ABSTRACT
B ack in 2011 the British government passed the Localism Act, which was intended to devolve power to local communities and allow them to draw up neighbourhood plans. This begged the important question about what we mean by a ‘neighbourhood’. It is a question that planners have been struggling with for years and the 15 neighbourhoods described in the
following pages illustrate the difficulties of pinning down a definition.
Part of the definition is geographical: a neighbourhood is a part of a larger settlement. Towns and cities have town and city centres around which neighbourhoods are arranged. In this respect a neighbourhood is similar to a district, or maybe an arrondissement if you are in a French city. In America you have precincts, which are electoral subdivisions like the wards we have in the UK. Then there is the idea of a quarter, which derives f rom the original subdivision of a Roman town into four districts divided by a crossroads, but which has now come to mean an urban district or neighbourhood. Or maybe we should be thinking of a neighbourhood as a suburb, somewhere less urban and more residential with a clearly subservient relationship to the town or city of which it is part.
