The context
This is a climate change based project located in the Inner West End of Newcastle, which is a multicultural area, with lots of green and social agendas but in need of support for community cohesion. Neighbour inter-connection is an important element in enhancing environmental and social sustainability locally in response to the expected impacts of climate change (eg episodes of extreme heat, cold and flooding) as well as stress rooted in other local problems.
Your challenge
We are seeking ways of enabling neighbours to get to know each other and feel comfortable about interacting. How can they keep in touch with each other and share among themselves a range of options for active participation leading to greater social solidarity (eg parks maintenance, vertical veg growing, challenging litter, utilising recycling, taking part in festivals), and knowing how to report incidents for action by agencies (eg enforcement against fly tipping, anti-social behaviour, drug dealing and so on). Within such a diverse community, there is also a pressing need to encourage connection between neighbours from different ethnic backgrounds and age groups.
Your deliverables
This project will ideally result in a method of / template for digital/social media interaction to encourage neighbourliness.
This could potentially build on an existing model: a Facebook page that operates for one street in the area, Sidney Grove. This page is lightly moderated, and is a ‘closed group’. It is a terrific community builder in the street. Replicating this type of digital community interaction in other streets would require engaging with very different sets of social attitudes and social media which have their own challenges (for instance, we’d need mechanisms to clarify absolutely that racist and anti-social behaviour, and trolling, will result in exclusion).
By developing a template together with community consultation tools, other streets and neighbourhoods within the West End can tailor the provision of their ‘neighbourliness’ activities to suit their particular needs and opportunities.
A potential additional outcome would be a prototype network of all these individual neighbourhood platforms, linking smaller groups into a wider West End community.