Search

Social scientists have long debated whether racial inequality is an unfortunate consequence of political and economic exploitation or a core feature of capitalism. In 1983, Cedric Robinson synthesized these two opposing perspectives, calling the latter racial capitalism and demonstrating its theoretical viability. In recent years, scholars have increasingly employed Robinson's conception of racial capitalism to explain a wide array of phenomena. Yet, urban sociology has not fully explored how racial capitalism changes and reshapes our core theoretical approaches. To begin to fill this gap, this special issue presents original papers that employ racial capitalism to extend, challenge, or refine theories of and methods for understanding cities and communities. In this introduction, we outline urban scholars' historical explanations of racial inequality and provide an overview of the development and definition(s) of racial capitalism. We then summarize the papers included in this special issue and discuss a pathway forward for urban sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research often links gentrification to racial inequality. Nevertheless, scholars know surprisingly little about whether the racial composition of gentrifiers moderates the consequences of gentrification. Few quantitative studies compare the effects of gentrification across different racial groups, and those that do tend to limit their outcome of interest to housing. This paper represents perhaps the first ever large‐scale assessment of the ways in which gentrifiers' racial composition is associated with local retail development. Using data on retailers in over 500 U.S. cities between 2000 and 2010, the paper shows that retail development was significantly slower in neighborhoods gentrified by Blacks rather than Whites. Put differently, White gentrifiers gained a disproportionate amount of the retail development associated with gentrification. Scholars must acknowledge that the consequences of gentrification vary depending on the racial composition of gentrifiers, which is likely one reason why the field struggles to appropriately operationalize and measure gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two cities loom large in the history of American urban restructuring. New York City's 1975 technical bankruptcy and Detroit's 2013 Chapter 9 bankruptcy have played an oversized role in urban theory. This is currently reflected in competing theories of post‐recession urban restructuring. "Austerity urbanism" uses Detroit as an exemplar, whereas "pragmatic municipalism" adopts the converse position arguing post‐recession reform is defined by local context. This paper draws on the small cities literature to generate a different account of recent municipal bankruptcies and their broader impacts. It uses qualitative methods to survey the causes and outcomes of all eight post‐recession Chapter 9 bankruptcies. The research recognizes the potential nationwide significance of these extreme events but avoids focusing on big city examples. The paper's findings suggest small and medium sized cities play a significant role in shaping recession‐related restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the institutional logics of the grocery industry, this paper argues that the "neighborhood effects" of a lack of resources provided by organizations to economically disadvantaged areas are moderated by institutional logics. From the 1930s to early 1970s, the grocery industry had a logic of "economies of scale." A new "mix‐margin" logic developed after the mid‐1970s: using low margins on high‐demand items to gain foot traffic needed to sell high‐margin items. Using company‐specific store location data (from 1970 to 1983), this paper analyzes whether differences in company philosophy affect their presence in economically disadvantaged zip codes. Results show that supermarkets were less likely to locate in economically disadvantaged zip codes when operating under a mix‐margin philosophy. These results indicate a shift to a "mix‐margin" institutional logic corresponded with an exodus from economically disadvantaged areas by the grocery industry after the mid‐1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with processes of place making among middle class residents in Santiago de Chile, and focuses on the ways in which neighborhood groups seek to receive heritage status for their areas of residence, as a way to contest the demolition of houses in order to build high‐rise buildings. I focus on the tensions inherent in reconciling a critical view of neoliberal residential politics with a securing of their individual or family class position. I bring together debates and evidence about social and spatial boundary making with analysis of strategies of reproduction of class position. The paper focuses on intraclass symbolic boundaries in place making and the local politics and practices involved, by addressing the relationship of the middle classes to territory and their place in the contemporary city (Andreotti et al. 2014; Bacqué et al. 2015; Bridge et al. 2012; Brown‐Saracino 2009; Zukin 2010). I discuss data obtained from research in five inner‐city urban Santiago neighborhoods involving a mix of sources: in depth interviews, nonparticipant observation, content analysis of CMN legal texts, and copies of the files prepared by neighborhood activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines how gentrifiers negotiate tensions between the narratives of liberal progressivism they espouse and their role in neighborhood change. Through in‐depth interviews with recent residents in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, this paper identifies patterns in rhetorical strategies and narrative techniques employed by interviewees to manage points of conflict. It finds that gentrifiers express ambivalence and feelings