Neighborhood.
A place. A local space. A feeling. A community.
This is, in brief, how I perceive what a neighborhood is, or can be.
How do you perceive or experience it?
I snapped the photo below of my daughter and a friend running and playing on our way home from school one day last month. For me, part of neighborhood is the potential for these types of meetings with fellow local residents to occur – often both spontaneously and regularly.
Neighborhood, for me, is about that context and rhythm of our lives lived locally and also these moments with others, moving through and inhabiting the area in shared dialogue.
Over the past three years in this neighbourhood, we have developed our local patterns, settled on our favorite bakery and coffee shop, gotten to know the matrix of little shops on the blocks around us and their open hours so we know where to go, for example on a Sunday afternoon for that missing ingredient.
We have developed that small rapport of exchange with diverse shop owners and employees, developed preferences for certain routes, processed our grievances about what aspects of the area we would opt to be changed (for us to want to invest or stay in the area), and also had many moments like the one pictured here- a fleeting but precious moment of movement and joy as we move about in our daily rhythms and schedules.
How do you translate ‘neighborhood’ in your language?