Позитивные изменения. Том 2, №4 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 4 (2022)

Architect William Eugene Drummond proposed the concept of a Neighborhood Unit, where a unit is understood as “part of the whole.” Drummond pointed out that the modern city (with its major projects now more than a century old) needs to recreate the social and political relations among its citizens and, consequently, the need for new special infrastructure. According to Peter Ivanov, Drummond took sociologist Charles Cooley's concept of the “primary circle of social relations” as the basis and focused attention on the neighborhood unit, the environment in which that very circle of relations — family, friendship, neighborhood — is preserved and maintained.

“Each neighborhood unit, according to Drummond, consists of low-rise apartment buildings, an elementary school, a playground and a neighborhood center,” Ivanov notes. In modern parlance, the Drummond neighborhood center is the “little capital” of the neighborhood, an amalgamation of a wide variety of functions that are still characteristic of the modern neighborhood center — a club, a place for meetings and gatherings, sports center, and so on.

In contrast to the modern developers' prevailing view of the neighborhood centers, Drummond saw them as a major tool for providing individuality and, following that, political subjectivity to the city neighborhoods. And then, each neighboring unit would create the fabric of the city itself, with business spaces and centers, parks, squares, and promenades emerging at the “junctions between the neighborhood units.”

Peter Ivanov notes that this concept became so popular that Drummond's terminology was borrowed in the 1920s by Robert Ezra Park, the founding father of the Chicago School of Sociology, who also argued that neighborhoods were the foundational core of the urban fabric. And by the 1930s, under the influence of the Chicago School sociologists, Clarence Perry offered his own understanding of neighborhood units, shifting the focus away from the political role of neighborhood centers[70]. It was Perry's approach, as Peter Ivanov notes, “that was creatively reworked in the USSR,” which resulted in the neighborhoods as we all know them.

From practically the only Russian-language review of Drummond's concept by Peter Ivanov, the reader can draw several important conclusions for this material:

• Neighborhood centers are a part of the neighborhood's living routine, lost during the “creative reworking,” and this might be a good time to bring this element back into the urban fabric;

• Neighborhood centers are one element of the neighborhood unit, creating a holistic structure and conditions for self-actualization of each resident, preventing stigmatization of certain groups of residents and unlocking the potential of neighborhood communities;

• Neighborhood centers create an identity for each unit of an entire city, providing (with sufficient development and scale of amalgamation) the territorial, social, and political subjectivity that we can already observe in a number of cases of the development of the Territorial Public Self-Governments or community foundations.

THE DEVELOPERS' VIEW

Positively, these findings are reflected in many ways in today's vision of the role and purpose of neighborhood centers by the leading development companies. This can be seen, in particular, from the agenda of most large-scale and regular professional events, such as the annual international conference “Factory of Spaces.” The organizer of the conference, the Blagosfera center, brings together community space owners and managers every year with a mandatory separate event dedicated to neighborhood center development. In the fall of 2022, such an event was the Neighborhood Center Leaders Session of development companies, organized in conjunction with the Positive Changes Factory.

Its key topics were those of the vision and the role of neighborhood centers, as well as the search for a neighborhood center development model that is most adequate to the contemporary situation.

According to Irina Gontarenko, Project Manager of Neighborhood Centers at Brusnika Company, each center is an element of the neighborhood's social infrastructure for self-actualization of the residents, establishing a community within itself and stimulating its development[71]. The roles of the community and the developer are clearly spelled out and distributed. Brusnika participates in creating the community, setting the development vector, moderating processes, assisting in managing controversial situations and providing financial support at the initial stage (the first year). The community contributes by community development activities, providing content for events, creating and implementing projects.