Neighbourhoods: Do They Still Matter?

About this issue

Issue number

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.

Tali Hatuka

19 Mar 2024

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Contents:

• Neighbourhoods: Do They Still Matter? On Our Agency and (Possible) Future Paths
  TALI HATUKA
• Normative Neighbourhoods
  EMILY TALEN
• Neighbourhoods still Matter because Housing Market Actors Believe They Matter
  GEORGE C. GALSTER
• The Agency of Socially Mixed Neighbourhoods: Insights from the Historic Centre of Naples
  CRISTINA MATTIUCCI
• Rethinking Enclosed Neighbourhoods: Vital Infrastructure for Design Innovation, Civic Engagement, and Biopower in Urban China
  COLLEEN CHIU-SHEE
• Neighbourhoods and Social Cohesion: Why Neighbourhoods Still Matter
  SEBASTIAN KURTENBACH
• The Concept of the ‘Neighbourhood’ in Crime and Place Theory and Its Influence on Police Strategy
  HADAS ZUR
• The Medium is the Messenger: A Quantitative Study on the Relation between Social Media Services and Neighbourhood Social Interactions
  JAN ÜBLACKER, SIMON LIEBIG, and HAWZHEEN HAMAD
• How Learning from Informal Settlements contributes to the Community Resilience of Neighbourhoods
  JOTA SAMPER
• Can Neighbourhoods Save the Smart City?
  ALESSANDRO AURIGI
• The Neighbourhood–Health Nexus: Design, Behaviour and Futures
  AMITAI BLOOM, GAL ELHANAN and TALI HATUKA
• A Neighbourhood Unit for Equitable Resilience
  ZACHARY LAMB and LAWRENCE J. VALE
• Publication Review

Neighbourhoods: Do They Still Matter?

In its simplest sense, a neighbourhood refers to people living near a particular place or within a specific range, sharing infrastructure and amenities. This does not imply that neighbourhoods are synonymous with communities, 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.

These aims may seem anachronistic to some scholars. Focusing on the scale of the neighbourhood is not evident in the globalized digital age, which is often characterized by enhanced urban densification and growth. In the contemporary era, regions, cities, and neighbourhoods are often viewed as networks of economic, social, and political power (Hall, 2009; Healey, 2006; Turok, 2009). This approach, enhanced by the digital revolution and the ongoing processes of globalization, challenged the traditional hierarchy of spatial categories. Scholars argue that ‘research needs to break away from the “tyranny” of neighbourhood and consider alternative ways to measure the wider socio-spatial context of people, placing individuals at the centre of the approach’ (Petrović et al., 2020, p. 1103). Advocates of his perspective often adopt a relational approach that perceives places from a ‘non-Euclidean perspective where place boundaries are fluid, and distances are relative’ (Vallée et al., 2020, p. 1). Furthermore, the neighbourhood scale from this point of view may be a trap in analytic research and might lead to ‘inaccurate estimations of the number and types of resources people may have access to in their neighbourhood, and of the magnitude of the social gradient in resource accessibility, what has been called the “constant size neighbourhood trap”’ (Vallée et al., 2015; Vallée et al., 2020, p. 2). As a solution, what many contemporary studies suggest is to ‘have the cake and eat it’: that is to expand the conceptual and theoretical approaches that address neighbourhood, by recognizing a paradoxical pattern in which the formation of regional networks reinforces the dispersion of urban-regional activities while also fostering their concentration in specific locales (Albrechts and Mandelbaum, 2007). This dual approach, that suggests addressing neighbourhood locality but viewing it as part of the wider network, raises theoretical challenges and is part of a heated ongoing debate in urban studies since the 1990s.

However, during the last decade, with the arrival of new digital platforms in our daily lives, new questions have been raised. Scholars start assessing the way digital platforms alter and/or support social cohesion, health, resilience, and infrastructure. Paradoxically, although digitization was expected to affect distance and thus diminish the role of geography and neighbourhoods, the latter are viewed as having an increasing role in our life. This perception and academic interest were enhanced during COVID-19 during which the role of the locale in supporting people was clearly evident. Numerous studies have shown that neighbourhoods affect individuals’ subjective wellbeing, and neighbours are an important source of everyday help and support, even more so in times of crisis (Zangger, 2023). Other studies showed ‘how characteristics of social and built environments affect relationships between disaster experiences and perceptions of risk, mental health symptoms, and food or financial insecurities’ (Finucane et al., 2022, p. 10). Neighbourhoods, again, became a category that raised intellectual interest.

But what do we know about the daily life of contemporary neighbourhoods? The growing role of digitization processes in our lives, and their role in expanding the geographical boundaries of our daily activities, has dramatically changed our daily conduct. We shop, socially engage, and manage using digital platforms; at the same time, we also constantly engage in marking the boundaries between the members we view as our daily community and the rest. Each of us lives in this local–global environment; the local, perceived as concrete and bounded, and the global, conceived as abstract and boundless. Most of us enjoy this duality of bounded locality and boundless globalism without thinking about this contradiction much. We live it!

