Most broadly, the excellent This Big City blog ran a great story (and related #citytalk session) a couple of months ago that discussed the different characters of different cities and how citizens both define and are defined by their cities' identity. Here's the piece: Urban Identity: Citizens and Their Cities
In terms of neighborhood identity specifically, I loved this New York Times article on a part of Manhattan's Upper West Side that "needs a name". This basic concept of a neighborhood without clear identity has been a fascinating one to me for years - part of the inspiration for my research on the role that transit design can play in promoting identity in areas that lack it, and is very similar to my project on a "neighborhood without a name" in Chicago (which ultimately became an article on the culture of first-wave gentrification in "fringe" areas). Much like Chicago (and unlike L.A.), it is surprising to hear about a neighborhood in New York City without a long-established identity. Sure, boundaries shift (due to movement or expansion of defining groups, as in the case of Chinatown, or thanks to overzealous real-estate agents stretching more 'valuable' names into areas on their fringes, as happened with Williamsburg), and new neighborhoods are occasionally even "created" due to re-branding (NoLiTa? SoBro?), but to have an area that is actively unsure of and seeking identity, seemingly out of thin air, is uncommon here - especially in Manhattan. The reason of course is that the neighborhood is actually, physically new - the result of massive new condo development on what used to be railyards between 59th and 72nd streets near the Hudson River. It literally has new streets (including Riverside Boulevard, a name that some are trying to brand the whole area with), few restaurants or attractions, and is - perhaps crucially - beyond the delivery areas of many of those that cover the rest of the Upper West Side. Yet it has some 8,000 residents. A great read: All This Neighborhood Needs is a Name.
Finally, more recently, I've come across two fascinating posts on the actual defining and mapping of urban areas. First, MIT Technology Review reported on a project called Livehoods from Carnegie Mellon researchers that ingeniously uses Foursquare 'check-in' data to measure "social proximity" in different parts of cities (currently Pittsburgh, NYC, and the Bay Area). It reminds me of the "Neighborhood Project" over at theory.org, which uses craigslist data to similar effect. Interestingly though, the Livelihoods folks code each area with numbers rather than names, because the data provide none (though they're considering crowd-sourcing the actual names at a later date, a bit like the LA Times did for its Mapping LA Neighborhoods project). Here's the article: Using Foursquare Data to Redefine a Neighborhood. Meanwhile, James Cheshire of UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Statistics gave a presentation on the subject of Mapping London's Population Flows, the results of which were posted on the SpatialAnalysis.co.uk blog. Cheshire considers the use of data such as surnames (see below), transport trips, twitter traffic, etc. to map the way people live and use different parts of the city.
