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.

Why do all cities have neighborhoods?

I've been writing about urban neighborhoods for several years now. I have made the claim that all cities have neighborhoods. In fact, neighborhood organization is one of the very few urban universals. There are very few features shared by ALL cities, throughout history and around the world. Besides neighborhoods, other candidates for urban universals include the provision of urban services, and the fact that if a society has an elite class, then many or most of its members live in cities.  See: Do all cities have neighborhoods? (2011), or

I find that I always hesitate a bit when writing that "all" cities have neighborhoods. That is a tough claim to prove. We simply don't have information about all the cities that have ever existed, so a claim for the universality of something like neighborhoods must rest on indirect evidence. Here are the three lines of evidence that make sense to me.

First, every description of a city that is sufficiently detailed and focused to mention the existence of neighborhoods, does in fact mention neighborhoods. This is far from an air-tight argument. But I've been looking at city descriptions like this for a number of years now, and so far this claim has held up. These include ethnographic reports of cities around the world, historical accounts of cities before the modern era, and archaeological reports of ancient cities. Archaeologists started thinking seriously about neighborhoods about eight years ago, and guess what? Since then, many reports of neighborhood organization have popped up. Check some of the works in the bibliography below.

Second, many bin-depth studies of neighborhoods, in the past and the present, have found that neighborhoods are crucial social and spatial units within their city. They are important in many ways for urban residents, and they are important for the overall operation and functioning of the city. Some of my favorite such studies are Robert Sampson's analysis of Chicago neighborhoods today, Abraham Marcus's study of Aleppo in the 18th century, and Eva Lemonnier's identification of neighborhoods at the ancient Maya city of La Joyanca. See: Why are neighborhoods important? (2014).   Or, in Publishing Archaeology, see Archaeological concepts of community confront urban realities today (2015).

Third, I carried out a study, together with a bunch of undergraduates, of neighborhood organization at semi-urban settlements (Smith et al, 2015). The study was based on the assumption that if neighborhoods formed at these rapidly-formed, often chaotic, and sometimes specialized settlements, then they would form at any good-size human settlement. We found neighborhoods did indeed exist at Plains Indian aggregation sites, arts festivale, RV camps, protest camps, shantytowns, military camps and forts, internment camps, company towns (including ancient Egyptian workers villages), and refugee camps. The only kind of settlements where we could not confirm or discomfirm the presence of neighborhoods was disaster camps.  See : Neighborhoods in semi-urban settlements (2011).

So, if neighborhoods really are urban universals, why is that the case? In our 2015 article, we give two types of answers: ultimate causes, and proximate causes. These concepts, borrowed from evolutionary biology, refer to the deep underlying causes of social phenomena (the "ultimate" causes) and to the basic day-to-day reasons for their formation ("proximate" causes). The underlying, ultimate cause of neighborhood formation is that people in cities need, or want, to live their lives on a smaller scale than the entire city. Some studies suggest that this is caused by constraints on human memory; one can only recall so many people, and effective social networks cannot be too large. Other studies suggest that living in cities causes social stress, and neighborhood organization is a way of relieving that stress.

It is interesting to note that neighborhoods can form in two very different ways. The most common path throughout history was the bottom-up approach. People living in an area interact with those around them (their neighbors), and eventually clusters or people, or communities, develop on their own out of the day-to-day actions of people. But in some cases, city or government authorities create neighborhoods. They organize cities from the top down, and people move into ready-made neighborhoods.

In our paper we identify the following proximate causes of neighborhoods: For bottom-up neighborhoods, simple sociality--interacting with your neighbors-- is the primary cause of neighborhood formation. Group preservation and defense also contribute to neighborhood formation in some cases. For top-down neighborhoods, established by authorities, the most common proximate causes are administration (the need to administer the residents) and control/surveillance. Sociality is a secondary consideration; if not present from the start, it quickly develops once people start living in their pre-made neighborhoods.

REFERENCES

 Arnauld, Marie Charlotte, Linda R. Manzanilla, and Michael E. Smith (editors)
2012    The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial Unit in Mesoamerican Cities. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.



Hakim, Besim S.
2007    Generative Processes for Revitalizing Historic Towns or Heritage Districts. Urban Design International 12: 87-99.

Lemonnier, Eva
2011    Des quartiers chez les Mayas à l'époque classique? Journal de la Sociéte des Américanistes 97 (1): 7-50.

2012    Neighborhoods in Classic Lowland Maya Societies: Identification and Definition from the La Joyanca Case Study (Northwestern Peten, Guatemala). In The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial Unit in Mesoamerican Cities, edited by Marie Charlotte Arnauld, Linda R. Manzanilla, and Michael E. Smith, pp. 181-201. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Marcus, Abraham
1989    The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century. Columbia University Press, New York.

Sampson, Robert J.
2012    Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Smith, Michael E.
2010    The Archaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29 (2): 137-154.

2011    Classic Maya Settlement Clusters as Urban Neighborhoods: A Comparative Perspective on Low-Density Urbanism. Journal de la Société des Américanistes 97 (1): 51-73.

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.

"Neighborhood has always mattered"

This is the title of a column in today's Boston Globe by Carlo Rotella. The column talks about how and why neighborhoods are important in today's cities, based partly on the author's experience and partly on Robert Sampson's book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. He also makes the point that neighborhoods are an urban universal, citing my work.

Neighborhoods clearly do matter, for many reasons. Whether you live in an idyllic tree-lined middle-class neighborhood in a U.S. city, or in a dirty and crowded shantytown slum in an African city, your neighborhood helps shape your experiences. It also contributes greatly to the nature and quality of your city.

Check out our current article,

Smith, Michael E., Ashley Engquist, Cinthia Carvajal, Katrina Johnston, Amanda Young, Monica Algara, Yui Kuznetsov and Bridgette Gilliland  (2014)  Neighborhood Formation in Semi-Urban Settlements. Journal of Urbanism 7 (published online).

Why are neighborhoods important?

Historical (Tokugawa) Japanese neighborhood

Why are neighborhoods important? There are many reasons, and many answers to this question. I recently read an interesting article by John McKnight, of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute. The article is called "Neighborhood Necessities: Seven Functions that Only Effectivley Organized Neighborhoods can Provide" (McKnight 2013). McKnight begins with the observation that today many institutions that are used by people in cities are cutting back--government, not-for-profit organizations, schools, medical systems, human servic organizations, businesses. He says that "The functional space they no longer occupy creates either a crisis or an opportunity."


He continues, "The opportunity is there if we recognize that during recent generations, institutions have often taken over functions once performed by local communities, neighbors, and their collective groups and associations. Medicine has claimed our health. Police have claimed our safety. Schools have claimed the raising of our children. Social services have claimed the provision of care. And corporations have claimed that everything we need can be bought."

My (sprawling) neighborhood

McKnight wants neighborhoods to take back a greater share of these activities and functions, to return control of key aspects of life and society to neighborhoods and communities. This idea is developed at greater length in his book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, co-authored with Peter Block (McKnight and Block 2010). There is a nice website of the same name. I am reading the book now. While some of the arguments sound idealistic and even romantic, I think the authors have seized on key dimensions urban neighborhoods, and why they have been important from the earliest cities to the present.

Returning the McKnight's article, here are the "Seven functions that only effectively organized neighborhoods can provide":

• Health. "Our neighborhoods are the primary source of our health." It is well known that longevity and many ailments are improved by strong social support networks, and neighborhoods can and should provide those networks.

  

  Neighborhood in Bungamati, Nepal

• Safety. Safety is a local issue, and two of its major determinants are the number of neighbors one knows by name and the extent to which people are present and interacting in the public space near home. McKnight is drawing on both Jane Jacobs (her  stress on "eyes on the street") and Robert Sampson (whose relevant concept is "collective efficacy"), two of the top experts on urban neighborhoods. See Jacobs (1961) and Sampson (2012).
• Environment and resources. Vibrant neighborhoods contribute to resource conservation in many ways.
• A resilient economy. Most businesses begin locally, and neighbors are the most reliable source of jobs and information about jobs. Local economic activity contributes to successful neighborhoods, and active neighborhoods stimulate local economies.
• Local food. The local food movement is just one manifestation of the positive association between neighborhoods and the production and distribution of food.
• Socialization and raising children. McKnight invokes the phrase, "It takes a village to raise a child" and encourages the involvement of neighbors in the collective raising and training of children.
• Care-giving. "Our institutions can offer only service, not care. We cannot purchase care." True care is what neighbors and community members provide for one another, not what paid professional dispense from distant locations.

While I find the historical component of these arguments in McKnight and  Block (2010) less than fully convincing, I do think that the basic message is on-target. Neighborhoods are so important that they exist and have existed in every know city that has ever existed on the earth. Sometimes authorities plan and create neighborhoods, but more often neighborhoods are generated by the normal, everyday actions of ordinary people. The question of how and why neighborhoods are so important has occupied many of the top urban thinkers, yet there is still much to learn. I think John McKnight and Peter Block have identified some of the key reasons for the social importance of modern neighborhoods. Their work is well worth reading.

Modern and premodern neighborhoods

Jacobs, Jane  (1961)  The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, New York.

McKnight, John  (2013)  Neighborhood Necessities: Seven Functions that Only Effectively Organized Neighborhoods Can Provide. National Civic Review 102(3):22-24.

McKnight, John and Peter Block  (2010)  The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco.


Sampson, Robert J.  (2012)  Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

One idea to improve neighborhoods

What are universal urban features?

1.Walled neighborhoods in Chang'an

What characteristics are shared by all cities, from the earliest to today, and around the world? Many of the features shared by all cities are not exclusive to cities or urban settlements. Things like housing, big buildings, wide streets, or social diversity are often found in villages and other non-urban settlements. Three features of cities seem to be true universals. By this I mean features that (1) are found in all known cities; (2) are often absent in non-urban settlements; and (3) have a major impact on life in cities. These three features are neighborhoods, urban services, and elites. There may be others that I haven't considered; let me know if you have ideas for non-trivial urban universals.

2. Neighborhoods (clusters) at La Joyanca

(1) Neighborhoods

For years I've been telling my classes that neighborhoods are one of the few urban universals. Figure 1 here shows the walled neighborhoods at the Chinese Tang city of Chang'an. Recent research of our urban group here at Arizona State University, has been targeting the neighborhood at cities through time. Archaeologists have woken up to the importance of urban neighborhoods, and this has become an active area of fieldwork and analysis; see the new book, The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial unit in Mesoamerican Cities. The clusters of houses at Classic Maya sites were neighborhoods; figure 2 here shows one example, the city of La Joyanca (from the chapter by Eva Lemmonier) Even semi-urban settlements have neighborhoods - see my post on this.

3. Bhaktapur neighborhood plaza

4. Model of a Bkaktapur shrine

Neighborhoods are often focused on key features such as a plaza, a water-source, or a temple. In the Nepalese city of Bhaktapur, for example, neighborhoods are formed around open plazas, often with water sources (fig.3). In addition, each neighborhood has one or more shrines. Our urban project has a small exhibit in the Museum of Anthropology at ASU, and the museum folks created a nice model of one of the Bhaktapur neighborhood shrines (fig. 4). Central features like this give neighborhoods a central focus for people to gather and interact on a daily basis.

(2) Urban Services

The next research project of our urban group is a study of urban services in premodern cities. In background reading for this project it occurred to me that urban services are another urban universal. When people live together in cities, they cannot take care of all of their basic social needs in the same way that rural people in villages can, and they also take on new needs that must be met in the city. Someone has to provide basic services, which include infrastructure (water, roads), education, commercial outlets, ritual, and places to gather. In modern cities, governments provide most of the urban services, but in medieval cities many services came from guilds, church groups, and private citizens. How does this work in premodern cities? And how are services affected by elites and inequalities? These are the basic questions we will be studying over the next few years. I will talk about our project in a future post (click here for some preliminary information). For now, I will just mention some basic services and how they intersect with neighborhoods.

