Neighbours Around the World: An International Look at the People Next Door

In an urbanising world, neighbouring is perceived to be steadily losing significance and a remnant of the past. The same belief can also be found in China where rapid urbanisation has had a tremendous impact on the social networks and neighbourhood life of urban residents. This chapter challenges the common perception of neighbouring in demise and argues that neighbouring remains an important form of social relationship, even if the meanings and role of neighbouring have changed. This chapter first charts the changing role of neighbouring from the socialist era to post-reform China. It then provides an account of four common types of neighbourhoods in Chinese cities – work-unit estates, traditional courtyards, commodity housing estates and urban villages – and considers how and why neighbouring in different ways still matters to them. In pre-reform socialist China, neighbourhood life and neighbouring comprised much of the daily social life of residents. Since the reform era, with the proliferation of private commodity housing estates, middle-class residents prioritise comfort, security and privacy, such that neighbouring levels have subsided. Nevertheless, in other neighbourhood types, such as work-unit housing estates, traditional courtyards and urban villages, neighbours still rely upon one another for various reasons.

This chapter focuses on the newness of neighbour relations and new scenarios of neighbouring that have emerged in the recently built residential districts of large Russian cities – Moscow and St Petersburg. In the last decades, the scenarios of neighbouring in Russia have undergone significant changes due to the collapse of the Soviet system and the formation of a new sociality. In this situation, new urban districts have become a testing ground where new scenarios of neighbouring have been developed in everyday communication. The study finds that the emerging scenario of neighbouring differs from lifelong Soviet neighbouring with its close personal contacts, as well as from the isolationism of the 1990–2000s, and is based on the management and flexible reconfiguration of neighbour relations. This chapter argues that the newness of urban settings is a special state that influences neighbour relations and leads to enthusiasm for, and intensification of, interaction between neighbours; the invention of new forms of neighbour relations; and the actualisation of neighbour solidarity in a space that is still deficient in other ways. While newness is a state that allows creative forms of sociality to flourish, it is also a limiting state in the way it imposes absence and deficiencies upon residents that requires them to create new, compensatory structures and solidarities.

This chapter seeks to analyse neighbouring in times of rapid change in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai. Using the local neighbourhood of Tianzifang as a case study, this chapter shows how the pace of change in Shanghai since the 1950s has reshaped the social fabric of the area, including traditional neighbour relations. As Tianzifang has shifted from an unknown neighbourhood comprised of traditional lilong dwellings, where social relations played out in private communal settings, to one of Shanghai’s most famous tourist spots, the relationships between residents, as well as with ‘outsiders’ and the familiar local environment, have also changed. Traditional neighbourly ties have been broken, rebuilt and transformed again through waves of new residents coming into the area and the displacement of others who can no longer afford to live there. For those who remain, the question of who is, and thus who is not, a ‘real’ neighbour has been narrowed to include only ‘insiders’ with a deep sense of belonging and connection to the area – i.e. the urban working class who have always lived in Tianzifang and own rather than rent their homes. Yet even this is no longer sufficient. The disruption that Tianzifang’s physical and social transformation has brought to residents’ lives has also imposed new social norms about how neighbours should behave in this new, intermediary space of public and private. ‘Real’ neighbours are those who conform to changing social norms while neighbours who breach them can be ostracised and excluded by others who once saw them as an insider.

Contemporary urban change is predominantly driven by migration and capital accumulation, with associated urban (re-)development projects – such as new-build gentrification – typically favouring the middle classes. Low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods are often said to be displaced from their homes, either directly or indirectly, or to experience a loss of sense of place induced by the physical and social changes to the area. With the latter in mind, we investigate the perceived opportunities and threats of urban renewal experienced by stay-put communities in the wake of new developments and demonstrate how a loss of sense of place occurs via conflict between neighbours affected by the change. Our focus on transnational spaces comprising co-migrant Kurdish/Turkish communities in the two cities of Istanbul (Turkey) and Vienna (Austria) reveals not only how profoundly the impacts of neighbour conflict are felt as once-close and supportive neighbourly ties are severed but also how well-established neighbourly norms and obligations in transnational spaces accentuate the conflict in the first place. Moral codes that require neighbours to look after one another, along with local power dynamics of support in return for loyalty, set expectations that neighbours will take each other’s side when needed. Our findings reveal that the situatedness of residents to the development projects (in terms of proximity, residential tenure and openness to change) causes neighbours to take opposing sides and that the conflicts generated are accentuated by the perceived failure of neighbours to meet their neighbourly obligations. The result is a loss of sense of place and belonging for all residents – not just those detrimentally impacted by the development – wrought by rising hostility and avoidance among neighbours, and an overall weakening of neighbourly ties.

