The Dictionary of Human Geography

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historical district, for example – will be articu-

lated and deployed according to the people

involved and issues at stake. As the other

three approaches suggest, ‘neighbourhood’ is

a term that is highly dependent upon the par-

ticular location in which it is embedded,

the local political and socialculture, and the

perspective of the individual experiencing or

observing the neighbourhood. dgm

Suggested reading

Mitchell (1993);Urban Studies(2001).

neighbourhood effect A type ofcontext-

ual effectwhereby the characteristics of

people’s local social milieux influence the

ways in which they think and act. Neighbours

present individuals withmodelsof attitudes

and practices that may either: (a) conform to

their own, and so reinforce their self-identity

and behaviour; or (b) contradict them and sug-

gest alternatives that they may adopt, especially

if there is considerable pressure to do so.

The search for neighbourhood effects has

been especially characteristic ofelectoral

geography, with a number of studies showing

greater spatial polarization of, for example,

support for a political party in an area than

suggested by its residents’ characteristics.

Most of those studies use aggregate data, how-

ever, and may involve anecological fallacy.

Relatively little is known about the processes

that generate the observed patterns, although

the importance of interpersonal influence is

often assumed, generating what is known as

‘conversion through conversation’. Similar

effects are postulated in the spread of other

attitudes and behaviour patterns, ineduca-

tion, for example. rj

Suggested reading

Johnston and Pattie (2006).

neighbourhood unit A relatively self-con-

tained urban residential area. Most units are

in planned residential developments, either

suburban districts ornew townsand similar

settlements.

The concept of aneighbourhoodunit was

first deployed in Chicago in 1916 and formal-

ized by Clarence Perry (1872–1944) in 1929.

It suggested the importance ofscalein plan-

ning residential areas: each neighbourhood

unit should be of sufficient size that it was

relatively self-contained for certain functions –

primary schools and daily shopping, for ex-

ample – and should develop as an integrated

community. British garden cities were

planned with neighbourhood units of about

5,000 persons: all unit facilities were within

walking distance and motorized transport

largely excluded.

Although the general concept continues to

underpin someurban planning, the assump-

tion that people wish to constrain parts of their

daily/weekly lives to such relatively small

boundedterritorieshas generated criticism,

while greater reliance on personal transport

has broken down the utility of such a cellular

division of urban space. rj

Suggested reading

Hall (2002).

neo-classical economics A school of eco-

nomics defined by the study of rational

economic choice and the price-based optimal

allocation ofresources, using a body of ana-

lytically rigorous and mathematically sophisti-

cated theory and techniques. It istheschool of

economics, at least in Anglo-America,

ubiquitous, hegemonic and mainstream. The

economist Roy Weintraub says, ‘we are all

neoclassicists now’.

Robbins (1932, p. 16) provided the iconic

methodological definition of neo-classicism:

‘a science which studies human behaviour as

a relationship between ends and scarce means

which have alternative uses’. The origins of

neo-classicism are earlier, however, with the

writings of a troika of late-nineteenth-century

European economists: the Englishman Wil-

liam Stanley Jevons (1835–82), the Austrian

Carl Menger (1840–1921) and the French-

man Le ́on Walras (1834–1910). Alfred

Marshall (1842–1924), the first economist at

Cambridge, codified, systematized and elab-

orated their works (including inventing supply

and demand diagrams: see figure) in his

enormously influential textbookPrinciples of

economics(published in eight editions between

1890 and 1920). After the Second World War,

the centre of neo-classical economics crossed

the Atlantic to the USA, taking its now famil-

iar abstract, mathematical form. A key influ-

ence was MIT’s Paul Samuelson (1915– ), the

second winner of the Nobel Prize in econom-

ics (1970), and author of the canonical text

of formal neo-classical theory,Foundations of

economic analysis(1947).

Neo-classical economics is neither mono-

lithic nor static, but there are a number of

core concerns that continually surface:

(1) The focus on rational economic

choice, the belief that individuals have

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_N Final Proof page 495 31.3.2009 3:13pm Compositor Name: ARaju

NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMICS