To illustrate the decline in a strong sense of community the
characteristics of suburban living are often cited by social and cultural
commentators. Spatially dispersed, lifeless during the daytime due to commuting,
an excessive concern with keeping up appearances in terms of lawns, flowerbeds
and property maintenance, moreover, suburbia, suffers perhaps worst of all, from
weak social relations between residents. Such disparaging commentary on
suburban neighbourhoods is frequently a premise for social scientists to define
their version of “the good community”, bemoan its absence or decline, and has
little concern for the phenomena of daily life in suburbia. In its concern to
advance one or another political agenda conventional social and cultural studies
miss just how suburban residents organise their everyday lives at ground level.
Drawing on the insights of ethnomethodology and other studies of social practice
we offer some therapeutic descriptions of neighbouring. From our ethnographic
fieldwork in a UK suburb we show, via the incident of the search for a lost cat,
how everyday talk formulates places and is formulated by its location in the
ongoing occasioned activities of neighbours. In contrast to studies that have
depicted suburbia as a place where morals are minimised, we show how conduct
amongst neighbours constantly displays specific and locally accomplished moral
commitments. Building on our own and other ethnographic research we list some
of the rules of good neighbouring and investigate how such rules are followed or
otherwise oriented to during encounters between neighbours. We also make a
start on the explication of the seen but un-noticed features of what neighbours
know of one another as settled neighbours. In doing so we return to our initial
topic of community and neighbouring to learn some of the good reasons for
neighbours maintaining the social distances that they typically do