In many countries in the Global North, interventions in deprived neighbourhoods have attempted to tackle poverty by spatially deconcentrating it. This has commonly been done through housing restructuring programmes in areas of social housing. Supported by the ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis, such interventions promote the diversification of housing tenures and housing typologies, based on the idea that a wider mix will result in increased opportunities of interaction across housing tenures and in local social networks becoming more heterogeneous. Using data from interviews, surveys and participant observation in meetings and events organised by local residents in North Peckham, an area in South London which in the 1990s and beginning of 2000s was the site of a large-scale housing restructuring programme, this chapter explores the expectations and experiences of neighbouring of long-term and newer arrival social housing tenants. This chapter shows that their different experiences of the neighbourhood and of physical and social change, as well as their diverging socio-economic characteristics – long-term residents tended to be older and retired while newer residents tended to have more complex needs – highly influenced perceptions of neighbourly relations and the significance attached to them. Despite finding high levels of neighbourly interaction and assistance, it also shows that attitudes and expectations towards neighbours were marked by a sense of nostalgia among long-term social tenants, stigma due to the area’s past and towards newer social tenants and by feelings of alienation due to the perceived residualisation of the social housing tenure and increased housing unaffordability.

This chapter reviews the conceptual developments in neighbour studies, charting the shift and bringing together older work on the ‘distance-closeness’ dynamic of neighbour relations with newer ‘equality of neighbours’ approaches. It seeks to empirically extend the sociology of neighbours through an analysis of the experiential narratives of neighbours living in contexts of urban multiculture in the United Kingdom. Drawing on two previous studies of urban multicultural social life and a small street study of neighbours in London, this chapter explores the everyday ‘publicness’ of the neighbour and examines the ways in which recent work on social infrastructure can be productively applied to neighbour relations. This chapter concludes that where cultural and social difference is a very ordinary – although not necessarily easy – experience, neighbour relations offer the potential to work as radical sites of pragmatic multiculturalism.

This chapter is based on 68 interviews in 12 mobile home parks that were part of a larger ethnographic study, conducted in 2005–2010 in West-Central Florida. Data analysis revealed diverse patterns of perception, sentiment, and interaction among neighbours, here understood as ‘neighbour culture’, both across and within communities. American mobile home communities are characterised by a high propinquity of residents and exposure to cultural housing stigma; however, these conditions alone did not determine local neighbour culture. In the analysis, I illustrate prominent patterns of neighbouring, ranging from perceptions and treatments of neighbours as (imagined) ‘family’ in senior communities to, partially, ‘trailer trash’ in suburban family communities. Going beyond description, I argue that the identified supportive, minimalist, and antagonistic forms of neighbour culture are linked to broader spatial and social structural contexts, as well as personal identities. This chapter’s findings have the potential to strengthen the theoretical framing and research of neighbouring in local and global perspectives in the future.

Singapore, a multiracial nation, where 80% of the population resides in mid- to high-rise public housing estates, provides an interesting milieu to study neighbouring in the context of high-density living. Its geopolitical position and socio-demographic features – such as an ageing demographic, changing family structure, and increasingly diverse population – have rendered social cohesion an integral aspect of national and neighbourhood-level policies, programmes, and institutions. However, these programmes and policies are built on a relatively static national narrative around mutuality, harmony, and community bonding that rarely takes into consideration current social, temporal, and spatial constructions of neighbouring. It is in this light that we re-examine the social construction of ‘neighbours’ and ‘neighbourliness’ in Singapore using a holistic quality of life (QoL) framework to better understand both institutional and lived forms of neighbourliness. A mixed-methods research approach, comprising 243 semi-structured interviews (161 with a Q method component) and a large-scale survey comprising 3,134 participants, was conducted to explore and assess current norms, attitudes, and practices around neighbouring. Our findings show a dominant set of practices around neighbouring that are polite, minimal, and often referred to as ‘hi/bye’. we note two particular perspectives of the relative importance of neighbours in contributing to QoL and consider the effects of hi/bye neighbouring upon an older group of residents for whom neighbours are still important. This deeper understanding around neighbouring in public housing estates also brings relevant insights to related social cohesion policies and programmes.

