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The purpose of this paper is to review, analyze and synthesize different pieces from literature to explore, define and describe the concept of social capital and its relationships with urban neighborhood design concepts. Additionally, to define the indicators and principles that can enhance social capital within urban design context. Moreover, to suggest theoretical urban neighborhood design concept that can adopt the changing discourse of social capital.

This research used the theoretical, analytical and descriptive approach-driven case study method. In all, 29 papers were analyzed to conclude the indicators that can measure social capital within the urban neighborhood design context and to conclude the required neighborhood design features and principles that influence social capital. Additionally, two new urban neighborhoods design concepts, cohousing and hybrid concepts that adopt new forms of social interaction, were studied, analyzed and then synthesized to suggest new neighborhood design concept, which is a heterotopia concept.

Heterotopia neighborhood concept aims to create real, different and heterogeneous functional spaces with different layers of meanings for people from different cultures in one place. Different visible enclosures are merged into spaces of otherness while the diversity gives a sense of entering another alternative place. The heterotopias neighborhood design principles aim to create a wide variety of forms, shapes and elements [different new spaces for different ritual activities to reflect the otherness self-reflection (homogeneous and scattered spaces)] and create linkage, hierarchy, contrast and mingling between spaces and places; well-defined functional effective spaces; different fantasy and leisure spaces; high standard quality of life and otherness space; flux in social realm and fluidity of spaces; mixed use and joint experience; and innovated technologies spaces to offer strange new temporalities.

This research recommended that different community stakeholders should participate in planning process, neighborhood urban design and decision-making process about public spaces to strengthen the community ties and achieve a heterotopia concept. Architect, urban designers and planners should adopt bottom-up design approach when designing neighborhood. Additionally, to avoid poor social capital research studies, the new researchers, practitioners and journal reviewers approaching social capital for the first time must read widely to gain an understanding of the concept from different perspectives and narrow their scope to their particular area of interest.

This research highlights the needs for empirical studies to examine the relationships/interrelationships between all neighborhood design principles and social capital. This might increase the knowledge on how we can design and increase the quality of neighborhood to foster social capital, which might offer interesting insights into how neighborhood urban design principles are combined to foster social capital within neighborhood context.

Neighborhood-based research encourages new suggesting concepts in designing every single place in the residential neighborhood in a way that can adapt the new forms of social interaction. This research scanned the current concepts of neighborhood design that concerned successfully with the changing forms of social relationships to conclude some design features and principles for neighborhood design to ensure and promote social public health and well-being. This research offers a unique perspective for better understanding the relationships between the neighborhood urban design as a spatial dimension and social capital. This research aims to enrich the socio-spatial knowledge and build a resilient urban community by suggesting theoretical urban neighborhood design concept, which is the heterotopia concept, and providing the urban designers and architects with a valuable thinking tool to design spaces.

Integrating and advancing social sustainability is foundational to achieving the urban sustainable development goals. Given the rapid transformation of cities in the Mediterranean region, this study sought to assess residents' evaluation of social sustainability in two socio-spatially diverse neighbourhoods of metropolitan Istanbul.

A questionnaire survey, adapted from an empirically well-tested and robust social sustainability framework, was used to collect data from 197 residents from Balat and Rasimpasa neighbourhoods in Metropolitan Istanbul. The study then employed quantitative analytical techniques such as independent sample t-tests and Pearson correlation to analyse the sample data.

In both neighbourhoods, accessibility and participation were ranked the highest and lowest dimensions of social sustainability, respectively. However, the t-test analysis revealed a statistically significant difference between the two neighbourhoods regarding social networking and interaction, safety and security and participation. The differences align with emerging studies on urban social sustainability in the Mediterranean and European cities that when considered from urban spatial contexts, significant differences emerge from a social network and safety perspective.

Our study invites urban planners and policy makers attention to and emphasise on lowly evaluated social sustainability dimensions such as participation in their efforts to promote sustainable urban development at the neighbourhood level. We reason that opening the decision-making process to include diverse voices and experiences of residents through participatory workshops might offer opportunities for context-specific, citizen-led urban planning and design strategies that are socially sustainable.

Previous studies have not fully accounted for how various socio-spatial contexts at the neighbourhood level shape differential evaluation of social sustainability. This paper extends the emerging work on urban social sustainability by situating residents’ evaluation of social sustainability indicators across two unique neighbourhoods with gridded and organic spatial characteristics in Istanbul. This paper is an important addition to ongoing work on how spatial organisation of neighbourhoods can influence experiences of social sustainability from an urban planning and design perspective.

This chapter aims at providing insight into how social mixing plays out in the Transvaal neighborhood in Amsterdam — a neighborhood which has gone through various rounds of urban renewal — in the context of nationwide polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch.