My argument in this issue is that within this duality localism precedes globalism, in times of peace and even more so in times of crisis. The local–global implies that the concrete is close and comprehensible. It is immediate. This results, in the past and continuing today, in multiple efforts and resources to protect the neighbourhood as a significant locale in a boundless global world. Multiple and varied actors are constantly engaging in defining the neighbourhood and using their definitions to design new frameworks of action from below and from above. With the top-down actors, we can name policymakers, urban planners, or even the police. Their motivation for supporting the existence of the neighbourhood unit is the ability to manage its growth and maintain order in the city. With the bottom-up actors, we can find the residents, community leaders, activists, and real-estate developers. Their motivation varies and includes social and cultural ideas or economic incentives.

Do Neighbourhoods Still Matter?

The direct response to the question posed in this issue, Neighbourhoods: do they still matter? is yes. It matters to many who maintain it as a meaningful construct to which they refer in multiple ways. But like many constructs, it is dynamic. So, even if we agree it is still relevant, we can ask what does the neighbourhood mean for us today? Where are we heading? What are the neighbourhoods of tomorrow? These are normative questions rather than analytical ones, and this collection is trying to address this from multiple and varied perspectives.

The issue opens with the paper ‘Normative Neighbourhoods’ by Emily Talen who offers a normative definition of what a neighbourhood should be. For Talen, a neighbourhood has identity, ‘a place that functions as its centre, everyday facilities and services, internal and external connectivity, social diversity within it or an openness to its enabling, and a means by which residents can be involved in its affairs and speak with a collective voice’ (Talen, 2024). Talen explains why we should pursue the normative approach to neighbourhoods and suggests that place, instead of the sociological categories of class or race, offers opportunities for forming alternative collective identities. Talen calls for not sentimentalizing neighbourhood life but instead ‘working towards a more explicit sense of what and where neighbourhoods are’. Viewing the neighbourhood as a normative construct reminds us that neighbourhoods depend on us, the people that act within the neighbourhoods and upon our agency, and thus neighbourhoods are elastic in time and space.

The rest of the papers are organized in two groups. The first group address the varied actors who influence the neighbourhood’s character and social dynamics, tracking why and how they act within neighbourhoods. In the second, we focus on neighbourhoods’ futures and on the big question: Where are we heading? We are offered some paths – sustainability, community, health, and resilience – to address the wellbeing of residents. Yet, there is much to be done to integrate these ideas into a meaningful framework that would support designers and urban planners in their interventions in existing and new neighbourhoods.

Agency and Its Role Shaping Neighbourhoods

Early twenty-first century residents are not passive actors who automatically follow top-down abstract frameworks that dictate their life paths. Without idealizing the role or power of the resident, it is clear that through our actions we shape our daily life and thus, our neighbourhoods. It is in the scale of the neighbourhood, that people can use ‘tactics for their own ends, without any illusions as to their ultimate practical effects. Where dominating powers exploit the order of things, where ideological dis course represses or ignores it, tactics fool this order and make it the field of their art’ (De Certeau et al., 1980, p. 4). Yet, as Michel De Certeau (1984) explained in his influential book The Practice of Everyday Life institutional actors and people are not necessarily in opposition to one another but form a complex entangled set of actions and strategies.

The paper ‘Neighbourhoods still Matter Because Housing Market Actors believe that They Matter’ by George C. Galster addresses the question of agency from various positions. Galster (2024) is doing two things in his paper. First, he reminds us that the urban neighbourhood is part of a larger economic market and with different market actors – households, owners, developers, and agents, brokers – taking decisions and influencing one another and neighbourhoods. Second, he argues that all these actors believe that the local area in which they live, own property, or try to sell property influences our wellbeing for a number of social, psychological and/or economic reasons. Galster suggests that these beliefs influence our behaviour. Thus, he reaches the conclusion that ‘neighbourhood is important because the household and property owner/ developer decisionmakers who drive these outcomes in market-dominated economies and the agents that serve and inform them believe and act as if it were important’. So, as long as these beliefs guide us (and he does not recognize a paradigm shift in the horizon), neighbourhoods will still be an important aggregate in the metropolitan city.

A more socio-spatial approach to the active role of different actors in shaping the neighbourhood is presented in the papers by Cristina Mattiucci ‘The Agency of Socially- Mixed Neighbourhoods. Insights from the Historic Centre of Naples’ and by Colleen Chiu-Shee, ‘Rethinking Enclosed Neighbourhoods: Vital Infrastructure for Design Innovation, Civic Engagement, and Biopower in Urban China’. These two related papers, from different cultural and political contexts, engage with the role of policy in shaping neighbourhoods. They both teach us about the agency and the extent to which the will of residents and the will of social and political powers are entangled and are always context specific. Copy and paste policies are impossible as the meaning and practices in neighbourhoods differ significantly.

Mattiucci’s paper focuses on the city of Naples and explains how the concept of neighbourhood is continuously ‘negotiated and redefined through everyday practices of urban interactions’ (Mattiucci, 2024). She explains how social diversity shapes the housing situations and economic activities that take place in the central neighbourhoods in the city. In her paper she tells us about the policy initiative of the city council to build a socially inclusive block of flats to keep the heterogeneity of residents in the city centre. She illuminates the coexistence of various inhabitants, social networks and spatial relationships and the way together they represent a unique concept of neighbourhood. This policy, that might fail in other places, ‘plays a crucial role in breaking down communication and resource barriers in urban spaces, and in reducing the inequalities between social groups, that are otherwise isolated in homogeneous areas of the city’.

