How do neighborhoods form?

Neighborhood organization is one of the few universals of urban structure. All cities, past and present, all over the world, are organized into neighborhoods. Sometimes neighborhoods are planned from the start by officials or commercial builders. Think of all the ready-made suburban neighborhoods built by developers today, with their phony bucolic- or English-sounding names. Or consider company towns, whether ancient Egyptian workers settlements or capitalist factory cities like Pullman, Illinois. The planners build in neighborhoods from the get-go. If they aren't planned out in advance, however, neighborhoods spring up on their own. People interact with those living nearby, new residents move into areas where they know people, or where people are like them culturally, and before long there are neighborhoods that are clear to residents and visitors alike.

Neighborhoods: suburban U.S., Ottoman city; Chinese city

One of the best ways to look at certain urban processes, to my mind, is to examine "semi-urban" places. These are places where large numbers of people gather together, often on a temporary basis. They aren't really cities--they aren't permanent enough. After a while, people leave and go home. But when people gather in  one place, a certain "energized crowding" takes place (see my post on Cities as  Social Reactors), and by looking at what happens, we gain a better understanding of urban processes and activities.

So, here I want to take a quick look at three very different kinds of semi-urban settlements (a company town, a protest camp, and the Burning Man festival) to see how neighborhoods develop. This post is based on a recent article (Smith et al. 2015) that looks at neighborhoods in a wider range of semi-urban settlements. I won't cite a bunch of sources here; see that article for citations and a more scholarly treatment.

Abadan, Iran, Company Town:  Top-Down Neighborhood Formation

Deir el-Medina, ancient workers village

The company town is a settlement planned and established by a central organization to house its workers so that they can work more efficiently. They tend to exhibit careful planning and regularity of housing; they show some evidence of the central authority; and they are physically set off from their neighboring settlements. We tend to think of company towns as modern features, used by capitalist enterprises. But the basic concept goes back to ancient Egypt at least. Pharaohs set up walled settlements that archaeologists call "workers villages" to house construction workers, or temple personnel. This was not by any means a capitalist economy, yet the form, function, and goals of workers villages matched closely those of a 19th century town like Pullman, Illinois. These settlements are one of the main types of what Kevin Lynch called "the city as a practical machine."

My example here is Abadan, an oil refining town set up in the early 20th century in Iran by the Anglo-Persion Oil Company (later known as British Petroleum). The company knew they would need to bring in workers from several national/cultural groups, and they were worried about possible trouble that could come if members of these groups could easily mingle with one another. So thay arranged the housing in a big band around the outside of the refinery, and
they kept individual neighborhood units separate from one another. The British executives and engineers were in one area, and various local and Near Eastern groups were distributed in other areas.

Neighborhoods laid out around the refinery, which was in the center

British neighborhood in Abadan

The plan to settle groups in physically separate neighborhoods was quite deliberate, as research into company archives has shown (see Smith et al 2015 for citations). So, Abadan ended up with a system of neighborhoods, distinguished culturally and socially, as a result of deliberate planning from the
top. Such "designed neighborhoods" are also found in other company towns, and in other regimented planned settlements such as internment camps.

Occupy Portland Protest Camp: Bottom-up Neighborhood Formation

Information from the Occupy Portland camp was gathered by Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman for her MA thesis. Katrina is an interesting urbanist; check out her "Think Urban" website or her Twitter feed. As an undergraduate at Arizona State University, Katrina worked for our interdisciplinary urban project, "Urban Organization through the Ages." She conducted ethnographic fieldwork during the "Occupy Portland" event of 2011. This was one of the many local protest camps that spring up following the initial Occupy Wall Street settlement.