This chapter examines patterns of neighbouring in the small Essex town of ‘Eastside’, located in London’s eastern suburban periphery. Drawing on qualitative interviews, two groups of resident interviewees are discussed: established, long-term, white British residents who have lived in Eastside for many years, and ethnically diverse newcomers who have recently moved to the area. This chapter focuses on patterns of neighbouring – both positive in the form of ‘neighbourliness’ and negative in terms of ‘unneighbourliness’ – and considers whether neighbouring provided the basis for residents to develop a sense of community. Basic neighbouring activities, such as saying ‘hello’ and the mutual provision of support, were commonplace, although proactive intervention and socialising with neighbours were more limited. Only a minority of both long-term and incoming interviewees identified a sense of community based upon neighbouring. The dominant aspect of the former’s sense of community was a ‘narrative of decline’ in which they lamented the loss of the more intense neighbourliness that they recalled from the past. Unneighbourliness was also evident, for example, in relation to noise, and various reasons for this are analysed including deficiencies within the physical environment, tenure prejudice, and established/newcomer resident tensions.

In March 2014, the minister responsible for public housing in the state of New South Wales in Australia announced that all 600 public housing tenants living in the historic heritage-listed adjacent inner-city neighbourhoods of Millers Point and The Rocks in Sydney were to be moved and the homes sold to the highest bidder on the open market. There were to be no exceptions, and the last public housing resident was moved from the area in July 2018. A common view is that public housing areas in countries with a residualised welfare system are characterised by attenuated social ties, anomie and bleakness. This chapter examines neighbouring, social ties, mutual assistance and sense of community among public housing tenants in Millers Point and demonstrates that this is not always the case. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with residents, plus observation, I show that the social connections among public housing tenants in the area were unusually strong and enduring. I argue that in order to understand why this was so, we need to look at the physical and social features of the area. Following on from the seminal work of Jane Jacobs, the New Urbanism movement argues that compactness, mixed land use and walkability are crucial enablers of social interaction and neighbourliness. These physical features were present in Millers Point. There is now a recognition by New Urbanism scholars that physical elements in themselves rarely create community and that the social features of neighbourhoods also have to be taken into account. In the case of the public housing tenants in inner Sydney, the key social features were longevity of residence and homogeneity. Another crucial aspect was a strong sense of social obligation. This was partially due to the presence of strong trade unionism in the area historically and the intermittent nature of employment at certain periods, which ensured neighbours rallied round to help those who were less fortunate.

How much goodness do we expect from our neighbours? People living nearby might be locked with each other in interdependencies by spatial proximity but often do not know each other more personally. This chapter explores the question of how latent neighbourliness – an expectation that neighbours will have our back even though we might not know them – emerges. We draw on statistical analyses of survey data from four neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, and a pre- and post-COVID-19 methodology, therefore capturing a time when people were asked to stay home and within their neighbourhoods. Our findings demonstrate that latent neighbourliness is neither significantly associated with personal support from neighbours when facing important challenges, nor personal support experienced in the neighbourhood with others whom we know, but who are not neighbours (e.g., family members). Neither is latent neighbourliness a fixed attitude that can be explained by individual characteristics and/or positions (such as age, gender, education, income, one’s employment situation and others). In contrast, we find that, apart from individual generalised trust towards others, the neighbourhood setting itself shapes levels of latent neighbourliness among all demographics. Additionally, those with younger children show higher latent neighbourliness, most likely a result of moral geographies. We argue that caring for children in public and experiencing or displaying moral codes that others can read makes it easier to develop an expectation of goodwill (or for that matter, hostility) from neighbours, without having more durable ties to them.