Hi Lauri,

I would agree with you that you are on the right track. I am not aware of any official definitions, since I am more on the rural side of this issue. But what I would suggest is looking into Sense of Place Concept (see: Frank Vanclay) and Relational Place Concept (see: Henry Lefebvre, John Friedmann, Doreen Massey).

I would look at community through connections. In a sense that a group of people could be connected e.g. through their religion; through a certain way of life. While at the same time be disconnected from other people through these same connections. Like e.g. different religion. Thus, these people will form a community that is connected and bounded through e.g. religion.

Community Connectedness is a component of Sense of Place, according to some authors, and I agree with that. Thus I would not limit that community could be looked only from sociological aspect, but also psychology and human geography are interested in this.

Neighborhood is more related to the geographical location. Unlike community that can spread through various levels of geographical locations and scales, neighborhood is of a human scale. And it can not transcend location. John Friedmann describes a relational place in his paper Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective (2010), and he does that from the point of view of a local and sticks to neighborhood as the appropriate scale. May be interesting for you to have a look.

But then again, though neighborhood is tightly related to the physical aspects: geographic location and scale it also has a social aspect. It is like looking at a coin, it always has two sides, and can be quite different (I prefer personally to say that it is like looking at a cube that has 6 sides so to illustrate the potential complexity).

Bottom line, I would say that community is related to the individual(s). Therefore in one place/neighborhood there could be several communities existing parallel and even overlapping. While neighborhood is related to the place it self. But in the sense that Friedmann (2010: Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective) makes his point, it should be remembered that neighborhoods are inhabited with people and do have a social side.

I hope you'll find this useful.

Neighbourhoods and Communities are dependent on the perspective that one views them. As mentioned above, it could be based on one's faith (or religion), one's interest or hobby, or even social networks! We define them for the purpose for which we are trying to group them, so that we can search for some truth or pattern which will try and make it feasible for us to predict the outcome in a particular situation. Hence the definitions could be as many as the topics being studied. Once we have defined the community, others can then try and see if they can conclude the same way as you have, or if the truth as they see it is different. Is this not what the scientific process all about?

Very interesting question!!!

I take a phrase from Lauri comment:

There have been views that neighbourhoods and / or communities are a fundamental “building blocks” of sustainable city.

Not only I would say. Communities are essential for the definition of sustainable territories. We were very concerned to the evolution of the little scale communities into the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula. We have been worked about it during the last three years this publication "Territories as laboratories" tried to define the basic points for this discussion. Problem in that scale we have been studying are coming from the definition of a "place" ino these territories, I mean the territorial portion identified as "our place, our territory" for the different commmunities. I will try to download some elements for this discussion.

"... neighbourhood could be more related to spatial structure - the physical part of the urban environment. Community, on the other hand, could be more like a social concept...."

Yes Lauri. I agree with you. But both concepts are absolutelly inter-related

Talking about physical aspects, I download here a pdf presentation about an academic work from 1st year Master program at Unuversity Fernando Pessoa-Porto-portugal about these kind of things. Please pay attention, because they are students of Architecture and urbanism very cooncerned to sociological problemas in the little scale: How to define the spave this community feel as its space....its territory.

Talking about the definition of the spaces owned by a community....

If you think it can be interesting. I can translate and comment int English:

In the word of Frazer(2000) community an be viewed as as value. It means bringing together a number ofelement such as mutual trust, self-help, solidarity and communality. The community can be approached in 3 different ways such place, interest and communion. Neighbourhood can be viewed as a grop of dwellings within a delineated community. spatially, neighbourhoods and communities have many things in common in the sense that they all have people living under the influnce of commuality

However, urban neighbourhoods and communities can be differentiated because of volume of activities between them. The rural communities are source of primary production while the urban communities do the urban kind of work i.e secondary economy. it depends on the angle at which an observer is making his or her own assessment

Having carefully read the various interventions, the discussion should be understood in a cross-sectional area, covering a variety of disciplines where man appears at the center, the author of their world and relationships.

  It seems clear the definition of neighborhood as the conceptualization of a place. The starting point seems to be the place, what man builds physically and mentally. There will inevitably think of the idea of ​​appropriation of space, to the concept of use of space, including space consumption, following the work of John R. Hipp.

The information about the differences between rural and urban communities are important. Really exist. Perhaps the concept of ownership of a place is clearer in the rural environment. We have many examples: Not the same rural man saying "my house" of urban man referring to "my apartment block" The sense of proximity between object and man are clearly different. The problem may come when the strong relationship between the place and men in rural areas, are lost by the abandonment of this environment and approach to the city, or the development or urban architectural typologies within the rural environment.

neighborhood tend to spatial though it should have a social interaction dimension among neighbors. Community does not require the spatial part since ResearchGate is a typical community which has not spatial content.

However in research data sense, we define it by the prevailing data collection units - census tract or the like. Until data is so easily available and costless, then we can use GIS to tailor make the appropriate unit of analysis. I wait for it to happen for over a decade - the processing costs are still very high ----- GIS server maintenance, software license cost, human cost to process the data for the final statistical analysis (which is actually cheap).

So in practice, we define neighborhood based on what is available and not based on what happens on the ground.

Read Kevin Lynch or urban images.

Although words have many nuanced meanings, a good place to start is a the foundational meanings of the words/concepts we are attempting to utilize. The preponderance of dictionary definitions for your words indicate that "neighborhoods" define a specific physical 'area' whereas the term 'community' relates to specific groups of 'people'. In general terms a community can exist in a neighborhood, or the term can be used synonymously with 'community', but a 'neighborhood' is not typically defined as existing in, or being synonymous with, a community. In some instances the differences are very subtle, so context then would be the determining factor in your usage of these terms.

Check the theory of strong and weak social ties.

Lauri,

If you are interested in spatial analysis, then you should do so using census tracks or Zip codes. In this case, census tracks are better because they contains homogenous populations I terms of income, lifestyle, assets, and distribution of disease. Otherwise if you make a spatial analysis of heterogeneous populations, there is the potential for alternative explanations: Confounding, bias, and chance

.

Thanks for the discussion,

Ben Olwe

Alumni, Walden university