5. Neighborhood temple in Calixtlahuaca

We are studying urban services through their facilities -- the places where they are provided. For the comparative study we have singled out three services that occur in most cities: markets/shops; temples; and assembly spaces. The small plazas and shrines of Bhaktapur are examples of neighborhood-level services in that city. Neighborhood-level service facilities can be widely distributed in cities, and typically there are many of them. But cities also have higher-level service facilities - that is, facilities that are larger and serve more people, and there are fewer of these features. Thus in Mesoamerican cities, there are often many small temples, distributed around the city (fig. 5), while there are only a few large central temples (fig. 6).

6. High-order temple at Palenque

7. Central plaza at Copan

Also, many cities have numerous small neighborhood plazas (fig. 3), but only one or two large, central plazas (fig. 7). For more information on our upcoming study of premodern urban services, click here.

(3) Elites

8. Medieval noble and beggar

My third candidate for an urban universal is elites. My claim is that in any society that has both cities and elites (that is, most complex, state-level societies), some or all of the elites will live in the city. There may also be rural-based elites, or elites who maintain multiple residences, but some elites will live in the city, and they will exert an influence over the lives of the non-elites. This is important, because in ancient societies, typically 5% or less of the population were in the elite class, and the small number of elite families had a disproportionate influence on urban life in cities. This claim also applies to modern cities, although the system of inequality and elites is radically different in contemporary western societies compared to premodern societies.

9. Elite and commoner house at Cuexcomate

Exactly how did urban elites influence city life in the past? There is probably variation among cities and areas, and this is one question we will investigate in our project. One very preliminary finding, from a small sample of cities, suggests that elite residences had better access to service facilities than commoner houses (surprise, surprise). But commoners living in the same neighborhoods as those elite residences had no advantages (in the distance they had to walk to get services).

While elites played important roles in ancient cities and societies, there has been surprisingly little comparative research on elites around the globe. Archaeologists usually identify elites by the size of their houses (fig. 9), and as the excavation and analysis of houses moves forward around the globe, we will learn more about ancient elites and their roles in cities.

Are there other urban universals beyond neighborhoods, urban services, and elites? Let me know if you have any suggestions. There is still a lot to learn about cities throughout history in the wide, urban world.

Archaeology and pink flamingos in Chicago neighborhoods

I just received Robert Sampson's new book on Chicago neighborhoods in the mail, and it got me thinking about some student archaeology projects in Chicago that I supervised years ago. Sampson's book synthesizes many years of research and technical publications, and it looks great. He argues for the importance of urban neighborhoods in understanding cities, poverty, crime, and urban life. Not only is Sampson one of the most prominent urban sociologists, but he also writes well. I'll blog about it here once I've had a chance to read the book. It is published by the University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Chicago is a great city for its distinctive neighborhoods, many based on variation in ethnicity, national origin, wealth, and social class. My first teaching position was at Loyola University of Chicago, and for a couple of years I sent students out to do research on modern material culture in Chicago. The students did the kind of research archaeologists normally do, but addressed at modern Chicago, not at ancient sites.

For example, archaeologists often compare different contexts (neighborhoods, or houses, or settlements) in terms of the kinds of material objects each had. These could be portable artifacts, or buildings or architectural spaces. We use the differences in artifacts between contexts to make inferences about social differences in the past. But do wealthy and poor neighborhoods really differ in their material remains? Archaeologists rely on knowledge of modern and recent contexts to generate analogies (formal comparisons) to interpret the past. We study these issues in modern contexts where we know both the material remains and their social significance, and then we apply that knowledge to the past. While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that rich and poor neighborhoods look different in their housing, their streets, and innumerable material measures, it is still useful to have firm data about how these relationships between artifacts and society work today, so that we can make better inferences about the distant past.