of guilt surrounding their presence in the neighborhood and that they manage this ambivalence through three main strategies: (1) reframing the outcomes of gentrification in positive terms, (2) distinguishing their behaviors and attitudes from the stereotypical “bad” gentrifier, and (3) displacing their responsibility for the process of gentrification onto another group of actors, such as the government or real estate developers. These results provide a framework for understanding how individuals justify their complicity in other processes which they see as morally questionable, such as unethical consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Gentrification literature focuses mostly on growth machines pursuing profits or residents pursuing taste preferences, to the exclusion of cultural intermediaries that connect these processes, particularly businesses. Recent research addresses this gap, but even those focusing on commercial gentrification tell a partial story, neglecting the subjectivities of merchants and ignoring the diversity of businesses involved. This paper contributes to this growing literature by exploring merchants’ attitudes, and moving beyond boutiques and independent businesses. Examining Chicago's Wicker Park, it asks “Under what circumstances do merchants come to embrace or repudiate gentrification in their neighborhood?” Merchants support gentrification when they understand it primarily as an alternative to financial instability and repudiate gentrification when they understand it primarily as a disruptor of aesthetic stability. This paper identifies two specific neighborhood mechanisms that determine how merchants might arrive at such understandings: geographical location and perceived customer base. Additionally, while there is heterogeneity in terms of these two characteristics, there is remarkable homogeneity in terms of understanding of neighborhood reputation. Specifically, there is a common understanding of the neighborhood's reputational hipness across respondents. Those who support gentrification value this reputation instrumentally while those who oppose it value it intrinsically, but either way, everyone orients themselves to this reputation in forming attitudes and making consequential decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georg Simmel famously argued that the sensory onslaught of the urban environment forces people to reduce the world to calculable quantities over colorful qualities and adopt a blasé attitude of muted emotions. Today’s digitally mediated city involves levels of quantification that Simmel could have scarcely imagined. However, rather than exacerbating the blasé attitude, this paper makes the case that digital technologies potentially increase our emotional and moral attachments to the urban environment—a phenomenon that can be called “scoreboard urbanism.” From Yelp ratings to Fitbit step scores, our relationship to the city is increasingly mediated by quantitative metrics. The purpose of this paper is to outline the basic characteristics of scoreboard urbanism as a distinct mode of life that entails new ways of perceiving and interacting with the urban public realm. In doing so, the paper argues that this phenomenon has transformed the city into a “gamespace” characterized by the competitive and exhilarating drive to score points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanscapes of disaster are socially and environmentally constituted. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of social vulnerability to disasters, the concept of urbanscape is enriched and empirically verified. This paper highlights how urban social hazards are more relevant for vulnerable people than the risk of experiencing the negative effects of extreme natural events. The analysis of floods in a slum located in a Mexican city reveals intricate socioenvironmental conditions underpinning a disaster process. Findings reveal that social, political, and economic hazards (including criminal hazards), imposed by the urban model on its inhabitants, are the most difficult to cope with and adapt to. This paper contributes to the wider literature on disasters, presenting an in-depth qualitative analysis of the factors propelling urban dwellers to endure in a vulnerable urbanscape, regardless of the physical and environmental conditions at the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the qualitative component of a larger mixed methodological study that explores how community stakeholders, most impacted by gentrification pressures in the Twin Cities, understand neighborhood change as it impacts their daily lives. The purpose is to expand the current theorization of gentrification through examining the lived experiences of those most impacted. We illuminate where community stakeholders' experiences align with and diverge from the common narrative themes often cited in contemporary gentrification literature such as demographic change and physical displacement. Although common narrative frames emerged, narrative distinctions also materialized. This differentiation highlights how gentrification pressures not only influence the redevelopment of physical space, but also culture and belonging in ways that can be distinctly different even in neighborhoods of close proximity. The implications suggest the importance of geographic specificity in policy and program approaches based on distinct histories of neighborhoods and their residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landlords are important gatekeepers in the rental market, and scholars have studied landlord perceptions across different markets. But differences between landlord logics within a market, which drive landlord behaviors, have been largely unexamined. Drawing chiefly on 30 in‐depth landlord interviews and 20 observations with property managers in Philadelphia, I argue that