Reviewed by Jeffrey S. Smith: Rethinking Neighborhoods: Connections and Cohesion by William A.V. Clark

Like countless other young couples, when my wife and I were looking to buy our first house, we met with a real estate agent who asked us to tell them about ourselves; where we grew up, our educational background, our family, our current jobs, the cars we drive, and our hobbies. That simple, seemingly innocuous, question helped them understand who we are so they could find a house in the best fitting neighborhood for us. We ended up selecting a house surrounded by other academics (one high school principal and four professors). Rethinking Neighborhoods helps explain how and why we selected the house and neighborhood we did, and why it was not surprising that we moved twelve years later. In other words, it provides a detailed summary of existing “research and debates about residential choice, residential sorting, residential segregation, and the role of neighborhoods in social connections” (p. x). It seeks to answer such questions as: why do people choose one neighborhood over another, what are the implications of those choices (for families, for overall health and well-being, and for our cities as a whole), how does neighborhood sorting and filtering work, how does the process of neighborhood selection intersect with peoples’ life course, and what do we know about how neighborhoods function? These questions may appear insignificant given the vast societal changes brought about by the digital age, but William Clark argues that neighborhoods still matter.