Occupy Portland camp. Photo by Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman

What Katrina found was that the campers in Portland quickly formed spatial clusters of like-minded people who spent time together. They set up their tents near one another. These groups took on names. In short, these were neighborhoods. This is a clear example of the bottom-up route to neighborhood formation. People created neighborhoods on their own, following their needs and interests. No one came along and organized the campsite. In fact, the participants in the Occupy Portland event refused to submit to a top-down organization. Someone pointed out that the campsite looked messy. If they reorganized it to look neater, with tents in nice rows, then the authorities would be less likely to tear it down. (This is a basic principle in informal settlement invasions in Latin America; local governments are far less likely to destroy shantytown settlements when they have neat streets and lots than when they are a mess).  But, true to their anarchist orientation, the participants refused to submit to this top-down structure. The messy, grass-roots organized spatial organization of neighborhoods was too strong to be torn apart in an effort to please city officials.

The Burning Man Festival: From Anarchy to Planning

The annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert is a fascinating case study of a semi-urban settlement. What began as a bonfire on the beach in San Francisco in th 1980s has grown into a huge annual campsite with as many as 70,000 week-long residents. It has always been a festival of arts and free expression, run with a series of anarchist principles, including radical inclusion, decommodification, communal effort, radical self-reliance, and leave no trace. The entire settlement is taken down each year, all traces are removed or destroyed, and then it is planned, surveyed, and built again the following year. Urbanists have only just begun to study Burning Man, and there is much to learn there about cities, urbanization, and social patterns.

The Burning Man site is on federal land, and the festival receives a permit each year. As the festival grew during the 1990s, people naturally gravitated toward specific areas, forming neighborhoods. These were linked by friendship and social bonds, as well as by interests (e.g., all-night loud parties in one area; campers with small children in another). But by 1996, the event had grown too large to function on its anarchist principles. People were shooting guns in crowded places, driving cars too fast and destroying tents and injuring people. The government threatened to shut down the festival (by denying the permit) unless more order were achieved.

Almost overnight, the site -- called Black Rock City -- became a heavily planned settlement, with a circular layout and the burning man tower in the center. There is now a "Department of Urban Planning" in the Burning Man organization. Neighborhoods were either continued, or established anew, again, using social bonds and common interests as defining features. These anarchists were able to submit to some top-down planning in order to continue to celebrate their anti-authoritarian and free-expression values.

Whereever you look, there are neighborhoods!

These are just three examples of semi-urban settlements with clear neighborhood organization. Our study found neighborhoods at many other types, from Plains Indians tipi camps to refugee camps. The conclusion I draw from this study is that neighborhoods are indeed a  universal feature of urban life. Whether created and enforced by authorities (state or corporation), or generated by grass-roots action of individual acting in their own, neighborhoods are an integral and crucial part of urban organization, from the distant past to the present.

For more details, see:

Smith, Michael E., Ashley Engquist, Cinthia Carvajal, Katrina Johnston, Amanda Young, Monica Algara, Yui Kuznetsov and Bridgette Gilliland  (2015)  Neighborhood Formation in Semi-Urban Settlements. Journal of Urbanism 8(2):173-198.

Cities of Tipis?

Comanche camp (George Catlin)

The Native Americans of the North American Plains were some of the better known nomads of recent centuries. Groups like the Crow, Cheyenne, and Sioux took advantage of the horses brought to the New World by Europeans to forge a successful way of life hunting bison on the plains. They moved their settlements of tipis throughout the year, following the requirements of bison hunting. Life alternated between small camps of  five or ten tipis and larger camps of up to 100 tipis. Some of the larger camps ("cluster camps" in the language of Banks and Snortland 1995) had an unorganized arrangement of tipis, and some ("circular camps") were ceremonial in orientation and the tipis were arranged in a huge circle.

