The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their blackballing from their blacklisting.
This week TCC published a new white paper, using the Origins name recognition tool to reflect upon the Leicester Riots in September. Our Engagement Hub looks at how data analysis can help to identify sites where engagement around community relations is needed.
And of course, there’s the Friday street-riot that is Charlie’s Attic – this week including a history of every punctuation mark.
Learning from Leicester
We recently released this white paper, looking at the context behind the Leicester riots in September. For those who missed the news around this (it occurred during the royal funeral), the tensions occurred between Hindu and Muslim young men in Leicester.
To help us with the analysis we used the Origins name recognition tool, which lets you look at the makeup and pace of change in communities. We believe it can help to identify potential cohesion risks, and to plan for engagement.
One of the key findings from the report is that the Leicester context was fairly unique. There are relatively few places with the exact same conditions as the area of north east Leicester where the violence occurred: a young population, high deprivation, and large Hindu Indian and Pakistani Muslim communities living in the same area. As the map below shows, the events in Leicester occurred at a fault line in the city, between places with large groups from both communities where the former community was larger, and those where the latter was more populous.
Another element which we were keen to examine in our paper was the role of ‘multi-diversity’ and ‘uni-diversity’. Multi-diverse places have a range of different communities within their non-white British populations. In uni-diverse areas the non-WB population comes from one or two much larger ethnic or national groups. Both ‘multi-diverse’ and ‘uni-diverse’ areas may be ‘diverse’ in the colloquial sense – in that they are not homogenously white British. But the patterns of settlement are quite different.
The chart below comes from the report. It shows, by way of example, the makeup of the non-white British population at a ‘multi-diverse’ postcode in Stoke Newington (in red), as well as that of a ‘uni-diverse’ community in Dudley Port (in grey). Both of these areas are 50% non-WB, but the makeup of that non-WB population is quite different – with the former involving an immense mix and latter comprising one large majority group.
The site in Leicester, where the initial tensions arose, is also shown on the map (in yellow). Its non-WB population is much larger than either of these places, and it is ‘uni-diverse’ even compared to Dudley Port; it is one of the most uni-diverse areas in England, in fact. While the recent tensions are certainly not explained by this factor alone, it goes some way to understanding the local dynamics.
Demography is not destiny. But our analysis of the Leicester unrest suggests it is not a coincidence that these tensions happened where they did. By looking at areas which share the same demographic, social and economic characteristics, those working in the field of social cohesion can take a more joined up and pre-emptive approach.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the grass roots take on your Friday bird’s eye view:
