The neighbourhood, a circle that changed function

Surveys conducted since the 1960s find a fall in the share of neighbours among relationships named, more marked in dense urban areas and in the most educated categories. The decline is relative: other circles have taken up more room, which does not mean that neighbourhood relationships have disappeared.

The fall concerns sociability relationships more than exchanges of services: having a neighbour round has receded faster than asking them to collect the post.

Residential mobility, longer commutes and the spread of communication means allowing distant ties to be maintained have reduced dependence on the immediate neighbourhood.

The fear of a city that would dissolve ties is an old one. Louis Wirth argued in 1938 that urban size and density made relationships superficial and segmented, a thesis that long served as the framework for the study of neighbourhoods.

Claude Fischer proposed as early as the 1970s the idea that urbanisation does not destroy relationships but allows them to be chosen elsewhere, a thesis that remains the dominant reading of these series. Barry Wellman spoke in 1979 of a community "liberated" from space, dispersed but very real.

Work on local mutual aid finds a specific function: the neighbourhood provides services that distance makes impossible, keeping a key, immediate help, informal watchfulness. These services have a practical value that distance cannot replace, and they often circulate between people who do not otherwise socialise.

That function does not presuppose emotional closeness, which explains why it persists while sociability relationships recede. The two dimensions move independently. A neighbour one barely greets may be the one entrusted with the keys during the holidays.

American work, notably that of Robert Sampson and colleagues on collective efficacy, published in 1997, associates certain neighbourhood characteristics, such as mutual trust and shared expectations, with residents' capacity to intervene.

Those analyses are ecological and their transposition to the French context is debated, residential configurations and housing policies producing different situations. The same level of neighbourhood relationships may thus correspond to very different realities depending on the type of housing.

The question asked about neighbourhood varies greatly between surveys: recognising by sight, greeting, doing a favour, having someone round are not the same thing and produce incomparable series.

In addition, the spatial definition of the neighbourhood is almost never explicit, which leaves each respondent to decide the perimeter they are answering about. A long series that seems to measure a decline may therefore partly measure a question whose meaning has changed.