The Neighborhood

Overview: Neighborhoods make up the patchwork quilt of human settlement. They express the values and culture and define the way we live and work together. Like biotic communities in the natural world, they form the complex patterns that we make upon the land. Some neighborhoods began as planned developments or subdivisions while others gradually evolved. Physical barriers such as hills, bodies of water and transportation corridors make effective neighborhood boundaries. But the strongest boundaries are often invisible social and economic forces that define neighborhoods by race, ethnicity, lifestyle and economic class. Poor urban ghettos trap people within. People yearn to live in real communities again, although most of us have no memory of what they were like. Modern planners who subscribe to the “new urbanist” movement are promoting the type of neighborhoods that existed in this country prior to the 1920s, before the automobile drastically altered the way we live. Their ideal neighborhoods include houses with front porches (but no lawns), old-fashioned alleys, narrow streets, low-rent apartments over garages, lots of parks and the whole spectrum of human activities within walking or bicycling distance.

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Format: HTML | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 1