The Capability of Places: Methods for Modelling Community Response to Intrusion and Change

By Sandra Wallman

How can we assess the ability of a place to respond to challenges like migration, recession and disease? Places which seem similar can respond very differently, and with varying degrees of success, to external threats and to the interventions designed to manage them.

In this magisterial work, drawing on decades of research, Sandra Wallman explores how we can measure and compare the resilience of communities, looking in detail at neighbourhoods in London, Rome and Zambia. Each locale is examined as a system which is more or less open or closed; open systems tend to be more resilient when faced with external challenges.

As well as being a fascinating study in its own right, the book includes detailed accounts of the research methods used, as well as a user-friendly typology for classifying local systems, making it an invaluable tool for students, researchers and policy-makers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783713820

Sandra Wallman

Sandra Wallman is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at University College London. She is the author of Contemporary Futures: Perspectives from Social Anthropology (Routledge, 1992) and The Capability of Places (Pluto, 2011).

Book preview

The Capability of Places

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:

Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University

and

Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex

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THE CAPABILITY OF PLACES

Methods for Modelling Community Response

to Intrusion and Change

Sandra Wallman

with Virginia Bond, Maria Alessia Montuori and Mai Vidali,

assisted throughout by Rossella Lo Conte

First published 2011 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Sandra Wallman 2011

The right of Sandra Wallman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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This book is dedicated to the memory of:

Yvonne Dhooge (1949–1996), who enabled the ball to start rolling in the first London study, and whose early insights into the capability of places have enhanced the story ever since

and to

Mohammad Muzzafar Ali (‘Sher Khan’) (1947–2009), refugee and leader of immigrants, who was found dead on the pavement in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele after 20 years in Italy waiting for asylum status.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

1Themes and a Model

2London – Ethnicity or Localism?

3Rome – Migrants and Migration

4Zambia – Terrains and Tuberculosis

5Three Sets of Methods, One Methodology

6Towards Typology

Appendices

A    London

B    Rome

C    Zambia

D    Methods

Notes

References

Index

List of Figures and Tables

FIGURES

1.1 Continuum between ideal types

1.2 Boundary effect

1.3 Local network effect

2.1 Map of Greater London Boroughs

2.2 LARA Housing Action Area

2.3 Medway Road Housing Action Area

2.4a Battersea street scene (1982), showing mixed housing options

2.4b Battersea back gardens, showing connectedness

2.4c Bow street (Medway Road), showing identical terraces and high rise blocks

2.4d Bow Housing Estate (Anthill Road)

2.5 Levels of the local

3.1 Map of Esquilino and Pigneto

3.2a Pigneto street scene, showing unplanned urban landscape

3.2b Pigneto central square, showing convivial local life

3.2c Esquilino: classical arched thoroughfare

3.2d Esquilino: typical monumental architecture

4.1 Map of 16 ZAMSTAR sites in Zambia

4.2 Allocation of ZAMSTAR interventions across four arms

4.3a George: typical housing (2005)

4.3b George: local drug store

4.3c Senama: typical housing (2005)

4.3d Senama market place

5.1 Research methods in context

5.2 London: indicators contrasting Battersea and Bow

5.3 Rome: indicators contrasting Pigneto and Esquilino

5.4 Zambia: indicators contrasting George and Senama

A1 Map to record Geographic Distance of people named in a Personal Network

A2 Map to record Affective Distance of people named in a Personal Network

C1 Annual risk of TB infection in 16 communities in Zambia

C2 Completion rates for ten sites

C3a George: individuals submitting sputum, by route

C3b Senama: individuals submitting sputum, by route

TABLES

2.1 Tenancy type in LARA in 1974 and 1978 (%)

2.2 Birthplace of LARA resident population in 1978 (totals and %)

2.3 Tenancy type in Medway Road in 1982 (totals and %)

2.4 Birthplace of Medway Road resident population in 1982 (totals and %)

2.5 Baseline difference of indicators in the London setting

3.1 Indicators in the Rome setting

3.2 Summary contrast between Pigneto and Esquilino

4.1 Indicators in the Zambia setting

4.2 First attempt at applying open:closed to Zambian sites

4.3 Qualitative assessment of all 16 sites

4.4 Sixteen sites along the open:closed continuum

4.5 Zambian sites classified open to closed ‘in feeling’

4.6 Constrained randomisation factors by community in Zambia

5.1 Layered continua/ meta -indicator frame

6.1 Field guide to the meta -indicators

6.2 Summary contrast between open and closed

A1 Age (%)

A2 Country of origin (%)

A3 Ethnic origin (%)

A4 Education/qualification (%)

A5 Social grade (%)

A6 Socio-economic classification (%)

A7 Occupation group (%)

A8 Industry of employment (%)

A9 Dwelling types (%)

A10 People living in dwelling types (%)

A11 Number of people per household (%)

A12 Household composition (%)

A13 Tenure (%)

A14 Travel to work (%)

B1 Italian population family size, 1991 (%)

B2 Population age structure, 1991 and 2005 (total values and %)

B3 Foreign population age structure, 2005 (% of total foreign population)

B4 Presence of foreigners (total values and %)

C1 Stigmatising perceptions of transmission among household members in George (N = 188)

C2a TB patients in George (N = 224), stigmatisation and disclosure

C2b PLWH in George (N = 60), stigmatisation and disclosure

C3 Stigmatising perceptions of transmission among household members in Senama (N = 142)

C4a TB patients in Senama (N = 157), stigmatisation and disclosure

C4b PLWH in Senama (N = 73), stigmatisation and disclosure

Acknowledgements

I cannot name the many people who have enabled or added value to this project over the years, most recently the publisher’s anonymous reviewers, but their input is warmly acknowledged. Other individuals and institutions can be specified. Each of the three studies was formally sponsored by a different agency and involved its own set of researchers, fieldworkers and informants. They are named, with appreciation, in footnotes to their respective chapters. The book has come together during the period of my participation in the EU/FP6 Network of Excellence ‘SUS.DIV’ (Sustainable Development in a Diverse World), originally convened by Dr Dino Pinelli and hosted throughout by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) in Milan. I am grateful to Valeria Papponetti at FEEM, and to Professor Maddy Janssens, the current convenor of the network, who allocated funds so that the team involved in the book could come together to brainstorm it face to face. This collective effort shows throughout the volume: my sincere thanks to Ginnie Bond, Alessia Montuori, Mai Vidali and Rossella Lo Conte for their good-natured commitment to seeing it through. Dr Raffaele Bracalenti and Dr Vanya Stenius at the Istituto Psicoanalitico per le Ricerci Sociali (IPRS) in Rome were generous contributors to the discussion and to the success of the Rome study reported as Chapter 3. Finally I thank Doug Black for enhancing maps and photos; colleagues in the UCL Department of Anthropology for their steady encouragement; and Pluto’s editors for their helpful criticism and general guidance.

SW

London

February 2011

1

Themes and a Model

THE PROBLEMS

How is it that similar settlements react so differently to the shock of change? Whether sudden-catastrophic or long-term-insidious, provoked by recession or development, in- or out-migration, epidemic or intervention – whatever the impetus to change, the variety of local response to it is not in doubt. In Europe at this time, migrants are the crucial litmus. ‘Fortress Europe’, for its purposes, wants to keep migrants out; demographic Europe, for other reasons, desperately needs to bring them in – and there are powerful interest groups lined up on either side of the policy divide. This is the normal stuff of democratic political process: governments swing between policies that might bridge the voter gap between extremes and yet keep the media on side; and the voters most often ignore or deny the contradictions in the discourse.¹

Crucially, however, the reality of migration ‘on the ground’ has a different dynamic. Whatever the national or supra-national consensus, local reaction to migrant influx varies from place to place, even between superficially similar neighbourhoods in the same town. Migrants themselves know the variations best. Whether they seek work or asylum, whether they place themselves or are officially placed, and largely regardless of cultural or racial profiles, they find certain parts of any large city more adaptable and more amenable to their presence than others.

In other economic and political contexts, issues raised by other kinds of incursion will be ‘hotter’ – disease, development, interventions of any kind – but in every case unexplained local differences get in the way of managing a predictable outcome. Policy implementation is impeded if not confounded by local diversity. The general problem raises a simple question: What differences make the significant difference between places? To address it, this book sets out to identify indicators of contrastive local styles which might explain why some local places adapt more readily than others; why some are relatively more open and others consistently more closed to the outside. Based on these contrasts, it offers a typology of capability in response to change.

This is not the more usual anthropological mandate: this is not an ethnographic analysis or a report of research findings as such. Rather it is an explanation of how a model of local responses to change was developed, building on the logic of contrasts between open and closed local systems as it emerged in separate field studies. Of course the ‘facts’ of these differences were not given to us fully formed: ‘facts’ never are. The raw data of anthropological ‘fact’ are people behaving all over the place; they become intelligible only when some kind of analytic frame is imposed on the chaos. The themes used to construct such frameworks change with problem and circumstance, but decisions about methodology and method have to be made every time. Questions like: What do I really want to know? and How best can I know it? are the bedrock of anthropological practice.

