Keith Hampton, a dear friend and colleague, just put together a site called i-neighbors. Keith is a sociologist interested in neighborhood communities (and their online equivalent) and this site is dedicated to supporting physical neighborhoods in the States and Canada.
Signing up for the site made me contemplate what it means to be in a neighborhood. I live near Folsom and 24th in San Francisco. I firmly identify as living in the Mission. My version of the Mission is quite a bit different than the one inhabited by my friends who live at Guerrero and Liberty, but we both identify as Mission residents. There are gangs in my neighborhood. The cut-off appears to be 21st. Do the two different gangs both identify as living in the same neighborhood? What about my Mexican neighbors – do they identify with the shi-shi folks on Liberty? My neighbors are obsessed with our block and keeping the meth addicts, homeless drunks and gun shots far away.
What constitutes a neighborhood in a city? How does class, race, religion and ethnicity play a part? Do i really live in a neighborhood bounded by zipcode or is my neighborhood also bounded by education level and transience? Of course, i’m guessing that this is exactly the boundary that Keith wants to tear down.
“Tear down boundaries” is probably too strong and unsubtle a concept.
Re-inforcing strong ties, strengthening weak ties, and facilitating overlap and connectors, is a more nuanced description.
Intellectuals/bohemians play a role as ourselves — we’ve been living in borderline/gentrifying neighborhoods since the beginning of modernity.
Tracking Genetic Command Line Umbrellas
Settling back into the cornfields… Billboards and window displays can track you! Genetic Art – A Brief History and Application to Immersive Narrative Automate Webcam Snapshots from the Command Line Umbrellas in the Net i-neighbors: “a FREE online co…
Thinking local
I’m sitting here in Gramd Haven, MI – thinking abotu how cyberspace needs ot hit meatspace. MeetUp does it well and so does Dodgeball, but when I hear about new services like StepUp.com – I get real excited. The UPS store is across the street – and I s…
neighborhoods are tricky. here in oakland, the boundaries are rather blurry and have different meanings and physical boundaries that differ by person. craigslist posts can specify neighborhood but allow users to define them are a good example of this. the boundaries of lake merritt/grand can be quite fluid. a city planner (chapple) at UCB had a class project on neighborhoods that shows how space is “configured” and the demogs of who/what is there, individually & organizationally. I like your neighborhood…it evokes besson’s vision of nyc in lon.
neighborhoods are tricky. here in oakland, the boundaries are rather blurry and have different meanings and physical boundaries that differ by person. craigslist posts can specify neighborhood but allow users to define them are a good example of this. the boundaries of lake merritt/grand can be quite fluid. a city planner (chapple) at UCB had a class project on neighborhoods that shows how space is “configured” and the demogs of who/what is there, individually & organizationally. I like your neighborhood…it evokes besson’s vision of nyc in lon.
(I’m one of the friends living on Liberty St.)
I generally tell people I live in Mission/Dolores, or “near Dolores Park”, or something like that. I feel a bit weird saying I live in the Mission, since it feels like a very different place. Valencia St seems to be a dividing line, containing both cheap tacquerias and expensive restaurants. On my side, you’ve got much nicer apartments, and a different flavor.
It feels like the biggest differences are socioeconomic and racial. I think that distinction became a lot more noticeable in that neighborhood during the dot-com boom, when a lot of it got gentrified.
What I think makes up a neighborhood is where a group of people have some shared identity, and think of each other as neighbors. I’m guessing that happens much more easily when your neighbors are of a similar socioeconomic strata, so you get neighborhoods carved up more when pockets of gentrification occur.
(though I am moving to Seattle in a couple weeks), I’ve lived about 10 blocks west, at 24th and Noe, which is Noe Valley, i.e., by all acounts, not the Mission and not Mission/Dolores. But, especially walking between them, the boundary between these 2-3 neighborhoods has usually seemed relative to whether one wants/needs to see them, plus also relative to one’s specific “center”.
I see neighborhood identity being significantly given bounds through external pressures, e.g., from city halls declaring zones and allocating funds and civic services, or from mass property developments. Even the architecture from one street to another–how the buildings allow people to congregate or not.
But, I think individuals and groups within a geographic area share their concept of a neighborhood around civic places that they use together, and around which they live: the church, the plaza, the stores, the bars, etc.
