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When Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy was finally able to announce the formation of a minority government after 10 months of deadlock, he called for political unity. The national parliament must work together to make up for lost time, he said.

But that unity will not easily be achieved while most other political parties are embroiled in their own internal struggles. Rajoy was only able to make his breakthrough thanks to a decision by the Socialist Party (PSOE) to abstain from a vote to allow him to form a government, rather than voting against him. That decision has split the party and led to the resignation of its leader, Pedro Sánchez.

Spain has endured two elections in the past year alone, and Rajoy’s centre-right People’s Party (PP) was the only major party to increase its vote and number of seats between those two votes. Rajoy’s strategists will therefore already be planning their next move.

The PP may be looking to dissolve parliament to call a fresh election. That could happen as early as May 2017 – as soon as is constitutionally possible. Rajoy sees a chance to secure a more stable share of the vote and even to form a majority government. It will not have escaped his attention that the PSOE’s abstention in his investiture vote was linked to its desire to avoid going to the polls at such a moment of weakness.

Socialists in disarray

The current political environment is challenging for social democratic parties all over the world, but the PSOE appears more hapless than most.

Having resigned as party leader at the beginning of October, Sánchez stepped down from parliament altogether on the eve of Rajoy’s successful investiture vote. His departure drew a close to an alarming month of infighting for the socialists.

The caretaker leadership that took over was keen to avoid another election. Given how many votes the party had lost between the elections in December 2015 and June 2016 votes, its position is weak. Its chances of being able to form a government, even in coalition, were slim at best. It would have needed the support of left-wing upstart Podemos and independence-supporting regional parties. That was acceptable to Sánchez, but not to some of his opponents in the party, many of whom were involved in the caretaker leadership.

While the party membership generally backed Sánchez’s stance of voting against Rajoy’s minority government and forcing another election, 68 of the party’s 85 deputies abstained on the orders of the caretaker leadership.

Essentially, the split within the party centred on whether the Socialists should pragmatically acknowledge their own fragility and permit Rajoy to form a government on the basis that his party obtained the most seats in June, or whether, as Sánchez suggested, they should, on principle, vote against a party which has enthusiastically implemented harsh austerity. This while conspicuously failing to address numerous allegations of corruption within its own ranks.

The Podemos problem

Other parties have profited from the PSOE’s plight too. Podemos has wasted no time in proclaiming itself the genuine opposition to the PP government, given the decisive role played by the PSOE in securing Rajoy’s parliamentary endorsement.

Younger voters have been attracted to Podemos because they see both major parties as representing their parents’, or even their grandparents’, interests. Many have still not forgotten the austerity policies introduced by the PSOE when it was last in government under Rodríguez Zapatero.

The new-media-savvy Podemos has been a major beneficiary as austerity has borne down on the young and the poorest in society. Its critique of the status quo is immeasurably more convincing than its policies but party leader Pablo Iglesias’s Manichean approach, based on a reductionist confrontation between “the people” and the corrupt establishment, appeals to many.

Podemos has problems of its own, though. A disappointing performance in the June 2016 election – more than 1 million votes down on the December result – has caused division. Iglesias’ lieutenant Íñigo Errejón has advocated a more measured, pragmatic strategy to reassure voters disquieted by the leader’s often heavy-handed rhetorical spasms.

It remains to be seen whether the PSOE and Podemos are able to find common ground in order to mount a rigorous, yet constructive, opposition capable of holding the new PP government to account.

Paul Kennedy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

As the Government launches its 'war on illiteracy and innumeracy' today, its own reading skills need some scrutiny.

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Peter Sutherland of the UN is right that the UK receives fewer asylum seekers than other EU countries, but not as few as BBC listeners were led to believe.

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Theresa May’s three-day tour of India marks the start of her attempt to secure post-Brexit business with non-EU countries. Yet the message beginning to emanate from the UK government is: Indians, we want your business, and your high-net-worth business travellers, but the rest of you are not as welcome.

While the UK wants to secure Indian trade and investment, India is keen to see improvements in the human dimension of their relationship, focusing in particular on the immigration and visa regime. Business and people, after all, are intertwined. People generate business, they are employees and innovators in it, and they consume the goods and services emanating from it.

