How to See Your Neighborhood

You have a partner. You have a shared floor. Now the question becomes: who else?

I want to be specific about that question, because the obvious answer is the wrong one. The obvious answer is: find people who agree with you. Find people who share your politics, your worldview, your analysis of what’s happening. Build a group of like-minded people.

Every case I’ve studied says this fails.

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It took me a while to accept this, because it’s counterintuitive. Groups built around political agreement feel stronger in the early stages — there’s less friction, less negotiation, less discomfort. But the documented pattern is consistent: groups anchored in shared ideology fragment under pressure. When the external situation changes — when priorities shift, when new information contradicts the shared analysis, when a member’s views evolve — ideological groups either enforce conformity or splinter. Neither outcome produces the kind of resilient network the path requires.

The groups that held together were anchored in something else: shared place.

This is not a new finding. When Indivisible published their organizing guide in December 2016, the most successful element wasn’t the congressional-pressure strategy — it was the interactive map. By mid-2017, roughly 6,000 groups had registered on it, self-forming around congressional districts. Theda Skocpol’s research team at Harvard studied these groups and found that the ones that survived went beyond the guide’s original model entirely — they pivoted to local elections, school boards, municipal governance. The bridge to sustained action wasn’t ideology. It was geography.

When Bed-Stuy Strong organized COVID mutual aid in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in March 2020, they split the area into four delivery quadrants. Something unexpected happened. Volunteers started identifying with their quadrant — the bounded geography generated shared identity, not the other way around. Within months, the network had reached every block in a neighborhood of 250,000 people.

When Belarusians formed resistance networks after the 2020 election, the organizing unit wasn’t a political faction. It was the apartment courtyard. The people who lived close enough to look out the same window.

Your neighborhood is full of people who disagree about almost everything but care about the thing outside their window. That’s your constituency.

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In Alice in Wonderland, Alice falls into a world that looks nothing like the one she left. Everything is strange — the scale is wrong, the rules don’t apply, the inhabitants operate by logic she doesn’t understand. But Alice does something remarkable: she maps it. She moves through Wonderland not by mastering it but by paying attention. She notes who lives where, what matters to them, what makes them dangerous, and what makes them reachable. She builds an operational understanding of a world she didn’t choose and can’t control.

That’s what you’re doing this week. You’re mapping your own neighborhood — and discovering, like Alice, that it’s stranger and more complex than you thought.

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Here’s what you and your partner do. You map your local landscape. Not the political landscape — the human one.

People you already know. Each of you lists at least five people in your life who’ve expressed concern about something local. Water quality. School funding. Road safety. Healthcare access. The cost of living. Traffic. The development going up on the corner. The park that’s falling apart. Not people who share your politics — people who care about something. You’ve been listening for this without knowing you were listening for it. Now write it down.

Places where people gather. Where do people in your area actually see each other face-to-face? Churches, community centers, diners, parks, libraries, veteran’s posts, barbershops, the bleachers at Friday night games, the parking lot after school pickup. These places matter because they’re where relationships already exist — relationships you can build on rather than building from scratch.

What’s already happening. Is there a neighborhood association? A mutual aid group? A PTA? A community garden? A civic group? A volunteer fire department? An informal group of parents who coordinate snow days? You’re not joining anything yet. You’re mapping what exists. Because the cases I’ve studied showed something else that surprised me: the most effective new groups didn’t start from zero. They connected to or grew out of things that were already there.

Map at least ten potential people between you. You won’t approach any of them yet — that’s the next chapter. Right now, you’re doing reconnaissance.

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There’s a concept from sociology that’s worth knowing here, because you’ll see it operating in your own map. Mark Granovetter called it “the strength of weak ties” in a 1973 paper that became one of the most cited in the field. The people most likely to bridge you to new networks aren’t your close friends — they’re the acquaintances you see at the grocery store, the person you chat with at school pickup, the neighbor you wave to but have never had a real conversation with. Close friends tend to know the same people you know. Acquaintances connect you to entirely different networks.

When you’re looking at your map, pay attention to the weak ties. The person you sort of know from the community garden. The parent you’ve exchanged exactly three sentences with at every soccer game for two years. The guy at the coffee shop who always has an opinion about the city council. These people are bridges. They connect your world to worlds you can’t see yet.

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Write your map in your field journal. Keep it analog — pen and paper, not a shared Google Doc. Not because Google is going to raid your network map. Because you’re building a habit of keeping sensitive information off platforms you don’t control, and the list of people you might approach about forming a civic group is sensitive information. It’s the kind of thing that’s perfectly legal and entirely your business and also the kind of thing you don’t need indexed and searchable.

Your partner makes their own map. Then you compare. Where do they overlap — the people you both know? Where do they diverge — the networks only one of you can reach? The combined map is larger than either individual map, and the places where your networks don’t overlap are the most interesting. Those are the bridges to communities you wouldn’t reach alone.

Sit with the map for a day. Look at the names. Think about who on that list has said something — even once, even in passing — that suggested they were ready for something more than complaining. That person is a candidate. Not a target. A person you might have a real conversation with.

The next chapter is about that conversation.

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