Is there anything "urban" about these big circular camps? Archaeologist Alice Kehoe thinks so. In her textbook, North American Indians, she says:

Nomad peoples were constrained to adapt social affairs to ecological cycles: most of the business that in towns [in other cultures] occurred over the year had to be compressed by the nomads into the few summer weeks when grass was most lush on the open plains. Trading, gambling, visiting friends from other bands, games and sports competitions, and seeking a compatible spouse or comrade were individual incentives to rendezvous in large camps. Adjudicating disputes, discussing policies and strategies for allied bands drew leaders to these camps. Above all, participation in rituals was a magnet (Kehoe 1981:

295). This is the first edition of the book; I have not had the opportunity to check this quote in the more recent 3rd edition.

Lakota camp, 1891

 I really like Kehoe's observation that activities that can be spread out through the entire year in permanent settlements must be concentrated into a few weeks in these large camps.  A few years ago I talked about three major dimensions of urbanism that are used in defining cities: population, complexity, and influence. Big tipi camps did not have urban functions. That is, they were not the setting for activities and institutions that affected  a hinterland. Nor were they permanent settlements, part of Louis Wirth's influential demographic definition of urbanism.

Cheyenne village

On the other hand, these large tipi camps were large dense settlements (if not permanent), and they certainly had a level of social complexity and intense social interaction that was not present in the smaller regular camps. This is the feature described in Kehoe's quotation above. And this is why I have called these tipi aggregation camps "semi-urban settlements," comparable  to pilgrimage sites, festivals, camp meetings, refugee camps, and some contemporary RV camps. These are places that are formed rapidly by an influx of people, who live in a densely-arranged form for a few days to a few weeks before dispersing. See my previous post on semi-urban settlements.That post describes an article I wrote with a bunch of students on neighborhood organization in semi-urban settlements. That paper is STILL in press; the journal is taking forever to get the paper into print. Arrrrrgh........

Quartzsite, AZ: A modern nomad camp?

I've listed below some sources on Plains tipi camps. Roland Fletcher's paper first suggested to me that this kind of settlement was relevant to concepts of urbanism. Banks and Snortland is a fantastic study that uses historic photographs to work out the nature and size of Plains settlements. Hassrick and Oliver are standard monographs on Plains Indian groups. Scheiber and Finley use advanced methods to identify the archaeological remains of ancient tipi sites.

Sioux camp, 1891

Examples like these Plains circular tipi camps are fascinating for illuminating the nature of urbanism. They have some but not all of the traits we normally associate with cities and urban places, and as such they help us understand the nature of human society and how it works out in spatial terms. When large number of people gather quickly, whether in a tipi camp or at the Burning Man festival today, certain kinds of interactions take place and certain kinds of social dynamics play out.

While no one would call a tipi camp a "city", these settlements are certainly part of the Wide Urban World.

Banks, Kimball M. and J. Signe Snortland  (1995)  Every Picture Tells a Story: Historic Images, Tipi Camps, and Archaeology. Plains Anthropologist 40(152):125-144.

Fletcher, Roland  (1991)  Very Large Mobile Communities: Interaction Stress and Residential Dispersal. In Ethnoarchaeological Approaches to Mobile Campsites: Hunter-Gatherer and Pastoralist Case Studies, edited by Clive Gamble and B. Boismer, pp. 395-420. Prehistory Press, Ann Arbor.

Small tipi camp

Hassrick, Royal C.  (1964)  The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Kehoe, Alice B.  (1981)  North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.

Oliver, Chad  (1962)  Ecology and Cultural Continuity as Contributing Factors in the Social Organization of the Plains Indians. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Scheiber, Laura L. and Judson Byrd Finley  (2010)  Domestic Campsites and Cyber Landscapes in the Rocky Mountains. Antiquity 84:114-130.

Stone circle, "tipi ring" from the Rocky Mountains (Scheiber & Finley)

Smith, Michael E., Ashley Engquist, Cinthia Carvajal, Katrina Johnston, Amanda Young, Monica Algara, Yui Kamoda and Bridgette Gilliland  (2014)  Neighborhood Formation in Semi-Urban Settlements. Journal of Urbanism 7 (STILL in press, maybe 2014 will be lucky).

