Defining Neighbourhoods
University of Chicago Professor of Urbanism Emily Talen.
The varying definitions of neighborhoods and methods for defining a physical basis and tangible meaning to neighborhoods based on the location of neighbourhood centres, boundaries, and spatial extents.
“Neighbourhoods are “the cellular dynamic of urban change.”
Talen posits neighbourhoods are defined by three essential characteristics : Identity, Connectivity, and Collective Voice. That collective voice characteristic worries me and I’m disappointment that in this course she doesn’t offer examples of meaningful subsidiarity.
Time for a careful read-read of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Ch6 The Uses of City Neighborhoods.This is the opening paragraph :
Neighbourhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As sentimental concept “neighbourhood” is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays w/ sweet intentions in place of good sense.
Jacobs warned against planner attempts to achieve social outcomes and Talen is clear on this as well. Jacobs: “When we try to justify good shelter [or for example good schools] on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles, we fool ourselves. We must first of all drop any ideal of neighborhoods as self-contained or introverted units.” Jacobs D+L Ch6
“Looking at city neighborhoods as organs of self-government, I see evidence that only three kinds of neighborhoods are useful: (1) city as a whole; (2) street neighborhoods; (3) districts of large, subcity size, composed of 100,000 people or more in the case of the largest cities.” “The self-government functions of streets are all humble, but they are indispensable. In spite of much experiment, planned and unplanned, there exists no substitute for lively streets.” Jacobs D+L Ch6
Both Jacobs and Talen observe the importance of the permeability of neighbourhood boundaries, the “spatial extents” as Talen calls them. Planners’ attempts to create fixed boundaries should be opposed.
Professor Talen describes the course objectives this way : ● How can we frame an argument in support of the place-based traditional understanding of neighbourhood; ● why is this traditional definition important; ● why should planners focus on neighbourhood identity and relevance?
“The spotting and inter-relationship of schools, libraries, theatres, and community centres is the first task in defining the urban neighbourhood and laying down the outlines of an integrated city.” Lewis Mumford, What is a City?
The very concept of neighbourhood has been associated in recent decades with a tendency to social homogeneity, xenophobia, self-selection bias, exclusion, white and class privilege. Talen and Jacobs both seem to say “don’t give up on the neighbourhood.
…the everyday neighbourhood substitutes place for homogeneity as the basis of neighbourhood definition.” Talen
”The most obvious of the three [city neighbourhoods], although it is seldom called a neighbourhood, is the city as a whole. We must never forget or minimize this parent community while thinking of a city’s smaller parts.” Jacobs D+L ch6
Jacobs is a pleasure to read. In this chapter she calls a comment by a British academic, a specialist on urban economics, “rather snooty.”
By my reading, Jacobs was talking more about the informal self-governing of civil society, a natural occurrence of the well-functioning city neighbourhood, than a formalized structure of neighbourhood self-government.“…self-government functions of city streets: weave webs of public surveillance thus protect strangers as well as themselves; grow networks of small-scale everyday public life thus of trust + social control; help assimilate children into reasonably responsible tolerant city life”
Jacobs identified the district — large, subcity size — as one of the city organs of self-government “The chief function of a successful district is to mediate between the indispensable but inherently politically powerless street neighbourhoods, and the inherently powerful city as a whole.”
The once and future neighbourhood | @cnupublicsquare Urban planner Emily Talen tells the history of the neighbourhood, why it became a controversial topic, and how the “everyday neighbourhood” could help a diverse North America come together.
More at…
“In the expanse of amorphous neighbourhood-free urbanism that constitutes much of our cities, there’s need to proactively work toward neighbourhood definition + reconstitution. Unless we do, neighbourhood can’t be used as a credible resource to help cities become better places.”
Neighbourhoods have been explicitly or implicitly used to promote social segregation. The problem can be addressed by proactively building for diversity or settling on a definition that connects + integrates smaller homogeneous neighbourhoods w/in larger heterogeneous districts.
Even the concept of neighbourhood has fallen from favour among many urbanists, discredited by xenophobic neighbourhood groups protecting “neighbourhood character” and opposing even gentle densification in single family home areas.
But the neighbourhood is important. It’s civil society, our informal shared experience of interconnectedness.
University of Chicago Urbanism Professor Emily Talen’s book is a fascinating study of the history from ancient times of how neighbourhoods formed and the mostly failed attempts to impose neighbourhood organization from above.”When [neighbourhood] identity is derived from physical characteristics and not social difference, neighbourhood can be a persuasive concept that rejects insularity and disconnection from broader urban forces.”
1. Introduction. The Debates “An urban quarter contains and promotes all the qualities of a city, inclusive. All is permitted and promoted that is not strictly forbidden.” Leon Krier
Ch5 Design Debates. Boundaries “can be an asset or problem depending on how they’re used. They’ve been used to keep people in (ghettos) and to keep people out (gated enclaves)… concern is whether the boundary is one of exclusion or “edge of a place that has a welcome at the door.”
