Built Environment at Fifty: Perspectives, Landmarks, and Prospects

Built Environment is celebrating its Golden Anniversary in 2024, and to mark this occasion a special double issue of the journal is being published to reflect on the changes that have taken place. The editors have identified some of the key papers published over the decades which are reprinted here, together with a commentary on whether they have stood the test of time and their relevance today. Making the selection has not been easy – we could have chosen a very different set of papers.

This introduction is in three parts. First, we trace the history of the journal, from its genesis in the 1970s as a journal targeted at local practitioners working in the UK, to its current much wider brief. Today, with international contributions and audience of academics, policy makers, practitioners and consultants, each issue is devoted to a single theme and edited by an expert in that subject. We then discuss our understanding of the term ‘built environment’ and some of the themes that have emerged from that interpretation. To demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of the journal and the move, over time, to an approach embracing social and environmental concerns and those of inclusion and equality, we have reproduced, with commentaries, papers devoted to seven themes which reflect the essence of the journal. Finally, we put on our ‘thinking hats’ to give a perspective on the future. It has been both fun and instructive putting this issue together as it has meant that we have had to delve into the past, think about the changing position of the journal, make difficult choices on the papers selected, and reflect on the contribution of Built Environment to urban planning.

History

As stated on the Wikipedia, Built Environment is a peer-reviewed academic journal focused on urban planning and related fields. It began in 1956 as Official Architecture and Planning and was published under that name until 1972. Between 1975 and 1978 it was known as Built Environment Quarterly and was then edited by David Pearce, conservation activist and one time Secretary of Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Topics discussed in the journal include: ‘architecture, conservation, economic development, environmental planning, health, housing, regeneration, social issues, spatial planning, sustainability, urban design, and transport’.

As might be expected, the birth of the journal was not straightforward. It emerged from Official Architecture and Planning in 1972, when it was rebranded Built Environment and published monthly starting in April of that year with about seventy pages in each issue. The authors of the short papers read like a ‘who’s who’ of urban planning in the UK. This short-lived period ended in March 1975 (Volume 4) with the formation of the Society for the Built Environment, based at the Royal Institute of British Architects, ‘bringing together of the various environmental design professions’.

Built Environment Quarterly was then published by George Godwin Ltd at Catherine Street in London, with three issues in 1975, and a new format based on themes – Housing, Transport and Urban Renewal were the first three selected. Each consisted of about six short (about five pages) papers, followed by a series of topical features and a comments section. The volume numbers were reset at Volume 1 (1975) and this has provided the baseline for the next fifty years.

The publication pattern was set with about half of each quarterly issue devoted to papers on a particular theme, and the editors seemed able to find a way of soliciting short papers from well-known experts. But it appeared this was not a robust business plan, as it was dependent on maintaining a good flow of relevant and interesting (albeit short) papers. This placed a continuous pressure on the editors to deliver and may have contributed to the sale of the journal from the Builder Group to Kogan Page in 1978 and ‘Quarterly’ was removed from the title.

As can be seen from the announcement above, Peter Hall and Tom Hancock took over as Editors. But what the announcement failed to mention was the format changed slightly: the theme became the focus for each issue, and less space was allocated to practice and book reviews. There was also a new link with the Regional Studies Association, with a regular section on regional planning, practice and methodology – a link that ended in 1985. Another development not mentioned in the announcement was that Louis Hellman (https://www.louishellman.co.uk/) agreed to provide a cartoon for each issue ‘illustrating’ the issue’s theme. This he did brilliantly from Volume 4 no. 4 to Volume 39, no. 4, and we have reproduced several examples in this issue.

The final piece of this complicated history of Built Environment was the establishment of Alexandrine Press (https://www.alexandrinepress.co.uk) in 1979 and their acquisition of the journal from Kogan Page in 1980. This change was seamless as the same editorial team continued to manage the journal. Tom Hancock left in 1980 to build the Milton Keynes peace pagoda and pursue other interests. Peter continued as editor for forty years. In 1983 he was joined by Mike Breheny who was replaced in 1993 by David Banister. Two editors became three in 2013 when Stephen Marshall joined Peter and David. Following Peter’s death in 2014 David and Stephen continued as Editors until they were joined by Lucy Natarajan in 2019.

