Settling on consistent neighbourhoods in Sheffield

What’s the problem we’re trying to fix and why bother?

This is a joint piece of writing by Tom French and Simon Duffy.

As written about here, we - Citizen Network Research and Tom French, with support from NHS South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) - are getting underway with a project to map Sheffield’s places and networks differently, collectively and consistently. As a starting point, we will be attempting to settle on how Sheffield can be described in terms of its neighbourhoods (however we may choose to define them). It is anticipated that this will lead on to subsequent phases where we might map others things within that context.

Some of Sheffield’s potential neighbourhoods and their geographic boundaries. Credit: Sheffield City Council, © Crown copyright and database rights 2023 OS licence number AC0000805013.

But why are we doing this, and haven’t we tried all of this before?

Let’s start with the second part of that question. Yes, there have been numerous and excellent attempts to list, describe and map Sheffield’s neighbourhoods by a number of people and organisations. These reveal inconsistent ideas about what neighbourhoods might look like in the city, however, and how invested in these ideas people feel.

Here are a few examples feeding into our current thinking… 

1. About a decade ago an ethnographic cyclist developed a list of 142 neighbourhoods by asking people on his travels: “Where do you live?” or, “Where are we?”

2. Sheffield City Council have explored this question too in the past few years. Although there is yet no official list of Sheffield’s neighbourhoods, their work did create a list of 100 neighbourhoods, which we’ve mapped very simply here using Felt. Thank you to Sheffield City Council for providing us with these boundary files.

3. More recently, as part of the ongoing City Goals work, citizens were asked to identify their neighbourhood in a digital survey that reached over 1,500 people. Our analysis of this revealed 148 neighbourhoods - adding 6 more to the earlier list. There were people in all these neighbourhoods who identified themselves with each of these neighbourhoods. Although, perhaps unsurprisingly given some of the extreme inequalities of power and money in the city, there was much more engagement in some neighbourhoods than others.

These are all things we will reflect on and test more with people as part of the work we are doing.

That just leaves us with the small issue of why we should bother to do anything more about this…

Identifying a meaningful and useful map of the neighbourhoods of Sheffield is not an academic exercise. England is one of the most highly centralised countries in the world, with the vast majority of the power and wealth concentrated in London. But centralisation doesn’t stop there. 

Local government in England is, by international standards, very weak, but also very large. In most countries, cities like Sheffield would be broken down into neighbourhoods, each with their own systems and decision-making capacities. Neighbourhoods like these open up rich opportunities for more meaningful citizenship, democracy and better relationships between people and with services, businesses and community organisations. 

The international literature suggests that the ideal neighbourhood would contain 4,000 people. So for a city like Sheffield, with a population of just under 600,000, you would ideally have about 150 neighbourhoods. This seems highly consistent with the data we’ve gathered so far.

If we can successfully map Sheffield’s neighbourhoods this opens up the chance to explore better ways of working together as citizens. This might include:

• Creating new kinds of actions in our neighbourhood

• Linking neighbourhoods together to share ideas and resources

• Working as a city to spot opportunities and needs

• Sharing meaningful information about what is good and what needs to change

• Perhaps even working differently as a city

What this means in practice is people leading better, healthier and more connected lives. If we don’t respect the reality of our neighbourhoods then not only will our neighbourhoods suffer, so will we. 

This doesn’t mean neighbourhoods are the only thing to think about. We can also belong to communities that cut across our whole city or extend beyond the city. People are connected by interests, beliefs and many diverse identities. But this only adds to the rich tapestry of citizenship. For example, the people at Pitsmoor Adventure Playground won’t just care about kids in Pitsmoor; they will be willing to teach and encourage other neighbourhoods. Or the work led by Darnall Wellbeing can be shared with other parts of Sheffield. We’ve all got gifts to share and stuff to learn.

As such, we need to pay attention, not just to the neighbourhoods, but also to the important boundaries and fuzzy areas. Neighbourhoods will share parks or share an interest in creating green spaces. Neighbourhoods will share shops, roads and places that contribute to the life of the community. Taking care of these things may be a responsibility that extends beyond any one neighbourhood. But, if we cannot identify the neighbourhood, we can’t identify the things that matter to the neighbourhood.

So, whatever we discover we will share, and we will create a way in which we can keep the conversation going. Ideally, the major institutions of the city will work together to help give more life and power to our neighbourhoods. And we are very open to suggestions of how we can start doing this now. 

But in the end we can always choose to do things differently ourselves too.

What will we be doing to achieve this and how might you get involved?

A number of things will be happening over the coming weeks:

• We will be using Maptionnaire to Develop and share an interactive, online way for people to…

  • ‘Draw’ and name their place(s) of identity, interest or physical base.

  • Reflect on some of the previous descriptions of neighbourhoods in Sheffield (as detailed above).

• We will be running three face to face events around Sheffield to provide an offline way to engage people with drawing and naming their place(s), with a particular focus on parts of the city underrepresented in the data so far;

• We will create the first version of a map to bring together people’s notions of place in and an round Sheffield, and to overlay this with current ways of doing this;

• We will be documenting the process in the open as we go for others to comment on or learn from here.

Watch this space! If you’re interested in being involved, supporting, informing or staying up to date with this work, please click here.