Physical Mobility

Question 1

Physical Mobility Primary Literature

What are the key points raised in Young, Gavron and Dench - The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict [Bethnal Green] (2011)

Answer 1

Provenance

Book models itself on Family and Kinship, as an update 50 years on - to comment on the ‘decline’ of the region, and the supplanting of traditional white families for that of Bangladeshi communities. It is by far more occupied with race, racism, government policy and social change.

Authors: Michael Young - co-author of Family and Kinship, founded the Consumers’ Association and Open University. Kate Gavron - fellow at the Young foundation. Geoff Dench - Prof. Of Sociology at Middlesex Uni; social anthropologist from Cam and LSE.

Source Type: Sociological Investigation

Commentary: Area in decline, not to do with families, but targets Bangladeshi families

Same book as Y+M - in being sociological., historical context - assimilation vs multiculturalism - how people viewed the movement of Bangladeshis into the community. At the time when there was a switch between multi and assimilation.

Ignores Bangladeshi views of race. Only 1 Bangladeshi account is considered.

This Bangladeshi is used to validate or refute a white comment - no agency to make his own comment.

Secondary - working class as against race. BNP - playing on idea that working class were against influence.

Time between research and publication makes analysis of impact hard. Draws from strong tradition.

Pinpointing the rise of the BNP is a good critique of the New Labour position on race; but fairly straightforward. Ignores instances where immigrants are welcomed into working class communities.

Schofield - on Powell, and Brook - memory of WWII as imagined as white - despite the role of commonwealth soldiers in the war - and how this impacted the conception of the welfare state - welfare state as for the whites only.

Interesting that paradoxes of anti-immigrant sentiment - i.e. the issuing of calpol to whites but not Bangladeshis

Paradoxical treatment of white and non-white children. Myths and untruths spread through gossip and storytelling - interesting trope.

Question 2

Physical Mobility Primary Literature

What are the key points raised in Anna Briggs - Who Drives the Family Car?

Answer 2

Provenance: Spare Rib - est. pop-culture feminist magazine. 1977.

Broader Historical Context: 1973 - 60% of women in large cities did not have a licence or household car - men however were twice as likely to have this; and would use said transport to get to work. Only 30% of Londoners commuted by public transport.

Stylistics: Use of satire and humour as a political tool is an interesting concept for the period - how this interacts with people.

Summary of Source Content: Gendered focus on the utility of the ‘family’ car - suggesting that women do not have adequate access to the right methods of physical mobility around town, and such is putting them at peril (i.e. children forced to walk home from school alone due to poor council planning, as mother and toddler cannot walk up hill)

Quotes: “Many children at the local primary school travel there and back alone - even the five year olds because the school is at the top of the steep hill and the journey’s physically impossible for mothers with toddlers”… “classic example of planning which forces mothers to put their children in danger”

“the survey claims that planning has been based on false assumptions - all foot journeys under one mile are not recorded in journey statistics (1) and in a cost-effectiveness exercise, the time of a working man is valued much higher than that of ‘non working’ people, so planning decisions are made to save time for the ‘high value’ people.”

Question 3

Physical Mobility Primary Literature

What are the key points raised in Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict

Answer 3

• Book, 1967
• Still widely cited in urban race relations studies.
• Source Legacy: The book had an immediate public impact, with reviews in major national publications, with the first leader in The Times, the fourth leader in The Guardian and a leading article on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph, on the 16th February.
• The Times used the publication to argue for much tighter control of ‘coloured immigration’.
• The Guardian editorial commented that our book, like the Milner-Holland report of 1965, had highlighted the failure of every agency involved in housing to tackle discrimination, and that they were unlikely to succeed in the future.
• Savage - Identities and Social Change - moment in sociology -where it moved from impressionistic, ethnographic model (Young and Wilmott) - universalising claims which shape social relations. Weberian influence, Rex = Marxist - Saw relations as competition over resources.
• Substrata of sociology - Ruth Glass - late 60s - lots of work on wider public debate on the city as a site of degeneration and breakdown.
• The underpass - the city becomes imagined as a space of problem and social breakdown. Rex et al are attempting to solve this.
• Broader Historical Context: Year before Rivers of Blood speech
• Key Contentions Around Subject: Immigration, race relations, generational dispute between population.
• Summary of Source Content: Study of Birmingham through the Burgess model, notably analysing the capacity for physical mobility and the impact this had upon racial and social tension, as the social and community dynamic of an area was disrupted. Elderly constituted the ‘most important native group’ to an area, and will be the last left in a community that is abandoned. Group seen as guardians of standards of a community. Will demand conformity to standards. Single men are seen as the first migrant group entering an area, likely for economic and temporary motive. This was seen to become permanent by contingency, resulting in marriage within or import of family to area. Tries to humanise sub-communities - against the dehumanising narrative against narratives. “Competing dialogues”
• Quotes: “The punitive policies pursued by the official of the local authority (promoting effective discrimination) will reflect and reinforce attitudes of hostility on the part of the host population at large” “Connection to a location is not often desired - ‘we live as we do, not out of choice, but because these alien people compel us to do so’.”