Cities, semi-urban places, and definitions

I periodically think about how we define terms like city and urban. There is no final and ultimate definition of terms like this. Definitions are tools. They help us solve intellectual problems and they help us understand the world. A definition that works in one context may not be helpful in another.

As I have discussed here previously (Original post on definitions), there are two major approaches to defining cities and urbanism: the demographic and the functional. Louis Wirth's influential demographic definition uses four features to define cities: permanence, high population, high density, and social diversity or complexity. The alternative functional approach says that any settlement that fulfills urban functions for a hinterland can be called urban. An urban function is an activity or institution in a settlement whose effects extend beyond the settlement. See the original post for more discussion and some references.

Role of 3 factors in definitions of city and urban

In a later post, I discuss how these and other definitions of city and urban vary in the importance they give to three factors: population, social complexity/ diversity, and influence or function. The other day I made up a diagram to illustrate this point. It is a kind of "triangular graph" that shows the relative importance of these three variables (at the 3 points). The two ellipses show how the major urban definitions rely on these three factors. Wirth's (demographic) definition relies entirely on population and complexity, so it lies far away from the functional point on the graph. The functional definition runs from the functional corner up toward the complexity corner. The reason for extending the area toward the top is that urban functions almost always require social complexity in the urban center. For example, a political capital typically requires different occupations and often different social class composition, if only to fulfill the basic operations of the government.

Camp meeting

In our attempts to understand complex social phenomena (like urbanism), sometimes examples at the extremes shed light on broader patterns. For this reason, in my class on ancient cities I always cover case studies whose urban status is the subject of great debate. The European Iron Age oppida is one example (functionally urban, but not demographically), or Chaco Canyon (just about nobody besides Steve Lekson considers this settlement to be urban). These cases help students see just what urbanism is all about.

In a paper I am now revising, my coauthors and I follow a parallel logic. In order to support a larger argument that neighborhoods are universal in human settlements, we examine a group of "semi-urban settlements" to see if they have neighborhoods. (the answer is yes in all cases except disaster camps). I talk about this study in a previous post. Our paper got a judgment of "revise and resubmit" from a journal, and one complaint of the reviewers was that we didn't define the term "semi-urban" very well. So I've been thinking about how these settlements relate to the standard definitions of urbanism. I made up a second triangular graph to help me understand these settlements.

Two categories of semi-urban settlement in the definition triangle

Actually, there are two very different kinds of semi-urban settlements, each with different dynamics of change (and different neighborhood processes as well). The first category I call "voluntary camps." These are things like religious camp revival sites, festival sites (like Burning Man), RV camps, and the the various urban "Occupy" campsites from last year. I am fascinated by these settlements, and I am convinced that they can teach us much about cities and urban dynamics. In terms of defining this category, the main traits are that these are limited-purpose settlements, rapidly settled, temporary, and voluntary. On the triangular graph they lie close to the Population corner. They do not have urban functions, and they may or may not have social diversity.

Japanese-American internment camp

The second group of settlements classified as "semi-urban" are those that planner Kevin Lynch called "the city as practical machine." I've talked about these previously. This category includes things like military camps, company towns, internment camps, refugee camps and disaster camps. The key feature of these sites is their top-down design and establishment in order to fulfill a specific activity within the larger society. Their specialized activity, whether confinement, economic exploitation, or something else, can be considered an urban function, so I place these settlements at the function/influence corner of the graph.

So, it turns out what one reason we had trouble coming up with a nice succinct definition of "semi-urban settlement" is that this category actually includes two very different types of settlement. But both are urban-like in some ways but not others, and few would be classified as "cities" or "urban settlements" on their own. But they are all part of the Wide Urban World, and they can all teach us much about cities and urban processes.

