Neighborhoods: Sentimentality or Necessity?

Today I dive into chapter 6.

I agree with Jane, “neighborhood” has picked up a saccharine connotation. It is a sentimental thing. I remember one of my Columbia professors saying (in just the right trendy cynical tone), “Community is dead. Community is a myth.” In my mind, community and neighborhood are nearly interchangeable terms.

One thing really struck me while reading Jane’s insights on what makes neighborhoods succeed or fail: how very similar neighborhoods operate to human male-female relationships. Before you dismiss me as crazy, consider these excerpts: “A successful city neighborhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed by them. An unsuccessful neighborhood is a place that is overwhelmed by its defects and problems and is progressively more helpless before them.” “Cities, like anything else, succeed only by making the most of their assets.” “In bad neighborhoods, schools are brought to ruination, physically and socially; while successful neighborhoods improve their schools by fighting for them.”

Now, of course, that last phrase – by fighting for them – reminds me immediately of T. asking me in all seriousness back when we first started dating, “Have you ever fought for someone?” He surmised that I never had. Perhaps he is right. So, like someone who really loves someone else, a good neighborhood fights for its stability and perseverance. This again speaks to the reality and applicability of our good chemistry concept, entropy, to urban studies.

Let me carry the analogy further. Jane states that a city neighborhood cannot prosper if it is inwardly-turned, aims for a town-like coziness, or wants to be in any way self-contained. No – only a neighborhood with mobility and fluidity of use – only a relationship with the openness and freedom created by trust – can make it in a city.

Jane goes on to make a three-legged typology of useful city neighborhood types, varying in size. She emphasizes that city streets need to be in a network with larger city districts (“hop-and-skip” people accomplish this, for they know unlikely people, and thus act as gluing agents to tie neighborhoods into networks). Also Jane emphasizes that district neighborhoods are a necessity, as they stream resources and empowerment to the small city-street neighborhood. Obviously, for Jane, “neighborhood” can take both abstract and literal forms. I can jive with this kind of thinking! Typologies are a clear way to break down huge concepts, when writing and explaining a social phenomenon (what could be more cumbersome?).