Neighborhood Neighborhood , by Emily Talen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 303 pp., £22.99 (hardback), ISBN: 9780190907495

What is a neighborhood in the digital age?In the context of contemporary configurations of regions, defined as networks of economic, social and political powers (Hall, 2009;Healey, 2006;Turok, 2009), responding to this question is not easy.The spatial turns of recent decades have heightened the theoretical debate over distinct spatial lexicons, and definitions of territory, place, scale, and network (Jessop et al., 2008).It is argued that social and economic processes occur on a growing geographical scale, beyond that of the city, and are transforming historically separate metropolitan areas into connected, polycentric regions (Burger et al., 2014).Advocates of this approach argue that the traditional, Christallerian central-place conceptualization of urban systems is outdated, and can best be replaced by a network view of urban systems without an urban hierarchy and with a significant degree of spatial integration between different centers (Burger et al., 2014(Burger et al., , p. 1921)).However, the idea of the network as the organizing logic of contemporary global environments -and for cityregionalism in particular -is questioned by other scholars, who argue that it is too soon to completely abandon the idea of hierarchical system and its development by the nation-state (Jonas & Ward, 2007;Kirby & Abu-Rass, 1999).They propose recognizing a paradoxical pattern in which the formation of regional networks reinforces the dispersion of urban-regional activities while also fostering their concentration in specific locales (Albrechts & Mandelbaum, 2007).This tension between networks and locales stands at the core of contemporary pandemic crisis.Surely, a global effort was needed to tackle the crisis, but the locale -the physical place that each of us inhabits -had a major impact on how our wellbeing was supported during the pandemic.Neighborhoods in the same city experienced the pandemic differently; parameters such as density, socio-economic status, public amenities and spaces, all played crucial roles in the resilience of neighborhoods.In the pandemic context, neighborhoods did matter.Crises are analyzed on national and city scale, but managed in the local neighborhood.The neighborhood scale is also relevant for present and future challenges such as climate change, food crises, and increasing immigration.True, global knowledge and efforts are required to tackle these challenges, but we should not forget that we experience them locally, at our doorstep.And not only in times of crisis.Many of our daily activities take place locally.But, even if we agree about the relevance of neighborhoods for tackling contemporary challenges, major methodological issues are at stake.First, as a unit of analysis, 'neighborhood' is not easy to define.Urban geographers and planners have not adopted a universally accepted definition of what constitutes an urban neighborhood (Flint, 2009, p. 354).Throughout the 20th century, and into the 21st, scholars have cultivated "a definition of neighborhood based on social demographics, which mostly meant that neighborhoods were defined as census tracts" (Talen, 2018, p. 63).Second, the ambiguity and indeterminacy that surrounds the idea of the neighborhood is often cited as a limiting factor that circumscribes its empirical value for urban analysis (Galster, 2019).Third, there is tension between the geographical and the social aspects of the neighborhood.As a focus of research, the neighborhood has a degree of inherent ambiguity, because it contains both geographic (place-oriented) and social (people-oriented) aspects.Many use the word 'neighborhood' interchangeably with 'community,' another term that is difficult to pin down (Kenny, 2009, p. 343).Fourth is the multidimensional character of the neighborhood.Neighborhoods are complex organizations, consisting of a series of spatially-based attributes and processes relating to both the built environment, and the economic, social, and cultural characteristics of the population residing there.