momentum of its own, more or less independent of the larger circle of life and interests about it.
- The organization of the city, the character of the urban environment and of the discipline which it imposes, is finally determined by the size of the population, its concentration and distribution within the city area. For this reason it is important to study the populations of cities, to compare the idiosyncrasies in the development of city populations. Some of the first things we want to know about the city, therefore, are: sources of population; immigration and natural growth; distribution of population within the city as affected by (a) economic, i.e., land, values, (b) sentimental interests, race, vocation, etc.; comparative growths of the population within different portions of the city area, as affected by birth- and death-rates, marriage and divorce, etc.
The neighborhood.—Proximity and neighborly contact are the basis for the simplest and most elementary form of association with which we have to do in the organization of city life. Local interests and associations breed local sentiment, and, under a system which makes residence the basis for participation in the government, the neighborhood becomes the basis of political control. In the social and political organization of the city it is the smallest local unit.
"It is surely one of the most remarkable of all social facts that, coming down from untold ages, there should be this instinctive understanding that the man who establishes his home beside yours begins to have a claim upon your sense of comradeship. … The neighborhood is a social unit which, by its clear definition of outline, its inner organic completeness, its hair-trigger reactions, may be fairly considered as functioning like a social mind. … The local boss, however autocratic he may be in the larger sphere of the city with the power he gets from the neighborhood, must always be in and of the people; and he is very careful not to try to deceive the local people so far as their local interests are concerned. It is hard to fool a neighborhood about its own affairs."[1]
The neighborhood exists without formal organization. The local improvement society is the structure erected on the basis of the spontaneous neighborhood organization and exists for the purpose of giving expression to the local sentiment.
Under the complex influences of the city life what may be called the normal neighborhood sentiment has undergone many curious
- ↑ Robert A. Woods, "The Neighborhood in Social Reconstruction," Papers and Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society, 1913.
