Neighbourhoods: Do They Still Matter?

Summary

For the contributors to this issue ‘neighbourhood’ is a place or area where people live and share infrastructure and amenities; it is not necessarily synonymous with ‘community’.

In its simplest sense, a neighbourhood refers to people living near or within a specific range, sharing infrastructure and amenities. This does not imply that, but rather, communities in the plural may be found in a neighbourhood. This straightforward, yet loose, approach is the lens through which we examine neighbourhoods in this issue. It allows us to do two things. First, to expand the neighbourhood category and include the planned neighbourhoods and unplanned informal settlements, and thus enlarge the places discussed beyond the Western context. Second, it helps us to bypass the conceptual question of what a neighbourhood is to the normative questions: Do neighbourhoods matter? And if so, in what way, and for whom? Also facing the future, what is needed to make them more meaningful to us? In that sense, the issue is engaged more in what the neighbourhood is doing for us, people residing in cities worldwide, rather than addressing it as a unit of analysis or representation of social-spatial processes. It looks at the present but aims to draw possible future paths to our daily places of living.