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European Sociological Review Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2006
European Sociological Review 2007 23(1):99-114; doi:10.1093/esr/jcl022
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

When Are Neighbourhoods Communities? Community in Dutch Neighbourhoods

Beate Völker, Henk Flap and Siegwart Lindenberg

Henk Flap, Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, NL-3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Siegwart Lindenberg, Department of Sociology/ICS, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, NL-9712 TG Groningen, The Netherlands.

Correspondence: Beate Völker (to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Sociology/ICS, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, NL-3584 CS, The NetherlandsEmail: b.volker{at}fss.uu.nl

This study investigates the degree to which community can be found in Dutch neighbourhoods and attempts to explain why there is more community in some neighbourhoods than in others. We apply a perspective on community which assumes that people create communities with the expectation to realize some important well-being goals. Conditions that account for the creation of a local community are specified, i.e. the opportunity, ease, and motivation to do so. These conditions are realized when (i) neighbourhoods have more meeting places; (ii) neighbours are, given their resources and interests, motivated to invest in local relationships; (iii) neighbours have few relations outside of the neighbourhood, and (iv) neighbours are mutually interdependent. Data from the Survey of Social Networks of the Dutch on 1,007 respondents in 168 neighbourhoods are used. Results show that there is a sizeable amount of community in Dutch neighbourhoods and that all the four conditions contribute to the explanation, while interdependencies among neighbours have the strongest impact on the creation of community.

Manuscript received: March 1, 2004.


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[Abstract] [PDF]


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