I’ve been thinking about populations recently, perhaps unsurprisingly after the recent PopFest conference, nevertheless I tend to justify the presence of certain groups as characteristics of particular neighbourhoods or communities. In itself this seems entirely valid, certainly no population is perfectly homogeneous, they exist along a spectrum of heterogeneity. We can see simply from our own experience of the world that some areas exhibit spectacular diversity of inhabitants, particularly urban areas, my case study area of Southwark, London springs to mind. Situated in central London, south of the River Thames it contains a population that spans the inequality divide from the wealthy, young, City workers resident along the redeveloping ‘Bankside’ and the older, settled familied of the leafier southern part of Southwark, to the poorer, often non-white, communties in central Southwark living in social housing, to the poorer, older white residents historically attached to the docklands to the north-east of Southwark. Notably rural areas tend toward greater homogeneity, but still exhibit some diversity in some characteristics even if others, particularly ethnicity are constant.

This is, however, not the point, the real issue is the difference between neighbourhoods and communities. Both are very difficult to define clearly, my snap judgement is that communities realte to people and neighbourhoods to the territories that people inhabit. However some deeper research will show cracks in this simplistic approach, sure neighbourhood usually relates to a metric space, things that are near to, or contiguous to something else, however creating neighbourhoods for individuals seems like an approach to constructing communities for those individuals, likewise geodemographic classifications are increasingly being conflated with indicating something signifcant about the underlying communities. Similarly, communities occupy particular areas, the practice of mapping communities which come from government requirements seeks to territorialise community and new pratcices in public service causes further confusion: community policing for safer neighbourhoods?

The main rule that I have been able to extract from much of this is the propensity for communties to represent a ‘softer’, perhaps more public facing approach and conversely, by neighbourhoods a ‘harder’, more quantified method is often implied. There are notable splits within the disipline of geography between those who are willing to engage ‘communities’, which are intangible, temporally variable, socially realised relationships (perhaps) and come with the baggage of uncertainty and those that would rather deal with the geographically discrete entity of the neighbourhood, safe in the knowledge that the implied precision of areal units are not widely questioned. Even within GIS there has been a diversification of approach, from the mainstream GISci enforcing a ‘spatial science’-style approach that has persisted since the quantitative revolution (at least), to the public participation GIS discourse which actively engages communities and individuals, and by extension critical GIS which for a time has critiqued territorially bounded ‘descriptions’ of community. Finally consider the governmental binary of ‘neighbourhood statistics’ and ‘community cohesion’, many councils use neighbourhood statistics to ‘measure’ community cohesion!