May has given a cursory nod to the people side of India’s concerns. She has announced that a select group of high-net-worth Indians and their families will now be offered access to the UK, with the launch of a “Great Club” for them. This is an “invitation only service” that comes with bespoke support from the government’s visas and immigration department.

Otherwise, the rest of the visa regime, which bears a strong May imprint from her days as home secretary, remains unchanged. In response to the Indian demand that visa conditions for students and skilled workers be liberalised, May has said: “Nine out of ten visa applications from India are already accepted. We have, I believe, a good system.”

What this quote does not take into account is the self-selection that happens before people reach a UK visa centre in India. The window to that visa centre has consistently narrowed under the UK’s Conservative governments, across visa categories. For instance in 2015, the financial guarantee for those seeking Tier 4 (general) student visas to the UK rose from £7,380 to £9,135 a year. This, in a country where the average annual income is £933.

Not a good system

When a student, or indeed any category of visa applicant, puts together the funds and paperwork required to submit a visa application, they face questions, delays, and further entry barriers. This is so for Indian students, and those from other nationalities, particularly from the Global South. The experiences of some my students at Oxford exemplify how the UK treats the best and the brightest who seek to study there:

I had a terrible experience applying for a visa. I applied from Bangladesh (my home country) … the application gets sent to Delhi for review, which means that the process takes about two months. When I applied the first time I was rejected due to a clerical error. The worst part was that there were no instructions in the rejection letter on how to appeal the decision. The only way I managed to eventually appeal and get the visa was through a connection who worked at the visa office in Delhi.

I was incredibly lucky, honestly, first because I knew someone in the local office and second because the university provided tons of support – they also wrote to the Delhi office on my behalf. Other Bangladeshi students have faced similar situations and have ended up with lots of wasted, hard earned money and not being able to take up their university offers in the end.

Even if a student has a generous scholarship and guaranteed accommodation and living expenses, they and their family members are treated with suspicion. The UK government’s keeping of students at arm’s length is a reflection of broader political discourse. One of my South African students shared this experience:

I feel like I have to justify my stay in the UK to strangers. I don’t think people are at all aware that international students pay higher fees as well as NHS charges – that we are not ‘sponging’ off the system.

We can add the NHS charge to this potent mix of rhetoric, policy and practice that makes international students feel unwelcome. Since 2015, students from outside the EU pay £150 per visa year for access to health services. If a family accompanies the student, this cost is multiplied. It is clear that the government does not simply see this as payment for services they expect students to use. Instead, the government proudly states that “after only six months [of the surcharge being introduced] it had collected more than £100m to contribute to the NHS for the benefit of us all”.

It is astounding that students and other visitors from countries like Mozambique, Bangladesh and India are paying for healthcare in a country where the aged are the biggest users.

Killing the goose

If students feel unwelcome, face visa restrictions, ever increasing fees and living expenses, limited scholarships, difficulty staying on to find a job, steep healthcare charges, and entry barriers for families, the net result, even for the utilitarians amongst us, is the killing of the goose that lays the golden egg. International students are a major source of income and employment generation for the UK economy. They contributed £7 billion in income in 2012 and supported 136,000 domestic jobs.

But these students are now voting with their feet. If, going against the trends of globalisation, the UK doggedly argues that British jobs, like British universities, are for British people, it has no one but itself to blame for steadily falling student numbers. Whereas 181,000 non-EU nationals entered the UK for higher education in 2010, by 2015, this number was down to 112,000.

Indian students are part of this trend. Some estimates say their numbers have halved in the last five years, going from 39,090 in 2010-11 to 18,320 in 2014-15. Some of these may have been the result of a crackdown on fraudulent education visas. But this focus ignores the practices, outlined above, that have contributed to international students’ general lowering of confidence in the systems around UK higher education.

By entangling education in nationalist jingoism, the tussle over net immigration numbers, and the budget deficits of key services, the UK government is showing a critical lack of vision. International students add immeasurably to the higher education sector in the UK.

The same can be said for the multicultural hives of ingenuity that are the UK’s financial, creative, health and technology sectors. UK universities, the City of London, the NHS and many other businesses and services take great pride in their internationalism.

The damage being wreaked through a narrow vision of what the UK and its institutions stand for, is already being felt, and will only accelerate. As the UK delegation makes its way from Delhi to Bangalore, it cannot ignore that people constitute business. Chip away at people, and the business environment will follow suit.

Nikita Sud was an Oxford Chevening Radhakrishnan scholar in 2001-03, partly funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That scheme no longer exists. Now Chevening scholars apply for one-year postgraduate courses in the UK.

Home Secretary Theresa May has announced an independent review of deaths in police custody. We take a look at the latest figures.

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Despite suggestions that young people are losing interest in the platform, its 1.5 billion users still puts Facebook at the centre of social media. The site was launched in 2004, and so those meeting Facebook’s minimum age requirement of 13 will, in 2017, be the first generation for whom Facebook has always existed.

We are now able to reflect on the long-term use of Facebook, which has enjoyed unrivalled longevity and growth. Those who joined in their early teens are now in their twenties and have “grown up” on Facebook, documenting their life through text, images, videos, and geo-location data such as “check-ins”. We spent two years interviewing these twenty-somethings to explore how they had documented their experiences of growing up on Facebook.

Their Facebook profiles have become effectively an archive of their lives. As our participants scrolled back through their Facebook timelines with us, they recounted the experiences they had posted to the site: exam results, new romantic relationships, breakups, losing a job, travel, and so on. Sometimes seemingly banal disclosures would remind them of more complex stories that were not immediately obvious. A photo of one participant sleeping on her father’s couch, for example, reminded her of a painful breakup with a partner. For another, the gaps in his timeline elicited stories about his gender transition that led him to switch to a new profile.

As our participants delved into their past many reflected on points in their lives where they were making critical decisions about their futures such as graduation, launching their careers and starting their own families. Some were in their final year of university study and were looking for a job. Today, Facebook profiles have become almost as important as a CV. And, much like the preparation and polishing of a CV, young people are cleaning up their Facebook profiles – prioritising stories about travelling or voluntary work and making the embarrassing details about nights out with friends private or erasing them altogether in an attempt to present a more professional, measured, mature identity.

Putting the best face forward

For many, Facebook has shifted from being the site on which to document carefree student days to a space where a more professional identity can play out. Recruiters have for some time examined social media profiles, something that raises important privacy questions. Facebook even now offers its own, work-focused Facebook app, Workplace, showing the company’s desire to expand into more areas of our lives.

Two participants in our study were final year medical students. Coached in a job-seeking seminar, they were told that the recruitment team would carry out web searches on the candidates, including Facebook pages. This was an incentive for them to tidy up their profiles, and reflect on how many years of Facebook posts might be interpreted by potential employers and patients.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens uses the expression “the reflexive project of the self” to explain how personal identity is not fixed in stone, but an ongoing project that we constantly work on. This concept is particularly applicable to social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter because it captures the way these services are embedded into young peoples’ lives, and their professional development.

By polishing their Facebook profiles they can revise their past – removing pictures or posts that no longer play a role in who they are, or who they wish to portray themselves to be. Entire events that once seemed significant can be removed, having since been diminished into the realm of teenage naivety as priorities, networks, and identities change.

Competing versions of identity

These erasures raise important questions. When in decades to come those who have grown up using Facebook are running for public office or moving into positions of power, how might we think differently about what constitutes a professional identity, and its relationship with our younger selves? Will future prime ministers be embarrassed by a love-struck selfie documenting a one month anniversary of their first relationship? Will future CEOs be deemed inappropriate for their jobs because of a flippant post made decades earlier? Should they?

Sports stars and politicians are often shamed and sometimes ruined for things they say on social media. Gymnast Louis Smith and footballer Joey Barton have found themselves in trouble for their questionable social media posts. Cheerleader Caitlin Davies’s career was ruined after a photo of her drawing offensive graffiti on an unconscious man was shared on Facebook.

The issue is that the hundreds or thousands of posts that make up twenty-somethings’ social media profiles are disclosures written and shared in the past, often forgotten and buried – until uncovered by someone scrolling back through them. In another case, the UK’s first youth crime commissioner Paris Brown resigned following the uncovering of apparently racist and homophobic comments posted on Twitter as a younger teenager.