I wish I had kept better records about the student projects. I recall two projects where students selected an upper middle class neighborhood and a working class neighborhood and compared them systematically. One student was an ardent cyclist, and her project focused on bicycles parked at high schools in the two neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, one could predict the neighborhood on the basis of the types of bikes found at the schools. Another student, interested in gardening, looked at landscaping--the kinds of trees and bushes planted in the two neighborhoods (both in yards, and in public spaces). Again, the differences were clear. Actually, Robert Sampson carried out some generally similar research as part of his studies of Chicago neighborhoods, recording information about building types, trash in public places, graffiti, types of stores, and other observable traits of the urban build environment. He related those data to information on poverty, crime and social dynamics in various neighborhoods. Maybe he should be an archaeologist! If he ever gets tired of sociology, we can find things for him to do......

Another project I recall was done by a student who had a job working in the field house of a large public park. She rented out sports equipment and did other tasks relating to use of the park for sports activities. But in addition to the regular legal use of the park, there were quite a few unofficial, informal, and illegal activities going on. She did an archaeological survey, noting the presence and types of artifacts on the ground surface in different parts of the park (this was a survey WITHOUT artifact pick-up!). It turns out that the various informal activities were divided into separate areas, all out of sight behind vegetation and other features. Lovers used one part of the park (as evidenced by small foil packages), winos were in another area (bottles), and the junkies used a third place (needles). One issue in the use of space (in both modern and ancient cities) is whether activities are separated into specialized places, or whether they share common spaces, perhaps at different times. This project was called something like "Illicit activities in a Chicago city park."

My favorite student project on Chicago material culture was a test of the hypothesis that lawn ornaments were associated with ethnicity. If you asked people in Chicago about who tended to have lots of lawn ornaments -- pink flamingos, blue balls, jockeys holding lanterns, upturned bathtubs with shrines -- the most common answer was that the Polish people had lots of ornaments. But the Poles said that the Italians or Mexicans were the ones with lots of junk on their lawns. The basic local story was that lawn ornamentation was associated with ethnicity. The student had seen a neighborhood where lots of houses had lots of lawn ornaments, so she set out to see if these were associated with a particular ethnic group. She got a list of names and addresses in this neighborhood (from a Democratic party worker), and used surname as a measure of ethnicity for each household. This was obviously a rough measure, but good enough for a student term paper. She also counted the lawn ornaments on each lawn, and made a map of the neighborhood showing the distribution of the numbers of ornaments (this student went on go get a Ph.D. in archaeology).

It turns out that the number of ornaments had nothing to do with ethnicity (in this neighborhood, at least). There was a hot spot on one street -- two houses, diagonally across from one another, had far more ornaments than anybody else. These two homeowners were in competition with one another, and they both went bonkers with more than 100 things in their front yards. But they clearly had an effect on their neighbors, because most yards on that one street had far more ornaments than elsewhere in the area. In fact, the map showed a steady decline in the frequency of ornaments as one moved away from the two top houses (a nice distance decay distribution, to be technical). So, in this one Chicago neighborhood, ethnicity had nothing to do with the frequency (or type) of lawn ornaments. Instead, two homeowners went nuts competing with one another for the gaudiest yard, and their neighbors joined in and put lots of things in their yards too.


So in this case, archaeological methods of studying the spatial and quantitative distributions of artifacts yielded information about modern society in Chicago. While archaeologists more commonly use insights from modern cities to interpret ancient cities, in this case archaeological methods from ancient cities contributed to our knowledge of modern cities. Research on past and present cities can be a two-way street.

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 .

Race, ethnicity, social class: Are most urban neighborhoods homogeneous or heterogeneous?

Many modern cities are segregated by race, class, or other parameters, and mixed neighborhoods seem rare. Most people believe that this is not a good situation, for many reasons. Much effort is devoted to trying to reduce the degree of segregation, and there is much research about how to do this. Some writers suggest that in the distant urban past, there were more mixed neighborhoods, and homogeneous neighborhoods are a modern phenomena. Others suggest that traditional cities always had neighborhoods organized by ethnicity or class or occupation. What is the truth here? What do we know about the extent of social clustering in premodern and nonwestern cities? When people who are alike cluster in neighborhoods, is this because they prefer this arrangement and make decisions to bring it about? Or are they forcibly clustered into ghettos, and then prevented from moving by laws and other top-down practices? Or perhaps such patterns arise as byproducts of other actions and decisions? If we study these things for premodern cities, can we derive any lessons for modern urbanism?

