Neighbourhood Character

The production register (Wentling 2017). The fifth cluster source gives character its builder-side mechanics: where Dovey analyzes the covenant's closure, Wentling documents the industry's own character-production instruments and their failure modes. The controls spectrum: "While architectural controls can accomplish some positive objectives, they can just as easily result in a sterile environment. In general, the more architectural controls dictate a particular style, the more they result in mundane environments" (Wentling 2017, p. 73) — Irvine, The Woodlands and Reston having "adopted contemporary design as the controlling motif," European new towns showing "controlled design dogma at its worst" (p. 73). The liberal alternative is the design guideline (Seaside's "straightforward" guidelines "allowed for great variety in building expression"; the Baxter Pattern Book "highly visual," suggesting "stylistic alternatives… preferable to strict architectural controls that mandate one specific style or house type," pp. 73–74) — and below that, the builder's product line: 3–5 compatible models, 4–8 with alternate façades, "variety within common themes" (p. 75). The register's historical depth: the pattern-book lineage (Downing 1842 — "housing design was brought into a world similar to fashion," p. 22; Sears mail-order's ~450 designs, p. 28) that first let styles "travel freely throughout the country" and "established a precedent for architectural diversity within residential communities" (p. 23) — the market's own character-apparatus, two centuries before the covenant. See advice-literature, place-identity, new-urbanism.

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; deepened at the Wentling ingest.

Definition

Neighbourhood character names the 'feel' or 'atmosphere' of a residential area — "at once social and material, slipping easily from spatiality to sociality" (Dovey, Woodcock & Wood 2010, p. 8) — and the politics that surrounds it: defended against new development in older suburbs, manufactured as instant identity in new ones. Residents' own definitions are experiential: "character is almost the, the feeling it creates in you … you walk through an area and you feel comfortable with it"; "[urban character is] the feel of a place, what it represents to you; the people, the buildings, the things that happen there are all part of the urban character" (pp. 59–60). The concept's double life is its definition: character is "often defended as a pre-existing state of affairs" yet "constructed in debates over new development" (p. 57) — "this place has a 'character' that is being threatened and the 'character' is that which is threatened" (p. 58, on the circularity of the Melbourne discourse).

The concept's two faces, from Dovey's four Melbourne suburbs: closed character (Camberwell) — uniformity, modesty and taste defended against difference ("I'm surrounded by PLUs – people like us. I see that as a comfort zone," p. 60), a "Procrustean character, open to difference but only under condition that differences be renounced" (p. 62); open character (Fitzroy) — the edgy mix of buildings, functions and people defended against conformity, where gentrifiers defend the place "against more of themselves" (p. 67). And its manufactured forms: Beacon Cove's covenanted uniformity ("We love living in Legoland!", p. 70) and Caroline Springs's façade-selection ("Choose your look, select your favourite façade," p. 73).

The concept's law: character becomes caricature when codified. "As 'character' becomes coded into either urban design codes or private covenants as a set of formal characteristics, character becomes fixed and reduced to caricature" (p. 8); "The character of place, like the sense of place, cannot be reduced to its characteristics without producing caricature. But it is not the desire for character that causes trouble but the belief that it can be defined and contained in urban codes and covenants. The only real characters are slippery characters" (p. 78).

Key Thinkers

• Kim Dovey (with Ian Woodcock & Stephen Wood) — the concept's principal theorists: character as experience, discourse and urban morphology (the three-direction methodology); the closed/open and defended/created typology; the caricature law; the covenant critique.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the concept's social engine (via Dovey): "distinctions between people, based in cultural capital, are made to appear as pure aesthetic judgements" — character discourse as taste-work ("the trouble is we're getting all these people in who all they've got is money… no taste," p. 61).
• Jane Jacobs — the mixed-use vitality whose "self destruction of diversity" (vital places attracting their own demise) the character defence both repeats and resists.

Related Concepts

• place-identity — the parent concept: character as place identity's residential, feel-based form.
• becoming — what codification forecloses: "Covenants are designed to produce an instant – but also final – place identity; in doing so they close down processes of becoming" (p. 78).
• habitus — the taste mechanism: character defence as distinction ("comfortably affluent" against "flashy" new money).
• gentrification — the ambivalent force: both the threat (Fitzroy's cleanup) and the defender (the gentrifiers' own resistance).
• taste — the aesthetic criterion: modesty, uniformity and the disdain for display as character's class code.
• comfort — the affective aim: the "comfort zone" that is also an exclusion ("people like us").
• palimpsest — the historical depth residents invoke ("it's not violating an industrial character to make it into a 21st century dwelling, that's adding a layer") against the instant heritage of the new suburbs.
• suburbanism — the cluster context: the new-urbanist suburb as the manufactured-character type.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source (Ch. 5, pp. 57–78): the resident definitions of character as feel (pp. 59–60); Camberwell's uniformity/modesty/taste defence and its Procrustes figure (pp. 60–62); Fitzroy's edgy mix and the graffiti ambivalence (pp. 63–67); Beacon Cove's Legoland uniformity and the Swallow Street counter-image (pp. 67–71); Caroline Springs's façade market and the "select your favourite façade" billboard (pp. 71–75); the covenant analysis and the Common Interest Development (p. 77); the caricature law and the slippery-character conclusion (p. 78).
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the production register: the controls spectrum ("the more architectural controls dictate a particular style, the more they result in mundane environments," p. 73; Irvine/Woodlands/Reston and European new towns as controlled-dogma instances, p. 73); design guidelines as the liberal alternative (Seaside's guidelines, the Baxter Pattern Book, pp. 73–74); the product-line instrument (3–5 models, 4–8 with alternate façades, "variety within common themes," p. 75); and the pattern-book prehistory (Downing's "world similar to fashion," p. 22; the Romantic precedent for "architectural diversity within residential communities," p. 23)
• The New London Vernacular (Callister 2026) — the planning-argument register: character discourse's double use in UK planning — the bad argument ("'it is out of character' is not always a good planning argument. Sometimes change is the point. But change still needs structure," p. 32) and the evidence requirement that redeems it (contextual design "should identify the urban type, street hierarchy, plot grain, height range, material palette, roofscape, frontage condition, heritage context and landscape structure. Then it should explain how the design responds. Without that, 'contextual' is just a word," pp. 54–55); the copy-paste test ("If the statement could be copied and pasted onto a site in another borough, it is not a contextual argument. It is a sales paragraph," pp. 43–44); and the future-character expansion ("Context does not only mean what is there now. It also means what the place is becoming," p. 32) — Dovey's defended character answered by a designed becoming. See contextual-design, planning-camouflage, becoming.

Open Questions

• Can character ever be used well in planning — or is the concept structurally capture-prone ("a highly flexible concept as useful in a period of radical deregulation," p. 58)? Dovey's answer — character is most alive when "threatened, contested and defended in public debate" (p. 78) — makes contestation the criterion; what does a design code that preserves contestation look like?
• The four cases are all Melbourne and all residential. Does the character/caricature law hold for commercial streetscapes, interiors, or the non-Anglo suburbs the study's ethnicity talk circles but never centres?
• The book's ethnicity finding is pointed: "built-form controls can easily become social controls" (p. 78) — the Chinese-garden and "glut of one nationality" quotations. Is the neighbourhood-character discourse the respectability politics of the majority, and how should the wiki's boundaries cluster register that?