to be intimately involved with each other, and neither do they have to just have superficial ‑‑ in other words we try to sort of find a kind of average that you can find a way of connecting with people that wasn't purely superficial, or that wasn't absolutely intense, so you can find a common space between those extremes.

And the four kind of principles of liveability, which we came up with, were these very simple ideas, first of all that people have to be able to develop a sense of rapport with the place where they are living.

And I suppose the best way to characterise that is as a sense of place, a sense of place attachment and actually strikingly one of the ways in which that really worked for people was to have a sense of pastoralism, so suburbs occupy this in‑between space between the city and countryside, and it's interpreted and perceived as a really positive thing for the people who live there.

So people need to have a sense of a place attachment and in the four suburbs that we studied the vast majority of people reported they felt very attached to, the place where they lived.  So they had a kind of point of orientation.  A sense of village feel, or just a sense of nice nature backdrop to their homes.

Now the second thing that people identified was this notion of access.  And this I think makes sense for all of us, in the locality or nearby, people have access to goods and services.  Now again a lot of the negativity about suburbs is that they are at some distance from the city centre, well yes but what we found was people actually, and obviously this means that they are to some extent car dependent, access their goods and services in other outposts around the perimeter of the city.

So people are not trying to get in and out of Dublin, but rather are travelling from one small town or village to another to access goods and services, so it creates if you like a different kind of circuit of mobility on the edge or the outskirts of the city.

Social fabric was very important to people's lives.  We found on average people had between five to six contacts that they could rely on for general help and support.  And those six contacts or social supports were either made up of family, friends or neighbours.  Now the interesting thing is that that was a different ‑‑ the social network had a different composition in each of the four suburbs.

So for example in Leixlip people mainly relied on friends for support, but that is because it was a well established suburb, there for quite a long time where people's neighbours had become friends over time.  In Rathoath on the other hand it was a relatively newly suburbanised place, a lot of people moved there at the same time, they had a kind of frontier mentality, so they tend to rely on each other, on neighbours for their support.

And in Mullingar and in Lucan, people tended to be at an earlier stage of family formation, they were two income couples, where they were relying still very much on friends as their support network.

So really what that showed is that support networks are absolutely crucial, but it doesn't have to be the neighbours, or the friends or the family, it can be one or other of those or a combination of those.

Finally in the suburban study we found that people really, to make it liveable there has to be some kind of collective orientation and this is really guarding against social fragmentation.

So what we found is relatively high levels of social participation, people knew about different things that were going on in the community and they tended to be involved in one or other of those things.  However they did feel that it was very difficult to get their voices heard within local government, so while there was a strong social participation, there was a lot of frustration about communicating the needs of the community to the powers that be.

So I suppose our learning from that was that we should not assume the kind of stereotypes about suburbia that it is somehow a difficult or challenging place to live, of course there are challenges there, but in fact people rated their suburban living as being quite positive and that's a message that we can take with us as suburbanisation continues in the Irish context.

Now the second study I wanted to draw on is the study of the social housing, which we did, we conducted a study of seven housing estates in the late 1990s and we found many problems in those social housing estates which, they tended to be socially and spatially segregated, they were perceived as unsafe, residents often used the language of imprisonment as a way of describing the places where they lived.

On the other hand, that's why I use the term enduring community.  Because it has a double meaning.  So people had to endure that sense of being imprisoned, of being second class citizens, because of where they lived.  But at the same time these places were characterised by a strong sense of communal solidarity that really anchored people in their everyday social relations and practices.

So community endured, even as the community was enduring particular challenges and difficulties.

Now we went back to the same seven estates in 2007/2008, so about ten years after the original study, in the meantime the Celtic Tiger had come and gone.  And I suppose what we were trying to assess was the idea, how many boats were lifted during the Celtic Tiger and did it have any kind of impact?

Did any of the extra money that was sloshing around actually disseminate down into these communities?

So we looked at the communities and really to gauge the degree to which they became more liveable in the intervening ten years, and there's a number of ways in which things had really improved.

So one way in which these communities had changed is there was a real raising of aspiration.  A lot of the young people were staying on in school longer, parents were returning to education, people who had been long‑term unemployed had been able to get work during the boom.

So in a way what Venhoven describes as life ability, people's life ability, the ability and capacity of people to engage in education and engage in work had improved in those intervening times and had a positive impact I think on their quality of life.

The second thing that we were able to identify was a much greater engagement on the part of residents in attempting to improve the quality of life in their estates and also to maintain that quality of life.  So there's lots of voluntary activity around arts interventions, obviously urban regeneration, sports activities, sports clubs, and things like ‑‑ simple things like designing and sustaining a community allotment garden.

