A REFLECTION ON THE  EMERGENCE OF MICRO-NEIGHBOURHOODS

April 2025
by Andie Heck

Not all demolitions are physical. Change can also arrive not with a wrecking ball, but with a name. Places that existed long before their “rediscovery” routinely get renamed, reshaping their identities and reimagining their boundaries. Typically encompassing a few city blocks, micro-neighbourhoods rarely emerge organically. They are often named into existence by those with the power and privilege to do so. When does a neighbourhood stop being what it was and become something else — and more importantly — who decides?

Neighbourhood names do more than identify an area on a map.

They carry historical and social weight, suggesting who belongs, whose history is recognized, and what kind of futures can be imagined there. A new name can elevate a neighbourhood’s cultural cachet, attracting investment and driving up the real estate market. Through this process, new names can also quietly erase the realities of its past and present.  

Across countless cities, influential actors in urban development have wielded the power of naming to rebrand a place and mold its social and economic future. Take SoHa, a term that New York City real estate developers attempted to impose on a stretch of Harlem in 2017 to attract affluent buyers. The name, an obvious attempt to evoke the cachet of SoHo, was met with resistance. Harlem residents viewed the change as an erasure of the neighbourhood’s Black historical roots and cultural significance. More than a real estate gimmick, neighbourhood names signal belonging, and when imposed from above, inevitably begin to overwrite existing social fabric.  

Micro-neighbourhoods can also spur gentrification, the effects of which can seep beyond the imagined boundaries of the district.

Consider Mile-Ex in Montréal, an area  nestled among the communities of Parc-Extension, Little Italy, and the Mile End. Historically a working-class manufacturing enclave of Montreal, the area was rebranded as Mile-Ex following a period of post-industrial decline and subsequent creative revival.

The name traces back to the now-defunct Restaurant Mile-Ex, which opened in 2012. By 2016, Vogue ran an article titled “Mile-Ex: The Hidden Montreal Neighborhood That’s Winning Over the Creative Set,” positioning the newly named micro-neighbourhood as an up-and-coming frontier for artists and entrepreneurs. Within a few years, the opening of the MILA Artificial Intelligence Institute and the nearby Université de Montréal MIL campus cemented its transformation into a hub for the type of creative class that Richard Florida could only dream about.

But as with many gentrifying neighbourhoods, the various local businesses that made Mile-Ex trendy in the first place were soon priced out. The name itself, a portmanteau of Mile End and Parc-Ex, subtly legitimized the leaking effects of gentrification.

The name signaled both physical and cultural proximity to the already-gentrified and fashionable Mile End while inviting encroachment into Parc-Ex, one of Montréal’s poorest neighbourhoods and home to a high proportion of immigrants and newcomers. The housing crisis and rising rents in Parc-Ex have only been exacerbated in recent years, and its proximity—both geographic and in name—to the creative Mile-Ex hub will likely continue to have profound consequences.


Once a micro-neighbourhood name enters into the public imagination, it can strongly influence perceptions of belonging, reinforcing the invisible lines of inclusion and exclusion. This phenomenon is clear in Philadelphia, where the neighbourhood of South Philly has been covertly fragmented along racial and socioeconomic lines.

The area west of Broad Street, historically a predominately Black working-class community, received an influx of middle- and upper-class white residents following city-led revitalization efforts in the 1990s. A 2016 study by Harvard researcher Jackelyn Hwang found that while Black residents continued to identify with the broader South Philly neighbourhood as a unified whole—associating the name with the area’s Black working-class heritage—white residents tended to identify with smaller geographic subsets of the area, adopting micro-neighbourhood names such as “Graduate Hospital,” “G-Ho,” “So-So,” “South Rittenhouse,” “South Square,” and “Southwest Center City.” The spatial delineations of these micro-neighbourhoods aligned with their perceptions of socioeconomic status and crime, and to South Philly’s long-standing Black residents, and were implicit markers of exclusion.

Naming a micro-neighbourhood into existence can be understood as an expression of soft power, reshaping the meaning of a place through cultural influence rather than formal authority. Trendy micro-neighbourhoods can therefore both signify and spawn broader cultural shifts. Who decides, after all, what is “trendy”? The creative and culturally-engaged types typically drawn to trendy urban neighbourhoods have long been associated with progressive politics, but the recent global surge in far-right ideology is beginning to complicate this narrative.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, a new micro-neighbourhood in Lower Manhattan became a harbinger of this shift: Dimes Square. At first, the name was an ironic nod to Dimes, a restaurant frequented by artists, writers, and other ostensible cultural tastemakers. As the term gained traction, Dimes Square became something much bigger than the five-block swath of concrete that it occupied. Just as “Brooklyn” became shorthand for countercultural millennial cool in the 2010s, Dimes Square became the urban symbol of the emergent counter-countercultural New Right.

By the summer of 2022, this small corner of Chinatown became a talking point in broader cultural discourse. The New York Times ran an infamous op-ed by Julia Yost, titled “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church” which identified Dimes Square as a place where wealthy young right-wing purported intellectuals, disillusioned with progressive politics associated with the so-called coastal urban elite, often lark about.

Whether or not Dimes Square “really exists” is irrelevant: its mythology has entered the public imagination and cemented itself in physical space through institutions like Sovereign House, a gathering place for dissident writers and artists aligned with the avant-garde New Right. The proponents of this new aesthetic of cool are rapidly accumulating cultural and political capital in the wake of the re-election of President Donald Trump.

The rise of micro-neighbourhoods like Dimes Square suggests that, today, this emergent aesthetic of cool is likely to be weaponized by New Right elites.

If the renaming of micro-neighbourhoods has long been shaped by an implicit elitism and commoditization of “trendy,” then what does this embracement of an explicit politics of exclusion mean for cities? The significance of designating a micro-neighbourhood extends beyond real-estate profiteering; it is a means of defining who and what is worthy of political and cultural attention, influencing the broader social and political landscape of cities.

So, what’s in a name? More than Shakespeare would have us believe. In naming a micro-neighbourhood, a new imagined community is born, imparting a politics of both inclusion and exclusion that can reverberate far beyond its boundaries. After all, sometimes saying it does make it so.

References

Bellafante, G. (2017, July 6). SoHa in Harlem? The misguided madness of neighborhood rebranding. The New York Times.

Burshtein, K. (2016, February 18). Mile-Ex: The hidden Montreal neighborhood that’s winning over the creative set. Vogue.

Florida, R. L. (2002). The rise of the creative class: And how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life. Basic Books.

Hwang, J. (2016). The social construction of a gentrifying neighborhood: Reifying and redefining identity and boundaries in inequality. Urban Affairs Review, 52(1), 98–128.

Sprague, M., & Rantisi, N. M. (2018). Productive gentrification in the Mile-Ex neighbourhood of Montreal, Canada: Exploring the role of the state in remaking urban industrial clusters. Urban Research & Practice, 12(4), 301–321.

Taylor, M. (2024, November 6). Crushing White Claws with Maga Hipsters on Election Night in Dimes Square. GQ.

Yost, J. (2022, August 9). New York’s hottest club is the Catholic Church. The New York Times.