These are some of the questions that motivate a research project I am involved in called "Urban organization through the ages: Neighborhoods, open spaces, and urban life." It is part of a series of transdisciplinary research projects at Arizona State University called "Late Lessons from Early History." One of whose goals of this program is to make comparisons between modern and past societies and try to draw lessons for modern society. If you have followed this blog, you will know one of my main purposes here is to explore connections and comparisons between premodern and modern cities. Not only do I write about both modern and ancient cities, but I often compare them or use examples from both categories to make a point.

Our research project has six principle investigators, representing the disciplines of anthropological archaeology (yours truly), sociology, geography, and political science.Our first joint article was published over the summer:

York, Abigail, Michael E. Smith, Benjamin Stanley, Barbara L. Stark, Juliana Novic, Sharon L. Harlan, George L. Cowgill, and Christopher Boone  (2011)   Ethnic and Class-Based Clustering Through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Urban Social Patterns. Urban Studies 48(11):2399-2415.

I'd like to be able to say that we have solved the historical puzzles of urban social clustering and segregation, but alas, we have only made a modest contribution. We describe our transdisciplinary and comparative approach to the problem; we discuss a number of drivers or forces that contribute to social clustering at the neighborhood level, and we give a few examples of how these have played out in different historical and geographical settings. We use the term "clustering" because the word "segregation" has considerable baggage in modern parlance, with implications that limit its application to premodern cities. There was ethnic clustering in many premodern cities, for example, but the dynamics were quite different from modern racial segregation. Clustering is a  more neutral term, better for comparative analysis.

One of our conclusions is that there was no single "traditional" form of social clustering. Many writers over the years have assumed that modern western cities developed out of a prior pattern of traditional cities (sometimes traditional means seems to mean medieval, sometimes early modern, sometimes Classical Greece or Rome). If we can understand the traditional situation and how it changed with modernization, this will help us understand modern cities. But there was never any single "traditional" pattern.

Another conclusion is that patterns of social clustering vary greatly, both within and between urban traditions. There is no such thing as a "typical" medieval European urban pattern; some medieval cities had homogeneous neighborhoods, some had mixed neighborhoods. There was no typical "Aztec" pattern or "Islamic" or "Chinese" pattern. Cities varied in their neighborhood organization within cultures or within urban traditions.

And a third conclusion of our paper is that there are many causes or drivers of clustering, and in any given city several of these are likely to play a role. We organize them into four broad categories, each of which has several individual drivers:

1. Macro-structural forces (capitalism, globalization, etc.)
2. The state (laws, policies, actions of governments)
3. Local regimes and institutions (real estate markets, zoning, local elites)
4. Bottom-up processes (individual choice, chain migration, neighborhood self-regulation).

Our next job is to refine our scheme and apply it to a greater number and range of case studies, with more systematic and in-depth analysis. Stay tuned.

Evolutionary biology and cooperation in urban neighborhoods

Binghamton, NY

I have just come across some current research by evolutionary biologists and anthropologists on social life and cooperation in urban neighborhoods. I first ran into the Binghamton Neighborhood Project: Science-Based Solutions to Real-World Problems in Our Community  by accident on the internet. This seems at first a strange project: the website mostly talks about community involvement issues: liveable communities, designing parks, relations with city hall and the like. But on their publications page, the articles consist of applications of evolutionary biology to neighborhood organization. David Sloan Wilson, a prominent biologist at Binghamton, is the author of some of the papers. Here are some examples: 

O'Brien, Daniel Tumminelli
2009    Sociality in the City: Using Biological Principles to Explore the Relationship Between High Population Density and Social Behavior. In Advances in Sociology Research, edited by Jared A. Jaworski, pp. 1-14, vol. 8. Nova Science Publishers.  http://bnp.binghamton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/OBrien-2010-Sociality-and-the-City-Proofs.pdf.

