Investigating Everyday Life in a Modernist Public Housing Scheme: The Implications of Residents’ Understandings of Well-Being and Welfare for Social Work

Stephen Hicks,Camilla Lewis

doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcy084

Stephen Hicks, Camilla Lewis

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcy084

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Abstract

Investigating Everyday Life in a Modernist Public Housing Scheme: The Implications of Residents’ Understandings of Well-Being and Welfare for Social Work

Highlights

Recent social work research suggests that state reduction in welfare spending under ‘austerity’ measures has resulted in services focused on assessment of risk ‘with little concept of the relationship of safeguarding to . . . economic or community context’ (Bywaters et al, 2018, p. 54)
While some of the research raises the question of how the stigma associated with social welfare need may prevent community members from seeking help—in part because they fear surveillance and blame (Bilson et al, 2017)—it tends to do so only in relation to those already subject to state intervention
The most common response was to talk about others needing support: either neighbours, longer-term and older residents, or those receiving health visiting, community or social work support

Summary

Introduction

Recent social work research suggests that state reduction in welfare spending under ‘austerity’ measures has resulted in services focused on assessment of risk ‘with little concept of the relationship of safeguarding to . . . economic or community context’ (Bywaters et al, 2018, p. 54). While some of the research raises the question of how the stigma associated with social welfare need may prevent community members from seeking help—in part because they fear surveillance and blame (Bilson et al, 2017)—it tends to do so only in relation to those already subject to state intervention. Little attention is given to the specificities of place, community interaction or how welfare need arises in situ. Perhaps because much of the research tends to reinforce notions of particular places as sites of comparatively homogeneous deprivation, the interactions between residents, where communities are more complex than they might first appear, often disappear from view. This article, focuses not on those already subject to state intervention, but instead, via immersion in a particular community, it asks how residents identify problems and highlights how some of their concerns are interpreted as part of everyday life

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