Debates about physical design focus on neighbourhoods’ boundedness and centeredness, street composition, internal and external connectivity. An earlier practice by which neighbourhoods were planned all at once on “clean slates” in existing urban places has long been discounted…… yet it is true that some aspects of the complete neighbourhood — particularly its centeredness — help build neighbourhood identity. In turn, this identity has local power.
The New Urbanists… proclaimed traditional neighbourhood form as central to urbanism, and threw out the modernist form that had allowed giantism, car dominance, and isolated buildings to spoil what they believed were the neighbourhood unit’s time-honoured qualities.
The neighbourhood endured, this time forming the central piece of an urbanist trilogy: region, neighbourhood, and block.
The root trouble with borders, as city neighbours, is that they are apt to form dead ends for most users of city streets. They represent, for most people, most of the time, barriers.” Jane Jacobs D+L Ch 14 The Curse of Border Vacuums.
Literal and continuous mingling of people, present because of different purposes, is the only device that keeps streets safe… It is the only device that encourages districts to form in place of fragmented, self-isolated neighbourhoods or backwaters. Jacobs D+L
Frequent borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or any other massive use of special land, can tear a city to tatters. Jacobs D+L
Pedestrian street schemes can introduce more problems than they solve. Yet this is a fashionable idea for downtown shopping streets + “town centres”…[They] can inject no end of border vacuums + dicontinuities of use where they may do greatest + most gratuitous harm. — Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Ch14 The Curse of Border Vacuums.
“The everyday neighbourhood substitutes place for homogeneity as the basis of neighborhood definition. Neighbourhood identity based on race and income has been deeply damaging.” — Emily Talen
Rather than using neighbourhood as a marker of social difference, the everyday neighbourhood defines neighbourhood not as bundles of social data but as physical places where built forms, identity, and social and economic worlds come together.
It means using place instead of class or race in the formation of neighbourhood consciousness and as an alternative basis of collective identity, one capable of transcending the desire for social sameness, the fear of others, and the distrust of institutions.”
Planners were seeking a more “sophisticated concept” of neighbourhood…“fully organic town planning” could be found in process-oriented theories of modernism… Jacobs’ crack that planned neighbourhood was nice if you “were docile and had no plans of your own” reflected this thinking.
Was Jane Jacobs right to say New Urbanists “only create what they say they hate” (i.e., more suburbia)? Yes and no, according to this article. New Urbanism and #JaneJacobs: A Tangled Disconnect
New York City has no official neighbourhood boundaries. Separate boroughs in New York have their own neighbourhood counts; Brooklyn has at least 90, and Queens has 99. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_neighborhoods_map.png …
”Lewis Mumford regarded neighbourhoods as simply “a fact of nature” and that to claim they were the “wilful mental creations of romantic sociologists” was “downright absurd.”
Many critics equated neighbourhood planing with production of “poverty enclaves.” What poor people needed was the antithesis of planned inward focused neighbourhood, they needed networks, dispersion, mobility to support integration with the broad urban milieu” See also @DougSaunders Arrival City
For millennia, the physical, identifiable neighbourhood was a mechanism that “kept society from falling apart” by helping to maintain an organized, place-based social grouping…
Sense of neighbourhood offered one avenue for the collective joining of forces, a source of mutual aid in societies that offered few sources of support and few avenues for self-advancement…
This need for local support constitutes a fundamental contrast between the collectivity of traditional societies and the individuality of modern ones.” Fun fact : Seventy percent of those who stormed the Bastille in Paris were from one specific neighbourhood, Faubourg Saint-Antoine. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14649831 …
There is an argument that neighbourhood should never be equated with “community” because the exclusionary tactics of neighbourhoods might infiltrate the more legitimate concerns of community-building. Ch7 The Self-Governed Neighbourhood.Ch8 Social Confusion “The most promising avenue for resolving debate [achieving social goals by neighbourhood design] is to reject social relationship–related claims, refocus on functionality — services, facilities, institutions — and welcome whatever social benefit might be derived”
Lewis Mumford was one of the few who recognized the difference and wrote the act of being a neighbour “to be real need not be deep: a nod, friendly word, recognized face, an uttered name — this is all that is needed to establish and preserve in some fashion the sense of belonging together.”
Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.” Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Ch3 The uses of city sidewalks: contact.
“What people know, in New York City, is their block, that mini-city of brick and mortar, friend and stranger, sidewalk and pothole whose every change, sudden or gradual, we note as we go about our days.” New York Times, 2015. The State of Your New York Block.
The social meaning of neighbourhood and the relevance of neighbourhood itself along with it — was near extinction by the 1970s…
The servicing aspect of neighbourhood is appealing because it is less ambiguous. Neighbourhoods can be defined by the facilities and services they contain and the distances residents travel to acquire them, in addition to the extent and nature of social and economic interaction. Serviceability can form the basis of planning and policy, not whether the neighbourhood is providing positive social experiences.