Communities and place matter for social well-being

The communities we are part of, and our ties to them, can have a big impact on our well-being. Professor of Geography, Ash Amin, explains why place should be central to understanding communities, and how place and communities intersect to affect outcomes for those experiencing disadvantage.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vital role of local communities in individual and collective well-being. Indeed, across the UK, we have seen localised mutual aid groups established to provide support to the vulnerable, and evidence of people reporting increased connection with family, neighbours and people in their local area.

At the same time, the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated deep seated inequalities of ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status, many of which intersect in the most disadvantaged places. As research from the IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities has shown, these areas face multiple stresses of health, economic and family well-being, leaving their vulnerable members especially threatened by the pandemic. Perhaps these may be areas in which community ties have been weakened, but it could also be that their historic negligence has left them more dependent on local community ties for their survival.

What makes local communities weaker or stronger, more or less equal, and more or less connected than others – and how these dimensions affect social well-being – is a question the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation are exploring through a new collaboration, Understanding Communities, which I am co-chairing with Professor Dominic Abrams. By bringing together researchers, policymakers and people working at the front-line of service delivery, we aim to identify practical proposals for action to help those experiencing the greatest vulnerability and disadvantage.

Locating community, placing well-being 

It is important to consider how we define ‘place’ and ‘community’, as this can have consequential implications. Understandings of place and of community are often imprecise and also conflated, especially in relation to how they affect people’s lives and life chances. Brexit, with its spotlight on the ‘left behind’, and COVID-19, with its revelations of the fine spatial grain of disease epidemiology and vulnerability, have made us more aware of local specificities and variations.

We are seeing growing policy interest in place – the neighbourhood, town, city or rural area as the space of historic legacies, everyday life, cultural attachment, family and social ties, distinctive landscape, institutional and socio-economic histories, and particular combinations of private and public goods.

This is an interest in place as a welfare resource or constraint, and in whether certain qualities of place play a decisive role in affecting individual and collective well-being. Places vary in different ways, ranging from the availability of jobs, services and public goods to the intimacies of locality including the lived landscape and local family, friendship and faith networks, and more. This raises questions for researchers, practitioners and policy makers. If research and social experience shows that place plays this role, which assets should receive policy priority, and in whose hands, to enhance local resilience and adaptability? Where does community, reflected in the strength of local senses of place, social obligations, and connections, fit into the picture of welfare resilience and vulnerability, since place is clearly about more than local community?

It is also worth remembering that community ties in an age of mobility, globalisation, diaspora and digital connectivity, are not reducible to local connections. People are caught up in all kinds of professional, religious, informational, material and emotional networks that are often geographically dispersed and virtual. Indeed, this pluralism and transversality may be a source of social resilience, allowing the net of possibilities to be cast wider, possibly at the expense of local obligations, unless local and trans-local ties turn out to be mutually reinforcing.

In turn, an abundance of local ties, forced perhaps by restricted horizons of mobility and connectivity beyond the locality, as we find in some historically disadvantaged localities, might weaken individual welfare prospects by turning communities inwards, though their stronger sense of place might be an asset at times of crisis such as the pandemic, as families and neighbours turn to help each other because of their strong ties.

In short, place, local community, and social well-being are connected, but in complicated ways that this joint British Academy and Nuffield Foundation collaboration seeks to acknowledge and address. If certain people in particular places are resourceful in these challenging times, are they so because of the strength of local community ties and place assets, or is it because they are part of a wider field of transactional and emotional ties and also benefiting from market relations and welfare supports that originate from beyond their locality? How can the relationship between community and well-being be reimagined with place at its centre, but not reduced to it?

Can you help identify practical solutions to support communities and advance social well-being?

A starting point in understanding how community relates to social well-being might be to work with a plural understanding of community and with a global sense of place, so as to appreciate but not fetishize local social ties.

Joint working with researchers, policymakers and practitioners from the beginning, with multi-disciplinary insights, and a good balance of qualitative and quantitative methods,will help to unpick the complex relationships involved, to understand their implications for policy and service delivery, and to translate research into practical proposals to make a real difference.

This is why we are seeking people from a wide range of academic disciplines, professional backgrounds and community support settings to apply to join our research innovation workshop in September 2021. We hope that bringing together people from different, complementary perspectives will result in innovative research proposals that will deliver concrete evidence for policy and practice.