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The government has just published [] on "building a local sense of belonging" - a toolkit for nurturing neighbourliness.

According to Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, civic pride is powerful stuff. "People who feel that they belong to their local area will get involved with local schemes and initiatives, will help their neighbours, will challenge inappropriate behaviour, will welcome newcomers and help them settle. They will pull together in a crisis and join together in a celebration. All this helps to build cohesive, empowered and active communities."

Her department's advice on this subject includes a number of examples of good practice including one which I have selected as my Map of the Week.

is an interactive map of Liverpool onto which residents are encouraged to contribute personal snippets about the city's history. So there's a story about an unexploded bomb, a giant cod and the day the Mersey froze.

According to government research, three quarters of people strongly feel they belong to their area, but that still leaves one in four of us without that attachment. As Hazel Blears says: "[w]hile social networking sites can connect us with friends all across the world, we may not know our neighbours well enough to have a cup of tea with them".

Initiatives like the Liverpool map are designed to foster a sense of shared history and geography. "Building a local sense of belonging needs to focus on the things we have in common and so be inclusive, rather than place of birth or ethnicity, which are exclusive," the department suggests.

Its guidance warns that communities with low levels of belonging can produce "dynamics of acute social antagonism (racist attacks, harassment, bullying) against newcomers". The problems, the evidence suggests, are most acute in neighbourhoods where local people feel they represent the predominant "declining" majority.

In such localities, "minimalist or different notions of neighbourliness and civility" are interpreted as lack of respect or hostility. Newcomers are blamed for structural shortages in social provision - housing, jobs, welfare and education.

This sort of social fracturing is a consequence of segregation - people tend to live with people who are like themselves in terms of ethnicity, wealth or age. The excellent puts it like this:

"Younger people have been gathering in enclaves distinct from older people. Migrants have been settling with others from the same country. Richer people have been moving away from poorer people. Local communities have become more fragmented. New housing estates tend to attract people with similar lifestyles, for example. Not infrequently, these lifestyles differ from others nearby, fracturing the locality. In many areas, 'local' has dissolved into a pastiche of housing estates, ethnic groups, lifestyle communities and groupings of different ages. Place remains important, but instead of identifying with the village, the town or the suburb, residents may identify more strongly with their estate, street or neighbourhood."

The government guidance puts the phenomenon a different way:

"Individuals often relate to the physical place as much as to people in that place. In traditional neighbourhoods, individuals recognised many of the residents, knew a number
of them well and counted some as friends. Today, many 'suburbanites' scarcely see their neighbours. Yet familiar landmarks - the pub, the church, a well-travelled street, the supermarket, the cinema - all provide a sense of belonging."

But I am not sure that "familiarity" is the same as "belonging". Research in Manchester found that "locals", born and bred in an area often felt that they had been left behind, or were inferior because they could not choose to move, or that the locality had been transformed (perhaps by new arrivals) so that it no longer felt like home.

PS: If we are all moving around more and flocking together with people like ourselves, what do we make of ? It shows the distribution of surnames, comparing 1881 with 1998. The Tuckers, Walkers and Fullers were names of families associated with washing sheep fleeces in the Industrial Revolution. Broadly, it appears that people have not been settling down miles away from where they were born, despite increased mobility.

Perhaps the answer is that people stay in the same town or area, but choose to live in a neighbourhood that reflects their class, wealth, age and culture.

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