Michael Green

Writer and producer

  • About
  • Print
  • Audio
  • Podcast
  • Projects
  • Book
  • Twitter

Meet your neighbours

In Environment, The Age on February 21, 2010

From backstreets to the big end of town, there’s reason for neighbours to become good friends.

Last year, my neighbour and I leafleted houses in the streets nearby. We proposed something unusual. On our flyer, we wrote, “…we’d like to set up a system to share some of our resources and build a friendly local community”, and then we promised all manner of neighbourly fun, including street parties, movie nights, swap meets and veggie sharing.

And now, our block in Carlton moonlights as a ‘sharehood’.

The Sharehood is a social networking website that shows you everyone with a profile who lives within 400 metres of you. It includes lists of things to borrow and lend and a forum for upcoming events. The first one was set up in Northcote in 2008, but it works no matter where in the world you live.

The Sharehood’s creator, website developer Theo Kitchener, says connecting online can help meeting face-to-face. “It’s all about encouraging neighbours to get to know each other in real life – all kinds of good things can come from that.”

So, aside from a sensible impulse to borrow a circular saw rather than shell out for one of my own, what’s behind my wish to know my neighbours?

Associate professor Kathleen Hulse, from Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, says knowing our neighbours not only makes us feel safer, but also meets our deep need for a sense of place. “Being connected locally is strongly associated with a sense of belonging, and we all need to belong somewhere. It’s a profound thing – that is what a home is about.”

According to Gilbert Rochecouste, from placemaking consultants Village Well, there’s been renewed interest in “caring for place”. Governments, councils and property developers are all aiming to strengthen local communities. “People are changing their priorities,” he says. “We’re seeing that with developers building ‘neighbourliness capital’ into projects.”

Mr Rochecouste points to Delfin’s Laurimar estate, past Epping in Melbourne’s north, which includes a town centre lined with local stores within walking distance of all the homes. “People meet in main streets, that’s where the heart is,” he says.

Also at Laurimar, a community worker is employed to organise activities. “In greenfields developments like that one, we’re starting to see place managers who coordinate community gardens, events and food swaps,” Mr Rochecouste says. “To build citizenship you’ve got to invest in it.”

The trend isn’t limited to the urban fringe. Sue West from the McCaughey Centre at the University of Melbourne says that over the last decade, state and local governments have supported more and more initiatives to build community resilience. Now, about eight in ten local councils say they fund projects of that kind, be they community gardens, local action plans or activities to bring different cultures together.

“There’s been growing interest in programs that involve communities in getting to know each other,” Ms West says. “The research was showing that a country or a community can be doing really well economically, but people’s wellbeing is beyond just money and the economic measures. It’s about the connections people have with each other.”

Ms West coordinates Community Indicators Victoria, a set of measures gauging social, economic, environmental, democratic and cultural wellbeing in local council areas. “Feeling connected to neighbours does contribute to wellbeing. It can be really important in difficult times, like the one we’ve just been through with the financial crisis, and the ones we continue to go through because of climate change and drought,” Ms West says.

Improved neighbourliness also goes hand-in-hand with environmental gains. As well as The Sharehood, there are a large number eco-friendly neighbourhood groups across our suburbs, such as Sustainability Street (a group training program in eco-living) and community gardens. There were 75 community gardens in Melbourne at last count, in 2006, and interest has been flourishing since then.

Transition Towns is another grassroots eco-development movement. The people in each location determine what they’ll do, but generally speaking, the goal is to live better with less – to re-make your area into a food producing, low-energy, low-emission, tight-knit community. It was founded in England in late 2006 and there are already over similar 250 initiatives worldwide. In Australia, 27 groups have officially signed on and dozens more are joining up, including seven in suburban Melbourne.

Razia Ross is convenor of Transition Town Boroondara, which traverses inner-eastern suburbs from Kew East to Ashburton. She says the threats posed by climate change and peak oil will change our relationships with people nearby. “It seems to me that we really need our neighbours in a way we didn’t before.” For now, her group is scheming for community gardens, orchards and guerrilla gardening.

The good news, according to housing researcher Dr Hulse, is that we have a strong base of neighbourliness to build on. “I think that the connections in suburbs are underestimated. Special initiatives like community gardens are important, but they wouldn’t work if there wasn’t already a fabric there,” she says.

