Direct, face-to-face democratic institutions where residents of a local area (a neighborhood, block, or housing complex) gather to make binding decisions on matters affecting their immediate community. A Neighborhood Assembly is the general deliberative body—the town hall for local issues. A Neighborhood Commune is the more radical form where this assembly assumes direct political and economic control, managing shared resources (gardens, tools, childcare), security, and dispute resolution, often operating on principles of consensus and mutual aid. They are laboratories of hyper-local self-governance, bypassing traditional municipal bureaucracy.
Example: After the city repeatedly fails to repair a dangerous intersection, residents of the Oak Street block form a Neighborhood Assembly. They meet monthly in a garage. They vote to install a community-funded traffic calming plan. This evolves into a Neighborhood Commune: they pool money to buy tools for a communal garden in a vacant lot, organize a rotating schedule for elderly care, and run a local security patrol. They've created a micro-polity based on direct participation, making the city government largely irrelevant for their daily lives. Neighborhood Assemblies and Neighborhood Communes.
A hyper-local model where the primary unit of political power is the neighborhood or block. Residents in a small, geographically bounded area meet in regular assemblies to make decisions on local issues (parks, traffic, zoning) and elect recallable delegates for city-wide coordination. It’s a building block for municipalist movements, aiming to reclaim the city street-by-street from impersonal bureaucracy and developer capital.
Example: The Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, organize their governance around autonomous municipalities where villages (neighborhoods in a rural sense) hold assemblies to make decisions. While part of a larger revolutionary structure, this foundation in direct, local decision-making is a form of Neighborhood Democracy.
Duff meaning: Dreadful Ugly Fat Freak of a Neighbor.
A neighbor you dread to see out of their house who is ugly on the inside and out. Morbidly obese, fat, and unfortunately seems to scantily clothed most of the time. A loud ass freak who strives to be obnoxious at all times. They tear around the corner and down your street in their reinforced made for fattys' vehicle like a crazy freak, regardless of any pets or kids that may be in the road. You try to live your life but this Duff neighbor makes it virtually impossible to exist within a 3 block radius without hearing their loud ass bi-polar blabbering. This Duff neighbor likes to do the flubby dance while being hit by the jet stream of a water hose which has been known to cause temporary loss of vision for passer-bys.
I thought they had found the house of their dreams until I saw their Duff Neighbor across the street.