Gradually over time, members of the Editorial Board and other experts took on the role of Guest Editor for each themed issue. This took some of the pressure off the Editors to select the authors for the papers, and to provide a continuous flow of papers on each topic. While the workload could be spread more widely, the Editors still have a key responsibility to identify both the theme for each issue and then to select the most suitable Guest Editor. The active support of the Editorial Board was important here. Help and guidance to the Guest Editors was important to maintain the quality of the papers, the range of topics covered, the increasingly global scope of the journal, and the necessity to publish quarterly.

Built Environment has maintained its pattern of publishing quarterly, but the size of each issue has been increased substantially. For the first thirty years, the annual page count has been between 300 and 350 pages, but this was expanded over the next decade to over 500 pages (+50 per cent). It now stands at about 700 pages (+40 per cent), meaning that the page count has doubled over the fifty years.

Built Environment: Interpretation and Themes

The built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another.

Richard Sennett, 2018

The term ‘built environment’ is complex. It is inherently inter-disciplinary and encompasses a wide range of subjects, disciplines, and professions. This in turn leads to a diversity of academic treatment, from discursive social science writing to more quantitative and analytic approaches. In Built Environment, with its different theme for each issue, our aim is to address this diversity.

Further, the themed nature of the journal enables a breadth and depth of treatment of one topic in single issue, in both print and online. This is made possible with the help of our guest editors, who are specialized in a particular field – possibly a field or fields at the margins of or outside the traditional territory of the built environment per se (e.g. geography, economics, public policy).

Examples of typically inter-disciplinary issues include ‘Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy’ (Volume, 39, no. 2): a market is more than a building, more than a public space; it is also a land use and locus of economic activity, housed in a particular kind of physical setting. Another example is commuting, which is not just about travel, but also separation of land uses, about cities and suburbs, home and work (Changing Patterns of Commuting, Volume 45, no. 4); while ‘Homes that Work’ (Volume, 49, no. 3) is additionally concerned with the intimate spaces of home working, a fusion of architecture, society and culture.

Indeed, the themed approach allows us to include topics that are not normally regarded as within the built environment sphere, but intersect with it, such as violence (Volume, 40, no. 3), big data (Volume 42, no. 3), cognition (Volume 44, no. 2), arts (Volume 46, no. 2) or liveability (Volume 48, no. 3).

The last ten years have seen a renewed prerogative for a geographically diverse treatment, addressing the Global South as well as the Global North. This is seen explicitly in the cases such as ‘Public Space if the Global North and South’ (Volume 48, no. 2), and geographically focused issues such as ‘Arab Cities after “The Spring”’ (Volume 40, no. 1) and ‘Urban Land Grabs in Africa’ (Volume 44, no. 4), but also in themes that are ‘universal’ in applicability but that have a substantially representation from the Global South, such as ‘Homes that Work’ (Volume 49, no. 3) and ‘Planning for Equitable Urban and Regional Food Systems’ (Volume 43, no. 3).

In addition, issues of inclusion have also received increasing attention, through ‘Inclusive Design: Towards Social Equity in the Built Environment’ (Volume 44, no. 1), ‘Women-led Urbanism’ (Volume 49, no. 4), and participatory approaches to planning (Volume 45, nos. 1 and 2).

Looking ahead, we anticipate further attention to the types of themes above, with the likelihood of greater attention to major societal challenges such as climate change, technologies such as artificial intelligence, as well as the future of built environment education and professions.

Our Seven Chosen Themes

We have chosen seven themes we regard as emblematic of Built Environment over the last fifty years:

Sustainability and the Environment
Urban Design
Inclusion
The Compact City
Technology
Regional Perspectives
Transport

For five of these themes we reproduce two papers (one earlier and one later) while in case of Technology there is just one paper and for Sustainability and the Environment three papers. Each theme is introduced with a brief commentary.

To represent Sustainability and the Environment we have chosen Environmental Impact Analysis. This seemed particularly appropriate as it was the first issue edited by Peter Hall and Tom Hancock.

There has always been a well-grounded critique of cost benefit analysis (CBA) for project assessment, as it necessitates making monetary valuations of the costs and benefits so that alternatives can be ranked. Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA) was developed to measure a much wider range of costs and benefits, using mainly non-monetary valuations. Built Environment has devoted three issues to this topic, and those papers selected reflect the basic methodology, progress made (over the intervening fifteen years), and the transition to strategic environmental assessment (in Japan). Analysis has made substantial progress from the classic Leopold Matrix (Leopold et al., 1971) to a much wider range of approaches monitoring, valuation, and participation (Glasson and Therivel, 2019). EIA has come of age, and it is now an essential part of project assessment, including the wider issues related to policies and programmes (Sadler and Verheem, 1996).

Urban Design has been a periodic theme in Built Environment. Two issues have explicitly addressed Urban Design (Theory and Practice in Urban Design, Volume 22, no. 4 and Urban Design Strategies in Practice, Volume 25, no. 4); other issues have significant urban design content (e.g. New Urbanism, Volume 29, no. 3; Urban Morphology and Design, Volume 37, no. 4). For this issue, we chose a pair of papers that focus on the more specialized sub-theme of Streets: Jan Gehl’s paper ‘The residential street environment’ (Volume 6, no. 1, 1980) and Vicinius Netto et al.’s paper asking ‘Does Architecture Matter to Urban Vitality?’ (Volume 48, no. 3, 2022).

The theme of Inclusion is expansive with issues touching on inclusive urban design and spaces and ways to greater equity, as well as the violence of exclusive practices and spaces. This theme is represented by papers from 1990 and 2023 that show the evolution of premises of diversity through studies of gendered lived experience of environments. That line was reprised to question institutions and practices in ‘Women and the Environment’ (Volume, 22, no. 1, 1996) and more recently ‘Women-led Urbanism’ (Volume 49, no. 4, 2023). Issues from other years focus on other social groups including children, with studies of younger people’s relationship with built space (Playgrounds in the Built Environment, Volume 25, no. 1, 1999; Children, Young People, and Built Environments, Volume 33, no.4, 2007).

In the 1990s the Compact City became a central concern in Europe as part of the sustainability debate as it was an issue where the EU could make a real contribution. Compactness and mixed use became symbolic of that process, which seemed viable in the smaller historic cities, typical of Europe, but not so appropriate for rapidly urbanizing global cities. Two issues of Built Environment have been devoted to the compact city (Volume 18, no. 4, 1992 and Volume 3, no. 1, 2010), and the papers selected here represent the original thinking and concerns, even at that time, on the advantages of compactness, and the situation later where the concepts have been applied in a megacity in the developing world [LN1] (Mumbai). The original optimism has been tempered with the reality of the megacity, suggesting that new thinking is now needed to understand the complex structures of global cities, not just in terms of their physical form, but also their rationality, inclusiveness, and opportunity (Breheny, 1992; Jacobs, 1961; Jenks et al., 2008).

For Technology we chose one aspect, Cyberspace, and reflect a single piece: Ken Friedman’s seminal paper ‘Building cyberspace: information, place and policy’ (Volume 24, nos.2/3, 1998) which was published roughly halfway through Built Environment’s fifty-year history.

Regions attract a distinctive perspective on built environments, and this theme has enormous relevance to international thinking on design and planning for sustainability. The papers from 2002 (Volume 28, no. 3, Islam and Built  Form: Studies Regional Diversity) and 2014 (Delta Urbanism: New Challenges for Planning and Design in Urbanized Deltas) reproduced here represent some of the research that used a Regional Perspective to explain how humans re-shape the world. Multiple issues, too many to list, have employed a regional perspective to delve into changing urbanisms, cultures, and ‘spatial development’ work of particular regions. These explorations provide a wealth of evidence on the shape of regions, for instance of those that shrank (Understanding Shrinkage in European Regions, Volume 38, no. 2, 2012) and those that expanded upwards (High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe, Volume 43, no. 4, 2017) and outwards (Burton and Gill, Volume, 41, no. 4, 2015) over the years.