This chapter is based on research with a neighborhood focus — daily interactions, urban renewal, and use of public space — which took place during 2007–2010. Methods used include participant observation, semistructured interviews, and focus groups.

The physical renewal implies renovating and pulling down social housing, and building new social or owner-occupier housing. This study provides insight into how residents of different ethnic and income backgrounds live together in the neighborhood, also taking into account the impact of social polarization at the national level.

By knowing how people with different ethnic and class backgrounds live together in Transvaal neighborhood, it contributes to the formulation of evidence-based policies for the improvement of social cohesion, livability, safety of the neighborhood, and social capital of local residents.

This study looks at social mix in the context of national-level social polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch. This creates a new viewpoint seen against how the general literature on renewal and social mixing tends to do two things: firstly it usually explicitly or implicitly is also a tenure mix strategy, and secondly the policy focus of the social mix is usually around class issues, that is, the mixing of poor social housing tenants with richer owners.

This paper presents a procedure for considering interactions of neighbourhood quality and property specifics within hedonic models of housing price. It handles interactions between geographical factors and the marginal contribution of each property attribute for enhancing values assessment. Making use of simulation procedures, it is combining GIS technology and spatial statistics to define principal components of accessibility and socio‐economic census related to transaction prices of single‐family homes. An application to the housing market of the Quebec Urban Community (more than 3,600 bungalows transacted in 1990 and 1991) illustrates its usefulness for building spatial hedonic models, while controlling for multicollinearity, spatial autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity. Distance‐weighted averages of each property attribute in the neighbourhood and interactions of property attributes with each principal component are used to detect any spatial effect on sale price variations. This first‐stage spatial hedonic model approximates market prices, which are then used in order to compare “expected” and actual property tax amounts, which are added to obtain a second‐stage model incorporating fiscal effects on house values. Interactions between geographical factors and property specifics are computed using formulae avoiding multicollinearity problems, while considering several processes responsible for spatial variability. For each property attribute, they define sub‐models which can be used to map variations, across the city, of its marginal value, assessing the cross‐effect of geographical location (in terms of neighbourhood profiles and accessibility to services) and its own valuation parameters. Moreover, this procedure distinguishes property attributes, exerting a stable contribution to value (constant over the entire region) from those whose implicit price significantly varies over space.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between the perceived neighborhood walkable environment (PNWE), neighborhood interaction (NI) and residents’ mental health, with a focus on examining differences among residents of different age groups.

Using an electronic survey questionnaire, data on PNWE, NI and mental health were collected from 1,159 residents across 205 communities in Shanghai, China. Our study utilized a structural equation modeling (SEM), employing the maximum likelihood estimation method. The structural equation model was fitted using the MPLUS software.

The mental health of young and middle-aged adults is generally poor, and they are at higher risk of depression than children and older adults. The effects of PNWE and NI on the mental health of residents varied among different age groups. As residents get older, their mental health is more affected by the PNWE. In addition, the influence of the PNWE on children and older adults’ mental health is direct and not mediated by NI. For young and middle-aged adults, the influence of the PNWE on their mental health needs to be mediated by NI.

This study marks the first examination of the relationship between PNWE, NI and mental health among different age groups of residents in China. The findings of this research can assist policymakers in gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which PNWE affects mental health. Furthermore, it can contribute to the development of more targeted walkable environment designs aimed at enhancing mental health among various age groups.

The relationship between religious belief and spousal choice in Nepal is examined, looking at how the importance that individuals place on their own religious faith influences their decision either to allow their parents and other relatives to arrange a marriage for them or to initiate their own love marriage. How the importance attached to religious faith within the individual’s family and neighborhood affects this decision, and how education modifies the relationship between religion and spousal choice are also looked at.

Ordinary least squares regression models are used to examine the relationship between spousal choice and key independent variables. Interaction terms are used to examine how education may moderate the relationship between personal, family, and neighborhood religious salience and spousal choice.

It is found that the effect of one’s neighbors’ faith operates differently based on one’s own level of education. The “moral communities” thesis is used to theorize that in neighborhoods where religion is regarded as very important, individuals need to expend more effort to maintain respectability, adhering to tradition by having arranged marriages. In neighborhoods where religion is less important, the weaker demands made by the “moral community” render individuals more free to choose their own spouses. For highly educated individuals, the effect of their neighbors’ religious belief is considerably reduced.

As Nepalis become more educated, they not only move out of the sphere of family influence, as discussed in previous research, but also away from being influenced by their neighbors.

The study aims to evaluate the relationship among architectural identity, physical identity and neighborhood attachment in a residential neighborhood in the core of Sanandaj, Iran.

