Are we in danger of losing our communities?
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Every day, at least one person goes on the WhatsApp group and says, I don't have anything for dinner tonight. Does anyone have anything to donate? And in this neoliberal age where people are told that they can do it all by themselves, there are very profound feelings of inadequacy and shame.

5.4 million low-income households across the UK reported experiencing food insecurity in the second half of 2024, as reported by the Joseph Roundtree Foundation, with 7 million, that's 60% of all low-income households, going without essentials like food, heating and water.

Over the same year, 74% of public sport and leisure centres were deemed to be at risk of shutting down, with closures of local authority-run community spaces now outpacing new openings in some London boroughs. As our needs increase, our avenues to reach each other seem to be shrinking.

Welcome to LSEIQ, the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I'm Jess Winterstein from the IQ team. We work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas and talk to people affected by the issues we explore. In this episode, I ask, are we in danger of losing our communities?

I want to understand how the cost of living has impacted our ability to connect. We'll find out why a bench is never just a bench and other design secrets to making neighbourhoods feel safer for women, why those facing the greatest economic and social challenges feel they're being set up to fail, and what tuberculosis has to do with the rethinking of our public spaces.

But before asking what can be done to strengthen our physical communities, let's return to Professor Shani Orgad, who we heard at the beginning of this episode. An LSE expert on inequality and contemporary culture, her research has highlighted the devastating impact these current crises have had on some of the most socioeconomically deprived communities in London. The stories that we have heard...

In these focus groups are really stories that rarely make it to mainstream representations of the current crisis. So for instance, a woman who was homeless for several years but has been very proactive in getting herself out of homelessness, actively seeking jobs, has two children.

And because she cannot afford the price of energy and water, she uses a daily bucket where she saves hot water. And this is how she baths her kids.

Another thing that was said and created, I think, quite humorous and supportive atmosphere in one of our focus groups where there were lots of pensioners, where they say, yes, we're talking about the unaffordability of energy and food, but let's admit it, we also struggle with the price of water. And so the rule, someone said in our house, is if it's yellow, don't flush. If it's brown, flush.

And everybody laughed first, but many people admitted that that's something again, that people literally do not flush the toilet during the day to save water in 2024 in London. That this example of deprivation created a sense of camaraderie highlights how valuable it can be to connect with people able to empathize with your own situation. Without proper funding, however, even the most supportive of networks can fail.

Here's Dr Divya Srivastava, a health policy expert and City University lecturer, who co-led the project with Shani. As part of their research, Divya and Shani conducted focus groups in centres across London, vital community hubs that are themselves, due to funding pressures, facing closure. And our focus groups actually, through the conversations, some participants learned from the others on how to do certain things which they didn't know before.

But I certainly think that the informal networks of support that many of the participants spoke about was very much because a substitute of what they really need is not actually available and there's a massive gap in public services. What really struck me is that many of them didn't know where to find support. They didn't actually know how to start to navigate that journey.

On the back of that, many of the participants were saying, well, actually, if I do try to fill out the form, it's designed for us to fail, that we actually find it too difficult, and then they just give up. So even though these things are maybe designed to actually target these types of groups and underserved communities, they're actually not able to access the support. And I think they would readily like the support if they can get it.

Requesting any type of state support requires paperwork, but with overly complex and increasingly online forms, the state risks disenfranchising the very people it's supposed to be helping. For anyone struggling or on the wrong side of the digital divide, community centres are vital places to find specialist support. I asked Shani how the increasing uncertainty around their funding was impacting the local community.

These are for many people a lifeline. These physical spaces in the sense that they are heated so people come there often to

keep warm for not an insignificant number of our participants. Sometimes that was their daily meal, so either through food that the community centre would serve or through cooking classes for instance. And it was also a crucial space and place to alleviate the loneliness and the isolation many people feel and that has been exacerbated during and post COVID-19.

Just an anecdote, you know, one story of many was of a mother of nine children with severe mental health issues. And she described how her local community center...

which I should say is really a dilapidated building. We were there in late December and we were literally sitting in the focus groups and freezing and the kind of, you know, the radiators buzzing. And it's an under-resourced community center. And yet this is her lifeline. And she said, if I didn't have this center, I wouldn't have made it. And she's a mother of nine.

But at the same time, for instance, she's a person who also was very much reliant on a mental recovery group run by volunteers. But now, partly because people, less enlist people can afford volunteering themselves because the local communities are stripped of money. And when local communities are stripped of money, people are

People find it much harder to volunteer and when there's all these crises that the volunteers themselves are struggling with. And partly because the public transport prices have risen, she cannot afford now taking the two buses she used to take to her local mental recovery group. And so she stopped.

So this is the price being paid. It's a real price and it's a knock-on effect. One of the participants said it's a domino effect. The community centers are not just cosmetic. They are vital for people's mental health, for people's physical health in terms of warmth and food, for people's ability to see someone, to get out of the house. And as Divya mentioned earlier, also they are vital sources of information.

This lack of funding, together with rising living costs, has created a perfect storm. A rise of need met with a decline in provision and crumbling infrastructure. The knock-on effects on individuals are stark. Here's Divya, followed by Shani.

One participant said she now doesn't take public transport because of the cost. I think this really speaks to an issue around shrinking people's mobility in London. And that's a huge, has a huge impact on people that are being more isolated and being more obviously left to being on their own. And maybe they would like to have some type of engagement. And that option now doesn't present itself unless they can walk to this community centre.

The other point that I think came up strikingly in our discussions was around the digital divide. There were participants who actually have chosen not to be online. And if that is their choice, this presents a challenge to local councils and charities where they think we're going to leave everything online for people to navigate.

Even for younger participants, sometimes the solution is not there or they found that they struggle with it. We had an example of a 19-year-old woman in Hackney who graduated school just over a year ago and has been looking for jobs since. And what was really interesting and heartwarming, not to over-romanticize it, is how at the end of the focus groups, when we were wrapped up, people approached her

and gave her tips and they exchanged numbers and said, call me tomorrow and I'll try to put you in touch with X and Y. So I think it has to be said that even for younger people who do have digital literacy and access,

There are fundamental limitations in relation to their ability to really cope and navigate these crises without a serious infrastructure that really is geared to supporting them.

I've lived on this estate since 2014. However, I grew up around here visiting my grandparents and my family since I was a little girl. This community of W11 has always been a more quiet and relaxed but also tight-knit in the sense that we like to champion each other's culture. After the incident at Grenfell, the tragedy, the whole community came together.

which was very powerful and you see that we've still tried to keep close.

Communities provide vital support, but these delicate ecosystems can be disrupted, especially when neighbourhoods undergo redevelopment. With so many competing needs, every project risks designing people out of communal spaces. I visited an estate currently undergoing significant renovation to speak to two young women from the area. Despite its inner-city location and being in the midst of a programme of retrofitting and re-landscaping, we're in a green and quiet spot.

Honey and Catalina are not just residents. They've been working as researchers on a project that aims to ensure their community's needs aren't forgotten as the project advances. Located next to Grenfell Tower, the site of a devastating fire in 2017, their community is still deeply impacted by the tragedy, which claimed the lives of 72 people. Both were brimming with ideas on ways to improve their environment. But first, Catalina, and then Honey, explain why their home is so special.

This area is rich in abundance with amazing artists, musicians, everyone's creative here and even though it seems like in the 21st century it's a different like hustle culture trying to stifle out creativity you can see like if you walk around Labrador Grove the mosaics that are giving a like with the green hearts and everything about Grenfell even on this tree here there's a green band

which is, you know, with Grenfell, everything's related if you see something green. It shows you that the community really came together in a time of struggle. I mean, our neighbour right there, she has a green scarf on her curtain and a green heart. It's a really big thing here.

There's certain areas that we have like in Latimer Road there's a shop which has been around since the late 70s So it's really nice to see that we're holding on to people who've been around our community who live here and we like to support them and but then you might see like a random Gales pop-up in Latbrook Grove or a Paul's Bakery which you can see it's like a little earmark of gentrification coming in and our people being pushed away and

Yeah, I think same thing like in terms of community like it goes back that there's a rich history here like from Windrush and things like that and coming together for Grenfell like that community didn't come out of nowhere like we have been here, we have been supporting each other. They were outside, it's a lovely peaceful estate. How have you found the sort of process of it being redeveloped?