It’s true in my block. At our sharehood events, long-term residents pass on local folklore to newcomers – yarning, for example, about the old Maltese man who built a boat in his backyard (too big for the yard, it jutted over the footpath) then set sail for Malta. It’s all part of the sharing.

A new nature strip

Depending on how you look at it, Gilbert Rochecouste and his partner Amadis Lacheta have either taken their work home, or their home to work. They run Village Well, a placemaking consultancy that works on relocalisation and civic renewal.

And on the nature strip outside their house in North Coburg, they’ve planted a community herb garden and installed a seat, among other things. “The old ladies who get off the bus pause and sit down and we’ve gotten to know them,” Mr Rochecouste says. “They’re so appreciative – sometimes they drop over pickles.”

He says neighbourliness turns a street into a meeting place. “There are eyes on the street. It helps breaks down the fear culture – you feel comfortable to knock on someone’s door and meet together. And it’s much more fun.”

Read this article on the Age website.

Village Well’s 10 ways to be neighbourly:

1.     Say hello to your neighbours when you pass.

2.     Organise a potluck lunch, dinner or picnic and invite people in your street.

3.     Plant a community herb garden on your nature strip

4.     Organise a neighbourhood swap – share and exchange clothes, garden produce, plants, books or skills.

5.     Organise a neighbourhood ‘salon’ – share music, food, poetry or stories.

6.     Install a seat on your nature strip for neighbours to sit and chat.

7.     Organise a yearly street party.

8.     Do some street beautification or community art.

9.     Create a community garden or green area.

10.  Put a free table on your nature strip and give away food, books, furniture and bric-a-brac.

Archive

    • ▼Print
      • ▼Environment
        • Contested territory
        • Community power
        • The last drop of water in Broken Hill
        • Totally Renewable Yackandandah
        • Electric vehicles lead the charge
        • You can never have too much garlic
        • Renewed interest in renewables
        • Reviving the race on a cleaner Yarra
        • Interview with Kevin Anderson
        • Renewable energy: power to the people
        • Left to pick up the pieces
        • Mining morality or vilifying coal?
        • A stake in the business
        • Round and round we go
        • A death in the family
        • Smarter urban water
        • Little fox, big problem
        • Flirting with disaster
        • Into the wind
        • The Great Barrier Reef: just unwell or terminally ill?
        • Seams of discontent
        • Bill McKibben
        • Unburnable carbon
        • Gelato at Brunetti's
        • The living fossil
        • Climate adaptation plan: the devil is in the appendix
        • Interview with Annie Leonard
        • Planning for a climate disaster
        • Bursting the carbon bubble
        • Doing the legwork
        • Repair Cafe
        • Switching to solar
        • Farming on the fringe: Q&A with Dave Sands
        • Farming on the fringe: Q&A with Anna Meroni
        • Farming on the fringe
        • Overshadowing
        • Greg Hatton's factory
        • Q&A: The Sharehood
        • Q&A with Carolyn Steel
        • Greener apartment blocks
        • Star ratings on the ground
        • Down to earth
        • Pacific islands face change that's hard to believe in
        • Life cycle assessment
        • Green renters
        • House energy ratings
        • Food glorious food!
        • 'Cash for clunkers' is a lemon
        • The shadow in the valley
        • Meet your neighbours
        • Six-star homes
        • Greensburg, Kansas
        • Towns in Transition
        • Sustainable House Day
        • Primate fear
        • The biggest catch
        • Close encounters: why medium-density living is the way of the future
        • Vegetable Power
        • From blue to green
        • Rubbish to riches
        • The old and the new
        • Teaming up and powering down
        • The green payoff
        • Power from the ground up
        • Permaculture club
        • Best footprint forward
        • Thinking outside the bin
        • They all want to change the world
        • When good neighbours become green
        • Beyond the stars: the rise and rise of domestic power use
        • Block busters: why apartment owners are seeing green
        • High five: why the new renovation rating is all about smart design
        • The lambs in winter
        • Global cooling
        • Waste not
        • Tour of duty
        • Powering down
        • Picking up the pieces
        • Pooling resources for a green future
        • Distance education
        • Globe trotter
      • ►Social justice
      • ►Community development
      • ►Culture
    • ►Blog
    • ►Audio
    • ►Projects

© Copyright 2017 Michael Green · All Rights Reserved