ABSTRACT
Many cities have quarters or neighbourhoods that confer on them a sense of place and identity through the historic and cultural associations they provide. Such places are usually the product of the many, mostly organic, transformations undergone by their cities through time. Soho in London, New York's Lower East Side, or the Left Bank in Paris all grew out of what Roy Porter calls the 'response to the deep pulse of the city' (Porter, 1994: 153). Thus neighbourhoods are rarely autonomous functional zones and usually have a symbiotic relationship with the city, and tend to have a cultural substratum that identifies and distinguishes them, a cultural element which gives rise to what can be termed neighbourhood culture. For example, the neighbourhood culture of Soho today is a complex mixture of historical literary and bohemian associations with elements of a 'red-light district' reputation (with all its implications in terms of gangsterism and permissive tolerance) plus a much more recent and highly visible gay culture.