The Mission has a couple truly great streets that the neighborhood obviously centers on. I think one says they live in the Mission when one or more of those are “their” streets. But, some big differences appear when you get down to exactly which of these streets are whose–and, since when, and even, whose streets they are *not*.
i-neighbors
Keith Hampton, a dear friend and colleague, just put together a site called i-neighbors. Keith is a sociologist interested in neighborhood communities (and their online equivalent) and this site is dedicated to supporting physical neighborhoods in the …
i-neighbors
Keith Hampton, a dear friend and colleague, just put together a site called i-neighbors. Keith is a sociologist interested in neighborhood communities (and their online equivalent) and this site is dedicated to supporting physical neighborhoods in the …
Good catch, danah, I just signed up and created a couple of neighborhoods in Ann Arbor.
Who are the people in your neighborhood? They’re the people that you meet when you’re walking down the street each day. (Fred Rogers)
Being Hispanic and living in a mini-barrio,”Little Mexico” ,in snooty Scottsdale,AZ,I have to say yes the gangs do consider themselves living in diff. neighborhoods. They(gangs) will only see it as their zone,the area itself and the people living there are really immaterial. Yes,they care about their families and friends but entering a gang,they basically follow a doctrine that the gang is their family(usually they come from alienated/broken families anyway).
As to the chi-chi “gringos”,well live and let live usually applies but the gangs will focus more on each other since they are more dangerous to each other. Once drugs get involved,robberies, destruction will occur,depending on opportunities(leaving doors open,nice cars in the open,etc).
As to creating neighborhoods and what divides one from another-go with housing/rental costs,everythings else derives from it.
Having lived in a bunch of cities, I would say that the vibe and flavor can change more across the same “neighborhood” or district in San Francisco than in some other cities, save maybe New York or Boston/Cambridge. Maybe.
20th and Valencia is indeed quite different from your 24th and Folsom, which is is quite different from a 14th and Valencia. In the case of Lower Haight, Haight and Pierce is also quite different from Noe and Duboce, and hairsplitters will call it different neighborhoods.
What I find interesting is where differences across the same neighborhood starts to prompt new names for that part of the neighborhood. When I moved to SF in 99, there was barely such a thing called “Duboce Triangle”, and the want for that neighborhood is what really solidified it as a real and distinct part of town, separate from LowerHaight and the Castro.
Just a note, the site is slowing down / timing out on some operations, don’t know if the burst of early pre-release activity caught them off guard.
Brookline i-neighborhood
Thanks to a recommendation by danah boyd, I’ve created an i-neighborhood for Brookline. The i-neighborhood site is an interesting experiment in adding a virtual layer to existing real world neighborhoods. (There’s an interesting discussion of the natur…
Brookline i-neighborhood
Thanks to a recommendation by danah boyd, I’ve created an i-neighborhood for Brookline. The i-neighborhood site is an interesting experiment in adding a virtual layer to existing real world neighborhoods. (There’s an interesting discussion of the natur…
I’ll take my moment to reccomend Rick Grannis’ “Trivial Streets” [The American Journal of Sociology [AJS], 103(6), 1530 – 64], which argues that “racial similarity along neighborhoods emerges primarily from their relational connections via tertiary streets rather than as a result of geographical proximity.” That is, people seem to think of connections between neighborhoods in terms of small streets; big streets *break* them. (Therefore, it might be more proper to describe yourself as “north of Mission, on 22” …)
New geosocial networking site aims to put neighbours in touch
MIT’s Keith Hampton launches i-neighbours for the US and Canada.
I’ll take my moment to reccomend Rick Grannis’ “Trivial Streets” [The American Journal of Sociology [AJS], 103(6), 1530 – 64], which argues that “racial similarity along neighborhoods emerges primarily from their relational connections via tertiary streets rather than as a result of geographical proximity.” That is, people seem to think of connections between neighborhoods in terms of small streets; big streets *break* them. (Therefore, it might be more proper to describe yourself as “north of Mission, on 22” …)
just checked out i-neighbors and it seems pretty neat. however (forgive my denseness) what is the difference between this and an open yahoo group?
thanks!
you’ve got i-neighbors!
Since it was all over the blogs last month, I made an i-neighborhood for my p-neighborhood. It was a pretty lonely place, but at least worth a try to see who would show up. I probably would have forgotten about…
Tracking Genetic Command Line Umbrellas
Settling back into the cornfields… Billboards and window displays can track you! Genetic Art – A Brief History and Application to Immersive Narrative Automate Webcam Snapshots from the Command Line Umbrellas in the Net i-neighbors: “a FREE online co…