How ideas work: memes and institutional material in the first 100 years of the neighborhood unit

This paper reviews the history of the neighborhood unit idea, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom, as a means to examine how urban design ideas work. It argues that ideas like the neighborhood unit gain their power by framing the institutional material we create to help us cope with work. Institutional material refers to cultural product that conditions human action. Types of institutional material in urban design include practice norms, professional communities, and governance structures. Although the neighborhood unit emerged through a transatlantic network of planners and designers, the institutional material it framed was particular, local, and contingent. Ultimately, the paper argues that the neighborhood unit grew out of institutional material in the early 20th century that itself was influenced by the garden city, and that both neighborhood unit and garden city ideas continued to shape new institutional material in subsequent decades.