2nd opinion: Exurb marks the spot

All professions have too much jargon. So it is with trepidation that I offer you another technical term. Like many, it's heading to the UK from across the Atlantic, along with the phenomenon that it seeks to describe.

The word is "exurban" or in its noun form "exurb". Over there it describes the vast areas of built environment, in some cases up to 100 square miles, which lie at the edge of or beyond the gravitational pull of any single city.

These are places that have neither the suburb's wide-ranging dependence on a city centre, or the presence of that network of human interactions that would make them towns in any traditional sense.

Exurbs matter because, via the Communities Plan and for other reasons, we are getting more of them in Britain and also because they exhibit both the pains and pleasures of modern urban living in an acute form. Not least to housing associations they matter because they challenge the notions of neighbourhood that we have just declared ourselves to be In Business for.

Exurb dwellers commute long distances for well-paid employment. Their urban cores are more akin to out-of-town retail and leisure parks than to the traditionally employment-based town centres we hold in our mind's eye. Public transport, hampered by relatively low densities and the lack of a city-centre work focus, fails to provide a sustainable level of service to those who do not own cars.

Leisure activity is characterised by a high level of personal choice for those who have their own transport and are acclimatised to travelling. High levels of debt, principally to sustain mortgage payments, add to the social stress.

My concern is that social landlords must recognise the scale of what we are facing. Bluntly, exurb residents don't do neighbourhood. Studies of British new towns (the nearest mid-20th century equivalent) have shown that initial neighbourhood involvement flatters to deceive. Once the physical structure of an area has been settled, residents, who have little historic attachment to where they happen to sleep at night, retreat to niche engagement.

Current exurbs, growing in a culture even less geographically based than then, are unlikely on this score to sustain significant levels of neighbourhood interaction for any length of time.

It gets worse. One remaining social difference between Britain and America is that US citizens have a much higher incidence of joining in neighbourhood activity. My hunch is that this is what makes many of their exurban communities survive and thrive in ways that ours don't.

In Business for Neighbourhoods is a great idea, and I want to endorse it. But if we pretend In is about talking to health, education, police, social services and so on, in the absence of real engagement with those who live there, we are simply the disconnected talking to the disconnected.

Working counter culturally is more expensive, takes more planning and requires a longer timescale than going with the flow. We need to recognise that and resource our work accordingly. The challenge applies equally to other institutions, including religious ones, where I read of it first.

So the blame for giving you this additional piece of jargon lies with a study of religious activity in exurbs by Dr Chris Baker for the William Temple Foundation in Manchester. They can be found at M14 5JP or on 0161 249 2502.