Introduction: young people and their relationship to Community

We have seen in previous chapters that many of the concerns about poor areas are not about poverty or inequality, but about behaviour. The way people behave (or act – a word with different connotations) in these areas is bound up with ideas of community or its lack, with criminal behaviour and lack of community action identified as destructive of good community. I want to look more closely at this relationship between behaviour, action and community in Southmead; young people's ‘behaviour’ and adult's ‘action’ are the subjects of this and the following chapter.

The behaviour of young people features as a major issue in representations of Southmead. Outside surveys fasten on young people and their behaviour as a principal problem of the area, and the community play portrayed the vexations of young people's conduct as an endemic factor of Southmead life. This focus on young people and their behaviour as a problem to community is wider than Southmead. Saul Alinsky, an evangelist for community organisation from Chicago, first writing in 1946 but influential among community groups years later, wrote of the common example of problems of youth and delinquency as being ‘one of the most frequent problems characteristic of the average community council’. His view was that to treat these problems as separate from all the other problems that communities face was a fallacy, merely providing the trimmings of special programmes that do not tackle fundamental issues. He used the visible issues of young people and crime to lead into fundamental questions of community and power; for him, the two are inseparable. Sheila Brown, in her extensive survey of both adults and young people in Middlesbrough, which started out as a study of young people and crime, but shifted its focus to the study of age as a social division, found the two issues of young people and community strongly intertwined in people's own accounts: