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This paper analyses how neighbourhood governance of social care affects the scope for frontline workers to address health inequities of older ethnic minorities. We critically discuss how an area-based, generic approach to service provision limits and enables frontline workers' efforts to reach out to ethnic minority elders, using a relational approach to place. This approach emphasises social and cultural distances to social care and understands efforts to bridge these distances as “relational work”.

The authors conducted a two-year multiple case study of the cities of Nijmegen and The Hague, the Netherlands, following the development of policies and practices relevant to ethnic minority elders. They conducted 44 semi-structured interviews with managers, policy officers and frontline workers as well as 295 h of participant observation at network events and meeting activities.

Relational work was open-ended and consisted of a continuous reorientation of goals and means. In some cases, frontline workers spanned neighbourhood boundaries to connect with professional networks, key figures and places meaningful to ethnic minority elders. While neighbourhood governance is attuned to equality, relational work practice fosters possibilities for achieving equity.

Further research on achieving equity in relational work practice and more explicit policy support of relational work is needed.

The paper contributes empirical knowledge about how neighbourhood governance of social care affects ethnic minority elders. It translates a relational view of place into a “situational” social justice approach.

As disaster resilience activities are increasingly occurring at the neighbourhood level, there is a growing recognition in research and in practice of the contributions that community stakeholders can make in assessing the resilience of their communities. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process in deriving a disaster resilience measurement framework by soliciting the perspectives of stakeholders from urban neighbourhoods in two countries. The authors examined their community values, and their perspectives on both the concept of resilience and the essential elements that they believe would contribute to the resiliency of their neighbourhoods.

The authors used an appreciative inquiry approach to draw out the perspectives of 58 stakeholders from nine focus groups in five urban neighbourhoods in New Zealand and in the USA.

Results of this research show common values and recurring perceived characteristics of disaster resilience across the study sites. A neighbourhood-based disaster resilience measurement framework is developed that encompasses individual/psychological, socio-cultural, economic, infrastructural/built, and institutional/governance dimensions of disaster resilience. In the process of developing the framework, the authors identified challenges in engaging certain segments of the population and in accounting for wider structural influences on neighbourhood resilience.

Issues relating to inclusive community engagement and linkages to cross-scalar resilience factors need to be addressed in future studies.

Results of this research provide insights and guidance for policy makers and practitioners when engaging communities in the development of resilience metrics.

This study fills the literature gap in evaluating community values and stakeholders’ perspectives on disaster resilience when identifying metrics for resilience interventions in urban neighbourhoods. The proposed measurement framework is derived from cross-cultural and diverse socioeconomic settings.

Social media have become a key part of placemaking. Placemaking revolves around collaboration between multiple stakeholders, which requires ongoing two-way communication between local government and citizens. Although social media offer promising tools for local governments and public professionals in placemaking, they have not lived up to their potential. This paper aims to uncover the tensions and challenges that social media bring for public professionals at the street level in placemaking processes.

This study aims to fill this gap with a case study of area brokers engaged in online placemaking in Amsterdam. In total, 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, focusing on area brokers’ social media practices, perceptions and challenges. The authors used an open coding strategy in the first phase of coding. In the second phase, the authors regrouped codes in thematic categories with the use of sensitizing concepts derived from the theoretical review.

The use of social media for placemaking imposes demands on area brokers from three sides: the bureaucracy, the affordances of social media and affective publics. The paper unpacks pressures area brokers are under and the (emotional) labour they carry out to align policy and bureaucratic requirements with adequate communication needed in neighbourhood affairs on social media. The tensions and the multidimensionality of what is required explain the reluctance of area brokers to exploit the potential of social media in their work.

Several studies have addressed the use of social media in placemaking, but all neglected the perspective of street-level bureaucrats who shape the placemaking process in direct contact with citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of transplanting the institution of homeowner associations or similar to existing urban neighbourhoods in order to correct imbalances in patterns of incentives and responsibilities that threaten the liveability and sustainability of cities.

The paper compares a recent published proposal for privatising existing neighbourhoods with the current Taiwan Government's attempt to assist shops on retail streets to create their own micro‐governance associations. The paper takes a strongly normative approach, using propositions from economic theory.

The paper identifies several crucial factors in designing an institution for privatising existing commercial neighbourhoods; notably the usage of coercive power and the efficient alignment of property rights.

The discussion in the paper rests on a small number of case studies in Taiwan and on qualitative information collected by interviews with key informants. This information is sufficient to illustrate our normative theoretical arguments about institutional design.

The paper offers some useful insights for public officials and private entrepreneurs seeking solutions to the problem of regeneration using voluntary urban neighbourhoods management.

The paper is the first published work to explore the adoption of homeowner associations in commercial neighbourhoods. It is one of the few papers to analyse the issues arising, using an institutional framework based on the new institutional economics.

The paper aims to consider whether Neighbourhood Panning provides the appropriate output legitimacy for citizen engagement in the planning process. The Localism Act 2011 transformed the planning process by shifting decision-making powers away from the local institutions and transferring them to local people. Neighbourhood planning has created a new dynamic in planning by using “bottom up” governance processes which enables local people to shape the area where they live. Local referenda are used to inject output legitimacy in to neighbourhood planning, and this planning self-determination can be considered as “spatial sovereignty”, whereby the recipients of the planning decisions are also the primary stakeholders that have shaped planning policy.

This paper will examine how Localism, as an evolving concept of local governance, is enfranchising local communities to take control of planning and development in their area. The paper will draw upon the experience of the revised planning methodology introduced by the Localism Act 2011 and consider its impact on the delivery of broader public policy objectives contained within the National Planning Policy Framework.

Localism provides an alternative form of citizen engagement and democratic legitimation for planning decisions which transcends the traditional forms of participatory democracy, and recognises that other paths of democratic law-making are possible.