landlords exhibit a range of logics. When faced with rental market decisions, some employ profit‐maximizing criteria, whereas others consider social closeness with tenants or the meanings of properties. These differences relate to pathways into property ownership: landlords who obtain property circumstantially focus on profit maximization less than those who purchase property deliberately to pursue profits. This paper extends our understanding of landlords, connecting their pathways to a range of logics within a single market context. It also suggests that policies should consider the logics of landlords they seek to influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the ethnic politics of commercial gentrification. We discuss how ethnicity is conceived of, managed by, and integrated into urban policy; and how the changing ethnic composition of the neighborhood is perceived and lived by entrepreneurs with different ethnic and class backgrounds. We employ the notion of "mixed embeddedness," coined by Kloosterman et al., to understand the changes gentrification brings about for ethnic minority entrepreneurs and to explain their responses to these changes. Using the case study of a gentrifying street in Amsterdam, namely, Javastraat in Indische Buurt, we draw on an analysis of ethnic packaging at the policy level as well as in depth interviews with ethnically Dutch and ethnic minority entrepreneurs. Our findings shed light on how ethnic minorities survive and manage commercial gentrification on their doorsteps as well as the complexity of social mixedness in gentrifying neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines food access disparity in relation to neighborhood diversity, especially race/ethnicity and poverty in a changing intrametropolitan spatial structure, using the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as a case study. With detailed grocery store data, this study finds a substantive change in food access between 2003 and 2015 in terms of both the number of grocery stores and the gravity‐based accessibility indicator, although such access varies by neighborhood characteristics and spatial location in terms of central city, inner‐ring suburbs, and outer‐ring suburbs. While access to grocery stores for minority‐concentrated neighborhoods in outer‐ring suburbs is comparable to other neighborhoods, neighborhoods with a high share of African American residents in inner‐ring suburbs and those with a high share of Latino residents in the central city have significantly lower access to food outlets. Neighborhoods with higher poverty rate tend to have more food outlets across the region except for in inner‐ring suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for research that considers residential selection as a social stratification process. In this paper, we present findings from work our team has done over the last 17 years to explore how people end up living where they do, relying in large part on systematically sampled in‐depth narrative interviews with families. We focus on four key decisions: whether to move; where to move; whether to send children to school in the neighborhood; and whether to rent or own a home. We found that many residential mobility decisions among the poor were "reactive," with unpredictable shocks forcing families out of their homes. As a result of reactive moving, housing search time frames became shorter and poor parents employed short‐term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long‐term investment thinking about neighborhood and school district quality. These shocks, constraints, and compressed time frames led parents to decouple some dimensions of neighborhoods and schools from the housing search process while maximizing others, like immediacy of shelter, unit quality, and proximity to work and child care. Finally, we found that policies can significantly shape and better support some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intersection of neighborhood change and parish reconfiguration in Charlestown, MA. The merger of two Roman Catholic churches has unsettled the congregational cultures, just as gentrification is unsettling broader neighborhood dynamics. Based on findings from 28 in‐depth interviews and participant‐observation, I examine the spatial reproduction of neighborhood segregation in the sanctuary of St. Mary's church. Affluent newcomers and "Townies"–stalwart residents who have weathered earlier waves of neighborhood upscaling–form power alliances that result in the exclusion of the poorest residents in the shared space of this urban church. By paying attention to the seating arrangements and other social interactions of churchgoers, I discover that the new parish vision of the merged church–albeit one that purported to celebrate the diverse residents of the neighborhood–resulted in the cultural exclusion of Latinos. Institutional decisions, the desire to maintain ethnic enclaves, and tacit messages of group exclusion reify the race and class divisions of the neighborhood within the walls of the church. I conclude with an exploration of the strategies of resilience to gentrification and merger evident in this case by attending to the actions of the disadvantaged in relation to the changing institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study concerns the struggle for Philadelphia's LOVE Park, which involved the general public and its functionaries on one side and skateboarders on the other. This paper argues LOVE Park was one place composed of two distinct spaces: the public space the public engendered and the common space the skateboarders produced. This case demonstrates that public and common space must be understood as distinct, for they entail different understandings of publicly accessible space. Additionally, public and common spaces often exist simultaneously as "public‐common spaces," which