It's a bit disrupted, just like in terms of simple walking. When we exit through the back way of this estate, like Hurst Way Walk, just to go to like a simple, to go to the gym, instead of just walking the normal way across the bridge, we have to cross onto the road, onto the other side. It can be a bit dangerous at night time because you have to keep your eyes out in the dark. So it does kind of disrupt.

So yeah, I'd agree with that as well. I think the construction, it's definitely changed the way you move around the estate. I think certain shortcuts and kind of routes that we grew up taking are not the same anymore. We've kind of had to change the way that we use the estate. But yeah, and then in terms of gentrification as well, like,

I think we do live in a unique part of London. You can turn a corner and you go to rich houses in Holland Park or Portobello type ways. It does almost feel like sometimes we neglect these parts. It is a great area to live in but we're not always portrayed in that way. In terms of redeveloping, how could your day-to-day experiences be improved as a woman?

definitely increased visibility in regards to lighting because if we walk around in the night time a lot of these lamps around us they don't work which is a shame because you want everyone to feel like it's accessible for people of all abilities and you know genders and ages and I would say maybe having people around that like the neighborhood where people look after each other having to foster a safer environment so I agree I think

to be honest I think it does come back to the basics like lighting and I just think sometimes they have the right ideas but they're not always like finished and it's like they do a halfway job so I think just finishing what you started and doing it to

just the bare minimum, I think would make a huge difference. There were certain activities in this project and I think one of them was how, like where do you go on the estate? And I realised that I actually don't stay on the estate or in the area, it's more working my way through to get out. And I thought, why is that? Because I wouldn't mind staying close, no one really wants to trek outwards to go and chill somewhere. So I think it is just having communal spaces but we don't really have them.

It's as basic as just having a seat in which is just nice to be in, feel safe, feel comfortable but we don't really have that in the area. And yes, it's just a bit like why? I think as well, like I never met Catalina or Kayla before the project but we all have similar ideas and pretty much the same foundation so it's like we all want the same thing. So it's not like I'm having these ideas but no one else wants them. Like it's a communal thing, we all want the same thing.

It's easy to take something as simple as a seat for granted, until of course it's gone. As Catalina and Honey point out, improvements don't need to be dramatic or expensive. A simple, well-thought-through walking route, or the use of art, can make a huge difference. We have, just behind us in Houseway Walk, there's like a green space. But it's nice and peaceful as we saw, but it's not really encouraged that people use it a lot.

It's quite abandoned, unfortunately. So we thought maybe having like walking loops in the green space, even around the area. Simple things like tracking, oh, you've walked this many amount of meters to encourage healthy habits. And also, maybe you don't want to walk really far out alone in the dark. You feel a bit unsafe, especially with what's going on in the news. You would want to get your...

like walk around but also feel closer to the area, safer like in a safe distance from home and outside. I think art is kind of like a universal language and there are so many different cultures here even if you're not artistic, even if you don't necessarily understand English or you can't read. I think bringing art into the community it just gives it a different kind of life and a different kind of colour and yeah I think yeah that is a way of bringing it back to life and bringing people out.

As these ideas highlight, there are many ways to foster community cohesion. But what works for Honey and Catalina's estate may not meet the needs of another. Understanding what a particular space needs requires connecting with its residents, including those challenging to reach.

Dr. Julia King and Olivia Theocredes Feldman, who worked together at LSE before founding the consultancy Social Place, understand this challenge. Their participatory research methods, which include bringing community members like Catalina and Honey onto projects as paid researchers, aim to give a voice to groups that are often marginalized in urban development processes. Here's Julia, then Olivia, in discussion.

Consultation is, I would say, pretty standard practice. But what kind of consultation that is, is I think where we come in, because a lot of a lot of forms of consultation tends to be unfortunately quite tokenistic. A lot of it is tick box exercises where the communities in which a project is happening are often said, would you rather A or B consultation?