Finally, Transport has always been prominent in the themes explored by Built Environment, often seen as a problem issue in urban planning, but more recently as a solution to improving quality of life and the urban environment. The early views were primarily concern with ‘civilizing’ the car, as it was realized that cities would have to adapt to the car or vice versa (Buchanan, 1963). Since then, the wheel has turned through interest in traffic management, demand management and pricing. But even then, the car continued to dominate, and city planners then promoted high quality public transport, and this provides the theme for our first transport paper, building on the Swiss Cities model (Kaufmann, 2004). Over the most recent past, with new debates on climate change, sustainability, accessibility and the rights of citizens over the ownership of city space, the debate has become richer with the advent of cleaner, rented, low speed personal transport. Our second transport paper examines the potential looking at North America (Shaheen et al., 2021).

Prospective – The Next Fifty years

To complete the picture given in this Golden Anniversary celebration, we give a perspective on the future direction for the journal and for journal publishing more generally. The most important urban planning issue is the growth in human population and the consequent impact on the environment and consumption. This population growth will not be distributed evenly across the globe: most growth will take place in Africa, and to a lesser extent in South America and South East Asia. That population will be increasingly living in cities and become ‘urban’, working in the service and technology sectors. Such a future seems clear, but the implications are less transparent with huge uncertainties. For Built Environment this means that the scope for new themes becomes vast, as population growth has substantial direct and indirect impacts on urban areas and their hinterlands.

Cities will become larger with the megacity and the megacity region, leading to complex structures and linear cities along public transport axes or in rings linked by high-speed rail – this is already happening in China and Brazil. City regions may develop more amorphously without strong planning interventions. But it not just city form and our understanding of the advantages of different ‘city types’, but also the value of open and green spaces, the functions of those cities, and the value of face-to-face contact – it could be argued that if cities cease to be places where people get together and socialise, then do they have any value? If the future is one of remote working, and online recreation and shopping, then the city population can be dispersed. An essential element here, and one that has not been addressed by Built Environment, is the importance of migration to the city and the wider trends of international migration. The city is often seen as being attractive, offering well-paid jobs and a higher standard of living. There are strong pull factors and historic associations play a part, but equally people are pushed from rural areas and from overseas whether from man-made or natural disasters or in search of a better life. Conversely, remote working enabling people to live and work in villages and the rural hinterland could blur the sense of self-containment of both cities and peripheral settlements, so that the concept of ‘town–country’ becomes a hybrid of the two in distinct locations rather than an intermediate blend of two.

Related to these issues are the huge inequalities between and within nations, cities, and smaller urban areas, not just in terms of income levels but also of perceived opportunities. In general, those living in cities are better off, they are better educated, and they have better access to health and other public services. They are also more engaged in and knowledgeable of the rapid changes in technology in all its forms, and they are also better connected and have a higher quality infrastructure (transport, energy and water). This image of the city makes them attractive, but cities are also places of huge inequality that include maldistribution of the same factors mentioned above, together with the added disadvantages of poor quality but expensive housing, high levels of pollution, loss of community, and high levels of crime. These issues will provide a rich source of material for Built Environment and some of them need to be revisited to determine whether city life is improving for all, both in established historical cities and in the controlled and uncontrolled expansion of megacities globally.

Cities are growing and the inequalities are becoming more apparent. But cities are also dependent on the global environment due to their enormous ‘footprints’. Cities need feeding and they need (clean) energy, green spaces, and water. But they produce huge amounts of waste (and pollution) – they are centres of consumption. That consumption is best illustrated by these needs plus the ubiquitous availability of internet connectivity.

City demand for all three of these essentials is increasing exponentially, yet the necessary investment in providing them is not keeping pace. At the same time, the expansive trends are problematic and alternative planning responses will be highly significant. These topics are all suitable themes for future issues of Built Environment.