In China, ‘Capitalist processes of urbanization and privatization have produced a growing number of enclosed neighbourhoods across the world. Critical scholarship often frames these neighbourhoods as products of an overextended neoliberalism and symbols of the fragmentation, segregation, and hierarchization of both space and society’ (Chiu-Shee, 2024). Yet, as Chiu-Shee explains, culture plays a role in the formation of these neighbourhoods’ realities, as she writes ‘enclosed neighbourhoods have been, and will remain, the everyday environments that shape citizens’ behaviours, values, and social relations. They have also served, and will continue to serve, as the vital infrastructure that enables both civic engagement overextended neoliberalism and symbols of the fragmentation, segregation, and hierarchization of both space and society’ (Chiu-Shee, 2024). Yet, as Chiu-Shee explains, culture plays a role in the formation of these neighbourhoods’ realities, as she writes ‘enclosed neighbourhoods have been, and will remain, the everyday environments that shape citizens’ behaviours, values, and social relations. They have also served, and will continue to serve, as the vital infrastructure that enables both civic engagement and biopolitical control – an irony that remains to be resolved’. Here again, the idea of enclosed neighbourhoods, that is often discussed in a pejorative way, in China plays vital roles in (re)shaping everyday environments, driving economic restructuring, transforming governance systems, and facilitating normative transformations in China.

Either way, one of the issues raised in these two papers is the extent to which policies influence neighbours’ dynamic and relations. This is the theme of the paper ‘Neighbourhoods and Social Cohesion: Why Neighbourhoods Still Matter’, by Sebastian Kurtenbach. He analyses the connection between neighbourly relations and social cohesion and the way this affects participation and the involvement of the residents in the locale. Based on a qualitative study in two urban districts in Germany, both characterized by high levels of social segregation and cultural diversity but differ in terms of local social service organizations and urban development, he shows that ‘there is a close connection between residents’ perceptions of social cohesion and inclination for social participation in the neighbourhood. Local social service organizations and associations can play a critical role in facilitating the social encounters that create such perceptions’ (Kurtenbach, 2024). The results support the idea that policy matters, and in contemporary times local neighbourhood initiatives and the development of meeting and community places, can contribute significantly to neighbourhoods’ relations and their active involvement in the process of shaping the neighbourhood.

It is not only policymakers, residents, and market-actors who are active in the neighbourhoods but also the powers of force. In any city, there are neighbourhoods where these powers are more active and visible than in others. In her paper ‘The Concept of the “Neighbourhood” in Crime and Place Theory and Its Influence on Police Strategy’, Hadas Zur reviews the way theories of crime and place conceptualized the idea of the neighbourhood over the last decades. Using the case of a neighbourhood in Tel Aviv she shows how the diversity of approaches increases the range and areas of police intervention in the neighbourhood and empowers their control and effect on place. This process ‘indicates the dominance of physical and micro-geographical approaches over sociological approaches’ (Zur, 2024). Yet she argues that although the neighbourhood still matters and plays a ‘significant reference point in police work’ it has many shortcomings, and she offers some paths for rethinking the dynamic of crime in neighbourhoods.

This set of papers on the actors in the neighbourhoods ends with the paper ‘The Medium is the Messenger: A Quantitative Study on the Relation between Social Media Services and Neighbourhood Social Interactions’ by Jan Üblacker, Simon Liebig, and Hawzheen Hamad. The paper brings back the tension raised in this editorial between the boundless digital world and local concrete daily life in the neighbourhood. More specifically, the paper engages with the role of internet-based social networking services (ISNS) (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X) in neighbourhoods. It starts by presenting the debate between scholars who ‘argue that ISNS diminish the significance of local physical place and hinder meaningful interactions, especially among neighbours’, to the scholars that view ‘ISNS as tools that foster new forms of connectedness and enhance relationships within neighbourhoods by creating opportunities to engage with existing peers’ (Üblacker et al., 2024). In a study conducted in two German cities (Essen and Cologne) they show that this debate is not black or white. ‘Messenger services and neighbourhood-specific social networks have a positive impact on social interactions within the neighbourhood. However, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter do not significantly affect social interactions within the neighbourhood’ (ibid.). In short, they show that neighbourhoods continue to play a crucial role in our social fabric, with messenger services enhancing the convenience of maintaining these local connections. Yet, ‘the prerequisites for engaging in the contemporary landscape of neighbourhood interaction’ are not equal and should be viewed in the context of digital divides and difference.

(Possible) Future Neighbourhood Paths

This set of papers links global questions and challenges with the neighbourhood scale. Sustainability, health, digitization, and equitable resilience are all big themes that have been addressed on multiple scales. These papers argue that we might gain a lot by addressing them at the local scale. If successful, we might be able also to create some paths to the scale of the city, or the region. What the following papers are trying to do is to use existing studies and findings in order to develop conceptual frameworks to deal with big themes at the neighbourhood level.

