Abstract

ABSTRACTCritical realism needs to explain how neighbourhoods – a middle-level social structure that people really use in everyday life – can emerge as real, with the causal power to promote individual and collective flourishing. Using distinctive neighbourhoods of Louisville, Kentucky, as a case study, we can see how neighbourhoods can emerge, develop distinctive projects which use the affordances of local social networks, and exercise downward causation on who comes to live there and how they live. This applies equally to such different kinds of neighbourhoods as the dense, walkable, close-in, mixed-use places favoured by the liberal ‘bourgeois bohemians,’ and to the spread out, large-house, car-based, conservative, gated communities far out in the suburbs.