The fieldwork done by urban sociologists made it possible to appreciate the importance of neighbourhoods in the everyday life of urban dwellers. Neighbourhoods have proved to be the key to integration and survival for different situations in the rapidly expanding cities of the 19th century. In the day to day context, neighbourhoods have been shown to act as a support to families broken by death or migration, for the old and the very young, for the sick and poor.

While in the 1970’s and 80’s neighbourhoods were primarily studied as a form of social interaction where the focus was on the interconnection between neighbours and kinship networks, the more contemporary writings in the recent years have been emphasizing  the place of neighbourhood within the wider range of urban networks and in the formation of both individual and collective identities. ¹