The Problems with Neighbors: An Examination of the Influence of Neighborhood Context Using Large-Scale Administrative Data

《The Problems with Neighbors: An Examination of the Influence of Neighborhood Context Using Large-Scale Administrative Data》

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作者: Yan Liu

来源: URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue1,P.

语言: 英文

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摘要: IntroductionHuman beings live in a society embedded by intricate networks and relationships with other people (Urry 2012). While family and friends provide strong social ties that are increasingly dispersed, neighbors offer more localized interactions at the day-to-day level. Researchers have long argued that positive interactions with neighbors are associated with a range of advantageous outcomes relating to the local provision of support and sociability (Unger and Wandersman 1982; Mollenhorst, Völker, and Schutjens 2009), crime control (Skogan 2015), and increased sense of community and place attachment (Prezza et al. 2001). Yet, one of the defining features of the neighbor role is that it has no a priori form or function; rather, it is defined solely in terms of physical proximity, that is, neighbors are people who live near one another. Thus, while it is expected that neighbors are generally friendly, helpful, and respectful of each other's privacy (Crow, Allen, and Summers 2002), in reality, there is considerable variation in the way neighbors perceive and interact with each other, such that problems between neighbors are just as likely to ensue as harmony (Cheshire and Fitzgerald 2015).This suggests that neighboring is not an unproblematic social practice, but is wrought with tensions and conflicts that arise in the context of physical proximity among domestic dwellers living “cheek by jowl” (Cockayne 2012). Neighbor annoyances over noise, pets, parking, fences, or trees can undermine one's sense of home as a place of enjoyment, privacy, and autonomy (Cheshire, Fitzgerald, and Liu 2019), while disputes can escalate into criminal behavior involving damage to property, intimidating behavior, and physical harm (Cheshire and Fitzgerald 2015). In accounting for the prevalence of neighbor problems (NPs) there is value in considering the effects of where one lives with regard to the contextual features of the neighborhood and/or the composite characteristics of the resident population (Ellen and Turner 1997; Dietz 2002; Durlauf 2004; Galster 2012; van Ham et al. 2012). While individual characteristics such as age or income might explain how a neighbor's conduct is subjectively construed as a nuisance, the dynamics and sorting mechanisms of urban capitalist development drive certain social groups into certain types of neighborhoods. If neighborhoods have their own effects on the outcomes of the people who live there, then it is vitally important to better understand which features of the neighborhood function to influence NPs, and in what ways. Only then can planners and policymakers design neighborhoods where triggers for conflict are minimized.This paper seeks to explore the prevalence of NPs as manifest through complaints made to a local government and to consider which neighborhood contextual factors might explain any observed patterns of NPs across the urban landscape in the city of Brisbane, Australia. We define NPs as the kinds of localized annoyances, nuisances, and troubles that are generated by neighbors, either deliberately or inadvertently, in the course of everyday local residential life, which may or may not be perceived as mundane and inconsequential. NPs are distinct from neighborhood problems, the latter of which are often understood as public incivilities perpetrated by others that potentially cause the denigration or deterioration of a neighborhood's public space (O’Brien 2016). The significance of NPs is that they are not characterized by where they play out (i.e., neighborhood public spaces), or the form they take (i.e., uncivil behavior) but rather by the perceived perpetrator: i.e., a neighbor; a person who lives nearby. Indeed, notions of public/private and civility/incivility become problematic when applied to NPs because they frequently arise in the context of domestic homemaking practices that become public issues when they spill over into other people's private spaces (Cheshire, Fitzgerald, and Liu 2019; Stokoe 2006), and in the context of otherwise harmonious or civil neighbor relations. This is not to deny that neighbors cannot be responsible for public incivilities, disorder, or antisocial behavior, or that NPs do not spill out to become neighborhood problems (Cheshire and Fitzgerald 2015). Rather, we argue that the broader gamut of NPs that are experienced in everyday residential settings constitute an urban phenomenon that is much more, but also much less, than simply an expression of social disorder (Ross and Mirowsky 1999). To date, however, work on distinctly NPs has been mostly limited to self-report surveys of neighbor annoyances (Nieuwenhuis, Völker, and Flap 2013; Cheshire and Fitzgerald 2015), with few opportunities to take advantage of naturally occurring administrative record-keeping procedures.In response, this paper uses records of neighbor complaints to a local council in Brisbane as a way of identifying and explaining the patterns of what Legewie and Schaeffer (2016: 138) call “an interesting but subtle aspect of neighbourhood life….” Neighbor complaints are a particular form of NP insofar as they involve a formal request to a local council or municipality for advice or third-party intervention. The likelihood of neighbors reporting to local municipal councils to have their NPs managed is contingent on a number of factors. The first is that only a certain type of NP can be brought to council attention, that is, those that are subject to local laws or legislation, such as dividing fences, parking, development compliance, or animal noise, which can legitimately be actioned when those laws are thought to have been breached. From this, we can assert that complaints to council represent a more formalized set of the constellation of NPs that typically arise in residential areas, and only a fraction of the kinds of problems that neighbors might encounter with each other. The second is whether the annoyance is serious or repetitive enough that it cannot be tolerated and thus warrants remedy, suggesting that complaints to council are indicative of escalating levels of annoyance that can no longer be addressed through a polite word to the neighbor or strategies of avoidance.The final condition is what other researchers have termed “contacting propensity” (Legewie and Schaeffer 2016), meaning the willingness of a resident to contact a city government to address problems when the first two conditions are in place. Interpretations of the contacting propensity of residents to use city government hotlines for managing local problems vary on whether such calls are indicative of new forms of political participation (Levine and Gershenson 2014; White and Trump 2016) or public custodianship (O’Brien 2015) on the one hand, or as signs of neighborhood conflict (Legewie and Schaeffer 2016) on the other hand. Following Legewie and Schaeffer (2016), we treat complaints to council as indicative of NPs over and above contacting propensity, the latter of which we control for by measuring the tendency of residents in any given neighborhood to complain about issues that are not neighbor related. In doing so, our work contributes to a growing body of scholarship that explores the prevalence of, and influences on, NPs as a distinct feature of urban residential life (see also Nieuwenhuis, Völker, and Flap 2013; Warner 2014; Legewie and Schaeffer 2016; Mendez and Otero 2018; Cheshire, Fitzgerald, and Liu 2019), while also offering an exemplar of the use of large-scale administrative data for understanding these issues.The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the ensuing section outlines our conceptual framework by drawing on Galster’s (2012) mechanisms of neighborhood effects to identify three sets of causal mechanisms in the domain of NPs: social-interactive, environmental, and geographical. Using this framework, we then formulate a set of hypotheses to explore which of these mechanisms have explanatory potential. We then outline our methodological approach involving a large-scale administrative dataset to explore neighbor complaints to a municipal government as a particular manifestation of NPs, and document the procedures of data preparation and methodological workflow for a spatial statistical modeling approach. This is followed by the presentation of results and interpretation, along with a discussion of findings, their significance and future work in the last section.