And there isn't any kind of actual decision making or shaping the place that happens because we really value the sort of tacit everyday experiences of people. And often that involves kind of unlearning your own assumptions around a space or relearning things that you might think is sort of banal, that someone might not even be interested in that sort of how you walk.

from a bus stop to home. And so our process allows these sort of everyday life stories to come in. There are always going to be certain like compromises that have to be made. But when those compromises are made, people are left out of that conversation and then feel like things are just being...

done to their areas, things are happening at them rather than with them. And so I think one of the things that we try to do in our work is kind of have that continuity run through it. So we involve young people in conversations, you know, with architects as we're working through a project. We try to involve them with whoever the stakeholder or the client is so that there is that back and forth and so that there is an understanding of what conversations are happening, whether that's like budgeting or like planning constraints or whatever it is. Basically, all the young women that we worked with, a lot of the time they were leaving

their area and going home, they had to traverse through an area that they thought was quite sketchy or dodgy. And they kind of had these techniques to get home. So like, oh, actually, I would get the bus if it was dark. And, you know, I would get off at that stop because that stop is less sketchy than the next stop or whatever it is. And that even though they had to incorporate that into their routine, it was still more valuable to them to leave their local area to hang out.

than to stay in their local area. So I think one of the things that really struck me is like, how can the place where you live also be the place where you socialize and the place where you hang out? And if you have a friend from the estate, like, where do you both go? You know, you're living like five minutes from one another. It would be amazing to have something five minutes from the both of you where you could just go and spend time.

Which is actually a really good point that ties into how consultation typically happens is that, you know, and sometimes you might consult with a certain demographic and group who say, get rid of all the benches, we hate them. And you kind of take that as the sort of gospel as a client team. And then you say, right, we're going to get rid of all the benches.

But you haven't spoken to a demographic who actually really value them and really like them. So I think also we know that young people are not engaged with broadly in planning and design and decision making. It's a huge gap in sort of how decision making happens. And so getting this demographic involved is, I think, eye opening and just brings a whole new set of experiences to which we should be designing for.

How would you suggest balancing the kind of needs of the community at large in terms of keeping safe and the need to ensure that all kind of age ranges within a community can get what they need out of the community?

So the safest place that anyone can be in is a place with other people around. It's just sort of obvious. So if you have a piece of public space that's being used, that's being loved, that different types of demographics will use it after school kids, dog walkers, people hanging around, that fundamentally is the best way to get a place safe.

Safe. It's better than CCTV. It's better than anything else you can do. It is fundamentally the best way that you can achieve safety. And so when you design out people, you're, in my opinion, designing in an unsafe environment. Across all of our work, maintenance is understood as a proxy for safety.

So when you take away that kind of the hand of stewardship, people read it as, OK, this is now unsafe for me.

Also, I guess when those opinions come out of like, let's remove the bench, there's antisocial behavior. To me, that kind of goes back to those consultation processes that are very short, where like you tell people, okay, what's the issue? And someone says the bench, but what has the bench actually done in terms of crime, you know? So I think it also speaks to a process of thinking about what is it about the bench that is causing you to feel that that needs to be removed in order to address crime. So is it that there are

Only groups of men that hang out at that bench and you as a young woman feel intimidated. Okay, that's a valid concern that you feel intimidated. But how can we address intimidation without removing the bench? Because removing the bench doesn't necessarily mean that you've removed this one group. Maybe it's, okay, well, can the dog park be expanded to be closer to the bench so that you get the dog walkers in the morning and at night and then you get kind of a mix of people coming through? Or is the bench near the playground a little bit more inviting?

One of the things that has come up quite a lot recently is the issue of loneliness with the internet and social media. And it can be easy to sort of forget about the importance of the physical landscape that we're all living in. We do a lot of work with a charity called Make Space for Girls who've been making a lot of noise around public provision for teens, which is

you know, an insane amount of money and resources goes to building a very small set of typologies, largely these, this awful, they're called moogas or cages, sort of caged football and basketball pitches. And these just aren't really great public spaces. And I think we've, the design, the design world has moved forward so much in terms of

What is exactly what you're talking about, like healthy public spaces and getting people out and about. And we have amazing companies that produce amazing social seating and furniture. But when it comes to teens, we just give them this caged football pitch. And I often think, what are we telling our young people when that's the thing that we provide them with? And so a lot of our work is actually just sort of trying to think more expansively about what a teen provision is and should be.

I also think in terms of use long term, that there is that desire to work with young people right now, because it takes just going to a park and looking at who's using those facilities to realize that, like, there are some groups that are just not using those facilities that just in terms of will your space be used? It isn't.

everyone's best interest to be working with who those potential users might be. Because I think sometimes we try to guess what people want and we just get that wrong. And like Julia was saying, for teenage girls, we have consistently gotten that wrong.

