John Lambert

Race Relations Research: Some Issues of Approach and Application

JOHN R. LAMBERT is a Senior Research Associate, and CAMILLA FILKIN is a Research Associate, at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham. In this paper we want to explore some issues arising from our undertaking a policy-oriented research project in the field of race relations: some of these issues derive from the aim of policy-orientation, some from the field of ’race relations’. The background to the research, as is appropriate for its place-the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Birmingham University-is the debate over housing policy, particularly council housing policy. The Cullingworth Committee on the allocation of council housing found local authorities in a confused state as to what they should be doing; research had shown up the shortcomings and dilemmas; there was no shortage of data about the fact of large concentrations of coloured immigrants in housing stress areas; but there were scanty data on the conditions in which coloured families live; there were varieties in the rules of residence and length of stay as admission qualifications, and there were hopes rather than policies for dispersal.’ The Committee Report argued emphatically for positive declared policies, and outlined how standard practices in relation to assessment and access, which assume considerable knowledge of the intricate confusing process of local authority housing, could have the effect of excluding coloured families, as do

From Theory to Method

In the previous chapter we outlined a general theoretical perspective which could inform a number of actual empirical investigations. We should again stress the point that in common with most research practice, rather than the formal models of many textbooks, the interplay between theory and practice in our study was continuous; what we have summarised is our developing perspective during the process of research. That process contained empirical elements which influenced and were influenced by the readings and ideas that we have described.

On Theory and Urban Sociology

This book is structured around close and careful scrutiny of events and issues in four neighbourhoods in the inner city areas of Birmingham between 1971 and 1974. We believe that what occurred is of relevance for a general understanding of urban problems and policies in Britain in the 1970s and that similar stories could be told about many other cities in modern Britain. Of course, there are special features about Birmingham, its size and history, which need to be grasped to make full sense of what was happening and to these we have drawn the reader’s attention in the text. But it is in the hope that the specifics of time and place can aid more general understanding that we have constructed this book around four case studies. They are the evidence for our more general statements, assertions and judgements.

Case Study 3: Saving for Improvement

Our third case study is concerned with the redevelopment process, the introduction of house and area improvement policies, and with allocation policies regarding the use of older homes by the local housing department. The scale is smaller here; we are concerned with the fate of a small block of some 100 houses which were once within the boundaries of an area for comprehensive redevelopment so designated, like that in the previous chapter, in 1955.

The State and the Housing Question

Our four case studies have been concerned with a brief period in one city’s involvement with the housing question. In this concluding chapter we will seek to point out significant common themes from the four studies and suggest how they may indicate general features of the situation rather than merely applying to Birmingham. We will do this with reference to those theoretical considerations outlined in the first chapter.

Case Study 4: Participation in an ‘Action Area’

Our final case study is concerned with an area whose future appears to rest with the efficacy of policies by which older homes are improved and maintained with grant aid to prevent their decay and obsolescence. As our case study will show a key to the success of such policies is as much a matter of confidence as it is of the availability of sufficient resources; and in attaining confidence the ability of residents to participate in the replanning of the neighbourhood will play an important part. So this case study looks in detail at the attempts of residents to participate and at the effects and consequences of their participation.

Case Study 2: Residents’ Action in a Redevelopment Area

In the last chapter we noted that one aspect of the ‘plight’ of ordinary applicants on the waiting list for council houses appeared to be their relative low priority for available lettings, the cream of which in number and quality went to those families affected by comprehensive redevelopment and slum clearance. We also noted that in our period of study there was a slump in new council building over demolitions so the relative position of ordinary applicants worsened.

Case Study 1: Queueing for a Home

Above we have sketched the development and the size of Birmingham’s housing stock, whose creation and administration has been so predominant a feature of the city’s government. The housing stock ranges widely in age, size and type and is situated within the city’s fifty miles of boundary and beyond.

Book Reviews : The Torture of Mothers. By TRUMAN NELSON (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969). 121 pp.

Violence in the City is a long book full of figures and tables and percentages, data from field interviews and questionnaire schedules, good, honest, sociologically informed journalism-a mass of information, and utterly boring. Its irrelevance shows most clearly when contrasted to The Torture of Alothers, a short and horrifying book which lets six Harlem mothers and their sons talk their anguish on to the page via a tape recorder. Their nightmare was being enmeshed in the violence of a white racialist system that found the sons guilty of murder. Blair Justice’s good intentions are nobly transparent. He finishes each of his chapters with a series of exhortations about what we should believe: that violence is bad; most people are good; the Mayor of Houston is doing a grand job; it is a pity that militants make more noise than the moderate black majority. He also agrees that there is awful injustice in the lot of being black in white America. Truman Nelson does not know how to make the reader believe his story, which starts with a free-for-all on a Friday afternoon in April 1964, when a fruit-stand in Harlem was upturned, and winds through a murder and a riot, to the sentence of the six youths to life imprisonment. It describes the ways of police forces, of the New York Tirnes, of judges in finding the guilty. It tells of the changing mood of the community as bewildered as the author in trying to make sense of the senseless; of courageous people trying to argue rationally for the defence of the six guiltless boys and failing. But it is the mothers whose truth and suffering the author is trying to communicate to us. There are no plans or programmes of action in the book, no exhortations to support anyone. It is remarkable in its tone of suppressed anger and moral outrage checked, always checked, to prevent emotion from blurring the picture, to be sure that the reader has no excuse for not believing-except emotion. The book is an extraordinary work of art that conveys more about violence in the city, its roots and causes and effects, than does the bland sociologizing of Blair Justice. The pretensions of Violence in the City are enormous. For once a publisher’s blurb is no exaggeration: ’This book furnishes a fresh analysis of why violence has struck our cities, but it goes beyond this. It not only focuses on causes, but also effects of violence, and what can be done about each.’ One’s scepticism is not diminished by references to ’the fiery Malcolm X’ or to ’French psychiatrist Franz Fanon’; nor by the uncritical acceptance of the Moynihan doctrine of the ’tangle of pathology’; nor by the earnest trust in the capability of public officials. A ’fresh analysis’ curiously lacks much reference to power and its