This book is built around three studies, drawn respectively from field research in London, Rome and Zambia (Chapters 2, 3 and 4).² They are set in very different places, each with its own research problem and resource budget, and using research strategies designed to suit. At one level their answers to both questions are distinct. Strategies of enquiry – How can I know this? – are adapted to particular constraints of setting and support. And each has its own focus, its own answer to What do I want to know here?

The London study set out to explain the different significance of ethnicity in two ‘mixed’ areas on opposite sides of the city, first in 1978, then with a revisit in 2007 to check for changes. The model framework sketched later in this chapter emerged from contrasts which showed up in this initial research. In Rome, also in 2007, the focus was on migrations into adjacent neighbourhoods in the old town, close to the central railway station, and on the experience and reception of extra-communitari migrants who make up the current wave. The aim, responding to the Municipality of Rome’s concern with migrant–host relations, was to document and explain differences between the neighbourhoods in this regard. The Zambia project started in 2005 and is ongoing. It is the social strand of a medically driven test of interventions designed to control the spread of tuberculosis in 16 sites across the region. Its first remit was to identify indicators of social type so that the sites could be stratified for statistical purposes – it needed to know how to classify sites so that each intervention could be tested across the range of local conditions.

While in respect of aims and research strategies the three studies are significantly different, at a higher level of abstraction they are framed by the same methodology: the three data sets have been analysed in one model framework so that the ‘higher’ aim of classification could be achieved. The description of three sets of methods under one methodological umbrella is instructive; the combination is explored in Chapter 5 and the separate sequences of method used appear as Appendix D.

So while the three ethnographic chapters of this book report the details of research data in the usual way, we are unusually explicit about the business of asking and answering those prior questions. Our emphasis is on the development, use and usefulness of the open:closed systems model which appears, in various guises, in the analysis of each study.

In effect, rather than seeking direct answers to the opening question: How is it that similar settlements react so differently to the shock of change?, the book charts the development of a typology which organizes data in such a way that the question can be asked and answered across different cases by people with different kinds of expertise. We aim to make the typology ‘friendly’ enough to be helpful across the wide range of persons and groups who may have serious interest in the issues. Hence the book spells out the reasoning behind the modelling and classification processes, and it documents the procedures used to identify key indicators of response capacity in unusual detail.

THREE FIELD STUDIES

The indicators distinguishing one kind of response from another show in national statistics, policy evaluations, personal anecdote, structured observation, local gossip and casual walkabout. All these sorts of data are used in this volume to draw profiles of localised sites in London, Rome and Zambia. Each study has a different relation to the classificatory model: in London it was developed, in Rome it was tested, and in Zambia it was directly applied. The start-up reasoning also varies: in the first study it was inductive – the model emerging from the detail of empirical research; in the second and third it was deductive – guided by the questions and hypotheses raised by the model. But the three studies share one aim: to explain the diversity of local systems and the logic driving different responses to in-migration or intervention. The basic assumption is the same in each case: whether the system is a neighbourhood, a village or a smaller unit identified for the purposes of research, the local system is a function of relations between people and place, of the options of topography and infrastructure available to ‘locals’ – and of the way they choose among them.

It is clear that material/structural elements – population, housing, transport, employment – form the framework of possibility for actors. Broadly speaking these elements govern the shape and scope of social networks, constrain/enhance options for identity and relationship, and ‘decide’ the conditions for trust and cultural dialogue. Exactly how the visible elements shape these non-visible processes is less clear. The metaphor of ‘fish tank’ and ‘fish’ is helpful, signalling that there is a difference between ‘fish’ and ‘tank’ aspects of neighbourhood, and/but that they are crucially interconnected. First ask: What kind of fish tank is this place? Which kinds of fish live in it? What options does it offer them? Then ask: How do particular types of fish move in it? Which of the options on offer does each sort of individual take up?

The metaphor of course has limitations: the boundaries of locality are permeable, negotiable, varying with situation and history; not rigid like the edges of an aquarium, but fuzzier,³ more like a pond fed by streams… Similarly, it masks the fact that connections between place and people are relational, not static; multiplex, not singular tracks through a body of water; and that interaction between them goes both ways – the place limiting personal options, the choices of individuals generating new options which in their turn alter the scope of the place and its reaction to ‘shocks’ from outside.⁴ The reality is that local places are systems in process, not fixed in space or form.

CAPABILITY CONCEPT

These many strands provoke three challenges, each demanding its own response. The first is methodological: it is essential to convey