Quote:
Originally Posted by bryanscott
That's the thing! It's so subjective.
What an abnormal city we live in.
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At least you name neighbourhoods. About 60% of Thunder Bay's urban area has no common neighbourhood name. Typically, we just say "the *whatever the nearest landmark is* area". And that can change depending on a person's experiences with an area. I grew up in the Walkover Street area, but most people call it the County Fair area. The media refers to it as Dawson Heights because a strip mall is called that, but there is actually a city-designated area a mile away called Dawson Heights, which is being developed under the name Gemstone Estates, but everyone calls it Silvertree. See? It makes no god damned sense.
Neighbourhoods are fluid and subjective, there is no such thing as a definitive map of neighbourhoods. A city can subdivide itself into many small parts and give those areas names, like Saskatoon has, and like Thunder Bay has done with wards, but people don't seem to use those names very often, so can you really call them neighbourhoods? Instead of clearly delineating them, if you're mapping them, just stick the name near the centre of the general area that it is associated to, and leave it at that. Neighbourhoods overlap. The neighbourhood I live in is called "Simpson", "Ogden" and "the East End". (According to a local community group, we're called "Evergreen".) What this area is called (and how much of the city is part of the East End) depends on who you ask. You can't draw a line to mark that. The city calls it "Fort William Neighbourhood" but to most people, that refers to an entire half of the city. (And part of what is commonly called Fort William today was legally in Port Arthur prior to our amalgamation.)
Winnipeg isn't abnormal at all. This is common in all cities. Even in New York. SoHo wanders around in the area between downtown and Hudson, slowly rocking back and forth between Tribeca and Little Italy. If its boundaries were clearly defined in 1980, they'd be all wrong now.