The neighborhood is increasingly used as an organizational anchorfor the promotion of planned social change, but defining neighborhood for programmatic ends in any given case is problematic because it admits a variety of competing choices. There is no universal way of defining the neighborhood as a unit, and selecting and defining target neighborhoods is a highly political and negotiable process. This article suggests a heuristic approach to defining neighborhoods that is guided by explicit programmatic aims, informed by a theoretical understanding of neighborhood and the elements it may include, and based on descriptive information on local context.
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