In his paper addressing the question of sustainability and power of the community, ‘How Learning from Informal Settlements Contributes to the Community Resilience of Neighbourhoods’ Jota Samper suggests that in times of an uncertain future plagued by the challenges imposed by climate change, political polarization, and urban conflict, we might want to learn from the informal settlements. He offers ‘three important lessons that can be gleaned from informal settlements: incrementality, sustainability, and self-reliance. These characteristics contribute to the resilience of the communities, making informal settlements the predominant neighbourhoods of the twenty-first century’ (Samper, 2024). Samper does not romanticize informal dwellers’ challenges, but points to the way they establish and build their community resilience. ‘These places serve as the bedrock of community existence and are a wellspring of innovation in the face of scarcity.’ With the presence of informal settlements worldwide, Samper suggests that excluding marginalized groups from participation in decision-making would mean that the only space for meaningful citizen action would be outside legal frameworks and institutions.

Sustainability is also a goal that many technological companies put as a primary aim. The use of the term ‘smart cities’ became common in the first decade of the twenty-first century, especially against the backdrop of digitization in contemporary daily life. However, there is no consensus on the meaning of the term, despite its importance and its contribution to urban development. If we do not know much about smartness and cities, we know even less about digitization processes in the neighbourhoods. In the paper, ‘Can Neighbourhoods Save the Smart City?’ Alessandro Aurigi suggests that we need to shift our focus from the smart city to the local scale. His paper makes a case for the ‘smart neighbourhood not as a plain, pre-determined, functional sub-unit of a centrally controlled and automated smart metropolis, but as a radically divergent – yet necessarily complementary – dimension of it (Aurigi, 2024). Aurigi emphasizes ‘the importance of recombining space, community and technology at the local scale, and discusses how the point is not opposing the smart neighbourhood to the smart city through a simplistic bottom-up vs top-down dualist vision, but rather reflecting on how these dimensions should work together’. For Aurigi design and development strategies should enable local innovation and experimentation, envisioning a grounded, sustainable, and effective smart city.

Digitization also affects contemporary health services: 1. the decentralization of health services from hospitals to the community, which includes outpatient clinics, day hospitals, emergency medicine, information and communication technologies (ICTs); 2. the digitization of health and new health monitoring tools increase interest in the neighbourhood scale. In the paper ‘The Neighbourhood–Health Nexus: Design, Behaviour and Futures’, Tali Hatuka, Gal Elhanan and Amitai Bloom, argue that while the medical arguments for policies that support health are maturing, the socio-spatial strategies in urban planning for supporting health in neighbourhoods remain embryonic. What neighbourhood design supports health? What is the reciprocal influence of health-related behaviour and urban design? Responding to these questions they address two bodies of related literature: studies that focus on neighbourhood design and its influence on health, and studies that focus on residents’ health-related behaviour. The links between these two bodies serve as a basis to develop a set of guidelines for future and existing neighbourhoods (Hatukaet al., 2024).

The issue ends with the paper ‘A Neighbourhood Unit for Equitable Resilience’ by Zachary Lamb and Lawrence J. Vale who ask ‘how this influential and controversial concept [of the neighbourhood] might be adapted to address today’s most vexing urban challenges: climate change hazards and widening inequality’ (Lamb and Vale, 2024). Drawing on a diverse array of global case studies, they argue ‘that the neighbourhood can be a unit for “equitable resilience”, but only if we reconceptualize neighbourhoods in significant ways’. It needs to be more socially and culturally inclusive, to be better linked to analysis and action on wider spatial and political scales, and it must link built environment changes to institutional changes that improve conditions in the domains of livelihoods, environmental safety, governance, and security from displacement. They call on us to see the ‘neighbourhood unit for equitable resilience as a meso-scale socio-spatial unit through which disadvantaged people are empowered to link separate interventions in the built environment together and tie local institutional changes to broader scale initiatives to achieve lasting improvements in their livelihoods, environmental, governance, and security conditions’.

These four papers, although focusing on different themes sustainability, digitization, health and equitable resilience are linked. The future of neighbourhoods will be affected by the way scholars will be able to integrate them into a holistic framework, while remembering the role, will and power of residents in activating it, as illustrated by the first set of papers. To be sure, the neighbourhood scale is complex, but at the same time manageable and complete. It can help us to understand and tackle global questions, while also seeing the people. As Aurigi argues, ‘When operating in and through neighbourhoods it becomes somehow impossible to divorce from the immediate social and physical contexts’ (Aurigi, 2024). Cities and neighbourhoods are not data collection units or units of analysis within wider models – they are living places. It is time for developing an updated design and policy framework that would guide us in supporting the present and future normative neighbourhoods.