Wilson, David Sloan and Daniel Tumminelli O’Brien
2009    Evolutionary Theory and Cooperation in Everyday Life. In Games, Groups, and the Global Good, edited by Simon A. Levin, pp. 155-168. Springer, New York.

Wilson, David Sloan, Daniel Tumminelli O'Brien, and Artura Sesma
2009    Human Prosociality from an Evolutionary Perspective: Variation and Correlations at a City-Wide Scale. Evolution and Human Behavior 30(3):190-200.

Low income housing in Newcastle

Next, I found an ad for a talk at Binghamton in April 2011, by evolutionary anthropologist Daniel Nettle (of Newcastle University, UK), on a similar topic: "The Tyneside Neighbournood Project: Investigating the Behavioural Ecology of a British City." I rooted around a bit to see if Nettle had published his work, but this is a current project that hasn't come out yet in print. But, Nettle's talk was recorded, and is available on the internet here. 

This is a fascinating talk. Nettle works in the field of behavioral ecology and evolutionary anthropology, and he applies these perspectives to differences in cooperation and social life in two neighborhoods in Newcastle. He describes the settings (a poor and a wealthy neighborhood) and investigates how three methodological approaches to cooperation and social behavior relate to one another: economic games, social capital surveys, and observation of behavior.

I have not read the Binghamton papers yet, but Nettle has got me thinking about how research on cooperation (one of the BIG TOPICS in both the social and biological sciences right now) relates to urban neighborhoods. What can neighborhoods tell us about human processes of cooperation? And what can cooperation within neighborhoods tell us about the Wide Urban World?

Do all cities have neighborhoods?

It's hard to imagine a modern city that does not have neighborhoods. What would residential areas in such a city look like? Is this even possible? Given the prominence of neighborhoods in social science research on life in cities today, I would guess that all modern cities do have neighborhoods. If a sociologist or planner, for example, identified a city that lacked neighborhoods, I'm sure they would study the situation and publicize it for being so strange.

For premodern cities whose housing and living conditions are described in historical documents, all or nearly all published examples have neighborhood organization (I haven't found a neighborhood-less city yet, and I haven't given up searching yet). As for cities only knowable through archaeology, my own specialty, neighborhoods are more difficult to identify but some progress is being made (Smith 2010). It seems that any time an archaeologist decides to look into housing and residential zones at an ancient city, the result is the identification of neighborhoods. My article on this is posted here.

What do I mean by neighborhood?  These are the working definitions I used in the article:

• "A neighborhood is a residential zone that has considerable face to face interaction and is distinctive on the basis of physical and/or social characteristics" (Smith 2010:139).
• "A district is a residential zone that has some kind of administrative or social identity within a city." (p. 140)

In the article I give some examples of premodern and nonwestern cities that have numerous small neighborhoods and a smaller number of (larger) administrative districts. The Hindu city of Bhaktapur in Nepal is an example (see Smith 2010 for details and citations). Although it may be difficult to distinguish neighborhoods and districts empirically, these concepts are important because they point to two of the major kinds of social dynamics that define and shape neighborhoods. On the one hand are bottom-up processes arising from social interaction among neighbors, and on the other are top-down processes of administration and control by city or state authorities. Much of what happens in urban neighborhoods is a result of the interaction of these bottom-up and top-down processes within a given built environment.

So far, we are batting 1,000. Whether one looks at modern cities, historically documented premodern cities, or archaeologically excavated ancient cities, all have neighborhood organization. But that's not all. Some large village settlements (e.g., prehistoric pueblo socieites in the U.S. Southwest) are divided into housing clusters or zones that resemble neighborhoods. And rapidly urbanizing sites, such as squatters settlements in the developing world, tend to have neighborhood organization. Even Black Rock City, the temporary city that is the site of the Burning Man festival each year, has neighborhood organization (generated by both bottom-up and top-down forces).

