Thread by @NanaimoCommons

Neighbourhoods, University of Chicago Urbanism Prof Emily Talen.

For those living in the undefined expanse of contemporary urbanism that characterizes most North American cities, can the neighbourhood come to be more than a shaded area on a map?

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"...written in support of those who believe neighbourhoods should be genuinely relevant in our lives... places that provide an essential context for daily life... identifiable, serviced, diverse, connected. Their primary purpose would not be social separation."

Sociologist Clarence Perry 1929 urban neighbourhood design.

"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."

An example of a planned neighbourhood unit is found in Heian Japan—present-day Kyoto capital of Japan for 11 centuries—where emperor Kwammu laid out the city in 75-acre units of 6,000 residents each with a superintendent who enforced local rules. Each had 16 blocks 400 feet sq

Architect and Urban Planner Doug Farr’s 2007 update of Clarence Perry’s 1929 neighbourhood plan.

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) + 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 neighborhoods’ boundedness + centeredness, street composition + internal + external connectivity. An earlier practice by which neighborhoods 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 neighborhood—particularly its centeredness—help build neighborhood identity. In turn, this identity has local power.

The New Urbanists... proclaimed traditional neighborhood 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 neighborhood unit’s time-honored qualities.

The neighborhood endured, this time forming the central piece of an urbanist trilogy: region, neighborhood, 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." #JaneJacobs 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 neighbourhdhoods 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. D+L Ch14

#JaneJacobs 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 neighborhood...“fully organic town planning” could be found in process-oriented theories of modernism… Jacobs’ crack that planned neighborhood was nice if you “were docile + 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 | @fanis_grammenos @planetizen shar.es/aoX3Wh

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. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broo…

"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 plan w/ production of “poverty enclaves" What poor people needed was antithesis of planned inward focused neighbourhood, they needed networks, dispersion, mobility to support integration w/ the broad urban milieu" See @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… 1/3

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... 2/3

This need for local support constitutes a fundamental contrast between the collectivity of traditional societies and the individuality of modern ones." 3/3

Fun fact : Seventy percent of those who stormed the Bastille in Paris were from one specific neighbourhood, Faubourg Saint-Antoine. commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?cu…

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"

Mumford was one of the few who recognized the difference and wrote the act of being a neighbor “to be real need not be deep: a nod, friendly word, recognized face, an uttered name—this is all that is needed to establish + 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.

Thread continues here... Ch9 Neighbourhoods and Segregation.

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