The Capability of Places: Methods for Modelling Community Response to Intrusion and Change
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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.
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).
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The Capability of Places - Sandra Wallman
The Capability of Places
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors:
Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University
and
Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex
Recent titles:
Claiming Individuality:
The Cultural Politics of Distinction
EDITED BY VERED AMIT AND NOEL DYCK
Home Spaces, Street Styles:
Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City
LESLIE J. BANK
In Foreign Fields:
The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration
THOMAS F. CARTER
On the Game:
Women and Sex Work
SOPHIE DAY
Slave of Allah:
Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA
KATHERINE C. DONAHUE
A World of Insecurity:
Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security
EDITED BY THOMAS ERIKSEN, ELLEN BAL AND OSCAR SALEMINK
A History of Anthropology
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN AND FINN SIVERT NIELSEN
Ethnicity and Nationalism:
Anthropological Perspectives Third Edition
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
Globalisation:
Studies in Anthropology
EDITED BY THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
Small Places, Large Issues:
An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology Third Edition
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
What is Anthropology?
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge
KATY GARDNER AND DAVID LEWIS
Corruption:
Anthropological Perspectives
EDITED BY DIETER HALLER AND CRIS SHORE
Anthropology’s World:
Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline
ULF HANNERZ
Culture and Well-Being:
Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics
EDITED BY ALBERTO CORSIN JIMENEZ
State Formation:
Anthropological Perspectives
EDITED BY CHRISTIAN KROHN-HANSEN AND KNUT G. NUSTAD
Cultures of Fear:
A Critical Reader
EDITED BY ULI LINKE AND DANIELLE TAANA SMITH
Fair Trade and a Global Commodity:
Coffee in Costa Rica
PETER LUETCHFORD
The Will of the Many:
How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy
MARIANNE MAECKELBERGH
The Aid Effect:
Giving and Governing in International Development
EDITED BY DAVID MOSSE AND DAVID LEWIS
Cultivating Development:
An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice
DAVID MOSSE
Ethnic Distinctions, Local Meanings:
Negotiating Cultural Identities in China
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Terror and Violence:
Imagination and the Unimaginable
EDITED BY ANDREW STRATHERN, PAMELA J. STEWART AND NEIL L. WHITEHEAD
Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production
MARUŠKA SVAŠEK
Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
Second Edition
PETER WADE
Race and Sex in Latin America
PETER WADE
Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War:
The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA
EDITED BY DUSTIN M. WAX
Learning Politics from Sivaram:
The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka
MARK P. WHITAKER
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.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3146 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3145 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 8496 4617 8 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1383 7 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1382 0 EPUB eBook
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
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