These are two useful processes that can help you understand a neighbourhood better.
Transect walk & Community Mapping (this was covered in Module 2)
A transect walk is a walk along a fixed path through the community, village or area to observe and learn more about people, surroundings and activities. It is usually carried out early in the community entry process to get an overall view of the community.
Why is a transect walk useful?
It can provide you with first hand knowledge of:
The surroundings eg. Farming crops, Housing & sanitation, Electricity.
What is happening in the community eg. Street markets, shops, sports & recreation.
How people interact with each other eg. The different roles played by men, women, children & people with disabilities.
How things work in the community eg. Transport, health & social services, jobs, social, cultural and religious activities.
Important issues such as street children, gangsterism, unemployment & domestic violence.
Place Management
Learning objectives for this section:
* Understanding what place management is
* Taking an in depth look at your neighbourhood
* How to find and mobilise the right partners to build a safe community
Place management is the way of:
Looking at a place, Thinking about it, Taking action in order to make it a better and safer place.
What do we mean by a safer & better place?
We mean a place where people can live, work, play and grow – a liveable place.
How do we do that?
As we have already discussed, disorder and crime don’t just appear out of nowhere (one broken window tends to lead to more disorder)
There is always a pathway that leads to harm, crime or disorder. If we can identify the point along that pathway, we can find a place to “interrupt” it, then we can possibly prevent harm from happening. For example: a broken street light provides the opportunity for a mugging or a rape. We must fix that light before anything bad happens.
How can a downward spiral in a neighbourhood be reversed? In a decayed neighbourhood, the task of creating a peaceful & safe community may seem enormous and overwhelming. So we must start with the small things.
Here are some examples of relatively simple actions that start the process of restoring the decay and rebuilding a safe neighbourhood.
1. Fix broken windows
2. Pick up the litter in your street
3. Get the street lights fixed
4. Paint over the gang signs and graffiti
These are not glamorous activities, but they are an essential foundation of the quality of our daily lives, and we are the ones who identify them and get them going.
Is there something simple that you can do in your neighbourhood right now to start the process of making it a better and safer place?
things you can immediately do yourself
things you can ask your neighbours to do, and things that you need help with from outside your community. Who will you ask and how about would you go about asking?
A neighbourhood is a mixture of different kinds of places and spaces:
Private spaces – peoples homes
Private spaces with open access - shops & shopping centres
Public spaces with restrictions – schools, clinics & police stations
Fully public spaces – roads, pedestrian walkways, taxi ranks
A place could be your home, a school, a park, a shopping centre, a street or a whole neighbourhood that has its own mixture of these. And all these places have their own problems and their own opportunities – and that’s what we need to start thinking about.
So when we say the word better – we mean better to live in, work in, play in and visit.
Place management is not reactive, but preventive. An important part of place management is dealing with small things BEFORE they turn into BIG things that will be out of our direct control.
Earlier, you produced a map of your neighbourhood, pointing out some of the problems, issues & incidents on the way. None of the issues that you have described, come out of nowhere. For every crime, every problem, every incident of disorder, there is a pathway leading up to it.
What made it possible for that kind of harm to occur?
NOW we can ask it differently – At what point/s along that pathway would it be possible to intervene, so that harm is less likely to happen again in the future?
The question we asked earlier... what was the pathway that lead from this harm?
Examples :
OPPORTUNITY 1
A taxi rank where people were regularly mugged as they pass through.
Action plan: Neighbourhood watch members with uniformed police officers visible at peak times. All passengers and drivers stand together to identify and apprehend muggers when they attempt to commit a crime.
Result: Muggers move elsewhere.
OPPORTUNITY 2
The parking area of a high rise building is being used by drug dealers.
Action plan: Improve lightning over the parking area with regular yet random patrols by neighbourhood watch members and SAPS.
Result: Dealers move elsewhere.
This approach to safety is based on:
Looking for opportunities – good or bad things can happen.
Making action plans to deal with or build on these opportunists
Building a better future, action by action.
We can choose how we think. We can choose our attitude and our state of mind. Our attitudes influence what we see as possible. Out of the idea of possibility comes plans for practice-able actions to deal with specific problems.
Finding route causes & devising action plans
Every problem comes from somewhere. It means that there was a pathway that led to that problem happening at a specific time and place. What we want to do is interrupt that pathway so that it is less likely for that problem to happen.
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