Suburbanization and Urbanization: The Comparison between Western and Chinese Neighborhood housing

It is hard to define Neighbourhood. In social aspect, neighbourhood means the social interaction between households. In urban development or design, neighbourhood is also used to describe the idealistic living environment. For real estate, neighbourhood becomes a selling point strongly welcomed by the middle class family in the city. Researchers have not agreed on an exact definition. Neighbourhood, then, are the spatial units in which face-to-face social interactions occur, the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realize common values, socialize youth, and maintain effective social control. In ancient civilization, neighbourhoods handled informal occurrences, such as marriage, child birth, burial, cleaning up, begging for rain and so on. In the word of Lewis Mumford, "Neighbourhoods, in some primitive, inchoate fashion exist wherever human being congregate, in permanent family dwellings; and many of the functions of the city tend to distribute naturally- that is, without any theoretical preoccupation or political direction- into neighbourhoods."