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(More customer reviews)During the early 1970's, I lived Philadelphia. Working class communities in South Philadelphia were ethnically and religiously homogeneous, quite parochial places where "working class" had not yet become coterminous with "working poor." It was commonplace for close relatives to occupy row houses next to each other.
I now live in West Virginia, where rural neighborhoods are commonplace. Frequently, such neighborhoods are organized around a collection of extended families. Distances among the homes which make up the neighborhood may be substantial, thereby making informal dropping-in less convenient than in a town or city. Nevertheless, even though contacts among like-minded West Virginian's may be comparatively infrequent, when they occur the are based on the accurate presumption that participants have lived similar lives, think alike, see the world in the same way, and can deftly and unself-consciously take the role of the other.
Herbert Gans' classic The Urban Villagers provides another look at the concept neighborhood. Much as in South Philadelphia, the Urban Villagers were close-knit groups of Italian families who lived working class lives. In the case of the Urban Villagers, however, the large, unattractive buildings they occupied made it easy for an outsider to mistake a community for an impoverished ghetto. One consequence of this is that the Urban Village no longer exists: relegated by city and federal officials to the status of a slum, it fell victim to urban renewal, and was bulldozed to make room for upscale apartment buildings.
The Urban Villagers is a fascinating book that shows how ethnography should be done. It also enables us to see that neighborhoods, from time to time and place to place, take many forms. Surely, a resident of Boston or Philadelphia driving down Route 10 in West Virginia would not recognize a neighborhood if he or she saw one.
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