So these kind of things then were giving people a way of engaging in their community, of course that then has the impact of enhancing people's capacity to act in their own interest, which is what is crucial to a community, that people feel empowered to act in their own interests.

And probably one of the best examples of that was the Fatima Mansions estate, which really over that period of ten years underwent a huge period of regeneration, but also relatively successful in challenging the dominant stereotype of what Fatima Mansions meant in the wider media.

So the way in which the estate was represented to wider public was really challenged by the people who lived there.  And that I think denoted a kind of a new confidence and a capability on the part of the community in dealing with external agents.

But it wasn't all good, unfortunately, and there are still certain problems that we identified, which have maintained themselves to the present day.  So unfortunately no matter how much energies and effort, resourcing you put in, we still found that in many of the estates there was a form of social apartheid continued to exist and it was more salient in some estates than others.

So what that meant was there are still pockets of social fragmentation evident in the environment, in the fact that there is still some very, very difficult to reach families, and so even when a huge amount of effort is put in, one‑on‑one interventions, which of course require a lot of resourcing, there are still some what you might call alienated minorities or dysfunctional families, which require a lot of support, and which can actually make things quite difficult and challenging for others living in the community.

And finally, we found Fatima was a kind of a dependency culture ‑‑ sorry across the seven estates a lot of the service providers suggested that people had imbibed that dependency culture to such a degree that it was interfering with their individual capacity building.

So I suppose what we concluded was that there were significant advances made in the liveability of these social housing estates over the ten years, but at a collective level, serious social exclusion problems still exist, and the process of improving the liveability of social housing estates and also investing in the life ability of people who live there are goals that we still need to focus on.

I just have a little picture there of Fatima Mansions, the photograph I took in 1997 and you can understand why people described their lives as being imprisoned, that was the motif they used, and that's a photograph of Fatima Mansions today, which is just transformed beyond recognition, but still requires a lot of work, a lot of input to maintain quality of life on the estate.

I'm not going to go through that, it's just a little slide about the kind of factors that help an estate to become successful and they are really around things like support, encouragement, affirming the community, having feedback loops with the local authority and when you don't have those, it creates issues of apathy, sporadic activism, people losing their confidence in the capacity to achieve things for themselves and indifference results.  So that was just one of the outcomes of the study, our capacity to map if you like successful versus unsuccessful estates.

I'm just going to spend the last few minutes talking about the third study, which was an absolute pleasure to be involved in, this as I've mentioned was a kind of collaboration with an artist, Mary Burke, where we talked to people living in west Tallaght, which as the people from west Tallaght will tell you themselves, is colloquially known as Beirut, the wild west or Apache land! It's interesting that those terms that are bandied around, they are terms that mean the frontier, the edge, the war zone.

So that's in a sense how many people from the outside perceive places like west Tallaght.  We wanted to see what ‑‑ I guess in the interviews, I wanted to try and get people's understanding of the symbolic and material qualities of their home and their own sense of home making and ageism within that.

What we found really was all the families that participated in the project, that home was a very special space and place.  A place that is regulated, because there is ongoing regimes of cleaning and decoration and redecoration, a place that is very family centred and as George pointed out, you come across blended and extended family members, passing in and through these spaces.

But for some of these residents, these are also contingent places, because they are homes that have been secured after years of being on a waiting list or agitation, and a home that potentially can be taken back by the Council at some point.

So that creates a certain element of feeling of insecurity for many of these people.

When I was actually reading through the interviews and trying to frame what people had said to me, I came across an article which said the meaning of home can practically be divided up into four different meanings for people.

Home as a physical structure, as a particular territory, as a centre for self identity and a social and cultural unit.  I found that really helpful in trying to frame the interview data.

So at the most basic level then homes obviously provide a place of material shelter, of privacy, continuity and a sense of permanence.  And it was very interesting that the people in Tallaght west, when we asked them, describe ‑‑ talk about the home and what it means, they really, really took pride in the home being structurally sound, that came up over and over again.  So people talked about it's well built, they're a solid house, they're actually a good, sturdy house.  They often compared them then with newer houses, where maybe children or relatives had moved to, where they said as one person said, I've a relative who bought a new house in a west Dublin suburb and the walls were paper thin, you could have a conversation with the girl next door.  These ones now, these are solid ‑‑ so it was very interesting, their use of that language to describe what the home meant.

And so that was a very significant thing to them, it's actual physical sturdiness.  Now without exception all of the people that we talked to were working on the house.  I think that's another thing we have to recognise, that a house, a sense and always an ongoing accomplishment.  And I think George brought that out too in his presentation.  A house is something that has to be adapted over the life course.

People were engaged in a whole lot of activity, because their houses, from their point of view were always in a state of becoming.  In a sense, I suppose you could argue that that's a kind of resistance to the way in which the house has been designed.

