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A neighbourhood (Commonwealth English) or neighborhood (American English) is a geographically localized community within a larger city, town, suburb or rural area, sometimes consisting of a single street and the buildings lining it. Neighbourhoods are often social communities with considerable face-to-face interaction among members. Researchers have not agreed on an exact definition, but the following may serve as a starting point: "Neighbourhood is generally defined spatially as a specific geographic area and functionally as a set of social networks. Neighbourhoods, then, are the spatial units in which face-to-face social interactions occur—the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realise common values, socialise youth, and maintain effective social control."[ clarification needed ] [1]
In the words of the urban scholar Lewis Mumford, "Neighborhoods, in some annoying, inchoate fashion exist wherever human beings congregate, in permanent family dwellings; and many of the functions of the city tend to be distributed naturally—that is, without any theoretical preoccupation or political direction—into neighborhoods." [2] Most of the earliest cities around the world as excavated by archaeologists have evidence for the presence of social neighbourhoods. [3] Historical documents shed light on neighbourhood life in numerous historical preindustrial or nonwestern cities. [4]
Neighbourhoods are typically generated by social interaction among people living near one another. In this sense they are local social units larger than households not directly under the control of city or state officials. In some preindustrial urban traditions, basic municipal functions such as protection, social regulation of births and marriages, cleaning and upkeep are handled informally by neighbourhoods and not by urban governments; this pattern is well documented for historical Islamic cities. [5]
In addition to social neighbourhoods, most ancient and historical cities also had administrative districts used by officials for taxation, record-keeping, and social control. [6] Administrative districts are typically larger than neighbourhoods and their boundaries may cut across neighbourhood divisions. In some cases, however, administrative districts coincided with neighbourhoods, leading to a high level of regulation of social life by officials. For example, in the T'ang period Chinese capital city Chang'an, neighbourhoods were districts and there were state officials who carefully controlled life and activity at the neighbourhood level. [7]
Neighbourhoods in preindustrial cities often had some degree of social specialisation or differentiation. Ethnic neighbourhoods were important in many past cities and remain common in cities today. Economic specialists, including craft producers, merchants, and others, could be concentrated in neighbourhoods, and in societies with religious pluralism neighbourhoods were often specialised by religion. One factor contributing to neighbourhood distinctiveness and social cohesion in past cities was the role of rural to urban migration. This was a continual process in preindustrial cities, and migrants tended to move in with relatives and acquaintances from their rural past. [8]
Neighbourhood sociology is a subfield of urban sociology which studies local communities [9] [10] Neighbourhoods are also used in research studies from postal codes and health disparities, to correlations with school drop out rates or use of drugs. [11] Some attention has also been devoted to viewing the neighbourhood as a small-scale democracy, regulated primarily by ideas of reciprocity among neighbours. [12]
Neighbourhoods have been the site of service delivery or "service interventions" in part as efforts to provide local, quality services, and to increase the degree of local control and ownership. [13] Alfred Kahn, as early as the mid-1970s, described the "experience, theory and fads" of neighbourhood service delivery over the prior decade, including discussion of income transfers and poverty. [14] Neighbourhoods, as a core aspect of community, also are the site of services for youth, including children with disabilities [15] and coordinated approaches to low-income populations. [16] While the term neighbourhood organisation [17] is not as common in 2015, these organisations often are non-profit, sometimes grassroots or even core funded community development centres or branches.
Community and economic development activists have pressured for reinvestment in local communities and neighbourhoods. In the early 2000s, Community Development Corporations, Rehabilitation Networks, Neighbourhood Development Corporations, and Economic Development organisations would work together to address the housing stock and the infrastructures of communities and neighbourhoods (e.g., community centres). [18] Community and Economic Development may be understood in different ways, and may involve "faith-based" groups and congregations in cities. [19]
In the 1900s, Clarence Perry described the idea of a neighbourhood unit as a self-contained residential area within a city. The concept is still influential in New Urbanism. Practitioners seek to revive traditional sociability in planned suburban housing based on a set of principles. At the same time, the neighbourhood is a site of interventions to create Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) as many older adults tend to have narrower life space. Urban design studies thus use neighbourhood as a unit of analysis. [20]
In mainland China, the term is generally used for the urban administrative division found immediately below the district level, although an intermediate, subdistrict level exists in some cities. They are also called streets (administrative terminology may vary from city to city). Neighbourhoods encompass 2,000 to 10,000 families. Within neighbourhoods, families are grouped into smaller residential units or quarters of 100 to 600 families and supervised by a residents' committee; these are subdivided into residents' small groups of fifteen to forty families. In most urban areas of China, neighbourhood, community , residential community, residential unit, residential quarter have the same meaning: 社区 or 小区 or 居民区 or 居住区, and is the direct sublevel of a subdistrict (街道办事处), which is the direct sublevel of a district (区), which is the direct sublevel of a city (市). (See Administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China)
The term has no general official or statistical purpose in the United Kingdom, but is often used by local boroughs for self-chosen sub-divisions of their area for the delivery of various services and functions, as for example in Kingston-upon-Thames [21] or is used as an informal term to refer to a small area within a town or city. The label is commonly used to refer to organisations which relate to such a very local structure, such as neighbourhood policing [22] or Neighbourhood watch schemes. In addition, government statistics for local areas are often referred to as neighbourhood statistics, although the data themselves are broken down usually into districts and wards for local purposes. In many parts of the UK wards are roughly equivalent to neighbourhoods or a combination of them.
("Neighborhood" is spelled with an -or rather than -our in the US and reflected as such here)
In the United States and Canada, neighborhoods are often given official or semi-official status through neighborhood associations, neighborhood watches or block watches. These may regulate such matters as lawn care and fence height, and they may provide such services as block parties, neighborhood parks and community security. In some other places the equivalent organization is the parish, though a parish may have several neighborhoods within it depending on the area.
