This report is concerned with community of place. The quality and character of local social relations can have significant impacts on quality of life, and as such it is something that policy-makers should care about.

This research seeks to establish what impact policy can and does have on the quality of local social relations and to identify where policy could do more to support community locally.

Although policy-makers can never force us to interact or trust each other, they can provide a framework within which trust and interaction might flourish. This report identifies what such a framework might look like.

The growing importance of ‘liveability’ to government policy-makers, and the establishment of the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, testify to the new understanding of how place matters to quality of life.

This report seeks to investigate local social relations and what can be done to encourage trust and interaction in neighbourhoods – factors that are important in building quality of life.

Draws on the experience of three diverse communities in Coventry and on a large research literature.

While structural forces affect what people want to do and can do, small-scale decisions about the nature of the places in which they live and the ways in which they can come into contact with others, make a vital difference to quality of community life.

In influencing community relations in positive ways we can do much better in avoiding damage to community of place, and in identifying early on in decision-making the questions we need to ask about the impact of policies and developments on the ties that bind us to one another and to places.

Institute for Public Policy Research
info@ippr.org

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//2003

Victoria Nash with Ian Christie

research

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration

Community development