REFERENCES

• Albrechts, L. and Mandelbaum, S. (2007) The Network Society: A New Context for Planning. London: Routledge.
• Aurigi, A. (2024) Can neighbourhoods save the smart city? Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 152–167.
• Chiu-Shee, C. (2024) Rethinking enclosed neighbourhoods: vital infrastructure for design innovation, civic engagement, and biopower in urban China. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 54–72.
• De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley. CA: University of California Press.
• De Certeau, M., Jameson, F. and Lovitt, C. (1980) On the oppositional practices of everyday life. Social Text, No. 3 (Autumn), pp. 3–43. https:// doi.org/10.2307/466341.
• Finucane, M.L., Beckman, R., Ghosh-Dastidar, M., Dubowitz, T., Collins, R.L. and Troxel, W. (2022) Do social isolation and neighborhood walkability influence relationships between COVID-19 experiences and wellbeing in predominantly Black urban areas? Landscape and Urban Planning, 217, 104264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.land urbplan.2021.104264.
• Galster, G.C. (2024) Neighbourhoods and social cohesion: why neighbourhoods still matter. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 25–41.
• Hall, P. (2009) Looking backward, looking forward: the city region of the mid-21st century. Regional Studies, 43(6), pp. 803–817. https://doi. org/10.1080/00343400903039673.
• Hatuka, T., Elhanan, G. and Bloom, A. (2024) The neighbourhood–health nexus: design, behaviour and futures. 50(1), pp. 168–184.
• Healey, P. (2006) Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203 099414.
• Kurtenbach, S. (2024) Neighbourhoods and social cohesion: why neighbourhoods still matter. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 73–94.
• Lamb Z. and Vale, L.J. (2024) A neighbourhood unit for equitable resilience. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 185–210.
• Mattiucci, C. (2024) The agency of socially mixed neighbourhoods: insights from the historic centre of Naples. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 42–53.
• Petrović, A., Manley, D. and Van Ham, M. (2020) Freedom from the tyranny of neighbourhood: rethinking sociospatial context effects. Progress in Human Geography, 44(6), pp. 1103–1123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519868767.
• Samper, J. (2024) How learning from informal settlements contributes to the community resilience of neighbourhoods. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 133–151.
• Talen, E. (2024) Normative neighbourhoods. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 13–24.
• Turok, I. (2009) Limits to the mega-city region: conflicting local and regional needs. Regional Studies, 43(6), pp. 845–862. https://doi.org/10.10 80/00343400903095261.
• Üblacker, J., Liebig, S. and Hamad, H. (2024) The medium is the messenger: a quantitative study on the relation between social media services and neighbourhood social interactions. Built Environment, 50(1), pp. 114–132.
• Vallée, J., Le Roux, G., Chaix, B., Kestens, Y. and Chauvin, P. (2015) The ‘constant size neighbourhood trap’ in accessibility and health studies. Urban Studies, 52(2), pp. 338–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014528393
• Vallée, J., Shareck, M., Le Roux, G., Kestens, Y. and Frohlich, K.L. (2020) Is accessibility in the eye of the beholder? Social inequalities in spatial accessibility to health-related resources in Montréal, Canada. Social Science & Medicine, 245, 112702. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socsci med.2019.112702.
• Zangger, C. (2023) Localized social capital in action: how neighborhood relations buffered the negative impact of COVID-19 on subjective well being and trust. SSM – Population Health, 21, 101307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2022.101307.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Although I am listed as a guest editor of the issue, editing is teamwork. Behind the scenes enjoyed the generous support of Professor Lawrence Vale, and Professor David Banister who helped me reach out to the important and diverse voices presented in this issue. I also gained a lot of support from Ann Rudkin and wish to thank her for the meticulous editing of the papers in this issue. Finally, I thank the writers for their contributions to this interesting collection of papers, which travels around the world, helped me to look differently at the unit of the neighbourhood in the city, at the role of planning and policy; it is but another step in the search for the meaning and function of neighbourhoods in our lives.

Meet the Editors

Paul J. Maginn is Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Masters of Public Policy programme at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of the UWA Public Policy Institute. He is co-editor of several books including: Suburbia in the 21st Century: From Dreamscape to Nightmare? (2022) and Disruptive Urbanism: Implications of the Sharing Economy for Cities, Regions and Urban Policy (2020). You can find him on Twitter: @planographer.

Nicholas A. Phelps is Professor and Chair of Urban Planning and Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. He previously taught in planning and geography schools at University College London, Southampton, Leeds, and Cardiff. His research interests cover the planning and politics of (post)suburbanization.

Suburbs: The 3Bs: Bland, Blend and Brutal Scapes

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

The contributors to this issue provide a rich and diverse interpretation of the concept of suburban bland, blend and brutalscapes within different national and metropolitan contexts. Together they reveal several common threads: the identity of suburbs as lying somewhere between ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural’; the role of incrementalism in suburban development; the differential value placed on suburban land and property; and the social, cultural, and political-ecological importance of suburbs.

Paul J. Maginn

04 Apr 2023

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Contents

• Making Sense of Twenty-First Century (Sub)Urban Landscapes: Blandscapes, Blendscapes, Brutalscapes and Brutopianscapes
  PAUL J. MAGINN and NICHOLAS A. PHELPS
• The Blended Landscapes of Outer London
  LUCY NATARAJAN, DIMITRIOS PANAYOTOPOULOS-TSIROS and JONATHAN MANNS
• Accessory Dwelling Units and Incremental Urbanism: Becoming ‘Urban’ or just ‘Intensive Suburban’?
  LAURENCE TROY and RYAN VAN DEN NOUWELANT
  From Edge City to City Edge
• PHILIP LAWTON and CARLA MARIA KAYANAN
  Emerging Post-Suburban Blendscapes in Metropolitan Milan and Amsterdam: Comparing Pioltello and Almere
• LORENZO DE VIDOVICH and YANNIS TZANINIS
  Institutional Blendscapes: The Suburban Governance Role of the Diputación de Barcelona
  SOFIA PAGLIARIN
• Regeneration and ‘Placemaking’ without Governance in a Greyfield Context: The Transformation of Salisbury, Queensland, Australia
  SÉBASTIEN DARCHEN
• Melbourne’s Suburban Landscapes Administering Population and Employment Growth
  NICHOLAS A. PHELPS, MICHAEL BUXTON and DAVID NICHOLS
• Publication review

Cover images: front: The Caspian Quarter, Barking Reach, East London (photo: CC sludgegulper): back: Stelingen, a suburban district of Garbsen near Hannover (photo: CC Daniel Schwen)

Meet the Editors

Karina Landman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Town & Regional Planning at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her work focuses on spatial transformation, including research on gated communities and safer and sustainable neighbourhoods, regenerative and resilient cities and public space.

Christine Mady is Associate Professor at the Notre Dame University-Louaize. Lebanon. She is a member of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) International Development Peer Review College. Her research focuses on the role of public spaces in unstable contexts.

Meet the Editors

Conrad Kickert is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo. Conrad has a background in urbanism and architecture from The Netherlands and holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Michigan. He has worked as an urban researcher and designer in Europe and North America. His research focuses on the evolving relationship between urban form, urban life, and the urban economy.

Emily Talen is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Chicago, where she teaches urban design and directs the Urbanism Lab. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Talen has written extensively on the topics of urban design, New Urbanism, and social equity. Her books include New Urbanism and American Planning; Design for Diversity; Urban Design Reclaimed; City Rules and Neighborhood. She is co-editor of the Journal of Urbanism.

Meet the editors

Nils Fearnley is Chief Researcher for the research group Market and Governance at the Institute of Transport Economics, Norway. His research focuses on passenger transport and, increasingly, on new, smart, and shared forms of mobility. He is currently project manager for the Norwegian Research Council projects MikroReg (https://www.toi.no/project-mikroreg), and Regsmart (https://www.toi.no/project-regsmart).

Editorial: Micromobility and Urban Space

Micromobility is gaining momentum in cities around the world. The benefits of increased, flexible, affordable, fun, space-efficient, and emission-free mobility and access are immediately apparent. Numbers of privately-owned as well as shared electric scooters (e-scooters) have grown from almost zero in 2017 to completely dominate urban scenes across the developed world a few years later. In parallel, concerns with, inter alia, accident risk, littering and cluttering, undesirable use of public space, and conflicts with other modes of transport and other uses of public space have grown at the same pace (Fearnley, 2020; Stratford, 2002). Indeed, debates on the use of public space, for what and by whom are accentuated with the advent and surge of micromobility.

Micromobility takes many forms (ITF, 2020a). This special issue on micromobility and urban space accepts a broad definition, which includes shared and privately-owned, docked and dockless, as well as motorized (electric) and non-motorized mobility devices intended for single-person transport. With the current state of play, this includes (but is not limited to) kick-bikes, kick-scooters, e-scooters, bicycles, e-bikes, skateboards, hoverboards, segways, electric wheelchairs/rollators, and electric unicycles.

Shared as well as privately-owned micromobility offers promise to help solve a range of policy goals – including flexible, affordable, inclusive, and accessible mobility; local and greenhouse gas emission reductions; congestion relief including on-board crowding relief for public transport; complementation of public transport services to increase their catchment area; health benefits; cost efficiency; and space efficiency (Ydersbond et al., 2020; Voi, 2021; Reardon, 2020; Ziedan et al., 2021; Luo et al., 2021; Fyhri et al., 2017; Yan et al., 2021; ITF, 2020b). As this special issue substantiates, and in line with some of the references cited, the achievement of such potential advantages cannot be taken for granted. Market forces will not, by themselves, necessarily work in positive directions. Various forms of regulation of shared micromobility are essential (Fearnley, 2020).

Micromobility vehicles have traditionally been in private ownership. Recent innovations, including GPS technology, smartphone apps, 4G and 5G telecommunication, mobile payment solutions, and improvements in battery technology, have brought the sharing economy into the micromobility domain. No authoritative sources have attempted to quantify the relative sizes of shared versus privately-owned micromobility. However, a clear pattern can be found in most countries: apart from e-scooters, private ownership of micromobility devices still dominates. A probable exception are cities with low bicycle use that have become victims of the shared dockless bike tsunami since the mid-2010s, of which the Chinese experience is vividly illustrated by Taylor (2018). 

When it comes to the impact of micromobility on the use of urban space and on transportation systems, the distinction between privately-owned vehicles and shared ones is not limited to differences in their contribution to parking and cluttering: Karlsen and Fyhri (2021) document other ways in which they differ. Privately-owned e-scooters replace car trips to a larger extent than shared ones – although both predominantly replace walking. They are also used for longer trips than their shared counterpart. Shared e-scooters, on the other hand, are used in first/last mile combinations with public transport to a larger degree than privately-owned e-scooters (see also Fearnley et al., 2020a). Also, shared micromobility still tends to attract the typical early adopter: young, educated, male, and high income.

