On suburban fringes, the spatial and social structuring of neighborhoods yields fragmented and reticular morphological patterns. Based on a case study in the greater Paris metropolitan areas, this paper proposal highlights the outcomes of planned subdivisions as a major type of morphology on the metropolitan fringe. But spatial fragmentation and reticular relations both challenge classical methods of urban analysis. An investigation of neighborhoods in post-suburbia requires a better theoretical understanding of the relationships between subdivisions and the various contexts that define a multi-level vicinity, with intricate effects produced by several geographical level in which the subdivisions are embedded : the neighborhood, the community, the local jurisdiction, etc.

To avoid the “constant size neighborhood trap” (due to the size and the relative fuzziness of their boundaries), the paper proposes methods to construct and analyze price change and social change, considering ad-hoc small areas, smaller than the municipal boundaries, which is the most commonly used. Using smoothing techniques and multivariate analysis, the paper presents a spatial analysis of property-level data from the Paris Chamber of Notaries (1996-2012) in a GIS, comparing several spatial definitions of small areas to better render the level of social homogeneity constructed by subdivisions and planned communities. By the means of a multivariate analysis, local trajectories of social and occupational status of seller and buyer pairs in properties located in subdivisions and planned developments are matched with data on geographical mobility of buyers and prices, and compared between 1996 and 2012.