Neighborhood associations are geographically bound, grassroots organizations that rely on volunteer membership and direct participation to identify and address issues within their neighborhood. Often these groups serve as intermediaries between residents and local decision-makers, such as government officials, developers and business owners, and providers of public goods and services. As a case example, we describe the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), launched in 1990. The NRP is a notable long-standing attempt to bolster the role of neighborhood associations in municipal governance. It demonstrates many of the potential benefits as well as the challenges of neighborhood associations as vehicles for locally scaled democracy. After this, we examine dynamics of community power and empowerment processes in neighborhood associations and make recommendations for practice and future research.

Falling in love is free…or is it? Although our “heart” and emotions may be unconnected to how much money or education we have or where we live, the process of initiating and maintaining a romantic relationship is most definitely connected to socioeconomic status (SES) and place. This chapter reviews the literature from the past fifteen years on the role of social class in four stages of romantic relationships: dating, cohabitation, marriage, and divorce. The existing research reveals several patterns. First, social class impacts all stages of a relationship, which contributes to perpetuating social class inequities throughout generations. Second, heteronormative assumptions dominate the existing literature with little focus on LGBTQ+ relationships. Moreover, gender appears to overshadow any impact of social class – in other words, women and men are bound by gender role expectations in relationships regardless of SES. Finally, and most importantly, research shows that most individuals, regardless of social class, hope to find a life partner and start a family. What social class “buys” an individual in terms of romance is ease…ease to date, marry, and divorce.

There is limited research examining community and neighborhood influences on prosociality in children and youth. In this chapter we outline three relevant theories that address how neighborhood and community processes influence prosocial behavior and review the empirical literature on the topic. Our review suggests that measures of neighborhood socioeconomic status, demography, and disorder have little direct association with prosociality in children and youth but that adolescent prosocial behavior is linked to social capital and collective efficacy. The community intervention evidence shows that providing increased opportunities for prosocial involvement may support greater prosocial behavior of adolescents, possibly by boosting community social capital. Further development of more specific theoretical models and further empirical research is required to better understand the complex neighborhood and community mechanisms across neighborhoods, cities, nations, and cultures.

This chapter discusses the ways in which collective identity fuels mobilization in Chile’s urban margins. It looks at how activists’ cohesiveness and their differentiation from other social actors produce a mobilizing identity that advances contentious politics. The chapter draws on participant observations and interviews to outline the contents and dynamics of political consciousness production in Santiago’s urban margins. In their interactions, activists wield discourses of informality and marginality to strengthen a sense of pride in their neighborhood that is immune to hegemonic narratives of stigmatization. The thick boundaries that local activists use to promote mobilization depend on them dynamically differentiating between two realms of collective experience: the formal and the informal. On the one hand, the informal represents the protected sphere of confidence and close connections within neighborhood organizations. Activism works as a way of keeping the informal alive. The formal, on the other hand, is seen as a threat that motivates protective collective action. Finally, the chapter shows how activists’ reactive and defensive mobilization generates a sense of self-determination.

Over a relatively short period of time, critical consciousness (CC) has become a prominent framework for describing how the developing person addresses systems of oppression. However, there has been less work to situate CC within developmental systems theory. The phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) is a developmental systems theory that accounts for how the reality of oppression influences developmental contexts and processes. We draw on PVEST to illuminate new theoretical directions for CC, including: (1) considering the broader context of CC within the developmental system; (2) addressing meaning-making as a primary developmental process that impacts CC; (3) considering CC as embedded in time, and (4) focusing on the dynamic and collective nature of CC. We explore the combined strengths of CC and PVEST to imagine new research questions that explore the contextualized and dynamic ways young people contend with systems of oppression across development.

This chapter examines the layout of the city, its neighborhoods, its interior and exterior, and its relationship to the natural environment that framed and constrained its growth. The chapter also provides an overview of the layout of the Asakura palace, the key neighborhoods, the doctor's residence, and the active neighborhoods found outside the city gates that help us to understand the larger hybrid function of the city.

