Public Intimacy in Neighbour Relationships and Complaints

This paper examines neighbour relationships as an example of non-familialintimacy. It focuses on the way disputes between neighbours often hinge onnotions of obtrusive public intimacy, in which the sights and sounds ofnormatively private domestic lives become sources of complaint. The analyses arebased on approximately 150 hours of naturally-occurring interaction withneighbours including telephone calls to mediation centres, environmental healthdepartments and anti-social behaviour units, neighbour mediation interviews,police-suspect interrogations in neighbour crime, and neighbour issues broadcaston television and radio. It was found that while the neighbours maintain goodrelations at the edges of private spaces, the physical arrangements of domesticproperties, with their shared boundaries, means that personal information can betransmitted and observed as a routine matter of course. Disputes often havetheir basis in the illegitimate breach of boundaries, and in the unwanted andunavoidable receipt of the sights and sounds of other people's intimatelives.