Conclusion

The conclusion offers a proposal to move past argumentation to better define and operationalize the everyday neighborhood. The proposal includes the need for strong centers, internal and external connectivity that helps build a strong sense of neighborhood, support for both a plan and a process, self-determination strengthened by neighborhood identity, the promotion of social connection via the neighborhood’s functionality, support and enabling of social diversity in multiple ways, and mechanisms for governance. The proposal is motivated by the idea that the everyday neighborhood still has relevance for many urban dwellers. Unraveling the debates and offering a proposal for how entrenched issues might finally be resolved, it leverages what is known about neighborhoods after a century of argument in hopes of making them ultimately more real, relevant, and realistic.

The Self-Governed Neighborhood

This chapter focuses on the issue of neighborhood self-governance, including the pros and cons of self-determination and local control. Strong, self-regulated neighborhoods fit well within a self-help narrative about residents taking control of their own destinies. But the downside, as the debates reveal, is the loss of power and the potential for insularity, which can further deplete power. At the same time, higher-level authorities are often resistant to relinquishing control, putting added stress on the ability of neighborhoods to self-manage. With a stronger sense of neighborhood, the debate can be resolved through better connection to wider political networks as well as better application of innovative budgeting and governance procedures that are already in place but not widely in use. Resolution of the self-determination debate, then, capitalizes on existing procedures, regulations, and governing authority that exist at the neighborhood level but have not been activated by an explicit understanding of neighborhood.

The Planning Problem

This chapter reviews the debate over predetermination, that is, whether neighborhoods should and can be planned into existence. The planned neighborhood is the result of deliberative action, either through a physical plan or as a set of orchestrated actions, in contrast to spontaneous neighborhood formation. The emphasis here is on the contrast between planning for a specified end state and “neighborhood planning” as a process with no predetermined outcome, especially in physical terms. A common narrative is that top-down neighborhood planning has been harmful, for example when it was used to motivate wholesale destruction of existing neighborhoods in the urban renewal period. The resolution of this debate proposes merging the best of both worlds: neighborhoods that do not ignore the importance of bottom-up generation but are still open to the possibility of a planned physical ideal.

Design Debates

This chapter reviews the primary design debates involved in neighborhood formation: whether they can or should be planned all at once and as complete units; their boundedness and centeredness, and their street composition and its effect on internal and external connectivity. All of these debates involve the limits and practicalities of neighborhood identity-building and consciousness, which can be thought of as being on a continuum from most extreme (whole units on clean slates) to more subtle (increasing connectivity via interconnecting pathways). Moving forward, there is hope for design resolution because the choices are not so black and white. Neighborhood design can maintain the positive aspects of identity-building by emphasizing centers (which also minimizes the need for explicit boundaries) and streets that can be simultaneously well connected and pedestrian based.

Getting the Neighborhood Back

While the opening up of the city and the loss of neighborhood identity was not universally lamented, many planners, sociologists, and social reformers reacted to the decline by trying to plan the neighborhood back into existence. Essentially the response to industrial capitalism was to apportion cities into manageable units and subunits—segmented, patterned, sorted into equal-size circles, squares, or hexagons at regular intervals, nested into hierarchical arrangements, often with mathematical precision. The quest for order and control manifested as the neighborhood unit—an urban partitioning that even ancient cities had practiced. In the 19th century, garden cities, model villages, and other idealized units were the more immediate precursors of the 20th-century version: relatively self-contained neighborhoods that had access to services, social life, and nature.

Neighborhoods and Segregation

This chapter reviews the final, and most significant, debate about the neighborhood: its association with social segregation. Many have argued that the delineation of neighborhood is by definition a form of exclusion, and that if neighborhoods weren’t identified in the first place, there would be less emphasis on social sorting and who is “in” and “out” of the neighborhood. There is no denying that the neighborhood, especially the planned neighborhood unit, was and is associated with segregation, sometimes explicitly. Proposed resolutions of this debate are (a) to make neighborhood-scale social diversity an explicit policy goal and (b) to look for ways to successfully integrate smaller, more homogeneous neighborhoods set within larger, heterogeneous districts. In both cases, it is again the physically defined neighborhood rather than the socially differentiated neighborhood that provides an identity through which diversity can be embraced.

Introduction

This introduction provides a general overview of the book’s main themes. A central argument is that there are basic commonalities about neighborhoods that span historical and global contexts. Following the decline of traditional neighborhood structure starting in the early 20th century, Western planners worked to plan the neighborhood back into existence, and that’s when debates about neighborhoods began: about social mix, serviceability, self-containment, centeredness, and connectivity within and without. The book offers a proposal to move past argumentation in hopes of better defining and operationalizing the “everyday neighborhood.” The proposal leverages what is known about neighborhoods, not only historically and globally, but also after a century of argument about their meaning and form in the modern American city.

Social Confusion

This chapter focuses on the long-standing debate over the quest to achieve goals about social relationships via the neighborhood. Earlier in the 20th century, it was common for neighborhood proponents to ascribe social outcomes to neighborhoods in the hope that social connection—and at times, conformity—could be instilled, if only neighborhoods were of a particular form. Later in the century, communications and transportation technologies dealt a further blow to the idea that neighborhoods were a viable source for instilling social outcomes like a sense of belonging and a sense of community. The social prescriptions of neighborhood form have long been problematized, but the argument seems to linger on, fueling critics of neighborhood plans. The most promising avenue for resolving this entrenched debate is to reject outright social relationship–related claims, refocus attention on neighborhood functionality—services, facilities, and institutions—and welcome whatever positive social benefits might be derived.

Reinventing the Neighborhood

As the historical experience of neighborhood waned, and as it became clear that reinstating the neighborhood via preset plans was going to be a significant challenge, interest in expanding the definition of neighborhood grew. These new definitions involved opening the door to concepts that, before the 20th century, would have seemed completely alien. Now detached from any traditional, physical understanding involving centers and boundaries, the idea of neighborhood could be expanded to investigate new modes of inquiry in a whole range of fields: biology, computer science, psychology, and physics. The newly acquired, open-ended approach to neighborhood definition was liberating, extraneous, or disabling, depending on one’s point of view. This chapter summarizes some of these neighborhood definitions to give a sense of the variety that now exists and to show how many of these definitions challenge conventional understanding of the neighborhood as a relevant and meaningful setting for daily life.

The Historical Neighborhood and Its Decline

This chapter reviews what is known about how neighborhoods were laid out and experienced, before the city was fundamentally restructured by technological and social changes emerging out of the 19th century. To what degree was the neighborhood ever identifiable, serviced, diverse, and connected? Counteracting the often more ambiguous contemporary understanding of neighborhood requires drawing on a broad historical and global perspective. Interconnection, localized identity, human scale, adjacency, access, the need for a graspable spatial unit to belong to—these are the regularities of urban experience that establish a more durable foundation for the traditional concept of neighborhood. Historical examples of neighborhood are important precisely because neighborhood form emerged as a regular feature of urban experience all over the globe, despite profound differences in urbanization processes.