Focusing on the work of Stuart Dybek and a case study of the literature of South Shore, this chapter considers how the neighborhood literature of Chicago has taken shape in response not only to literary antecedents but also to historical changes in the city’s neighborhood order. The emergence of the New Chicago, a post-industrial metropolis that developed through and around the old familiar industrial city, created new possibilities for the city’s writers. Stuart Dybek’s stories of Pilsen/Little Village have made him the dean of the New Chicago’s writers, putting him at the head of a cohort that ranges from Gwendolyn Brooks to David Mamet, Nelson Algren to Gabriel Bump.

Looking back at the mid-twentieth century, we can assemble a cohort of works that paint a composite portrait of neighborhoods as the industrial city as it reached full maturity, with decline approaching or already under way.In the postwar decades, neighborhood literature shifted in its response to the challenge of representing cities as the postindustrial metropolis, primarily organized not around turning raw materials into finished products but around handling information and providing services, began to emerge around and through the receding industrial city.As the postindustrial city matured in the final decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first, neighborhood literature took on the task of mapping it with greater nuance.One city that experienced a postindustrial renaissance in neighborhood stories was Boston; the many movies set there deploy the equipment of genre fantasy to consider what has been gained and lost in the changes that shaped the postindustrial city. They are, in part, about the possibilities opened up by this transformation.

This chapter analyzes novels set in gentrifying US neighborhoods to propose that the novel’s complex, dialogic system offers opportunities for exploring the negotiations between structure and individual agency that precipitate processes of gentrification. Adept as the novel is at representing a diverse range of subjectivities and interpersonal relations, stories of gentrification must also show how subjecthood is molded by larger historical, political, and economic forces. The texts are read through close attention to genre, treated neither as a taxonomy of fixed structures nor a concept so anarchic as to be practically non-existent, but as a form of textuality emerging through negotiations between communities comprised of individual genre consumers with specific preferences, and the industries producing texts for consumption. Thus, genre is a useful lens for exploring similar interactions between structure and agency underlying gentrification. There is no single genre of gentrification novel. Rather, the best examples bring genres and modes such as the frontier story and the picturesque into collision or merger in order to show gentrification’s effects on different communities.

When manumitted female palace slaves left the imperial palaces, they settled in various parts of the empire as either married or single persons with their palace identity. The women’s former status in the harem hierarchy, and the extent of their palace affiliation, determined (at least to some extent) where they resided. Chapter 4 is devoted to a study of the residential districts of manumitted female palace slaves, with a view to tracing the impact of household affiliation and of status on their residential patterns. Following their departure from the imperial palaces, manumitted female palace slaves began a new life in various parts of the empire, but mainly in Istanbul. The chapter demonstrates that households composed of palace women and their husbands were located at certain distances to the palace. Having established the residential pattern of manumitted female palace slaves, who were familiar with the imperial court culture and lived in society with their palace identity, the chapter explores the place of these women in society. Through an analysis of court records, the chapter demonstrates how palace-affiliated women integrated into society and developed social and communal relationships, especially with residents of the neighborhoods in which they lived.

In this chapter, we shall study techniques for analyzing social networks. An important question is how to identify “communities,” that is, subsets of the nodes (people or other entities that form the network) with unusually strong connections. Some of the techniques used to identify communities are similar to the clustering algorithms we discussed in Chapter 7. However, communities almost never partition the set of nodes in a network. Rather, communities usually overlap. For example, you may belong to several communities of friends or classmates. The people from one community tend to know each other, but people from two different communities rarely know each other. You would not want to be assigned to only one of the communities, nor would it make sense to cluster all the people from all your communities into one cluster. Also in this chapter we explore efficient algorithms for discovering other properties of graphs. We look at “simrank,” a way to discover similarities among nodes of a graph. We then explore triangle counting as a way to measure the connectedness of a community. In addition, we give efficient algorithms for exact and approximate measurement of the neighborhood sizes of nodes in a graph, and we look at efficient algorithms for computing the transitive closure.