In localities where neighborhoods do not have an official status, questions can arise as to where one neighborhood begins and another ends. Many cities use districts and wards as official divisions of the city, rather than traditional neighborhood boundaries. ZIP Code boundaries and post office names also sometimes reflect neighborhood identities.
Gentrification is the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has been used to describe a wide array of phenomena, usually in a pejorative connotation.
A township is a form of human settlement or administrative subdivision. Its exact definition varies among countries.
The administrative divisions of China have consisted of several levels since ancient times, due to China's large population and geographical area. The constitution of China provides for three levels of government. However in practice, there are five levels of local government; the provincial, prefecture, county, township, and village.
New Urbanism is an urban design movement that promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New Urbanism attempts to address the ills associated with urban sprawl and post-Second World War suburban development.
A gated community is a form of residential community or housing estate containing strictly controlled entrances for pedestrians, bicycles, and automobiles, and often characterized by a closed perimeter of walls and fences. Historically, cities have built defensive city walls and controlled gates to protect their inhabitants, and such fortifications have also separated quarters of some cities. Today, gated communities usually consist of small residential streets and include various shared amenities. For smaller communities, these amenities may include only a park or other common area. For larger communities, it may be possible for residents to stay within the community for most daily activities. Gated communities are a type of common interest development, but are distinct from intentional communities.
A dead end, also known as a cul-de-sac, no through road or no exit road, is a street with only one inlet or outlet.
A city centre is the commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart of a city. The term "city centre" is primarily used in British English, and closely equivalent terms exist in other languages, such as "centre-ville" in French, Stadtzentrum in German, or shìzhōngxīn (市中心) in Chinese. In the United States, the term "downtown" is generally used, though a few cities, like Philadelphia, use the term "Center City" or "City Center".
Barrio is a Spanish word that means "quarter" or "neighborhood". In the modern Spanish language, it is generally defined as each area of a city, usually delimited by functional, social, architectural or morphological features. In Spain, several Latin American countries and the Philippines, the term may also be used to officially denote a division of a municipality. Barrio is an arabism.
A county-level municipality, county-level city or county city, formerly known as prefecture-controlled city, is a county-level administrative division of the People's Republic of China. County-level cities have judicial but no legislative rights over their own local law and are usually governed by prefecture-level divisions, but a few are governed directly by province-level divisions.
A residential community is a community, usually a small town or city, that is composed mostly of residents, as opposed to commercial businesses and/or industrial facilities, all three of which are considered to be the three main types of occupants of the typical community.
Neighborhood planning is a form of urban planning through which professional urban planners and communities seek to shape new and existing neighborhoods. It can denote the process of creating a physical neighborhood plan, for example via participatory planning, or an ongoing process through which neighborhood affairs are decided.
In urban planning, infill, or in-fill, is the rededication of land in an urban environment, usually open-space, to new construction. Infill also applies, within an urban polity, to construction on any undeveloped land that is not on the urban margin. The slightly broader term "land recycling" is sometimes used instead. Infill has been promoted as an economical use of existing infrastructure and a remedy for urban sprawl. Its detractors view it as overloading urban services, including increased traffic congestion and pollution, and decreasing urban green-space. Many also detract it for social and historical reasons, partly due to its unproven effects and its similarity with gentrification.
Mixed use is a type of urban development, urban design, urban planning and/or a zoning classification that blends multiple uses, such as residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, or entertainment, into one space, where those functions are to some degree physically and functionally integrated, and that provides pedestrian connections. Mixed-use development may be applied to a single building, a block or neighborhood, or in zoning policy across an entire city or other administrative unit. These projects may be completed by a private developer, (quasi-) governmental agency, or a combination thereof. A mixed-use development may be a new construction, reuse of an existing building or brownfield site, or a combination.
Microdistrict, or microraion, is a residential complex—a primary structural element of the residential area construction in the Soviet Union and in some post-Soviet and former Socialist states. Residential districts in most of the cities and towns in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union were built in accordance with this concept.
Neighborhood character refers to the 'look and feel of an area', in particular a residential area. It also includes the activities that occur there. In everyday usage, it can often be synonymous with local character, residential character, urban character and place identity, but those terms can have more specific meanings in connection with urban planning and conservation.
There is considerable confusion in both Chinese and foreign sources over definitions of urban places and hence considerable variation in estimates of China's urban population.
Generally the concept of the neighborhood unit, crystallised from the prevailing social and intellectual attitudes of the early 1900s by Clarence Perry, is an early diagrammatic planning model for residential development in metropolitan areas. It was designed by Perry to act as a framework for urban planners attempting to design functional, self-contained and desirable neighbourhoods in the early 20th century in industrialising cities. It continues to be utilised, as a means of ordering and organising new residential communities in a way which satisfies contemporary "social, administrative and service requirements for satisfactory urban existence".
A dong (Korean: 동) or neighborhood is a submunicipal level administrative unit of a city and of those cities which are not divided into wards throughout Korea. The unit is often translated as neighborhood and has been used in both administrative divisions of North Korea and South Korea.
Housing discrimination in the United States refers to the historical and current barriers, policies, and biases that prevent equitable access to housing. Housing discrimination became more pronounced after the abolition of slavery in 1865, typically as part of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. The federal government didn't begin to take action against these laws until 1917, when the Supreme Court struck down ordinances prohibiting blacks from occupying or owning buildings in majority-white neighborhoods in Buchanan v. Warley. However, the federal government as well as local governments continued to be directly responsible for housing discrimination through redlining and race-restricted covenants until the Civil Rights Act of 1968.