The global climate crisis also has both direct and indirect impacts on the city. As sea levels rise, many coastal cities become vulnerable to flooding, and this together with the increasing frequency and severity of weather events have increased the costs of mitigation and adaptation. Cities also act as ‘heat islands’ with the built form absorbing heat, making them warmer than the surrounding areas, and they have levels of pollution that exceed the WHO safe limits. Higher temperatures and pollution have health implications for the elderly and the young, and they increase the numbers of premature deaths, as well as overall levels of sickness and disease. Cities were unhealthy places to live 150 years ago, and they may increasingly become so again in the next fifty years. This underscores the importance of research around potential spaces and technologies for future living environments.

In the coming years we can expect increased attention to nature-based solutions, ecosystem services, and biophilia, which could also lead to new relationships between the natural and built environments, as concepts of ‘nature’ and different species cohabiting with humans are taken into consideration.

We can also expect advances in technology to bring further innovations driving change in the built environment, building on recent trends, from transport technologies (e.g. alternative fuels; drones) and operations (e.g. mobility as a service) through the exploitation of artificial intelligence and ‘urban science’ to social media (both as a behavioural setting and use as a research resource). As ever, the connectedness of these things is more difficult to predict than the individual advances; while fifty years ago one might have predicted advanced computation or ‘flying cars’, it would have been less easy to predict the use of a pocket-sized computer (smart phone) to gain real-time public transport information or order a cab from on board a delayed train, or to use data from social media postings to gain insights into the differential perception of place in the built environment.

Indeed, the next fifty years could even see the establishment of new off-world human-built environments, whether in space or on the Moon or Mars. Such developments could pioneer new kinds of building format, settlement unit and structure – underground and/or enclosed urbanism – according to the environments, their socio-political structure, and construction technology. The prospect of 3D printing of buildings could be synergistic with the creation of built environments in hostile environments where remote construction minimizing human labour is the priority.

There is no shortage of critical topics for future issues of Built Environment, some of which are mentioned here, but others will naturally emerge over time. The difficulty may be in identifying relatively self-contained, yet interesting themes that can be addressed with a set of internationally sourced papers. The complexity and interconnectedness of global topics related to urban policy and planning issues provide difficult but interesting opportunities.

And that complexity and interconnectedness feature in our first issue for 2025 devoted to Postgrowth Planning. Edited by Dan Durrant, Yvonne Rydin and Marjan Marjanovic, the issue will address the implications of a built environment where economic growth is no longer the desirable aim of planning, where resources are limited, and where their allocation cannot be driven purely by financial returns on investment. The contributors come from the range of disciplines involved in constructing, designing, managing, and governing the built environment and the issue will be published in late January/early February, a little earlier than our usual schedule.

REFERENCES

• Andres, L. and Natarajan, L. (2024) Towards Women-Led Urbanism. Built Environment, 49(4).
• Appert, M., Drozdz, M. and Harris, A., (2017) High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe, Built Environment, 43(4).
• Bontje, M. and Musterd, S. (2012). Understanding Shrinkage in European Regions. Built Environment, 38(2).
• Brand, J. (1996) Sustainable Development: The International, National and Local Context for Women. Built Environment, 22(1).
• Breheny, M. (ed.) (1992) Sustainable Development and Urban Form, London: Pion.
• Buchanan, C. (1963) Traffic in Towns, London: HMSO.
• Burton, P. and Gill, J. (2015) Suburban Spaces, Suburban Cultures. Built Environment, 41(4).
• Friedman, K. (1998) Building cyberspace: Information, place and policy. Built Environment, 24(3/4), pp. 83–103.
• Gehl, J. (1980) The residential street environment. Built Environment, 6(1), pp. 51–61.
• Glasson, J and Therivel, R (2019) Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessment, 5th ed. London: Routledge.
• Jacobs, J (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage.
• Jenks, M, Kozak, D and Takkonon, P (eds) (2008) World Cities and Urban Form: Fragmented, Polycentric, Sustainable? London: Routledge.
• Kaufmann, V. (2004) Social and political segregation of urban transportation: the merits and limitations of the Swiss cities model. Built Environment, 30(2), pp. 146–152.
• Kraftl, P., Horton, J. and Tucker F. (2014) Children, Young People and Built Environments, Built Environment, 33(4).
• McKendrick, J.H. (1999) Playgrounds in the Built Environment, Built Environment, 25(1).
• Netto, V. M., Saboya, R. and Vargas, J. C. (2022) Does architecture matter to urban vitality? Buildings and the social life of streets and neighbourhoods. Built Environment, 48(3), pp. 317–340.
• Reeves D. (1996) Women and the Environment, Built Environment, 22(1).
• Sadler, B and Verheem, R (1996) Strategic Environmental Assessment. The Hague: Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment.
• Shaheen, S., Cohen, A. and Broader, J. (2021) What’s the ‘big’ deal with shared micromobility? Evolution, curb policy, and potential developments in North America, Built Environment, 47(4), pp. 499–514.

