Fire Fighters, Neighbourhoods and Social Identity: the relationship between the fire service and residents in Bristol
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Place as a social constructThese ideas of particularity of place, used by the researchers in the CIS network and by others in environmental psychology owe a debt to a different field entirely, to human geography. Human geographers have long argued for the social component in the spatial, that is that the spaces and places we visit and inhabit are formed by people’s uses of them and are viewed differently by different individuals. Places are not just objective spaces, rather they are socially constructed and dependent in part on our use of them. Massey argues (1999) that for too long, whilst geographers have accepted that the spatial has a social aspect, other social scientists have neglected the spatial aspect of the social, and although some in the social sphere have examined the spatial (Burley 2007, Gieryn 2000), it is really the social turn in geography (Massey, 1995) that has had the greater impact. Coming from outside of geography, a number of these issues have been addressed by Dixon and colleagues (Dixon 2001, Dixon, Durrheim 2004, Dixon, Durrheim 2000) taking a social psychological perspective, in papers which address taking a discursive approach to place identity (2000), place in relation to contact theory (2001) and how place is transformed through processes of desegregation (2004). In the first of these papers, Dixon addresses fundamental issues relating to social and spatial identity. He contends that questions of ‘who we are’ tend to be closely allied to questions of ‘where we are’ (page 27), and argues that not only do social sciences tend to evade the spatial, but that even social psychology avoids environmental psychology (potentially a comment in itself on intergroup hostility at a specific level of abstraction). In the context of this, he identifies three limitations to the pursuit of the spatial in social psychology. The first of these is that social identity approaches tend to ignore the ‘rhetorical traditions’ through which places and their associated identities are constructed and given meaning, that is, social psychology often views place as neutral, a point he revisits in the subsequent papers. Secondly, the current relationship between social and place identity ignores how assumptions about place are imbued with power, and used to justify certain socio-spatial relations. Thirdly, he identifies a marginalisation of the political aspects of this at an individual level. These factors are revisited in his 2001 paper on the contact hypothesis. In this paper, he identifies four different ways of viewing space in contact research, although in many cases these are likely to hold for much of social psychology. The first conception is that social space is a neutral backdrop to activity, with the implicit assumption that it is not, therefore, relevant. The second is that there are ‘ecological variations’ (page 591) in different locations of contact, and that these do imply a contextual specificity, but one which is arbitrarily constructed. This then serves to make the preconditions for successful contact increasingly and minutely rule-bound. The third conception views social space as something which, by distance or proximity, as opposed to any innate or constructed quality, acts to facilitate or impede contact. This ignores wider dynamics of power, such as who lives where and how ‘outsiders’ (Sibley 1995, Sibley 1999) are recognised and treated in communities, which governs people’s real-life experiences of mixing with different people. The fourth conception Dixon views as a latent conception, although it is the one that to him is the most meaningful. In this view, space is seen as having an effect on contact participants, but it tends not to be noted in a meaningful way by these researchers, rather just recorded as an aside or an interesting observation. Dixon then links these conceptions of place to Sibley’s work, as discussed elsewhere, on boundaries and the way in which others and outsiders are perceived on a psycho-social level. With the FRS persisting in utilising contact approaches in specific geographical locations, this clearly has ramifications for this research project. To reiterate, place is not merely a container of social activity (Massey, Allen et al. 1999, Massey 1995), rather it contributes to the nature of that social activity. For Cresswell (2004), place is the interplay of people and the environment, but more specifically, it is also ‘space invested with meaning in the context of power’ (page 12). As such, discussions of place are inherently political, as is the constitution of place. One of the ways in which this is particularly apparent is in the delineation of neighbourhoods, which I will discuss below, and in the ‘deciding’ of who gets to live where (Cresswell 2004), whether through housing policy, house prices or neighbourhood reputation. In extremis, this can lead to the exclusion of substantial groups or indeed, whole neighbourhoods. This is discussed in the subsequent section. NeighbourhoodsNeighbourhoods have been taken as a unit of study in sociology since the 1920s (Bridge 2006), when the Chicago School studied the way in which economic forces reordered the urban neighbourhood. More recent developments in sociology have included those around social and cultural capital (Putnam 2000), which are seen as located in specific neighbourhoods at particular times. Other developments have come from human geography and environmental psychology, in addition to urban studies and policy studies, following from social policy where the neighbourhood has increasingly become the subject of area based initiatives. The neighbourhood is of relevance to this research project as both the unit to which AFRS interventions are directed and the location for much of the research. Further, it is also the level at which, as the CIS network suggest (Pol, 2002), social identity functions within the city. Whilst there are a number of theories of the neighbourhood (Sullivan, Taylor 2007), the aim of this section is less to assess the theoretical nature of the neighbourhood, more to examine how it is constituted at a social and spatial level, proposing it as a unit of study for this research project. Galster (2001) takes a primarily spatial view of the neighbourhood, defining it as ‘the bundle of spatially based attributes associated with clusters of residences’ (Galster 2001) (page 2111) in his attempt to provide a rigorously quantifiable conceptualisation of the neighbourhood. He critiques previous attempts to define neighbourhood as focussing on the social aspects of neighbourhood, which can only be measured, he claims, once the location has been specified. However, he does not deny that there are social aspects of neighbourhood, although he views these in economic terms, stating that ‘the consumers of neighbourhood can be considered the producers of neighbourhood as well’ (page 2116). This view of the attributes of neighbourhood being mutually causal over time is reiterated by Forrest and Kearns (2001), who view the neighbourhood as ‘community’, ‘context’, ‘commodity’ and ‘consumption’ (page 2141-2). Defining neighbourhood as ‘overlapping social networks with specific and variable time geographies,’ (page 2134), their definition is essentially social, although it does also recognise that, unlike ‘community’ neighbourhood does require a degree of physicality (Forrest, Kearns 2001). They also provide some critique of other neighbourhood research which they see as being overly focused on poor and degenerate neighbourhoods, at the expense of more less extreme environments, and potentially also at the expense of those neighbourhoods which are studied, as they are further stigmatised (Atkinson, Kintrea 2001) – aspects which I have been careful to avoid in this research project. Both of these theorists demonstrate – perhaps unwittingly – that the neighbourhood is both a social and a spatial construct. From a theoretical perspective, the distinctiveness of the neighbourhood as the place in which people live relates to personal self image and sense of community (Mannarini, Tartaglia et al. 2006) and also to place attachment and cultural capital (Lewicka 2005). From a pragmatic level, a number of interventions are currently made at a local level, for instance Neighbourhood Renewal, and information is collected at this level by the fire service and other agencies. Further, studies themselves do not occur entirely out of place, and a neighbourhood scale is a manageable, navigable, human scale area in which to undertake a study, an issue which will be addressed in greater detail in the Methodology Chapter.
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