Relationships & neighborhood

Urban Spaces|Urban Places’ Frank A. Mills has an excellent post on types of neighborhoods. He starts out talking about hanging out with his neighbor. Which is the same thing I did. Saturday morning, after getting my baked goods at Catania Bakery, stopped by Justin’s as he was sitting in his front yard reading the paper. We just sat there for a while yakking away, one of his neighbors stopped by for a quick talk and later, I called one of my neighbors over (also on his way back from Catania). And like Mills, I saw that it is these relationships that we have with our neighbors that make a good neighborhood. It’s not the buildings, it’s the people.
A relational neighborhood, well in one definition “we find that a relational neighborhood is a neighborhood where residents share a commitment to the neighborhood, to each other, and to joint participation in improving their neighborhood.” One of the building block of creating or supporting the commitment and the relationships is face to face meeting. We need a place where we can meet each other on a regular basis. For some folks it is the park where you let the doggies run free. Others it’s the monthly BACA meetings and other neighborhood civic/political organizations. And maybe this is why we get so excited over businesses in or very near the TC (Truxton Circle), because it would be another place to run into each other and have that face to face contact.
Anyway, read Urban Spaces, it is an excellent post.

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