Repository
A curated and searchable collection of community-related research reports, case studies and publications
What are community studies?
Published: 2012
A short presentation on the definition and evolution of community studies by Graham Crow, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Methodology at the University of Edinburgh.
Place typologies and their policy applications
Published: 2011
This report was commissioned late in 2009 by the Spatial Analysis Unit in the Department for Communities and Local Government. It was originally designed as a ‘toolkit’ to support analysts and policy users in CLG (now renamed DCLG), other central government departments, regional government and local authorities in using classifica…
Championing Small But Vital Charities
Published: 2011
This leaflet makes the case for why local charities are important and what can be done to support them.
Small and local charities play a vital role in their community but they need help to not only survive, but thrive.
Places, people and politics: Learning to do things differently
Published: 2010
This “learning history” was commissioned by the Leadership Centre for Local Government to give those people who participated in the government’s Total Place pilots the space to consciously reflect on their experiences. The inductive research method adopted, with the deliberate use of an open research question, was intended to enable the hi…
Evaluation of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal: Final report
Published: 2010
The National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (NSNR) was launched in 2001 with the vision that “within 10 to 20 years no-one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live”.
In 2005 AMION Consulting was appointed by the (then) Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to undertake an evaluation of the implementation of the Strategy….
The New Deal for Communities Experience: A final assessment
Published: 2010
This report is a synthesis of evidence presented in a series of final reports from the national evaluation of the New Deal for Communities (NDC) Programme carried out between 2001-2010 by a consortium led by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University.
The Programme, launched in 1998, is one of the most …
Total Place – A practitioner’s guide to doing things differently
Published: 2010
This report collates “the wisdom of a number of people who have been involved in the Total Place adventure”. There were 13 Total Place pilots in total over the period 2009-10 and the report concludes that “there is no single set of rules to follow”.
Total place: a whole area approach to public services
Published: 2010
This report, which was published just before the 2010 General Election that swept New Labour from power, set out the government’s ambition for “a new direction for local public services, based on extensive work over the last year by central government, local authorities and their partners.” The measures set out in this document built on the com…
The Grandmother Project: Towards a New Partnership between Family & State
Published: 2004
The basic argument in this report is that the postwar welfare state in Britain set out to build public support around stable, lifelong marriage and the nuclear family. But the state itself then helped to undermine marriage by its own increasing emphasis on motherhood, including supports for single parents. Public policy also ignored the ex…
Exploring Ethnic Tensions Through Locality
Published: 2003
In preparation for research into the relationship between people and place in London, Belinda Brown explores some of the issues she hopes to illuminate through it. Her starting point is that prejudice and discrimination, which feed racism, are not deviant traits in inherently ‘bad’ individuals. Rather they are a by-product of a hu…
Growing the European Urban System
Published: 2003
In this paper Sir Peter Hall suggests that there are two alternative ways of looking at cities and city systems, both valid, which need to be combined. He looks at the performance of the European urban system in the last quarter century. From this, starting from the European Spatial Development Perspective, he suggests some lines of p…
White Immigrants: A Portrait of the Polish Community in London
Published: 2003
In the process of preparing research on Polish migrants to London, Belinda Brown explores the problems confronted by the Polish community in London – expected to become larger with the accession of Poland to the EU – and the overlap with problems experienced by black migrants. She identifies a number of difficulties with con…