Changing nature of community Flashcards
Agrarian Community
Self sufficient and a clear class structure
Contemporary rurl community
Counter-urbanisation and rural gentrification. Between 1961 and 1971 ‘accessible’ rural areas grew in poulation by 44%
Rural pop today
17.6% people in the UK live in rural areas and characterised by higher numbers of elderly residents
Imagined Communitites
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Anderson (1991)
Rural idyll
Idealised image of the rural area - safe, nice housing, etc.
Rural social change
Loss of kinship connections - now most are ‘incomers’ and few can trace families back generations as in the past
Rural housing
Idyll is of rose-covered cottages but reality is few people live in these. Jones and Tonts (2003) found standard of living of housing is generally lower in smaller towns, the costs of construction is higher, greater availability of cheaper housing in rural areas and costs is higher.
Rural health
Figures in UK + Canada suggest lower morality rates and longer life expectancy (Cabinet Office, 2000) Other evidence from UK, North America and Australia indicates there are higher accident rates and greater prevalence of chronic ill health (Gesler and Rusketh, 1992)
Rural crime
Levels of victimisation are significantly lower in rural areas than in urban areas. In general, rural residents are half as likely to be victims of property crime
Different types of crime in rural environments
‘Activities of lawlessness’ - Okihoro (1997) found that a fishing community in Canada put emphaiss on poaching, moonshining and petty corruption. Interpersnal violence including violent disorder, often alcohol related between small town rivals (Gilling and Pierpart, 1999). Social disroder - Vandalism a major component while farmers compain about trespassing + disturbing livestock.
Isolation
Class, race, gender, sexuality all have issues in the rural community
Sterotypes in rural setting
Traditionally discourses have reported strict sterotyped representation of gender roles - masculinity is constructed through a rugged masculinity image (Campbell and Bell, 2000) and femininity is constructed through terms of domestic accomplishment and representation of young women as shy, demure and wholesome (Little, 2012)
Little, 2003
Rural setting heavily associated with an assumption of heterosexuality.
Rural homelessness
Cloke et al (2000) - ‘sociocultural constructions of rural space as prime, privileged, and problem-free territory have resulted in it becoming associated with particular lifestyles, social groups, housing structured, and patterns of service. The hidden and emerging spaces of rural homelessness (non)provision that fit within such constructions and in it becoming disassociated from groups, activities, and provisions deemed to be inappropriate and ‘out of place’
Belief in community
Rose found evidence that people of Poplar believe that a sense of community existed during the 1920s and 30s
- High numbers of people worked in the borough
- Residents knew all the people in the local shops
- Remembered affectionately by residents
- Doors weren’t locked, people helped each other.
Rebuilding communities
‘One of the greatest dangers in (re)building communities is that they will tend to become insular and indifferent to the fate of outsiders’ (Young)
Urban crime
‘This is a population that no longer can expect the economic prosperity and stable work the welfare state promised; this population instead exists in an insecure world where form of security that the welfare state sought to provide have been abandoned or privatised. The world of the ‘precariat’ is one characterised by chronic job insecurity. This is a world where temporary jobs remain temporary and rarely become full time’
Neighbourhood watch
- Launched in 1982
- Grew rapidly: by 1990 it had reached over 80,000 schemes, covering 4 million homes.
- ‘The potency of the Neighbourhood watch was that it reverberated with nostalgic echoes of the night watch, it was an ideological wedding between community and protection, between society and surveillance.
CCTV 1994
In 1994 it was estimated that 78 towns and cities had CCTV watching over public spaces
CCTV 2010
By 2010 there was an estimate 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain-one for every 14 people.
CCTV debates
- Debates about the extent to which CCTV is an infringement of liberty
- Some argue it increases freedom by decreasing fear
- Wide public support
- But, also recognition that CCTV could be used for inappropriate monitoring and have social consequences.
Rural Asylum centres
Recent plans to accomodate asylum seekers in a number of rural locales have fuelled debates about the ability of the countryside to the proposed development of asylum centres in Nottinghamshire and Oxfordshire. (Hubbard, 2005)
Rural Asylum centres opposition
It is unsurprising the threatened incursion of asylum seekers triggered community opposition of the magnitude and fervor witnessed in Newton and Bicester, areas with little tradition of non-white occupation. (Hubbard, 2005)
Rural Asylum centres stereotypes
While protesters rarely made explicit reference to issues of race or colour, instead played up the fact that the locale did not have necessary infrastructure to cater for asylum seekers, the representation of asylum seeks as feckless, culpable and dangerous clearly identified them as a group that threatened the privileges associated with living in a white, sexually ordered rural environment. (Hubbard, 2005)
