Neighbourhood Unit - History

History

Clarence Perry’s conceptualisation of the neighbourhood unit evolved out of an earlier idea of his, to provide a planning formula for the arrangement and distribution of playgrounds in the New York region. The necessity for a formula such as this was attributed to the rise of the auto-mobile in the early 20th century. During a period where road sense had not yet amalgamated with the social conscious, and many of the urban tools we now use to manage the threat posed by vehicular traffic did not exist, or were not in abundance (such as pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and road signs), developing cities such as New York, which embraced the motor car, suffered street fatality rates in excess of one child a day.

Clarence Perry conceived of neighbourhoods in this time period as islands locked amidst a burgeoning sea of vehicular traffic, a dangerous obstacle which prevented children (and adults) from safely walking to nearby playgrounds and amenities. Perry's neighbourhood unit concept began as a means of combating this obstacle. Ultimately, however, it evolved to serve a much broader purpose, of providing a discernible identity for the concept of the "neighborhood", and of offering to designers a framework for disseminating the city into smaller subareas (suburbs).

While there is evidence that the concept of the neighbourhood unit emerged as early as 1923, at a joint meeting of the National Community Center Association and the American Sociological Society in Washington, D.C., it was the publication of Clarence Perry’s paper, in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, which led to its promotion as a planning tool. Titled, "The Neighborhood Unit, a Scheme for Arrangement for the Family-Life Community", Clarence Perry’s monograph offered in concrete terms a diagrammatic model of the ideal layout for a neighborhood of a specified population size. This model provided specific guidelines for the spatial distribution of residences, community services, streets and businesses.

Perry’s concept of the neighbourhood unit employed a variety of institutional, social and physical design principles, influenced by such popular notions in the 1920s as the separation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and arterial boundaries demarcating the inwardly focused neighbourhood cell from the greater urban lattice. The cellular nature of the neighbourhood unit allowed it to be utilised as a building block in the development of neighbourhood arrays, leading to its systematic modular usage during periods of rapid residential expansion in many countries across the globe.

While Perry’s name is most commonly associated with the notion of the neighbourhood unit, the idea of "re-defining and re-planning the city of the basis of neighbourhoods", was not Perry’s in isolation. In a paper on the Neighbourhood Unit, Lewis Mumford considers the neighbourhood as it is organically experienced as well as the various – theoretical and practical - influences that lead to Perry’s formalisation of the neighbourhood unit as an urban planning mechanism. Mumford credits Perry as taking: "the fact of the neighbourhood; and showing how, through deliberate design, it could be transformed into what he called a neighbourhood unit, the modern equivalent of a medieval quarter or parish: a unit that would now exist, not merely on spontaneous or instinctual basis."

William E. Drummond - a central architect in Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio between 1899-1909 - defined the ‘Neighbourhood Unit’ within his submission to the Chicago City Club’s planning competition of 1912. The competition wanted to address, "the theoretical and practical parameters, social and physical, of a micro-community in a suburban context with a focus on housing; the second concerned a community centre", calling for proposals for a ‘quarter-section’ site south of central Chicago. Drummond’s plan advocated for the neighbourhood unit to be the organising basis of the whole city; to be ‘regarded as a unit in the social and political structure of the city’.

The competition was largely a reaction to the squalid urban living conditions in the early part of the twentieth-century. It was part of the larger progressive and reformist era in American politics. Progressives saw the slums as a consequence of corruption and exploitation which they believed could be overcome through local political activation. Drummond was influenced by notable sociologist Charles Cooley, who he credited and surmised in his submission saying, ‘in the social and political organization of the city is the smallest local unit’. These sociological and political foundations are interesting when considered against the various applications and permeations of neighbourhood planning (see Urban Application).