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Neighbourhoods: Evolving Ideas, Evidence and Changing Policies

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Neighbourhood Effects or Neighbourhood Based Problems?

Abstract

A major issue for those interested in developing policy from research is that the vast majority of the academic contributions to the neighbourhood effects debates have come from work conducted in the United States of America. More often than not, the case studies have evolved from the Chicago school. In contrast policy makers are increasingly requiring more locally sourced examples from which to develop interventions and policies. In exploring why neighbourhood effects research has failed to have the expected impact on urban policy the first section of the chapter suggests a set of issues that need to be addressed in order for research to link directly with policy outcomes. Firstly, the broad area of work that is defined as neighbourhood effects consists of multiple disciplines researching from their own, often competing experiences and perspectives making it easy for policy makers to ignore the research. Secondly, researchers need to have a convincing story to tell policy makers. Thirdly, the research needs to integrate the multiple aspects of individual life courses and the range of residential contexts through which people move. Thus, a better understanding of the processes behind neighbourhood effects is called for: This includes understanding better what can constitute a neighbourhood and neighbourhood space and whether they need to be spatially and temporally contiguous. Similarly, we need to know much more about how individuals choose their living environments, how they search for housing, what trade-offs they make and what cost structures they use when making their decisions. There are symmetries in the need to understand the effects of partial and missing information on these processes. Finally, we need to better understand the processes that are missing in the black-boxes that are used mediate neighbourhood effects. What mechanisms are important, for whom, when are they important and where. Only when we can thread all of these competing facets together will the academic discipline be in a better shape to deliver a more coherent story to policy makers and move beyond the policy mistakes of the past.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    From 1999 until 2003 the author was Special Adviser to the First Minister of Scotland (with responsibilities for housing, neighbourhood and city policies), then 2003–2004 was Chief Economist (DSE) and Deputy Secretary for Policy and Strategy in the Government of Victoria, Australia, and from 2004 until 2008 was Chief Economist in the Canadian Federal Government Department for Cities and Communities (Infrastructure Canada).

  2. 2.

    Hedonic estimates of the (unobserved or implicit) prices of particular dwelling attributes, such as number of rooms or the presence or absence of a garage, are derived by regression analysis that estimates observed housing prices or rents as a function of the observed characteristics of a set of dwellings.

  3. 3.

    Some cultures and nations do impute values to places per se, for instance aboriginal Australian cultures would not fit Glaeser’s assumptions nor indeed would Gaelic Scots and many nations have iconic locations that they, in some sense, pay for.

  4. 4.

    The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a review, at broadly five or six year intervals of the quality of research publications by staff and of the wider impacts of their research. The next census date is currently end 2013.

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Acknowledgements 

I am grateful to Alice Oldfield for comments on this chapter and to David Manley for the incisive comments he made on an earlier draft. Remaining errors are all my own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Housing Research, School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AL, Scotland, UK

    Duncan Maclennan

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  1. Duncan Maclennan
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Correspondence to Duncan Maclennan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1SS, United Kingdom

    David Manley

  2. , OTB Research Inst for the Built Environm, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 9, Delft, 2628 BX, Netherlands

    Maarten van Ham

  3. , Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RS, United Kingdom

    Nick Bailey

  4. , The Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and S, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom

    Ludi Simpson

  5. , Centre for Housing Research, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, KY16 9AL, Fife, United Kingdom

    Duncan Maclennan

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Maclennan, D. (2013). Neighbourhoods: Evolving Ideas, Evidence and Changing Policies. In: Manley, D., van Ham, M., Bailey, N., Simpson, L., Maclennan, D. (eds) Neighbourhood Effects or Neighbourhood Based Problems?. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6695-2_13

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