Green Communities and Neighborhood Planning

The Neighborhood as a Social Fact

Recognition of the neighborhood as an appropriate geographical unit for urban planning may be traced back to the first half of the 20th century. In the 1920s, urban planners slowly began to acknowledge that the neighborhood scale would provide a compelling complement to citywide, comprehensive planning by offering a window into the social organization of urban society. First, the neighborhood is the spatial container in which citizens spend most of their time, and with which they are most concerned. Second, planning at the neighborhood level allows taking into account the physical, social, and economic distinctiveness of communities whose specificity goes unnoticed in comprehensive planning.

This interest for the neighborhood as a “social fact”—as prominent American planner Lewis Mumford once put it—very much conditioned the various models and practices of neighborhood planning from the 1920s onward. It was hoped then, and to a large extent it still is today, that social problems may be tackled through adequate neighborhood design. Good physical design, according to this perspective, should not be rated for its architectural, infrastructural/technological, and aesthetic standards alone but, most crucially, for its ability to attain social objectives by influencing people's choices and behaviors in socially efficient ways. By applying appropriate standards of physical planning, the argument goes, one can act on society through the physical environment to produce desired social, economic, and environmental outcomes. As a consequence, every model of neighborhood development devised throughout the history of neighborhood planning represented a reaction to the social context and urban conditions of the time. A famous example is the “neighborhood unit formula” presented by Clarence Perry in 1923. Perry's formula, which has remained one of the most influential endorsements of neighborhood planning, intended to fight the problems of social anomy and urban criminality that were crippling U.S. cities. Through the design of self-sufficient neighborhoods promoting the use of common facilities, neighborhood units were expected to foster a spirit of community and neighborliness. Another influential urban planner, Patrick Abercrombie, played a somewhat similar role in the 1940s in the United Kingdom by establishing the neighborhood as the basic planning unit. For the first time, planners on both sides of the Atlantic were urged to take into consideration the design of residential communities in a comprehensive, integrated fashion.

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