Review: Southwest Philadelphia By Michael Mccauley

I’ve lived in Chicago almost all my life. There’s a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago; Good and bad. Living on the south side of Chicago most of my life would make you think there’s nothing but violence in the city. Even though Its bad, I enjoy the neighborhood I live in now. The neighborhood I live in is Roseland, but I grew up in Englewood. Both neighborhoods are similar, but they have their differences.

In Streetwise, Elijah Anderson (1990) discusses the social forces at work in an urban area he calls the Village-Northton. His is a sociological field study of the daily interactions between the residents of an area encompassing two communities--in his words, "one black and low income to very poor (with an extremely high infant mortality rate), [and] the other racially mixed but becoming increasingly middle to upper income and white" (Anderson, 1990, p. ix). In keeping with valid sociological fieldwork, Anderson (1990) immersed himself in the community from the summer of 1975 through the summer of 1989.

Because my neighbor is considered suburban it often gets a bad rep. A lot of people think that suburbs are boring and aren't interesting. As this suggests, the problem is also cultural. For the most part, American culture and opinion are still created, even in the Internet age, in cities at either edge of the continent. If intellectuals do deign to look at the suburbs they assume that so much banality must be hiding something deeply

The reader will find it difficult to draw connections between these neighbors and themselves when they hardly even know many intimate details about the lives of these characters. However, this is because the reader is put into a position where they are viewing characters from an outside perspective in the same way that the neighbors view each other: with little information about their lives. This is backed up in Neal Alexander’s article, titled “Profoundly Ordinary: Jon McGregor and Everyday Life”, where Alexander comments on the anonymous nature of the neighborhood, stating “The calculated anonymity that results is clearly intended to make a point about the nature of contemporary urban life, where neighbors typically maintain a defensive reserve toward one another” (Alexander 729-730). The novel maintains a type of irony in that it must detach the reader from the story in order to connect them in the same way that the characters are connected.

Provided the unofficial definition, majority of the United States could easily guess the word: “The slums outside of Los Angeles. This area is very poor and revolves around gang violence, sex and drug dealing.” That’s correct, you guessed it right! It’s the infamous Compton. The city that everyone has heard in the news or in a song at one point or another. This definition was taken from Urban Dictionary, a site that allows anyone to define specific words and terms. It is easy to see that Compton is often related with drugs, crime and gangs, but the general public fails to realize the truth behind the suburb. The smaller Los Angeles district is filled with hard working people that have been disenfranchised and defined as numbers and statistics.

My neighborhood contains a rather small number of houses. Only six houses and that includes my house. My neighborhood happens to be the best neighborhood in my opinion. The reason why I think so is that I hardly know any of my neighbors. what may appear awkward about my neighborhood is that all the houses are positioned on the same side of the road as my house. Surprisingly, on the other side of the road, there are just trees. There are more houses down the road, but I do not consider them my neighbors because that distance is more than I am willing to walk for a cup of sugar. If one is looking from the road at my house. it would appear that I only have two neighbors. One that lives behind my house, and another that lives to the left of me, but all of my other three neighbors are hiding. Right beside my mailbox, there is another mailbox and a dirt road follow the dirt road to meet Jason( cue the scary music). Yes, his name is Jason, and his house has always creeped me out ever since I found out I had another neighbor. ( p.s.

The yards are kept and I see an elderly couple outside doing yard work and raking leaves. I observe one neighbor hanging Christmas lights from the roof. The neighborhood has a mix of ethnicity. I see Hispanic, Caucasian and African populations. This family is Lutheran and attends a church a few blocks away. There is also a nearby Catholic church. The local hospital is about 1 mile away and I passed it on my way to their home. There are many doctors' offices and dental offices near the hospital. Many yards still have election signs still in the yards. There are not any billboards visible displaying any media. I do see some newspapers in driveways. This neighborhood has close access to the highway. The city of Chicago is about a forty five minute drive. The father says he takes the train to commute to the city for work in the city. He is a machine operator for a manufacturing plant in the city.

The study examined data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). They created 847 census tracts to create 343 neighborhood clusters. The

In the communities I grew up in, there were frequent changing circumstances that actually left my family not really as part of the community. From dingy, cheap and tiny places for rent, there has been significant points brought to the attention of the reader in this book that could attribute to the failure and success of neighborhoods. In Suburban Nation, the opening pages give a lot of insight on the issues that can come from these big and fancy, new housing developments.

2. The street in where we live is where the wealthy people live, so it’s not really crowded like in streets of the city. Besides, it’s actually distant from the city.. the noises and the poor. Basically a good place to refresh and rest your minds. To be honest, I’m not really close with our neighbours. They’re rich too and somehow, I always get the feeling they actually pretend to be nice to other people and have this evil back-up plan somewhere in their head. (Which I do not have of course!)

Cobblestone Estates is near Westbrook Park, which includes a few other activities alongside community trails that allows walking, running, or bicycling. These Estates are less than three miles from the closest school district. Also, within that three-mile radius there are several restaurants, parks, and businesses. Since I observed two families spending time together outside, I suspect that block parties and neighborhood parties, bonfires, or cookouts take place! Similarly, Winding Brooks trailer park is about four miles from the same activities and the Central DeWitt School District. Not everyone would like to live in community where everything is within a couple miles. Others enjoy the journey to their location, but the residents in each of these neighborhoods prefer things to be within a couple miles because it is comprised with their personal identity. Personal identity allows changes in life as you go on, this includes the choice of where one may

to visit your neighbor can be rewarding. On the flip side, city life breeds a more dangerous lifestyle and leaves no chance for getting to know your fellow townsfolk.

Throughout the world of suburbia, there seems to be a persistence of communities who attempt to create a perfect, enclosed world for the whole of the community to live in. By providing for everything that the inhabitants would ever want, suburbia is able to close itself off from those around it that it deems unworthy of belonging. While this exclusivity helps to foster the sense of community, it can also bring with it isolation from the outside, and also from within, and have disastrous results. Throughout the semester, there have been a number of works that have dealt the issue of isolation, but the greatest representation of a work whose physical qualities in its representation of suburbia help to

In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.

Neighbors are the people who live near us, and their behavior influences our daily life. Good neighbors can make us feel comfortable and give us many help, and everyone will benefits from a good relationship among neighbor. In my point of view, these are three conspicuous aspects of the qualities of good neighbor.