Built Environment at Fifty: Perspectives, Landmarks, and Prospects

• Built Environment at Fifty: Perspectives, Landmarks, and Prospects
  DAVID BANISTER, STEPHEN MARSHALL and LUCY NATAJARAN
• Environmental Impact Analysis: Scientific Tool or Philosopher’s Stone?
  DAVID BANISTER
  Brian D. Clark, Keith Chapman, Ronald Bisset and Peter Wathern (1978) Methods of environmental impact analysis.
  John Glasson (1994) Life after the decision: the importance of monitoring in EIA.
  Sachihiko Harashina (2001) A new stage of EIA in Japan. 
• The Built Environment: Framing and Enabling Vital Streets
  STEPHEN MARSHALL
  Jan Gehl (1980) The residential street environment.
  Vinicius M. Netto, Renato Saboya and Júlio Celso Vargas (2022) Does architecture matter to urban vitality?
  Buildings and the social life of streets and neighbourhoods. 
• Inclusion and the Rise of Liveability
  LUCY NATAJARAN
  Jos Boys (1990) Dealing with difference. 
  Maria Carrizosa (2023) No house is just a house: house interviews, space-use intensity, and city-making.
• The Compact City
  DAVID BANISTER
  Susan E. Owens and Peter A. Rickaby (1992) Settlements and energy revisited.
  Seema Dave (2010) High urban densities in developing countries: a sustainable solution? 
• Revisiting Cyberspace
  STEPHEN MARSHALL
  Ken Friedman (1998) Building cyberspace: Information, place and policy.
• Regional Perspectives
  LUCY NATAJARAN
  Attilio Petruccioli (2002) New methods of reading the urban fabric of the Islamicized Mediterranean.  
  Campanella, R. (2014) Fluidity, rigidity and consequence: a comparative historical geography of the Mississippi and Sénégal River Deltas and the deltaic urbanism of New Orleans and Saint-Louis. 
• Transport – There Must Be Better Ways
  DAVID BANISTER
  Vincent Kaufmann (2004) Social and political segregation of urban transportation: the merits and limitations of the Swiss cities model. 
  Susan Shaheen, Adam Cohen, A. Jacquelyn and Broader (2021) What’s the ‘big’ deal with shared micromobility? Evolution, curb policy, and potential developments in North America.

Meet the Editors

Robert Sember is an educator and artist who has taught most recently at The New School’s Eugene Lang College in New York City and with the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Program’s Higher Education in Prison initiative in Auburn, Alabama. 

Gerry Kearns is Professor of Geography at Maynooth University, Ireland, and works at the intersection of historical, health, and political geographies. He is the author of Geopolitics and Empire and co-editor of Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis.

Molly Rose Kaufman is the Executive Director and a Co-Founder of the University of Orange, a free school of restoration urbanism in Orange, NJ. She currently teaches in the Freedom Scholars program at The New School.

Mindy Thompson Fullilove is a social psychiatrist and professor of urban policy and health at The New School, NewYork. She is the author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It.

