The Contemporary Defended Neighborhood: Maintaining Stability and Diversity through Processes of Community Defense

This article extends Suttles’ (1972) theory of the defended neighborhood by applying the framework to a contemporary context and exploring the social processes that residents of a diverse community used to defend their neighborhood from change. Drawing on data from an ethnography of Beverly—a stably diverse, highly efficacious, upper middle–class neighborhood on Chicago's far southwest side—I identify and examine three defensive processes used by residents: cultivating neighbors and a culture of surveillance, demarcating and enforcing boundaries, and the creation of an insider housing market. I show how residents employed these neighborhood defense processes to maintain desirable conditions and stable diversity in their community. Defensive processes, however, also resulted in collateral consequences for Black residents, who experienced more scrutiny and surveillance than did White residents. These findings demonstrate how residents’ defensive processes can promote neighborhood stability, but may also result in the social exclusion of perceived outsiders including their own neighbors.