Round Lake: From Methodist Camp Meeting to Modern Village

 The village of Round Lake is located in Saratoga County, NY, between Albany and Saratoga Springs. It stands out in upstate New York for its unusual layout and architecture. I used to live in Saratoga County, and I was always intrigued when I drove through Round Lake. The village consists largely of houses in Victorian style (gingerbread molding, steep gables, front porches, etc.), but many are small cottages, far smaller than most Victorian style houses in the U.S. The houses are located very close together, but with parks and open spaces throughout the settlement. The streets are narrow and laid out in a generally concentric wagon-wheel arrangement around a large wooden assembly hall in the middle. There is an old Victorian style hotel at the edge of town, but the village has few stores or other businesses. Interesting, quaint, and charming, the architecture and layout of Round Lake stands out like a sore thumb in the region around Albany,  New York.

Last spring, as part of an ongoing investigation into semi-urban settlements, I began reading about religious camp meetings. As I looked at their spatial structure, it dawned on me that Round Lake must have originated as one of these summer religious camps. They contain numerous small and insubstantial shelters—usually tents or cabins—arranged around a central circular clearing in the woods where the preaching takes place. Some have a simple elevated open-air stage, and some have more substantial preaching halls. As temporary summer camps, there is no need for a large number of permanent businesses. It seems that in Round Lake, a camp meeting settlement had turned into a permanent village.

Last week my wife and I found ourselves back in the Albany area with a few hours to kill, so we headed over to Round Lake to see whether my interpretation was correct. The first thing we noticed was a historical marker (New York State has great roadside historical markers) that confirmed the village’s origin as a Methodist camp meeting site in the late nineteenth century. We walked around and took some photos (seen in this posting) and talked to some residents. At the Public Library we purchased a history of the town, written in the local history genre. The book is:

Hesson, Mary, David J. Rogowski, and Marianne Comfort

         1998       Round Lake: Little Village in the Grove. Round Lake Publications, Round Lake, NY.

The first meeting, in 1868 (from Hesson et al.)

Round Lake was founded in1868 by the Methodist-Episcopal Church of the Troy Conference. The Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad stopped at the site, and the first meeting that summer drew 8,000 people! The first preaching, as at many camp meetings, was done from a raised platform built of wood. Attendees stayed in tents. In 1874 Ulysses Grant attended the meeting, and in 1885 the large auditorium was built, with a pipe organ.In 1887, the religious association that had organized the events was changed legally to the Round Lake Association, giving the settlement a broader base than just a summer religious revival camp.By the end of the nineteenth century, secular educational and cultural events had been added to the program, alongside the religious meetings.

The auditorium.

A surviving hotel

Over time, people started building more permanent structures, small wood frame houses in the Victorian style. Wealthier residents built larger houses, and temporary guests stayed in one of several hotels, one of which still survives. Today, the village of Round Lake is a charming place whose residents see themselves as friendly neighbors. Even the librarians, who are not from the village, noted the friendliness of the residents and the open, public aspect of life in the village.

The village, with the lake in the background (from Hesson et al)

The history book mentioned above has some fascinating facts about early Round Lake. In 1878 an entrepreneur built a scale model of the holy land on the shore of the lake, including a large diorama of Jerusalem. Visitors could wander around Mount Lebanon and Galilee, and hear one of the two daily lectures at the park. In 1887 the George West Museum of Art and Archaeology opened in the village, and through good fortune came to house an ancient Egyptian mummy excavated (looted?) in 1881 at Thebes. And we are told that in the winter, people raced horse-drawn buggies on the frozen lake. When I lived in Saratoga County I saw truck races on the ice of the same lake.

1819 camp meeting (not Round Lake)

For more information on nineteenth century camp meetings, see these sources:

Andrzejewski, Anna Vemer  (2000)  The Gazes of Hierarchy at Religious Camp Meetings, 1850-1925. Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8:138-157.

Deviney, Claudia Head  (2002)  From Spirit to Structure: A Study of Georgia's Historic Camp Meeting Grounds. MA thesis , Department of Historic Preservation, University of Georgia.

