How ideas work: memes and institutional material in the first 100 years of the neighborhood unit

Abstract

This paper reviews the history of the neighborhood unit idea, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom, as a means to examine how urban design ideas work. It argues that ideas like the neighborhood unit gain their power by framing the institutional material we create to help us cope with work. Institutional material refers to cultural product that conditions human action. Types of institutional material in urban design include practice norms, professional communities, and governance structures. Although the neighborhood unit emerged through a transatlantic network of planners and designers, the institutional material it framed was particular, local, and contingent. Ultimately, the paper argues that the neighborhood unit grew out of institutional material in the early 20th century that itself was influenced by the garden city, and that both neighborhood unit and garden city ideas continued to shape new institutional material in subsequent decades.

Keywords:

• neighborhood unit
• urban design ideas
• institutional material
• practice norms
• professional communities
• governance structures

Acknowledgements

The Regional Plan Association granted permission for use of Figures 1–3. The Urban Land Institute (ULI) granted permission for use of Figure 9. The anonymous reviewers provided constructive feedback which greatly aided development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this period, how to best lower density (Unwin 1918).

2. A number of other examples are also pertinent, including the critical examination of successive iterations of British new town planning, the evolution in the ULI literature away from the neighborhood unit, and the successive development and ongoing debate regarding neighborhood planning models within New Urbanism.