A neighbourhood is not a naturally occurring unit of knowledge. Its name may refer to an administrative boundary, a historical identity, a planning area, a familiar walking radius or an imagined territory whose limits vary among inhabitants. These definitions overlap imperfectly, and every choice of boundary changes what the researcher can count, compare and infer. The analytical difficulty is not solved by making the boundary larger or by adding more observations. A park, a building, a route and a residential street do not automatically add up to a neighbourhood claim, because their relationships depend on daily rhythms, connectivity, accessibility, morphology and lived meaning. ScalarArchitecture asks when the neighbourhood becomes a defensible evidential unit rather than a convenient label. The answer requires an explicit assembly rule: declare the spatial boundary and the temporal window; identify which places and situations were actually observed; connect measured conditions with routes and perceived experience; preserve internal differences; and explain which claims remain unsupported. A mapped indicator of green proximity, for example, need not correspond to an inhabitant’s accessible or restorative green space. Both descriptions may be legitimate while answering different questions. HOODKNOWS offers a methodological context for holding such accounts in productive tension rather than compressing them into one synthetic score. A neighbourhood becomes evidence not at the moment its outline is drawn, but when the heterogeneous relations inside that outline are documented sufficiently to justify a carefully bounded proposition. The limits of the neighbourhood claim are part of its knowledge, not an embarrassment to conceal.
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