Defining neighborhoods

L'Enfant Plan, Washington, DC.

One of the questions that came up during yesterday's H Street Alley Tour (which ended up being also an H Street history tour in part) was what is the physical definition of Capitol Hill.

Neighborhood definitions are based in large part by mobility patterns. In the era of the Walking City (1800-1890), people lived close to work, and they walked, and for the most part they lived, shopped, played, worked, and went to school in their own neighborhood.

This was about a 15 to 25 minute maximum area.

So the area around the Navy Yard, where many many people worked, where ships and armaments were constructed for more than 100 years, was its own neighborhood, as was the part closer to the U.S. Capitol, as was the H Street neighborhood, Lincoln Park, etc.

With automobile based transportation, even in the city traffic, 15 minutes takes you much further, and so Capitol Hill is expanding so to speak, amalgamating areas like Lincoln Park and the Navy Yard (Barracks Row), and now maybe H Street.

There are other reasons: real estate interests try to define neighborhoods in terms of the most inviting and successful parts of neighborhoods (it's fun to read real estate ads for places in Mount Rainier, MD or H Street NE--"be part of the arts district, the renaissance, etc.").

It occurred to me while answering the question that you could adapt some of the centre-periphery discussion from the studies of imperialism and underdevelopment from sociology and political economy. Granted that is a discussion about "first" world and "third" world nations, but I think it has some explanatory power.

Core parts of areas of the city like Brookland or Capitol Hill (Pennsylvania Ave. SE) end up becoming "centers" for larger swaths of the city, and neighborhood naming conventions change as a result too.

The trick is the neighborhood core has to want and accept and embrace this definition, or they can't capitalize on it. (I.e., compare the Brookland commercial district on 12th Street NE to Capitol Hill. There is no substantively successful neighborhood-walking based commercial district center in Ward 5.)