Are neighbourhoods real?

ABSTRACT

Critical realism needs to explain how neighbourhoods – a middle-level social structure that people really use in everyday life – can emerge as real, with the causal power to promote individual and collective flourishing. Using distinctive neighbourhoods of Louisville, Kentucky, as a case study, we can see how neighbourhoods can emerge, develop distinctive projects which use the affordances of local social networks, and exercise downward causation on who comes to live there and how they live. This applies equally to such different kinds of neighbourhoods as the dense, walkable, close-in, mixed-use places favoured by the liberal ‘bourgeois bohemians,’ and to the spread out, large-house, car-based, conservative, gated communities far out in the suburbs.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighbourhood
• emergence
• downward causation
• social structure
• Louisville
• suburb

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Centre College students Clara Gaddie and Erica Yao for their help with this research, to Nate Kratzer, of the University of Kentucky, for the quantitative data on Louisville neighbourhoods, and from the critical comments of the Working Group on Human Flourishing, Social Solidarity, and Critical Realism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

William (Beau) Weston is Van Winkle Professor of Sociology at Centre College, where he has taught since 1990.

ORCID

William (Beau) Weston http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9648-297X

Notes

1. Neighbourhood data were constructed from average data for the Census tracts comprising the neighbourhoods.