On most winter afternoons the light in Michael L. Charney's apartment just off Kirkland Street is blocked by William James Hall.

Charney seems to have adjusted to life in the shadow of Harvard's ivory tower, but with a new proposal to build the Knafel Center for the Humanities just across the street from William James, he says he feels his neighborhood's character slipping away.

"Do you want to see the sunlight when you walk down the street?" he asked. "Do you want to be blown over by the wind funneling between the buildings?"

But Charney, who is now acting chair of the Campaign to Stop Knafel, is one of the many Cantabrigians beginning to question the city's current growth patterns.

In Alewife, Central Square, Cambridgeport and nearly everywhere in between, community leaders are voicing concerns with what they say is capricious and ill-planned development.

A year ago, a group of locals worried about these recent trends formed the Cambridge Residents for Growth Management (CRGM), an organization designed to focus on citywide rezoning as a means to control over-development.

The group put together a petition outlining their rezoning proposals, which in September faced a vote by the City Council.

According to John R. Pitkin, a Cambridge consultant and one of the petition's original signers. Cambridge's perceived over-development stems from a range of problems, including the city's high proportion of tax-exempt institutions, a 36-year-old zoning code and a continuing transition from family-owned businesses to national chains.

But after getting mixed results in the City Council chambers, Pitkin said that the CRGM is beginning to focus on combining the forces of the city's collection of neighborhood development groups, such as Charney's Campaign to Stop Knafel.

"It seemed like the logical next step was to pull people together from different neighborhoods," Pitkin said. "These are all cross-cutting issues--no neighborhood can address any of those issues on its own."

And for the grass-roots community activists like Charney, the communication and momentum that comes from a citywide group is productive.

"The fact is that other people have been troubled by University expansion," Charney said. "Its very helpful to speak and meet with people who have had to fight similar battles."

Other neighborhood leaders echoed Charney's enthusiasm, but were careful to point out that there is a difference between city-wide activism and local activism.

Lisa Birk works with the Alewife Study Group, a North Cambridge neighborhood organization that has been fighting development in this corner of the city.

"Zoning is absolutely the base of the issue, but ours has some peculiarities because it's a flood plain and it has some contamination," she said. "Cambridge has a problem city-wide, but it plays it self out differently in each neighborhood."