The market for shared micromobility is characterized by a few factors which contribute to some of the main challenges associated with shared free-floating micromobility. On the demand side, there are economies of scale, similar to network effects in public transport (Mohring, 1972), and economies of density as demonstrated by Arnott (1996) for the taxi market. The more vehicles a shared micromobility operator supplies in an area, the more attractive (available and accessible) are their products to consumers. For this reason, unregulated markets easily become a scene where operators, often armed with considerable venture capital, battle for market shares and future earnings potential, resulting in their vehicles flooding cities. We have seen this unfold in cities including Paris, Oslo, and Stockholm in the case of shared e-scooters, and in several Chinese cities for shared dockless bikes. On the supply side, the cost profile of shared micromobility is unusual in the realm of transportation. Relatively speaking, investment costs are moderate to low, and entry and exit costs appear low. Fluctuo (https://fluctuo.com/), a European shared micromobility monitoring service, offers weekly updates of launches and exits across Europe. Their reports are indicative of an industry with extremely mobile fleets which can be located and relocated globally to wherever they generate the most revenue. Inevitably, this exacerbates the unregulated market’s tendency to flood cities – sometimes overnight.

The sheer number of vehicles in poorly regulated markets has posed a major challenge for cities and their land-use authorities. Although increased micromobility – notably cycling – is usually an urban transport policy goal (see, for example, Hagen and Rynning, 2021; Pucher et al., 2021), it turns out that many cities are not prepared for the large influx of bikes and e-scooters that we have witnessed in recent years. The provision of parking facilities and bike lanes – also appropriate for e-scooters – has, in most cases, proved inadequate. As a result, we see a tendency for increased conflicts between pedestrians, cyclists, e-scooter users, and other users of increasingly scarce urban space. E-scooter users may, for example, take to the sidewalks for reasons of traffic safety and accessibility. In this way, shared micromobility has contributed to putting the need for more, and better protected, cycling infrastructure on the political agenda.

Shared micromobility schemes can be docked (station-based), or dockless (free-floating), or a combination of these. Whether a system is docked or dockless has profoundly different impacts on cities, the use of public space, and the need for local government intervention. Regular docked citybike schemes are easily managed by local authorities. Trips must start and end at designated racks whose location is defined by local authorities. The schemes’ opening hours and other codes of behaviour, including pricing policy, are largely determined by a local government. Dockless schemes, on the other hand, are quite the opposite. Trips can start wherever a vehicle can be found and end wherever users desire, as long as it is within the operator’s geographical operating area. Thus, dockless systems meet the needs and preferences of their users to a much greater extent than those that are station-based as US statistics confirm. While the growth in station-based bike schemes tends to flatten out, free-floating systems of shared micromobility appear to increase exponentially (NACTO, 2020). Also, in Norway, more than one in three e-scooter users state that they use the traditional, docked citybike scheme less due to the availability of shared dockless e-scooters (Fearnley et al., 2020b). However, there is wide evidence that unregulated dockless micromobility schemes can create some very particular problems regarding use of public space (Fearnley, 2020). Notable examples include cluttering caused by large numbers of parked e-scooters in central places, on pavements and in front of building entrances, and thrown into fountains, rivers, parks, or ditches. While such visual intrusion is in itself problematic, it threatens the safety and accessibility of others – especially those with mobility and sight impairments. On the positive side, dockless schemes tend to serve challenged and low-income communities better than their docked counterparts and thereby improve equity (Meng and Brown, 2021; Yan et al., 2021).

Motorized, or electric motor-assisted micromobility modes tend to attract slightly different demographies from non-motorized micromobility modes. E-bikes have, for example, proved relatively more popular with the elderly and women than traditional bikes (Fyhri et al., 2017; Fyhri and Fearnley, 2015, and they are also chosen for their higher speeds (Flügel et al., 2019). 

In several countries, the legal status of micromobility – including helmet requirement, minimum age, access to pavement riding or, as in the UK, an outright ban – depends on whether the micromobility vehicle is motorized. The organization of shared micromobility schemes is also affected by whether vehicles are motorized. While non-motorized vehicles are typically used for downhill trips and must be rebalanced regularly, shared fleets of motorized and motor-assisted micromobility vehicles require much less balancing.

This Issue

This special issue of Built Environment investigates how new forms of micromobility impact the city, its land-use and transport system, the occupation of space, users and non-users, and the environment. The perspective is international. The contributions cover a full continuum from the early accounts of conflicts and controversies caused by the introduction of new forms of personal mobility devices, to more mature micromobility markets where micromobility, given the right set of policy tools and corporate governance practices, offer solutions to many of the dilemmas associated with urban mobility, social inclusion, public space, and climate change – to name a few. 

We start in Ghana, where traditional bicycles are common, but recent micromobility inventions like the (shared) e-scooter do not yet dominate Ghanaian cities or streets. Regina Amoako-Sakyi et al.’s 2021 study predicts that e-scooters and other micromobility modes will have a rough time expanding into Ghana’s urban streetscape and transport systems. Their study documents low acceptability of – and even aggression towards – micromobility from local drivers, in a country where traffic accidents are already alarmingly high (Global Road Safety Facility, 2021). Add to that the fact that e-scooters’ accident risk is already very high compared with cycling (Fearnley, 2020), the recipe for disaster can only be avoided by means of broad awareness-building, careful regulation, and enforcement.