Might this kind of scrutiny intensify as entire lives recorded on social media are dredged up and put under the microscope? Or perhaps our attitudes will change, and they will be appreciated for what they are – moments in time, often from long ago.

For either the carefully edited approach to Facebook or the forgotten posts that come back to haunt their creators, it will be interesting to see the impact on future generations. What, for example, will a child think on scrolling through the Facebook timelines of parents who grew up using social media? Might the edited, polished version of their lives that they have put forward on Facebook stand in place of memory, and so eventually become the recorded story of their lives, however carefully curated and managed?

Sian Lincoln is affiliated with The British Sociological Association (britsoc.co.uk) and the Association of Internet Researchers (aoir.org).

Brady Robards is affiliated with The Australian Sociological Association (tasa.org.au) and the Association of Internet Researchers (aoir.org).

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a still widely read 1964 essay for Harper’s Magazine outlining what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics. Marked by “a sense of heated exaggeration”, suspicion, and wild fears of political conspiracy, it was, he argued, a common part of American political life. It dated back to the rise of the antislavery movement before the Civil War, and every so often, it resurfaced at times of national crisis.

Hofstadter was alarmed to see this way of thinking infuse the politics of his own time. One example was the “Red Scare”, a series of anti-communist investigations and purges led by Senator Joe McCarthy. And then there was Barry Goldwater, the Republican party’s 1964 presidential nominee.

Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, was an outsider in the Republican party, known for his staunch anti-communism and opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He surprised everybody by beating the better-known and more moderate Nelson Rockefeller to become the party’s choice for president.

Goldwater picked up support from conservative voters who feared their role in society was under threat – that the fast-changing US was being taken away from them and their kind. “Traditional American values” were being undermined by left-wing intellectuals; the country was in danger, under threat from communist aggression abroad and Soviet spies and sympathisers at home.

Mainstream political leaders didn’t understand these fears, or simply chose to ignore them. But Goldwater did understand, and he won over grassroots activists by speaking directly to their concerns.

At home, he promised to reduce government spending and cut welfare payments. Abroad, he was committed to militant anti-Communism, including the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. He summed up his views at the Republican party convention in 1964: “

I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Goldwater was admired by Republican activists, but the wider electorate considered him beyond the pale. In the November election, he was crushed by the incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson. Nonetheless, Goldwater’s campaign fundamentally changed the thinking of his party – and five decades on, the conditions that led to the rise of Goldwater are on full display once again.

Fear and loathing

In his 1964 essay, Hofstadter argued that the paranoid style tends to resurface when class, ethnic and religious conflicts come to the fore. All three are roiling the US today.

The gap between the political elite and middle- and working-class Americans is as wide as it’s ever been. The uncertainty that set in after the economic crisis of 2008 endures; it has left workers deeply anxious about jobs and wages – and they fear labour competition from immigrants, especially Mexican ones. Internationally, the rise of radical Islam has threatened American interests abroad – and a series of "home-grown” extremist terror attacks have only reinforced the image of a nation under threat.

Mainstream politicians have been slow to respond, but like Goldwater before him, Trump has seized the moment. He has promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico, keep out Muslim immigrants and cancel free trade agreements to protect American jobs. As for the rest of the world, he has promised tough measures to wipe out the so-called Islamic State and has talked particularly tough on China.

As a self-proclaimed crusader against a corrupt political establishment, Trump has promised to see Hillary Clinton thrown in jail. He will “drain the swamp” to clean up the political system.

As Hofstadter put it, the paranoid style of mind creates “heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed”. Sure enough, many of Trump’s supporters apparently see their candidate as a knight in shining armour who can do no wrong. From this standpoint, attacks on his campaign aren’t grounded in reality or motivated purely by political differences; they are the work of a political conspiracy.

“Crooked Hillary” is a “nasty woman” rather than a political opponent with a different vision for America. The election is being “rigged”, and Trump will only accept the result if he wins.

Trump has successfully cultivated an image of martyrdom, which goes a long way to explaining why he has survived myriad allegations of personal misconduct that would have destroyed any normal campaign. To his devotees, accusations of tax evasion and scamming are over-egged or false, while the women who have accused him of sexual harassment are lying gold-diggers bankrolled by the Washington establishment.

