Elise Richer, Urban Institute

Elise Richer plays center halfback for the Flanders Football Club and does social policy research for the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

If defining a neighborhood is difficult, given the subjective notions people bring to the definition, then defining a community seems to be virtually impossible. The word community has such a nice ring -- implying some kind of intangible bond or consensus -- that everyone presumably wants to belong to one, and ideally more than one. Because many of the projects I'm currently working on involve "community-building" or "community development," I bandy the word about a lot, and probably without nearly enough scientific rigor. During a meeting this past week, someone raised the concept of a-spatial communities, in the context of asking how one could measure the health of such a community. The more I've been thinking about this idea, the more it has appeared to me that most of the communities we talk about -- "the environmental community," "the Latino community," "the social science community" -- are not related by space at all, or at most, their spatial ties are far less pronounced than other binds.

When dealing with urban issues, the words community and neighborhood are sometimes used interchangeably. But there is clearly a difference between the two. "Community opposition" has a much different ring from "neighborhood opposition." One implies a consensus among people unified around one vision and against a bad idea; the other phrase invokes parochial NIMBYism.

What makes a good neighborhood? What elevates a neighborhood to the level of a community? This morning I'm writing from my parent's house on Cape Cod, and the questions seem pertinent in this small town. The street they live on is a neighborhood of sorts, I suppose, but due to the number of people who choose to live here only part-time, it has an a-spatial feel. Additionally, it lacks foot traffic and hangouts, being strictly residential. Most people here do not have school-aged children; nor do most work in the same location or come from the same place. So it is definitely lacking most of the elements I expect from my neighborhood in D.C., the aspects which allow me to even define it as a neighborhood -- the fact that I see familiar faces on the street, that I see the same pets in the park each morning, that I can recognize patterns in the movements around the block.

And yet my parents work hard to be good neighbors. They are the kind of neighbors many urban neighborhoods would appreciate more of: People who take care of their property and improve their houses, who water your plants when you're away (and trust you to water theirs), who know the names of the other residents on the street. Perhaps urban neighborhoods like mine lack these relationships because of the residents' transience and heterogeneity. The people who live in the row houses near me are different from the people who rent apartments in my building; even the renters in the two nearest apartment buildings are different from the renters in my building, due to the varying conditions of the units and the corresponding rent levels. Within my own building, while there are some people I know by first name and others by sight, there is little I know about them personally. We may never become a community, because we lack a common goal or even any common characteristics beyond an accident of geography. The simple fact of our common humanness and our predilections toward hearing monkeys hoot in the morning and toward searching for parking spots at night unifies us as much as anything else.