Neighbourhood

TMA 03

Making social Lives
Neighbourhood

Good fences make good neighbours
Neighbourly relations can be ordered and defined in a number of ways whether it is through certain identities or virtual social rules, created, maintained and repaired by people in groups with a situation in common or a relationship to act out in their everyday lives. This essay examines the relations, conflicts and differences that come with neighbourhood life both in the Uk and other countries where contradictions and the limits between what is seen as friendly and where invasive behaviour starts are an important part of ordinary, daily life. Last of all it will show how these relations can easily break down due to tensions caused by conflicts over noise and space where the division between private and public life is hard to define.
When we speak about local residents we see them as having a collective or group identity with a particular situation in common, but they also have relational identities as neighbours with conflicting feelings of trust and suspiciousness. In addition people seem to behave in certain ways when they are part of a group as many researchers have discovered through studies on identity, such as sex, family, age, nationality, the same job, woman, man or even places. A group or collective identity can refer to people who share a place for a short period of time, or local residents. Tajfel ( Taylor, 2009, p. 170), found that if you tell people that they are part of a group this automatically influences the way they act. Another social identity has to do with places, can refer to people’s connection to streets or wider neighbourhood, for example, seller and buyer. Collective or group identities are important as well politically, they organize and mobilize people, for example, the women’s right to vote or even to receive the same pay. We often behave in ways which tell others who we are or how we want to be seen, a little like play acting, our daily lives become a...