But I think it's a more positive process of making the house a home.  And that can really only be done by the people who occupy it.

Now in Tallaght west, home as territory was extremely important.  Because as I've mentioned people perceive their external environment to be quite unsafe and to be a place that was often difficult to navigate.

So you have this tension all the time, in social housing estates between a really strong sense of neighbourliness and close kinship networks and then on the other hand this kind of anti‑social behaviour of a small minority, which can have a really damaging effect on the neighbourhood and the environment.

So for people in Tallaght west, safety and security were really important.  If you take something like a garden, front and back gardens were less often viewed as extensions of the house, but rather as buffer zones, buffer zones between the privacy and security of their home and the sometimes indefensible space of the neighbourhood around them.  And this was particularly the case for homes that are awkwardly positioned on corner sites facing maybe an open green.  Where people in those were really exposed and faced persistent vandalism, including damage to the house itself, or to planting, trees and cars that are parked there.

So what is the impact of this?  Of course the impact of this is to intensify the desire to come in and close the door.  And as one resident said, to stick to ourselves.  Another resident described her home as a safe haven where you can forget about the world.

So there is a strong security discourse underscoring this of people keeping their doors locked, keeping windows tightly closed all the time and keeping windows curtained so they had the facility to see out, but people didn't have the facility to see in.

Home then thirdly, was perceived as a place of self identity and self expression, that sort of connects back to this idea of the home as something that is becoming, that you use your resources and you draw on your capacities and those of your extended family, because we found a huge gender division of labour here, that women who had access to men could get things done on their garden or their house, whereas women who didn't have access to men were really stuck with just keeping their aspirations of how the home might be, but weren't able to actually do it.  Of course for a lot of people they were very financially straightened so very much reliant on voluntary support and help.

So this is how people decorate, the kind of pictures they put on the walls, particularly putting family on the walls, and creating those inter‑generational connections within the space.  And affirming if you like the placement in the wider network.

I would also mention nature was significant, they all talked about the mountains as the backdrop that was significant to them in making Tallaght west a liveable place, which is what the pastoral suburbanites also said.

Home is also a social and cultural unit and again we found very high levels of social bonding between people, just as we found in the suburbs that we looked at back in 2010.  So there's a strong kind of culture of care.  People putting other people up until they got a house, people moving in with their parents and living, sharing accommodation until they could get to their space.  And then offering their home in turn to others.

One of the kind of unintended things that came up was that this culture of care centred on home and making it available to family and friends as required, also extended to keeping pets.  And taking in stray animals and providing temporary homes for household pets of other family members.

So we found really that animals constituted a really important part of the dramatis personae of these households.

In every household they had pets to which they were attached, they were taking care pets of adult children or had dramatic stories to tell of pets past and present.

I found that really interesting, I looked in the literature and could find nothing that featured the place that animals occupy in the hearts of participants in their homes, so I really thought that was quite a significant insight that we learned from our participants.

And these, the dogs and so on that were there, they weren't really kept for security reasons, they had a very strong social function, which was very salient to the respondents, we recently came across a piece by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times talking about acquiring a pet in New York City and discovering that pets are key to breaking down social barriers.  I think we all know that, that if you walk in the park or go out with a pet, it is a point of introduction to others.  And she actually says that cities in their planning need to be thinking about creating dog runs, and creating programmes for people can lend pets to each other and so on.

I would be very strongly like to pursue that, because this was a thematic which I had not anticipated, but which was very meaningful to people in creating their own sense of home.

Okay so finally then, what does all this amount to?  I have just given you a small kind of trip through three sociological studies.  I suppose in thinking about ordinary homes and ordinary places, we need to recognise what is shared in common and work from that basis.  And what we found is that there is not any big difference between the people living in social housing in Tallaght west and the people living in very nicely appointed houses in Rathoath, County Meath.  People want the same things, people have the same aspirations, it's easier for some people to attain them than others, but we are all basically looking for the same kind of things, and we need to start from that position.

Cultivating a sense of place is really important to bedding down into a community, for a community to thrive it needs to have this sense of there being there.  Creating circuits of sociability, in the suburban study obviously children are a massive bonus to suburbia, when kids are out on the green or being brought to and from school, it's a point of encounter with others, maybe we can think about dog walking in the same way, creating circuits of sociability.

People need to be provided with opportunities for affiliation and engagement for ways of connecting with others, we do find in most communities there is a lot of civil society activity that makes that possible.

Finally we need to see people and places in terms of a positive resource model rather than a deficit model, when people think of Tallaght west they think deficit, when you go and meet these people who are often working under very challenging conditions to provide really beautiful, ordinary homes for their families, we see a positive resource model at work.  So I think challenging stereotypes is really one of the main things that we can do to promote the notion of liveability.  Thank you very much.