The Identifiable Neighborhood
This pattern is shaped by
Problem
When residential areas are too large to know and too anonymous to care about, nobody takes responsibility for the public spaces, nobody recognizes the other people on the street, and the area degrades. People need to live in a unit small enough that they recognize faces and feel known.
Evidence and Discussion
Research on social networks in neighborhoods consistently finds that people can maintain casual recognition of roughly 500 faces — enough to fill a few blocks. Beyond that, anonymity takes over. The neighborhood that works is the one where the mail carrier knows your name, the corner store owner recognizes your kid, and you notice when a stranger is wandering.
Therefore
organize residential areas into identifiable neighborhoods of roughly 500 people — small enough that residents recognize each other, large enough to support a shared gathering place. Give each neighborhood a name, a center (even just a corner with a bench and a tree), and clear edges (a park, a street, a change in character). The test: can a resident describe where their neighborhood begins and ends?