Question 4

Physical Mobility Secondary Literature

What are the key points raised in Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, ‘Place’, from Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (2009)

Answer 4

• Many council estates built in the 20th century were peripheral in relation to the urban areas they were attached to, both spatially and socially, with the two often going hand in hand. This can be seen in the North Earlham, Larkman and Marlpit Estates.
• By the 1970s, there was more of an acknowledgement among planners and architects of the need and desire for private garden space, which was reflected in a move away from the provision of purely public garden space and a return of private gardens, albeit significantly smaller than before.
• The stigmatising effect of the negative categorisation of the estates and their residents were deeply felt by some research participants, whose associations with the area have been profound and unsettling: Lorna Haley’s overriding memory of the Larkman is the feel of ’shame’ it induced in her.
• In perpetuating the idea that the poverty and reputation of the estates was the result of the ‘slum’ inhabitants, whose characteristics were somehow handed down between generations, representations of the space of the estates shifted the blame away from structural poverty and the attitude of the council and outsiders to the area onto the residents themselves.

Question 5

Physical Mobility Secondary Literature

What are the key points raised in David Feldman, Why the English like Turbans?, Structures and Transformations

Answer 5

• 1968 - Sikh silent march through Wolverhampton.
• 1976 - Win exemption from law requiring motorcycle helmet wearing.
• 1989 - No helmet on building site
• Enoch Powell speech 20 April 1968
• Assimilation was dominant political discourse approaching multiculturalism
• 1980s - Proliferation of race units and race advisers to address economic disadvantage and discrimination.

Question 6

Physical Mobility Secondary Literature

What are the key points raised in Simon Gunn, People and the Car: The Expansion of Auto-mobility in Urban Britain

Answer 6

• 1960 - Patrick Gordon Walker, House of Commons - Car is ‘major dynamic factor for social change… expression of men’s sense of independence and self-respect.’
• Car offered new socio-technical infrastructure w/ accompanying reorganisation of social life.
• John Urry - car as transformative agent reshaping physical landscape and rhythms of modern life.
• Sociological studies - People and the Motor Car (1964); Leicester Traffic Plan (1964) - self-consciously modern sociologies.
• Whilst 1960s suggests motorisation was in full-flow, car ownership was still only modest. Regional variations - Luton 1962 - 45% own a car (affluent workers); only 12% in Cumbria (1960) where steel workers were.
• As Young and Wilmott noted of the transition of families from Bethnal Green to ‘Greenleigh’, ‘cars, telephones and telegrams represent not so much a new and higher standard of life as a means of clinging to something of the old’
• The male-centric nature of studies of ‘affluence’ may have skewed the larger perspective; the Cambridge group study of Goldthorpe et al. (The Affluent Worker) acknowledged, for instance, that in their sample households neighbours continued to play a more important role in women’s lives than in those of men.

Question 7

What did Peter Ratcliffe note about Sparkbrook? (Rex and Moore)

Answer 7

• The uncritical use of terms such as ‘race’ and ‘race relations’ combined with the rigid essentialism associated with ethnic categories immediately stands out; alongside focus on men.
• Book was highly provocative, esp. in Birmingham. Invigorated debates about minority housing and immigration
• Core argument - housing is a commodity around which there is contestation/struggle arising from the fact that groups have differential access to such social goods. Contentious with Marxists
• A major concern of the Sparkbrook study lay in the poor quality of much of the property occupied by working-class families, and especially those from immigrant groups
• The stratified sampling design deployed in the survey element of the study had effectively ‘over-sampled’ the larger properties (such as HMOs) and this was not reflected in the initial analysis.

Question 8

What did Rex and Moore’s Sparkbrook study do?

Answer 8

Housing was placed at the fulcrum of family, kin and community and recognized as having fundamental implications for the likelihood of acquiring de facto social citizenship rights, not least a decent education and appropriate work opportunities.