Neighbourhood Environmental Services and Neighbourhood ‘Effects’: Exploring the Role of Urban Services in Intensifying Neighbourhood Problems

This paper examines the consequences of a system of neighbourhood environmental service provision which fails to pay sufficient attention to territorial differences in ‘need’ for such services. It explores the impacts of a ‘territorial injustice’ of service provision for poor neighbourhoods, arguing that insufficient service provision operates as a ‘neighbourhood effect’ compounding the problems of being poor and living in a poor area. The paper shows how high levels of social need and a failure within environmental service provision to compensate for these levels of need combine and interact to deepen the environmental problems encountered in many deprived neighbourhoods. In particular, the paper shows how these interactions reduce the capacity of both front line service providers and neighbourhood residents to cope with environmental challenges and thus reveals processes which entrench neighbourhood disadvantage. In so doing, the paper contributes to debates about how so-called ‘neighbourhood effects’ occur.