ABSTRACT
Our investigation of the public sphere has taken us outside the private realm of personal space, personal property and the intimate realm of household, to the realm of strangers and their social encounters. But this realm of strangers, we soon realize, is not a homogenous space. The urban space is not only split along a public-private distinction. It is also subdivided into socio-economic and cultural patterns. One of the main manifestations of these patterns of differentiation is the urban neighbourhood, where social groups, ethnic and cultural groups and other subsections of the society tend to find a particular place of their own while the political, economic and aesthetic processes find an outlet to be expressed (Madanipour, 2001). In this chapter, we look at the patterns of urban neighbourhoods and see how they subdivide the urban space and the impact of this subdivision on the public-private division of space. Indeed, it is at the intersection of these two systems of differentiation and stratification that we can find a number of major characteristics of urban space. On the one hand, neighbourhoods show how identity and difference find a spatial shape, while on the other hand public-private distinction works within and across the neighbourhoods to frame patterns of social life. It is here that the universality that is associated with public-private distinction finds a particular flavour, as it falls within the distinctive framework of the neighbourhood. At the intersection of the public-private and neighbourhood systems of differentiation, publicness of public spaces and privacy of the private sphere are both challenged. This chapter, therefore, steps outside the home, but stops at the neighbourhood level, where there is some degree of familiarity with the environment through various forms of attachment.
