A New Emphasis for Neighborhood Research

Abstract

Levels of Neighborly Interaction. The thesis of this paper is that the study of neighborly interaction on a person to person level is essential to the understanding of the modern neighborhood. The traditional view that families are the units of neighborly interaction' has so dominated thinking in the field that we have almost no precise knowledge of the way in which residential location conditions the social relations of individual neighbors.2 Yet it is obvious that neighbors individually create and participate in networks of relationships with members of neighbor families. In the writer's view, a new orientation which will emphasize rather than obscure such person to person interaction is the primary need of research today. While the idea of studying social relations among individual neighbors is a departure from traditional orientations, it is new only in carrying to a logical conclusion the implications of generalizations commonly made about neighborly relations, and in stressing a detailed type of analysis which has become increasingly popular during the last decade. Two generalizations clearly implying a need for the study of person to person relations among neighbors may be mentioned: first, that in the city, the neighborhood tends to disappear; and second, that in urban residential areas children are the neighbors (i.e., best acquainted locally, and most thoroughly enmeshed in local relationships) of all family members, while mothers are next best, and other family members decidedly worse as neighbors.4 In the first of these statements, what is meant by neighborhood is a residential grouping of families, members of which are mutually acquainted and stand in a cooperative relation to each other. Even though such neighborhoods become attenuated in cities-and that they do seems abundantly