Lorne Platt (2021) offers a fascinating account of how skateboarders find new uses for, and interactions with, existing urban furniture, spaces, and built environment, often to the annoyance of their fellow residents. Just as cycling and micromobility are considered illegitimate in Ghana by many drivers (Amoako-Sakyi et al., 2021), so skateboarding continues to create conflict over the use of urban space several decades after it first appeared. Platt suggests many ways in which the consideration of skateboarders’ needs and preferences can create more interesting urban spaces for all.

The next contribution takes us to the UK and two case studies of the introduction of docked and dockless bicycle hire, respectively. While presented by shared bicycle companies as solutions to achieve transport policy goals at no cost to the public purse, they created a whole new set of challenges to urban local authorities (Dudley et al., 2021). The rise and fall of these services, initially showing great promise but subsequently unable to deliver either financially or transport-wise, with littering and vandalism as end results in the dockless case, echo the experiences of so many cities worldwide where dockless bikeshare schemes in particular fall between legislative stools and render local authority governance void. When contested, voluntary agreements between bikeshare companies and local authorities are, unfortunately, barely worth the paper they’re written on.

Although they acknowledge concerns and limitations regarding shared and privately-owned micromobility, the next three contributions are forward looking: they point to ways in which micromobility can be part of the solution to urban transport and contribute to urban strategies and goals (Shaheen et al., 2021; Uteng and Uteng, 2021; Sundqvist-Andberg et al., 2021). Susan Shaheen et al.’s paper reviews the history micromobility in the US before taking a forward look at dilemmas and, more prominently, opportunities for the future of shared micromobility, which depend heavily on soundly based regulatory and policy actions. Tanu Uteng and Andre Uteng’s paper combines land-use analysis with the potential accessibility gains of e-bikes. With two Norwegian case studies, they show how e-bikes can increase accessibility to jobs, especially in areas that surround city centres. This effect can be amplified with supporting transport and land-use measures, for example cycle lanes, speed limits, and densification and transformation of such areas. Henna Sundqvist-Andberg et al.’s paper analyses, in combination, the sustainability performance of the urban transport system and the sustainability of Finnish e-scooter service providers’ business models. The emphasis is on the latter, that is the degree to which sustainability is an integral part e-scooter companies’ business model. Although Finnish cities’ legal toolbox is limited, the authors find that e-scooter companies have incorporated several elements of sustainability into their business models, although their perspective rarely encompasses the entire urban transport system. As several contributors to this issue highlight, the importance of (co-)regulation in order to stimulate benefits and innovation, while at the same time attending to other societal goals, is emphasized. Where a city’s legal powers to regulate the market for shared micromobility are weak (or lacking), much can be achieved with active, two-way dialogues between city authorities and shared micromobility providers.

Micromobility offers many potential benefits but also some pitfalls. Outcomes depend crucially on how local and national governments find the means to regulate so as to mitigate problematic side-effects and to facilitate the realization of the benefits. Land use and transport are deeply intertwined policy areas. For urban micromobility, this is even more so. 

The future of micromobility is uncertain. Bicycles, skateboards, and e-scooters are undoubtedly here to stay. But new technologies, vehicles, and business models will inevitably emerge and disrupt urban mobility into the future. It is therefore essential that governments at all levels are proactive, flexible, and facilitative in order to achieve wider goals for transport, society and climate. The role of micromobility in a multimodal transport future must be maintained and promoted.

REFERENCES

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Micromobility and Urban Space

About this issue

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Summary

The contributors to this issue investigate how new forms of micromobility – e-bikes, e-scooters and skateboards – impact the city, its land-use and transport systems, the occupation of space, users and non-users, and the environment. They look at the potential benefits of micromobility and some of the pitfalls, and how local and national governments must find the means to mitigate problematic side-effects while facilitating the realization of the benefits.

Nils Fearnley

10 Jan 2022

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Contents

• Micromobility and Urban Space
  NILS FEARNLEY
• Drivers’ Cycling Experiences and Acceptability of Micromobility Use among Children in Ghana
  REGINA O. AMOAKO-SAKYI, KWABENA K. AGYEMANG, COLLINS A. MENSAH, PRINCE K. ODAME, ABDUL-A. SEIDU, YVONNE A. ADJAKLOE and SAMUEL A. OWUSU
• Bodies, Boards, and Wheels in Urban Public Space: Skateboarding the Ledges, Rails, and Steps of the City
  LORNE PLATT
• Urban Local Authorities and the Delivery of Micromobility Strategies: Obstacles in the Implementation of Bicycle Hire in the UK
  GEOFFREY DUDLEY, DAVID BANISTER, and TIM SCHWANEN
• What’s the ‘Big’ Deal with Shared Micromobility? Evolution, Curb Policy, and Potential Developments in North America
  SUSAN SHAHEEN, ADAM COHEN, and JACQUELYN BROADER
• Accessibility Mapping through Linking Land-Use Development Potentials and Planning for Cycling
  TANU PRIYA UTENG and ANDRE UTENG
• Sustainability and the Contribution of Electric Scooter Sharing Business Models to Urban Mobility
  HENNA SUNDQVIST-ANDBERG, ANU TUOMINEN, HEIDI AUVINEN and PETRI TAPIO