So while Trump may seem like an anomaly, his campaign is in fact a constellation of familiar themes pulled together at a particularly fraught moment in US history. And candidates like this have won before.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan, another ideologically conservative Republican outsider, was elected president. To some on the right, Reagan – who spoke in Goldwater’s favour at the 1964 convention – represented the ultimate vindication of Goldwater’s vision. The thread connecting the three candidates was on full display in Reagan’s convention speech in 1980, where he pledged to “make America great again”.

It remains to be seen if Trump will enjoy the success of Reagan or go down in flames like Goldwater. Either way, Hillary Clinton should understand his political appeal as well as anyone: in 1964, aged just 17, she campaigned for Goldwater herself.

Kevern Verney was a co-investigator for the Barack Obama Research Network, 2010-2014, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

If victors get to define the reasons for their victory, then losers just get told why they’ve lost. Within hours – minutes even – of the announcement of the shock BBC exit poll at 10pm on May 7, Ed Miliband was being informed in no uncertain terms why he had done so badly by an army of observers, critics and supposed party comrades.

It is ridiculous to imagine that in such a short space of time anyone can properly explain why Labour’s performance was so disappointing. We still don’t know why all the opinion polls were so out of alignment with the final result. Did they consistently over-estimate Labour support in the campaign or was there a late defection to the Conservatives? These things matter.

But political debate rarely stops for the lack of adequate data. As a consequence, in the wake of this and every other Labour disaster at the polls, prejudice often masquerades as analysis. Most infamously, Labour’s third defeat in a row in 1959 saw party leader Hugh Gaitskell and his revisionist cohorts in academia and the media blame its association with nationalisation. But they had long been critical of nationalisation and blatantly sought to use defeat to ditch Labour’s constitutional commitment to public ownership. It was arguable, however, that Gaitskell’s own campaign blunders had harmed his party more. But he still plunged Labour into years of bitter and harmful division.

Blairites seize their chance

In the same way, Miliband’s many Blairite critics have formed an orderly queue to tell us why he lost. The columnist John Rentoul has already written that 2015 “was an election that Labour could have won, and David Miliband could have won it”.

After beating his brother for the leadership in 2010, Rentoul and the Blairite blogger Dan Hodges, insist Miliband should have admitted that Labour had spent too much money in office and signed up to much of the Cameron government’s austerity programme rather than opposing it.

Theirs is the prevailing view among many leading Labour parliamentarians, most of whom wanted David Miliband for leader. According to Pat McFadden, the shadow Europe minister, and a figure close to Blair, defeat flowed from Ed Miliband “turning the page on New Labour” and his failure to appeal to “the aspirational family that wants to do well”. “We need”, McFadden continued, “to speak about wealth creation and not just wealth distribution.”

Labour’s appalling performance in Scotland and its inability to win more than a few marginal constituencies in England certainly needs explanation. But is the answer, in effect, going back to 1997 and what Rentoul semi-ironically calls “the eternal verities of the Blairite truth”?

Not yet over New Labour

Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership because New Labour had failed. Uncritically accepting the economics of neo-liberalism, Blair said Labour could still make Britain a fairer society. Between 1997 and 2010 there were many, if modest, gains as a result. The minimum wage, tax credits, investment in public services among other measures certainly improved the lives of some: relative poverty fell.

But New Labour’s faith in the market meant it contributed to the deregulation that led to the 2008 banking crisis, one which even the former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, admits was the real reason for the huge deficit inherited by the Conservative-led coalition. The party was also in trouble electorally, even before the fiscal crisis. It crawled to a majority in 2005 with 35.2% of the vote – and only then after Blair promised he wouldn’t seek another term as prime minister. The seeds of the SNP surge were laid before 2010, while the alienation of many former Labour voters had long been obvious. Even David Miliband conceded that more of the same was not an option, that the party needed to renew itself.

It is clear that the course taken by Ed Miliband did not work. But we do not yet know for sure why. Was his attempt to move on in a leftward direction from New Labour flawed from the outset? Or did the fault lie in the uncertain means by which his strategy was communicated? Was any Labour leader fated to fail in 2015, given the flawed record of New Labour in power, one that remains fresh in the minds of many voters?