Root Shock Twenty Years On: Displacement – Its Harms and Remedies

• Respect the Common Life the Way You Would an Individual Life
• Treasure the Buildings History Has Given Us
• Break the Cycle of Disinvestment
• Ensure Freedom of Movement

REFERENCES

Root Shock Twenty Years On: Displacement – Its Harms and Remedies

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

This special issue marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Mindy Fullilove’s Root Shock. The papers here attest to the impact of her work, elaborate on her concept of ‘root shock’, and contribute analyses that affirm the book’s core paradigm linking human life and wellbeing to the qualities of urban environments. While disruption and community displacement affect the whole world, the issue focuses on historic and contemporary situations in Ireland and the United States with their shared history of forced displacement being used to control land and populations.

Robert Sember

31 May 2024

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• Root Shock: A Concept at Twenty
  ROBERT SEMBER
• Root Shock at Twenty: Reflections from Roanoke
  MARY CARTER BISHOP
• Root Shock at Twenty: Reflections from Pittsburgh
  DAN HOLLAND with TERRI BALTIMORE and PHIL HALLEN
• ‘We Couldn’t Get the Big Win’: A Situation Analysis of the Stress of Gentrification at Differing Points in the Process
  MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE, SARAH HOWE, MOLLY ROSE KAUFMAN, DOMINIC MOULDEN, CARLEY WETED, KATHERINE SILVA, AUBREY MURDOCK, SERITA EL AMIN, and DEREK HYRA
• The New York City Real Estate Industry and Voter Suppression
  DEBORAH WALLACE and RODRICK WALLACE
• Carceral Displacement: The Root Shock of Mass Criminalization
  LA-MEIK COOK TAYLOR, ERIC PARIS WHITFIELD, KEITH ROGERS, and ROBERT SEMBER
• A Year to Go Home: A Story of Fighting Deep Disinvestment
  SISTER ANETHA PERRY and STEPHEN DANLEY
• From Root Shock to Urban Alchemy: The (Re)making of Urban Space through the Lens of Black Older Women
  H. SHELLAE VERSEY, LAURENT REYES and JARMIN YEH
• Root Shock and Postcolonial Trauma in Ireland
  GERRY KEARNS
• Displacement in Place: Root Shock in the Pearse Street Community,
  Dublin 327
  MARY BROE
• From 'Route Shock' towards Spatial Justice: Mapping Travellers'
  Storied Places and Mazeways 337
  KAREN E. TILL and RACHEL MCARDLE
• Root Shock as Social Discipline: Marginalization and Racism in Irish
  Social, Asylum, and Refugee Policies 349
  NIAMH MCDONALD
• Resisting Root Shock in the Collapsed City: Constructing Community and the Fight
  to stay Put through Tenant Organizing in Dublin 360
  TOMMY GAVIN and CIAN O’CALLAGHAN
• Root Shock’s Missing Appendix: Using Situation Analysis for Critical Policy Studies and Beyond
  JENNIFER S. RAMIREZ, KATHERINE DILLARD GONZALEZ, TALIB HUDSON, and WHITNEY BLANCO
• Cover images: front: Relocation of a family from Pittsburgh’s Hill District in April 1951 (Photo: Richard Saunders); back: An Irish family in Moyasta, County Clare being evicted during the Land War, c.1879 (Source: Lawrence Collection, National Library of Ireland)

Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning, and the World’s Games, 1896–2032

The first edition of Olympic Cities, published in 2007, provided a pioneering overview of the changing relationship between cities and the modern Olympic Games. This substantially revised and much enlarged fourth edition builds on the success of its predecessors. The first of its three parts provides overviews of the urban legacy of the four component Olympic festivals: the Summer Games; Winter Games; Cultural Olympiads; and the Paralympics. The second part comprises systematic surveys of six key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics and Paralympics: finance; sustainability; the creation of Olympic Villages; security; urban regeneration; and tourism. The final part consists of ten chronologically arranged portraits of host cities from 1960 to 2032, with complete coverage of the Summer Games of the twenty-first century.

Contents

Meet the Editor

Tali Hatuka, an architect and urban planner, is the Head of the Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design, in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University. She works primarily on planning and urban design issues, focusing on the relationships between urban development, city design and conflicts in contemporary cities.

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

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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.