If neighborhoods are truly a universal aspect of urban organization, two questions are worth exploring: (1) why is this the case? and (2) what are the implications for modern cities and urban policy? Stay tuned, we don't have the answers yet. In the meantime, you can find out about a transdisciplinary research project on urban neighborhoods and open spaces.


References:

Smith, M. (2010). The archaeological study of neighborhoods and districts in ancient cities Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 29 (2), 137-154 DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2010.01.001

Mark Twain on the urban villages of London

The newly published autobiography of Mark Twain contains this gem of a description of London in 1896:

One little wee bunch of houses in London, one little wee spot, is the centre of the globe, the heart of the globe, and the machinery that moves the world is located there. It is called the City, and it, with a patch of its borderland, is a city. But the rest of London is not a city. It is fifty villages massed solidly together over a vast stretch of territory. Each village has its own name and its own government. Its ways are village ways, and the great body of its inhabitants are just villagers, and have the simple, honest, untraveled, unworldly look of villagers. Its shops are village shops; little cramped places where you can buy an anvil or paper of pins, or anything between; but you can’t buy two anvils, nor five papers of pins, nor seven white cravats, nor two hats of the same breed, because they do not keep such gross masses in stock. The shopman will not offer to get the things and send them to you, but will tell you where he thinks you may possibly find them. And he is not brusque and fussy and unpleasant, like a city person, but takes the simple and kindly interest of a villager in the matter, and will discuss it as long as you please. They have no hateful city ways, and indeed no ways that suggest that they have ever lived in a city.

       -- Mark Twain  (2010)  Autobiography of Mark Twain, volume 1. University of California Press, Berkeley, page 108.

The metaphor of "urban villages" has been common in urban studies for some time, from the classic Boston ethnography of Herbert Gans (1962) through some of the recent new urbanist planning literature (Neal 2003) to contemporary research on Chinese urbanization (Hao et al. 2011).Writers often seem surprised to find that neighborhoods in big cities are like villages, but that surprise derives from the sterotypical western view of the urban way of life (Wirth 1938). In fact, neighborhoods are one of the few universal features of cities (Smith 2010), and the social dynamics of urban neighborhoods often parallel the social dynamics of villages. Life is lived at a social and spatial scale much smaller than the entire city; people often know their neighbors and cooperate in various ways. Urban villagers may have rural-like customs and practices, or rural-like cultural values (as noted by Twain).

One reason for the existence of urban villages is the role of migration in the formation and maintenance of neighborhoods. Premodern cities were demographic sinks, with high mortality rates. Neighborhoods often formed, and were maintained, by migration from a particular rural area, giving them both a rural complexion and a social or cultural distinctiveness. And migrants often maintained social relations with their relatives in the countryside.

Of course modern inner-city neighborhoods often depart from the "urban village" model, as research by Robert Sampson and other sociologists shows. But it turns out that there is a remarkable continuity in the presence and locations of the poorest neighborhoods from Twain's London until the present. Charles Booth's social maps of London in 1898 are surprisingly similar to such maps compiled today. This figure, first published in The Economist (May 4, 2006) is reproduced from Sampson (2009). Perhaps London's poorer neighborhoods today are less like "villages" than they were in the days of Twain and Booth, but some of the basic neighborhood structure has endured for more than a century. I wonder what Mark Twain would make of modern London (or Hannibal, Missouri, for that matter).

Thanks to Seven Tomek for bringing the Mark Twain quote to my attention.

References:

Gans, Herbert J.
1962    The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. The Free Press, New York.

Hao, Pu, Richard Sliuzas, and Stan Geertman
2011    The Development and Redevelopment of Urban Villages in Shenzhen. Habitat International. In Press, corrected proof available online.

Neal, Peter (editor)
2003    Urban Villages and the Making of Communities. Spon Press, London.

Sampson, Robert J.
2009    Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: Social (Dis)Order Revisited. British Journal of Sociology 60:1-31.

Smith, Michael E.
2010    The Archaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29(2):137-154.

Wirth, Louis
1938    Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44:1-24.