Neighborhood (social science)

Neighborhood (or Neighbourhood) from the vantage point of an individual refers to a group of houses or buildings surrounding that person's own residence, or clustered together into a meaningful or recognizable unit. A neighborhood in this sense is usually thought of as a residential unit larger than a residence and smaller than a city. Neighborhood can also describe the physical area surrounding that residence, as well as the area surrounding particular buildings used as reference points. Thus, "my neighborhood," "my old neighborhood" (usually meaning the area where the speaker lived previously, "the school neighborhood", and "the Cathedral neighborhood". Neighborhoods may be naturally occurring areas, defined by the daily behavior and institutions of neighborhood residents, or areas defined by geographical features (e.g., "the highlands"), location (e.g., "back of the yards"), political wards or precincts, or social and demographic features ("e.g., the Cambodian neighborhood, Chinatown). Some of these features may be visible and contemporary, others may be historical, obscure or lost completely.

Boundaries

Many different neighborhoods have indistinct or blurry boundaries, and the issue of identifying or drawing the boundaries can be important in all cases. A wide variety of considerations may go into "drawing the neighborhood map" and many different groups, organizations and interests may be involved: school districts, police precincts, urban planning or community development districts, census tracts, neighborhood associations and others.

Community

The relations between neighborhood and community can be very complex, with a neighborhood functioning as a single community, two or more communities, or no communities at all.

Urban neighborhoods

Neighborhood in Geography

The main CZ entry on Geography notes four historical traditions in geographical research: spatial analysis, area studies, study of human-land relations, and earth science research. The concept of neighborhood figures in all four of these traditions. Neighborhood-based spatial analysis looks at a variety of issues from spatial distribution of food and other resources, the proximity and distribution of public and private spaces, and a wide variety of other, spatial topics. Area studies in geography often address issues of neighborhood-level concerns in comparative studies of regions, cultural, language areas and other areas. For a long time, geographical studies of human relationships with the land have been addressed at neighborhood levels, particularly in studies of rural and pre-industrial neighborhoods. Earth science is perhaps the one of these four topics least hospitable to the concept of neighborhood; yet even there issues of the proximity of the earth's resources to particular neighborhoods - whether in an Appalachian hollow or the assorted neighborhoods of Manhattan - built as they are on the granite of Manhattan Island.

Rural neighborhoods

Roughly 25% of the U.S. population continues to live in rural areas, only a portion of which are primarily or solely agricultural. A rural neighborhood might include not only a group of farms or winaries, but also one or more coal camps, or hollows, a small town surrounding an industrial plant, or any of a growing variety of recreational communities.