I also think that there is a sort of this idea that, oh, well, girls don't like to play football, which we now know is totally incorrect. What we found is that actually, yeah, they do want to use these spaces, but maybe what needs to happen is you need to change the markings on the ground. It's actually sometimes really subtle things that can really change how the public will use the public spaces.

Marking pitches so a range of sports and games can be played, or rethinking the size and position of benches to facilitate conversation are just two ways to open up green spaces to different groups. The lockdowns of the pandemic highlighted how crucial access to the outdoors is to our wellbeing. Now, Julia argues, is the time for planners to think innovatively.

If you take any kind of major Spanish flu, tuberculosis, these kind of major health events, global health events, they have triggered massive innovation. Sort of like, you know, the entire modernist movement was a reaction to tuberculosis and thinking we need to house people in ways that air can flow through them. And I keep on thinking with COVID, I'm like, this has never happened. We know the value of public space oh so well when we were trapped in our homes and couldn't leave.

But yet, where is this renaissance in our public lives? On the contrary, our public lives are being completely eroded, completely underfunded. We've lost 50% of public toilets in the last decade alone. So...

I think there is this sort of umbrella desire and we really want to shout about how important our public spaces are, how this is what stitches us together. This is what binds us as a society. And if you underinvest in those spaces, you're underinvesting in people and places. And I think we're seeing the many consequences of what it is when you don't invest in public life.

Even when investment is made, however, it's all too easy to repeat what's been done before. By bringing residents from marginalised groups into the redevelopment process, Julia and Olivia aim to encourage a more inclusive approach to public space design. This, however, is just one part of the equation, particularly at a time when standing still comes at a cost. With both funding pressures and the cost of living still high, are we in danger of losing our communities? Here's Shani, then Divya.

I think we are in huge danger of stripping our communities of their vital kind of virtue. And this fundamentally has to do with money. But the reality is we had people work in local charities and also people who themselves used to volunteer, for instance, food banks, but can no longer do that.

So for local communities to stay alive, some of the money needs to be kept within the local community and to come back to the local community. People, however huge their heart is, with no state funding, the whole system crumbles and collapses.

Locating the focus groups in the community centres, I think, to us brought useful nuances on understanding local Londoners' lives and where they live. Around them, the local councils are struggling, the charities are struggling, the community centres are really central to these people's lives. The expectation hearing the focus group participants is that they expect these community centres to be around after we met them. So I think there is an opportunity here to leverage what these community centres offer the local populations and how they could better address their needs.

And finally, Julia, reminding us of Catalina and Honey's experiences, and Olivia. You heard the young women talking about the tragedy of Grenfell. They really felt a community response to that. But that could only happen because they already were a community. And so I think sometimes we don't see community when it's there. But having said that, I do think communities are fascinating.

are fractured in certain environments. When you spend 50% of your salary on a terrible rental accommodation, I actually think that makes it really hard to feel like I'm a valued member of this place. I think you feel extracted upon and stood upon. And so, yeah, I think communities everywhere, if you look, but under so many pressures that it makes it really hard for that to materialize.

I would completely agree with that. I think it would be also unfair and quite wrong to say that we're a danger of losing our communities because I think that that strips people of any agency to have the connections and be embedded in the worlds that they're embedded in. But equally, there are these great pressures on people that do put some of those connections at risk and that can, yeah, have quite serious consequences on communities. One of the things that's really important for the both of us is that

While we think that design does impact communities and does impact how community can be built, we're not saying that design is going to create communities like that is, you know, architects tried to do that. The modernists tried to do that. It did not work. You cannot just create a society, create a community. But if you don't have those physical things like parks, like public toilets, like

a place to hang out in public space that is free, that is open, then yeah, it is going to be more of a struggle to maintain a community. This episode was produced and written by me, Jess Winterstein, with script development by Sophie Mallett and editing by Oliver Johnson. If you'd like to find out more about the research in this episode, head to the show notes. And if you enjoy IQ, please leave us a review.

Join us next month when we ask, how do we avoid falling for online scams? If you liked this podcast, you might like the LSE Events podcast, which features talks by some of the most influential figures in the social sciences. Listen to the recent talk, for example, by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. For more inspiring content, search LSE Lectures and Events wherever you get your podcasts.