After doing some additional reading – I’ve redefined the neighbourhood boundaries. Initially I just centred the ‘block’ or neighbourhood around our house, besides being, well, a little egocentric, this created problems because it leaves a little area to the north stranded between our neighbourhood and Alexander Parade. Alexander Parade is a major road and too much of a social & physical barrier to have running thought the middle of a community. So, as there are not really enough houses to consider treating as a separate community, for the purposes of this project, I’ve merged them into ours.

Below I’ve worked out six ‘neighbourhoods’ based on Alexander’s principles. I’ve also decided to work on this scale because it makes sense practically – it’s large enough to sustain some fairly large scale sustainable interventions, but small enough to be managed locally and have effective individual involvement.

It would make sense to break this down again if people started putting this design into action, into smaller “housing clusters” or “action groups” (8-12 households, 20-50 people)

So ‘my neighbourhood’ becomes the area defined by Alexander Pde, Gold Street, Wellington Street and Hotham Street. The area highlighted on the plan below; it has about 400 residents, and is roughly 220x200m.