ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on changes versus stability in neighborhood names, boundaries, and organizations. It discusses the concepts of natural areas, defended neighborhoods, and symbolic communities. The chapter reviews some of the empirical work on neighborhood naming and bounding. The work by Hunter, carefully examining name and boundary changes over a fifty-year span, highlights the influences of class-linked stratification concerns, and racial dynamics, on processes of neighborhood naming and bounding. Names and boundaries are "often only the symbolic representation of significant social divisions and distinctions". The symbolic communities view interprets the changes as residents' accommodation, within a constrained ecological context, to the changes taking place around them, that is, the local historical forces at work. The chapter extends the discussion of stability and changes to concerns about neighborhood mobilization, effective community organizations, and community policing. In considering community policing service delivery within a neighborhood governance structure, it is instructive to contrast it with the governance surrounding the beat-based community policing program.