This quantitative study conducted a survey of 208 residents in a historic neighborhood. The study hypothesized the mediating role of physical identity on the relationship between architectural identity and neighborhood attachment. Structural equation modeling using analysis of a moment structures (AMOS) software was used to test the research hypotheses.

Research findings show the reliability and validity of the proposed model. The results indicate a significant relationship between architectural and physical identity and a significant direct relationship between physical identity and neighborhood attachment. However, no significant direct relationship is found between architectural identity and neighborhood attachment, and only a significant indirect effect is found through physical identity. Therefore, architectural identity elements contribute to increasing physical identity and subsequently attach to the neighborhood.

Given the necessity for revitalizing the neighborhoods in the historical core of the cities to prevent the migration from old neighborhoods and the destruction of the valuable fabrics, establishing emotional relationships between residents and the place and improving interactions among residents is required. The mental values of residents change over time. Although the identification and use of identity elements in residential buildings is a significant way to revitalize the historic residential fabrics, only a few studies have experimentally assessed the impact of architectural identity elements in the creation of physical identity on the residents’ attachment to the historic neighborhood.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the interaction of enclosure and disclosure, and analyze the dynamics of this bond. It also investigates the interaction between open spaces and closed spaces in housing areas as fundamental public and private realms of the neighbourhoods to understand the relation between physical and social environments.

The research aims to grasp the effects of open spaces on the development of the physical and social structures in a community at the intersection of enclosure and disclosure. To display potentials of the relation between these two notions, the behavioural treatments at the intersection of open space and housing units as the basic modules of the pattern, and the effects of spatial organization forms on them are explored. The methodology of the study is formed through the clarification of tangible and intangible facts simultaneously, conducted by spatial and behavioural analysis.

The intersection of enclosure and disclosure in neighbourhoods receives both practical and academic attention. The zone not only creates appropriate conditions for a vital urban life, but also helps to generate social structure in the neighbourhood. Furthermore, although the modernist settlements are criticized because of urban monotony and lifelessness since the last two and three decades of the twentieth century, it is seen that the situations in which “the spatial organization of housing units” and “the formation of urban pattern of the settlement” were dealt synchronously generate vividness and achievement in an urban context.

The study aims to grasp how the intersection zone is affected by the differences of “urban activities in open spaces as one of the main indicators of vividness” and “spatial organization of dwelling units with a perspective from the other side of the border”. Moreover, to understand the capacity of the intersection zone in physical reality, the research aims to evaluate theoretical data through the actual dynamics of daily life. The combination of various research methods that constituted mostly spatial and behavioural analysis is one of the most robust sides of the research.

The purpose of this research study is to extend the concept of third places, as explained by Oldenburg (2000), as being places designed as meeting places and as being dynamic rather than static.

The primary site for this paper is a neighborhood ritual of shared meals that has taken place every Wednesday for the past fourteen years. This was a 6 month study focusing on semi-structured interviews.

Characteristics of third places when compared to other arguments for the classification of third place supports the use of space instead of the purpose of a place as the main consideration for the classification of “third place”.

Defining social events within homes as third spaces pushes the traditional third place theory forward. It offers a way for rituals to be explored more deeply through the experiences they offer.

This study asks the reader to pay attention to the periphery where interaction takes place and consider how we frame concepts of third places.

Third places create an environment that allows individuals expressions of restraint (to keep the distance between yourself and others), relaxation (to be yourself), freedom (from judgment), reflexivity (when you look back at past events) and vulnerability (opening yourself up to the possibilities that come from interacting with others).

The distinction of third place is not so much in the categorization of the building but rather in the use for which the space serves. Extending these conversations into future research endeavors would be to continue and to extend the discussion/description of third places.

Social interaction has a vital role in the healthy development of children. Growing up without a family for children – who are called “children in need of protection” (CNP) in this study – can cause developmental disorders. Social interaction with their peers and with society is important for their well-being, as well as for the whole society. So, for the good of both, more appropriate and supportive living environments should be produced. In this study, the authors will try to answer the question: How do environmental factors affect the social interaction of CNP in outdoor spaces within a village-type settlement?

A children's village is chosen as the case area since the children's village typology provides a strong relation between indoor and outdoor spaces. Data are gathered through the review of visual and written materials and systematic observation in order to analyze the issue in a natural setting.

The output of this study underlays the effects of location, layout and characteristics of residential areas at the neighborhood scale, as well as the spatial, physical and functional factors at the singular-space scale. The intentional social function of the space was found to be the strongest factor in enhancing social interaction.

There are no adequate studies focusing holistically on environmental factors in outdoor living spaces, including spatial, physical and functional dimensions, that affect the social interaction of children in need of protection.