Duggan, Betty J.  (1995)  Exploring the Archaeological Potential of the Religious Camp Meeting Movement. Tennessee Anthropologist 20(2):138-161.

Moore, William D.  (1997)  "To Hold Communion with Nature and the Spirit-World": New England's Spiritualist Camp Meetings, 1865-1910. Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7:230-248.

Weiss, Ellen  (1987)  City in the Words: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha's Vineyard. Oxford University Press, New York.

Neighborhoods in semi-urban settlements

Pilgrim housing in Mecca

NOTE, added 2015: This paper is now published.

New, rapidly growing places can reveal the patterns and processes of urbanization, sometimes more clearly than traditional cities. I have a group of students working right now on neighborhood organization in what we are calling "semi-urban settlements." This category describes newly-formed residential places, typically with a special purpose, that have rapidly grown into large settlements. If these settlements exhibit neighborhood organization (and it appears that most or all of them do), this would support the notion that neighborhoods are a fundamental component of human settlement.

A second level of analysis focuses on neighborhood dynamics. Are neighborhoods in semi-urban settlements homogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of various social parameters? That is, do they have clustered ethnic or religious groups? Are they formed by the bottom-up actions of residents acting on their own, or are they formed by the top-down actions of authorities who plan and administer these places? And once established, is life in these places more influenced by bottom-up or top-down forces? We hope to find some answers to these questions.

Black Rock City, home of Burnng Man

So what semi-urban places are we including in our sample? Here is our current list (subject to modification):


Periodic settlements:

• Pilgrimage sites. Where do all those pilgrims stay when they arrive at their destination for several days of worship or relaxation? There is a big literature on pilgrimages as processes, but very litle on the temporary housing in the destination city.
• Festivals. Burning Man and other annual events bring large numbers of people together for short, intense periods of interaction and activity. Black Rock City, the annual settlement for Burning Man, does have neighborhoods (see my paper on the archaeological study of neighborhoods), but what about other festivals?



19th century camp meeting

• Camp meetings. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people were drawn to temporary cities in the woods in nineteenth century America. Did they organize themselves into neighborhoods?

Large-scale contemporary camps:

• Refugee camps. The creation of spatially separate neighborhoods is part of the design standards for refugee camps, partly for

  

  Chinese disaster camp

  reasons of logistics and partly to keep hostile ethnic and national groups apart.
• Disaster camps. Less is known about whether neighborhoods are found in disaster camps or not.

Temporary concentrations of nomads:

RV "neighborhoods" at Quartzsite ?

• Plains Indian aggregation sites.What happens when nomadic peoples gather in once place for some time? For example, when the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho gathered at Libble Bighorn to oppose Custer's force, did they arrange themselves into "neighborhoods" by tribal group?
• Winter RV campsites. RV sites like Quartzsite are the modern equivalent of Plains Indian nomadic aggregation sites. Can these patterns at Quartzsite in Arizona be considered neighborhood-like social units?

Japanese internment camp, Arizona

Practical settlements (see "the city as practical machine")

• Company towns. Whether 19th-20th century industrial towns (like Pullman in Chicago), or ancient Egyptian workers villages, specialized production-oriented settlements share a number of spatial and social characteristics. Do those characteristics include neighborhood organization?
• Military camps. As a specialized settlements, established by authorities for some kind of practical task, military camps have some similarity to company towns. Do they have neighborhoods?
• Internment camps. When large groups of people are forcibly settled in a restricted location that has been built for that purpose, do they form neighborhood-like groups? We will look at the data from Japanese internment camps in the western United States during World War II.

We may also include informal settlements (squatters settlements) and some other settlement types in our project.We think that by investigating neighborhood dynamics at these varied kinds of "semi-urban" places, we can achieve two ends. First, we may illuminate aspects of the social and spatial organization of these settlements. Second, we hope that these cases will help us understand urban neighborhood dynamics in general. Part of the impetus for this study is to explore some of the themes of our recent joint article .