The Next Hundred Million by Joel Kotkin

Author:Joel Kotkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

THE NEW NEIGHBORHOOD NETWORK

The renewal of neighborhoods like Ditmas Park suggests that family and community are likely to remain central forces in the next few decades. Rather than “pigeon-hole ourselves into separate worlds of interests,” as one futurist predicted in 2006, social networking and instant messaging are actually bringing Americans closer together, facilitating such interactions as helping children with homework, or coping with illness and other life changes.4

The Flatbush Family Network, like Peachhead, a popular parent-oriented network in southern California, underscores a remarkable shift in social priorities back to family and community. So do networks in lower-income areas like Newark, New Jersey, where a neighborhood-based network of Family Success Centers (Newarkfamilysuccess.org) provides peer counseling on family issues. Many of the workers there are parents from the neighborhood, trained by a long-standing nonprofit agency.5

Other groups work as agents of family and community activism. Perhaps most important, these community networks connect people who might want company to, say, make their daily exercise at the park seem a bit safer or less lonely.6 Two researchers who studied networks in a certain suburb described them as “[an] opportunity for neighborhood interaction that is ultimately responsible for increased community involvement, in the forms of social ties and increased public participation.”

Digital networks perform some of the functions that urbanist Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” did in the old, cohesive city neighborhood. Information about the arrival of a promising new store or restaurant, or the unwelcome appearance of a possible child-molester, travels through these community networks much as it did when mothers spoke over the washing, men went to the pool hall or Kiwanis, or kids hung out at the corner candy store.7

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