The paper argues that neighbourhood planning has created a paradigm whereby local planning preferences, as an expression of spatial sovereignty, do not necessarily align with the broader public policy objective to build homes in the right places.

This paper examines the role that neighborhood associations might play in helping to govern American cities. In contrast to recent arguments that there has been a decline in grass-roots level “social capital,” the empirical evidence suggests that local neighborhood associations are growing in number, and are increasingly active. We discuss the theoretical foundations for involving neighborhoods in governance, and argue that informal associations can mediate between citizens on the one hand, and large-scale bureaucracies and businesses, on the other. In addition, a formal system of associations may encourage discussion among fragmented neighborhoods, which in turn could improve conflict negotiation and develop mutual understanding. We argue that a major impediment to the development of a neighborhood council system in Los Angeles has been a lack of information about existing neighborhood-based associations, and discuss an ongoing initiative to develop a comprehensive base of information regarding neighborhood associations in Los Angeles.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of European Union Objective 1 funding on the development and formalisation of a neighbourhood‐based group situated in a regeneration area in the UK. The role, function and impact of a Community Empowerment Network (CEN) (funded by the Labour Government as part of its Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy) is also examined and assessed.

The findings of the paper are informed by a critique of the policy literature and the ways in which “leadership” roles and responsibilities are played out within neighbourhood settings. The empirical research derives from an analysis of the role and practice of CENs in England.

The paper argues that the external initiatives restrict the autonomy and independence of community based groups. Furthermore, the paper makes the point that such externally driven programmes are often located within neighbourhoods with little reference to identifying the needs or priorities of residents.

There are important lessons here for policy makers and practitioners in public policy to reflect upon. The paper seeks to draw connections between the literature on community development and planning/regeneration management. These links are important to sustain and to open the discussion to a broader audience of researchers and practice managers.

The paper raises questions concerning how local residents/groups can be facilitated into articulating their needs and exercising agency in terms of changing the decision‐making/resource allocation processes.

The paper adds to understanding the practice of empowerment networks.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the influences of social trust and neighborhood cohesion on public trust in the police in China.

This study used survey data collected from roughly 5,600 respondents by the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). Multivariate regression was employed to analyze the effects of two forms of social trust, generalized trust and particularized trust, and three types of neighborhood cohesion, neighbor solidary, support and interaction, on public trust in the Chinese police, controlling for personal background characteristics.

Both generalized trust and particularized trust exerted a significant positive effect on trust in the Chinese police. Greater neighborhood cohesion also enhanced public trust in the police. Elderly, women, less educated and people with rural hukou and higher perceived social class were more likely to trust the police.

The CGSS data contained only a single item that could be used to measure public trust in the police. Future studies should consider using multiple survey items to reflect Chinese people’s trust from different conceptual dimensions, such as procedural- and outcome-based trust and police legitimacy. The CGSS data also did not contain information on some relevant predictors, such as victimization and fear of crime, personal and vicarious contact experiences with the police, and news and social media usage and exposure. Future studies, if possible, should incorporate these theoretically relevant and empirically proven variables into the analysis.

Improving neighborhood cohesion is a clear path to cultivate stronger public trust in the police. Policy-makers and officials must bring the neighborhood-centered approach back to local governance by working closely with police leaders and other private and parochial social institutions to launch programs that can effectively stabilize and strengthen local communities and actively promoting positive interactions and social bonds among residents. Policies and programs aimed at enhancing public trust in the police should target at younger, better educated and urban Chinese who are more likely to be critical of the police.

Despite their high relevance, social trust and neighborhood cohesion have received only limited attention in past research on Chinese attitudes toward the police. This study represents one of the first attempts to examine different forms of social trust and neighborhood cohesion on public trust in the police in China.

This paper aims to share the experience of a collaborative platform for social innovation (SI) in urban governance in Brussels (Belgium) and to formulate recommendations for future initiatives.

The publicly funded collaborative platform “Brussels by us”, which aimed to improve the quality of life in specific neighbourhoods in Brussels (Belgium), is presented as a case study for SI in urban governance. The case study is detailed according to four dimensions based on the SI and living lab literature.

While the initiative appeared to be a successful exploration platform for collaborative urban governance, it did not evolve into concrete experimentation nor implementation of the solutions. Possible explanations and recommendations are formulated.

The findings of this paper are based on the experience of a one-year initiative. The results should be completed by similar case studies of longitudinal initiatives, and with other levels of implementation such as experimentation and concrete implementation of solutions.

This paper presents a concrete case study of a collaborative platform implemented in a specific neighbourhood in Brussels (Belgium). Its digital and offline approach can help other practitioners, scholars and public institutions to experiment with the living lab methodology for the co-ideation of solution in urban governance. The four-dimensional framework presented in the study can provide future initiatives with a structured reporting and analysis framework, unifying and strengthening know-how in the domain of SI.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the development of the third sector and its relationship with social inclusion by reference to a specific case study – the Castle Vale Community Regeneration Services (CVCRS). By drawing upon an informed understanding of CVCRS the authors examine the ways in which the discourse of “regeneration” and the “third sector” is played out.

The paper uses a case study approach as the basis for framing the debate and analysis.

The paper concludes that the capacity of third sector organisations to meet the expectations of local residents and local agencies and professionals represent real challenges. The case study also illustrates the way in which such organisations share the characteristics of small businesses and this raises important questions over the skills and capacities of those managing such projects.

Implications for third sector organisations can be generalised from this paper.

The paper identifies the ways in which the medium to long‐term sustainability of such projects is contingent upon enhancing both the management/governance of such projects and also the mainstream funding of projects.

Case study material provides a richness in description and adds to understanding of the topic.