By the time we know the answers to these questions, a new Labour leader will have been elected and will already be taking the party in a direction likely to have been influenced by those nostalgic for Blairism. But going back to the future is not necessarily the best way to move forward.

Steven Fielding is a member of the Labour party

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It’s widely accepted that when people of different religions and ethnicities live side by side and interact, it improves mutual trust and relations. By the same token, research shows that when there are more ethnic or religious minority people in a neighbourhood but less interaction between them and the white majority residents, the latter tend to be more prejudiced and less trusting.

This theory – based on the “contact hypothesis” – gives us reason to be concerned about segregation between white majority and ethnic or religious minority residents. That’s why a recent report claiming that ethnic segregation is increasing across the UK caused a flurry of debate about how to address the issue.

But in reality, the picture is far more complicated. Some research draws the opposite conclusion: that British cities have actually become less segregated over the years.

Other experts have criticised the way the report measured segregation, arguing that we should be more concerned about tackling racism instead. After all, even in residential areas with low levels of segregation, people can self-segregate in spaces such as community centres, cafés, sports clubs, and bars, in order to avoid contact with each other.

Beyond the neighbourhood

Wealth can also play a role: when neighbourhoods are both segregated and poor, it can lower the quality of community life, or it can enhance community welfare and support. The place where we live undoubtedly shapes our lives – but it’s not the only factor.

Let’s not forget that our attitudes toward others are shaped outside our neighbourhoods, too. We also spend time in the workplace or other institutions, such as universities, schools, parks, public services, shops and sports associations.

Research based on the European Social Survey has demonstrated that diversity in the workplace can play an even greater role in forging friendships between people of different religions and ethnicities. It has even been shown that chain cafés, which are dotted throughout cities, create a convivial spaces which enable more in-depth interactions between diverse consumers.

All of this evidence seems to indicate that the kinds of spaces where interactions take place have an impact on the attitudes of white majority people toward minorities. To better understand this link, my colleagues and I developed a study: after gathering data from surveys in Leeds, UK, and Warsaw, Poland, we analysed the prejudice of white residents of these two cities.

We asked them about their contact with people from minority groups in a variety of places. We then classified these places into five types of space, according to the different degrees of closeness they created between people. There were private spaces (homes), social spaces (social clubs, sport groups, community centres), institutional spaces (places of work and study), spaces of consumption (restaurants, pubs, bars, cafés) and public spaces (streets, parks, public transport, public services).

We measured people’s attitudes with two questions: the first was a “feeling thermometer”, where respondents express the warmth of their feelings towards other groups in terms of degrees, from zero to 100. For the second question, we asked respondents how friendly they would be towards minority groups if they became their neighbours.

Meeting places matter

The results confirmed what we suspected – that where contact takes place matters when it comes to reducing prejudice. In Leeds, people held more positive feelings towards minorities when they interacted with them in institutional and social spaces. But only encounters in social spaces would make people more friendly to new minority neighbours.

So, while sharing a workplace with minorities can improve feelings toward them, this does not necessarily translate into neighbourly friendliness among white British people.

In Warsaw, we found a positive link between feelings and meeting minority people in public and consumption spaces. In particular, encounters with minority people in bars, restaurants and cafés were more likely to lead white majority residents to be friendly to them in neighbourhoods.

We suspect that in Warsaw cafés and restaurants play a similar role to social clubs and community centres in Leeds, by bringing people of different backgrounds together. Since the opening of country’s borders in 1989, Asian (mostly Vietnamese) restaurants and takeaways have spread across the Polish capital. They often become the sites of the first and – as it turns out – most meaningful encounters with non-Polish residents.

All this confirms that contact between people from different backgrounds is crucial for building cohesive societies – and we know that residential segregation makes this contact less likely.

But the spaces where contact takes place matter too. Whether in Leeds or Warsaw, encounters in public spaces do not translate into friendliness toward new minority neighbours. Reducing segregation does not guarantee that everyone will get along. Rather, we should cherish social spaces, as well as bars, cafés and restaurants, where people are encouraged to act as neighbours – not just strangers living side by side.

The research mentioned in this article was part of a project funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award to Professor Gill Valentine.