Who is a neighbourhood? Studying a thing that isn't a thing in Southeast Asia

Abstract

There is no such thing as a neighbourhood. But neighbourhoods are everywhere. Neighbourhoods are regularly described as things, but we cannot touch them. We typically understand neighbourhoods as places, but we can neither see them nor find their edges. The more one stares at a neighbourhood, the more it seems impossible to see it. Nevertheless, there is something—an often intangible and indescribably social something—compelling us not only to imagine but to experience the neighbourhood being stared at as a real thing. In social science analysis, one important thing that we stare at but cannot see is ‘the social’. To more properly understand the neighbourhood, then, this paper takes the social seriously. It places people and their relationships at the centre of a project to develop a working understanding of the neighbourhood. Instead of asking, ‘What is a neighbourhood?’ the paper suggests that we must always begin by asking, ‘Who is a neighbourhood?’ The empirical basis for the paper's conceptual reflections on the neighbourhood emerge out of a collaborative research project conducted under the auspices of a multicity research project called the Southeast Asia Neighbourhoods Network.

From strict socialism to social evils: Changing childhoods over three generations in urban Vietnam

“…As part of the restructuring of the education system since Đổi Mới, the Vietnamese state allows private and semi-private schools to operate, expanding parents' options if they have the financial means (Glewwe & Patrinos, 1999). We are cognizant that a child's 'neighbourhood' is a socially constructed geographical space (see Harms, 2022). Participants were asked specific questions so as to understand their emic perspectives of this term, which is the focus of a different paper.…”