Neighbourhood - Sociology

Sociology

Neighbourhoods have several advantages as areas for policy analysis as well as an arena for social action:

  1. Neighbourhoods are common, and perhaps close to universal, since most people in urbanised areas would probably consider themselves to be living in one.
  2. Neighbourhoods are convenient, and always accessible, since you are already in your neighbourhood when you walk out your door.
  3. Successful neighbourhood action frequently requires little specialised technical skill, and often little or no money. Action may call for an investment of time, but material costs are often low.
  4. With neighbourhood action, compared to activity on larger scales, results are more likely to be visible and quickly forthcoming. The streets are cleaner; the crosswalk is painted; the trees are planted; the festival draws a crowd.
  5. Visible and swift results are indicators of success; and since success is reinforcing, the probability of subsequent neighbourhood action is increased.
  6. Because neighbourhood action usually involves others, such actions create or strengthen connections and relationships with other neighbours, leading in turn to a variety of potentially positive effects, often hard to predict.
  7. Over and above these community advantages, neighbourhood activity may simply be enjoyable and fun for those taking part.

But in addition to these benefits, considerable research indicates that strong and cohesive neighbourhoods and communities are linked –quite possibly causally linked – to decreases in crime, better outcomes for children, and improved physical and mental health. The social support that a strong neighbourhood may provide can serve as a buffer against various forms of adversity.

Read more about this topic:  Neighbourhood

Famous quotes containing the word sociology:

    Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.
    Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)

    Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.
    Nancy Chodorow, U.S. professor, and sociologist. The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, ch. 2 (1978)