Neighbourhood and class: a study of three neighbourhoods in Hong Kong

This paper investigates the relationship between neighborhood cohesion and organization and class in Hong Kong. It draws on a survey of 1200 face-to-face interviews in an up-market private housing estate on Hong Kong Island, a large, neither rich nor poor public housing estate in the New Territories and a mixed-use, low-income inner-city neighborhood in Kowloon. Four indexes measure interneighborhood and intraneighborhood differences—namely, attraction to neighborhood, neighboring and psychological sense of community adapted from the Buckner scale of social cohesion, and social organization developed by the author. There are significant differences between the neighborhoods. However, these differences are not duplicated between occupation-defined class within the neighborhoods, although there are some differences based on self-defined social class. The likely explanation lies in the character of the three neighborhoods, government policy, effect of private housing management and the low level of spatial differentiation by income across the city.