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Simmel Moves to a Different Neighbourhood

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The Public Life of Friendship

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life ((PSFL))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses three cases of contemporary neighbouring initiatives: community housing and co-living; friendship-driven living choices (where people move into a neighbourhood in order to live near their friends); and neighbourhoods of common interest (e.g. gay neighbourhoods), along with the resistance to this. These cases all suggest the possibility that we can choose our neighbours as we choose our friends. The chapter also points out that friendship networks do not depend on location (neighbourhood), or even on obvious signs of common interests (e.g. sexual orientation). They tend to be more like personal communities, formed of personal attachments and interwoven connections across different settings, of which neighbourhood is only one, along with family, work and informal social groups of all kinds.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘Murundaka’ is a local Wurundjeri word meaning ‘a place to stay or live’. The Wurundjeri are a people of the Indigenous Australian nation of the Wurundjeri language group, in the Kulin alliance. They historically occupied the Birrarung (Yarra River) Valley, its tributaries and the present location of Melbourne.

  2. 2.

    This 2016 study of professional gay men’s personal communities used a ‘snowballing’ sampling technique to recruit a small sample of gay men who work in the nominally ‘gay friendly’ setting of health care in New South Wales (Colgan 2007; Rumens and Kerfoot 2009: 756). The participants were aged between 29 and 51. Over half the subjects were registered nurses. A third worked in healthcare administration and some participants worked in allied health. None had been married and only one participant had a child. Snowballing a small sample is unlikely to represent “the proportionate relationships among [a population’s] constituents” (Crouch and McKenzie 2006: 483). However, it can be used to uncover the dynamics of a particular situation. In addition, the methodology followed here was based on the lengthy ‘personal communities’ analysis of Spencer and Pahl (2006: 213). This requires extensive re-interviewing and is known to produce data saturation, after 6–10 interviews (Morse 2000: 5). The analysis of personal community maps and interviews revealed (among other things) neighbourly social connections.

  3. 3.

    Like the other names cited in this chapter, ‘Martin’ is a pseudonym used to protect the privacy of study participants.

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  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Jennifer Wilkinson

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  1. Jennifer Wilkinson
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Correspondence to Jennifer Wilkinson .

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Wilkinson, J. (2019). Simmel Moves to a Different Neighbourhood. In: The Public Life of Friendship . Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03161-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03161-9_8

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03160-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03161-9

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