8 Neighborhood as Nexus: A Trans‐historical Approach to Emplaced Communities

Abstract

Case studies from two distinct geographic and historical contexts are analyzed here with respect to the model of neighborhood-as-nexus. Sector B South, an urban neighborhood from 14th century Peru and Chicago's 20th century Bronzeville neighborhood are examined with respect to a) how they integrated neighbors and families with diverse social identities, b) the various geographical and historical processes that brought these neighbors together, and c) how each neighborhood was integrated into a wider urban and regional landscape. Sector B South and Bronzeville illustrate how wider processes alight in everyday life for urban residents. More generally, these cases provide an opportunity for exploring how a neighborhood approach can help bring clarity to the similarities and differences in the social experience of everyday life between two temporally and geographically distinct societies.

Ancient Lowland Maya neighborhoods: Average Nearest Neighbor analysis and kernel density models, environments, and urban scale

“…In our identification of neighborhoods, we stipulated that not every household had to be included in a neighborhood. Analysts digitized neighborhood boundaries based on their observations of the KD patterns, following the densest areas on the raster and delineating neighborhoods in places where the KD output bottlenecked or did not touch, topography and natural features, and anthropogenic features such as roads, reservoirs, or other services [see 187 ] which may act as natural boundaries between past neighborhoods (e.g., [ 2 ] in the Maya region; [ 45 ] in the Andes), just as in neighborhoods today (but see also [ 56 ]).…”

“…Households clustering into social units such as neighborhoods is a seemingly ubiquitous feature of ancient complex societies. Examples exist in the ancient Near East [42,43], the Andes [44][45][46], North America [47], and the Indus Valley [48].…”

Communities in Motion: Peripatetic Households in the Late Moche Jequetepeque Valley, Peru

“…Houses, neighborhoods, and wider settlement scales may be interdependent precisely because they are nested (Jacobs 1961). This interdependence amplifies the political nature of communities, for neighborhoods often function as political communities with local leaders or representatives that report to higher authorities (Hallman 1984;Lazar 2008;Pacifico 2019;Stone 1987). As elements within a political landscape, households "in urban neighborhoods represent resources in knowledge, information, creativity, commitment, and energy .…”

The Dynamics of Maya State Process: An Integrated Perspective from the San Lucas Neighborhood of Copán, Honduras

“…In Mesoamerica, ethnohistoric and ethnographic examples show how reciprocal labor relationships form between closely residing neighbors for planting, harvesting, and architectural construction and maintenance (Carmean, McAnany, and Sabloff 2011; Thompson, Meredith, and Prufer 2018). In particular, attending festivals, feasts, burials, or ceremonies together at a “focal node” or “nexus” within a neighborhood contributes to social cohesion and solidarity between neighbors (Blackmore 2011; Hutson 2016, 80; Lucero 2003; Pacifico 2019). A community is formed through such coordinated practices and common experiences of place, resulting in shared conceptions of history and identity (e.g., Basso 1996).…”