This history of the idea of “neighborhood” in a major American city examines the transition of Atlanta, Georgia, from a place little concerned with residential segregation, tasteful surroundings, and property control to one marked by extreme concentrations of poverty and racial and class exclusion. Using Atlanta as a lens to view the wider nation, LeeAnn Lands shows how assumptions about race and class have coalesced with attitudes toward residential landscape aesthetics and home ownership to shape public policies that promote and protect white privilege. Lands studies the diffusion of property ideologies on two separate but related levels: within academic, professional, and bureaucratic circles and within circles comprising civic elites and rank-and-file residents. By the 1920s, following the establishment of park neighborhoods such as Druid Hills and Ansley Park, white home owners approached housing and neighborhoods with a particular collection of desires and sensibilities: architectural and landscape continuity, a narrow range of housing values, orderliness, and separation from undesirable land uses—and undesirable people. By the 1950s, these desires and sensibilities had been codified in federal, state, and local standards, practices, and laws. Today, Lands argues, far more is at stake than issues of access to particular neighborhoods, because housing location is tied to the allocation of a broad range of resources, including school funding, infrastructure, and law enforcement. Long after racial segregation has been outlawed, white privilege remains embedded in our culture of home ownership.

Benjamin Looker investigates the cultural, social, and economic complexities of the idea of neighborhood in postwar America. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood s significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. Looker examines radically different neighborhood visions by urban artists, critics, writers, and activists to show how sociological debates over what neighborhood values resonated in art, political discourse, and popular culture. The neighborhood- both the epitome of urban life and, in its insularity, an escape from it was where twentieth-century urban Americans worked out solutions to tensions between atomization or overcrowding, harsh segregation or stifling statism, ethnic assimilation or cultural fragmentation."

Nettle’s book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically deprived in the UK. Tyneside Neighbourhoods uses multiple research methods to explore social relationships and social behaviour, attempting to understand whether the experience of deprivation fosters social solidarity, or undermines it. The book is distinctive in its development of novel quantitative methods for ethnography: systematic social observation, economic games, household surveys, crime statistics, and field experiments. Nettle analyses these findings in the context of the cultural, psychological and economic consequences of economic deprivation, and of the ethical difficulties of representing a deprived community. In so doing the book sheds light on one of the main issues of our time: the roles of culture and of socioeconomic factors in determining patterns of human social behaviour. Tyneside Neighbourhoods is a must read for scholars, students, individual readers, charities and government departments seeking insight into the social consequences of deprivation and inequality in the West.

What Can Space Do for the Arts?; What Can Arts Do for Space?; and What Can Arts and Space Do for the Community? Through the lenses of creative placemaking and neighbourhood arts ecology, Trivic re-examines the position of community arts in the spatial, social and cultural landscape. Emphasising urban design considerations of complex interdependent relationships between arts, space and people, he re-explores the role of community-based arts activities in shaping urban neighbourhoods, enriching public life and empowering communities. This is divided into an analysis of spatial opportunities for the arts in the neighbourhood; and a study of the impacts of bringing arts and culture activities into local neighbourhoods and communities, using Singapore’s nodal approach as a developed case study. Using spatial opportunity analysis, the book demonstrates a step-by-step procedure for identification and evaluation of the neighbourhood spaces that work best for community arts and culture activities. In the study of impacts, Trivic proposes a holistic framework for capturing and evaluating the non-economic impacts of arts and culture, on space, society, well-being, education and participation. An invaluable template for arts event organisers and artists to assess and maximise the outcomes of their creative efforts in local neighbourhoods, as well as an important reading for students and practitioners of neighbourhood planning, urban design, and creative placemaking.

Culture is a living thing. In social settings, it is often used to represent entire ways of life, including rules, values, and expected behavior. Varying from nation to nation, neighborhood to neighborhood and beyond, even in the smallest localities, culture is a motivating factor in the creation of social identity and serves as a basis for creating cohesion and solidarity. This book explores the intersection of culture and community as a basis for locally and regionally based development by focusing on three core bodies of literature: theory, research, and practice. The first section, theory, uncovers some of the more relevant historical arguments, as well as more contemporary examinations. Continuing, the research section sheds light on some of the key concepts, variables, and relationships present in the limited study of culture in community development. Finally, the practice section brings together research and theory into applied examples from on the ground efforts. During a time where the interest to retain the uniqueness of local life, traditions, and culture is significantly increasing in community-based development, the authors offer a global exploration of the impacts of culturally based development with comparative analysis in countries such as Korea, Ireland, and the United States. A must-read for community development planners, policymakers, students, and researchers.