Monoculture

We are now three years in Aston and sometimes I have the feeling that the tide is running against us. We selected Aston mainly because it was a multicultural and multireligious neighbourhood, and we hoped very much to build bridges between people of differing background. We had no illusion about how difficult this would be: you can't force people to become friends with strangers! We knew it would be a slow process of establishing trusting relationships.

But shall we have the time to do so? Is our neighbourhood not changing from a multicultural community into a monoculture? The statistics have it that about 20% of the population of Aston is white English and Irish, but that is not the impression you get when you walk the streets. You hardly see any white people: they seem to have disappeared from the scene.

What is happening is that white people are still moving out of the neighbourhood. They follow their children who have moved out ahead of them in search of the employment opportunities no longer found in Aston. The same is happening, but to a lesser extent, to the Afro-Caribbean people. They are still present in good numbers, but they are ageing and their children are no longer with them. The empty places are being taken in part by new migrants, refugees from Africa and Asia, and economic migrants from Eastern Europe. It remains to be seen, however, how stable these new arrivals will be. This leaves the Asian population, from Pakistan and Bangladesh, already in the majority. They are a young population, fast growing in this country and with plenty of relatives in their countries of origin willing to come to England and hoping for a better life. They will occupy the empty places left by the other groups and as a consequence Aston will grow into a monocultural neighbourhood.

I like to emphasise that the processes underlying this development are all very natural, there is nothing sinister about them. Lots of individual decisions, all making sense by themselves, point in the same direction and the combined outcome is a monoculture.

How to react to this development? You can't stop the tide. I think, two things can be done. There are people in Aston among the white and the Afro-Caribbean population who do not want to move out. They see the variety that is still being present as a plus, as something to be appreciated and cherished. It will be important to spot these people and support them in whatever way we can. They show what a future of living together may look like. Secondly, when neighbourhoods continue to lose much of their variety, one needs to look beyond one's own neighbourhood and attempt to bring neighbourhoods of different kinds together. As somebody told me in a slightly different context: it will make the difference between a ghetto and an enclave.

Ton