emphasizes how they reciprocally shape one another. This sheds light on the emergence of "anti‐common public space," which is evident in LOVE Park's 2016 redesign. This concept considers how common spaces are increasingly negated in public spaces. The introduction of common space to the study of public spaces is significant as it allows for more nuanced understandings of transformations in the urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways notions of community are produced and understood by homeowners/ members, staff, and board members of eight Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in the state of Minnesota. The CLT model utilizes a mixed property regime that ensures the permanent affordability of land to make it accessible to low‐income people. In most cases, CLT land is made up of noncontiguous parcels spread across a neighborhood or municipality, embedded in an existing landscape of geographic and social communities. CLTs have been lauded as agents in and for community control of urban land tenure, yet there has been little scholarship on what exactly "community" means to those involved. This article addresses this gap through an analysis of the empirical findings of a three‐year study of CLTs in Minnesota in which participants were asked to think through how they conceptualized the community in the CLTs they were a part of. Our findings show that little sense of community exists among the CLT homeowners we interviewed. Despite this, CLT homeowners did feel a sense of community in their relationships with CLT staff members, and, interestingly, expressed a feeling of (imagined) community with future CLT homeowners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which neighborhood conditions foster the growth of ethnic organizations? This paper explores how changing unemployment, homeownership, and immigration in neighborhoods shape the growth of ethnic organizations in San Francisco from 1940 to 1970. Using hierarchical linear modeling, this paper analyzes the growth of white ethnic and racial minority organizations as postwar neighborhood changes took form. Results indicate that white ethnic and racial minority organizations experience very different growth trajectories. Findings indicate that the growth of racial minority organizations was negatively affected as foreign-born population size grew and unemployment rose. White ethnic organizations, however, were impervious to these same neighborhood changes. These results suggest that social heterogeneity and economic uncertainty stall the growth of racial minority organizations, whereas white ethnic organizations are unaffected by these conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, scores of American cities have witnessed the re-emergence of large-scale homeless encampments for the first time since the Great Depression. Commonly portrayed as rooted in the national economic downturn and functionally undifferentiated, this paper demonstrates that large-scale encampments are rather shaped by urban policies and serve varied and even contradictory roles in different localities. Drawing on interviews and observations in 12 encampments in eight municipalities, this study reveals four distinctive socio-spatial functions of encampments shaped by administrative strategies of city officials and adaptive strategies of campers. I demonstrate how large-scale encampments paradoxically serve as both tools of containing homeless populations for the local state and preferred safe grounds for those experiencing homelessness. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of homeless seclusion for social analysis and policy, arguing that exclusion and seclusion are two sides of the same coin of the management of marginality in the American city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers an unexamined mechanism in the selection processes that sort the urban poor into different neighborhood environments: the landlord. Scholars of poverty and residential mobility have long been interested in how the choices of low-income families interact with structural barriers to create high-poverty neighborhoods that reproduce social and economic isolation as well as racial segregation. However, they have not examined the ways in which these choices are shaped by the intermediary force of the landlord. This paper draws on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with 20 landlords and 82 residents in Baltimore, examining their engagement with the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. Findings show that landlords' strategic implementations of voucher rules contribute to residential sorting patterns through a three-step process: first, selection, in which targeted recruitment tactics favor voucher tenants; second, a sorting process in which landlords cherry-pick the lower-end voucher tenants, matching them to hard-to-rent units; and third, landlords' selective retention of tenants who do not have the means to leave. This results in rigging the game, where a process of 'reverse selection' operates: Rather than tenants selecting homes and neighborhoods, landlords are selecting tenants. Taken together, these tactics result in a strategic balkanization of the rental housing market that retains voucher holders where they can be most profitable-in the very neighborhoods policymakers would like to provide them with the opportunity to leave. Landlord tactics serve as a powerful mechanism in the concentration of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, cities around the world have increasingly relied on culture‐based development strategies for the revitalization of urban areas, such as urban heritage and the development of a creative economy. Typically, either one of these practices is put in place; however, in Kampong Glam, Singapore, both heritage development and creative economy strategies have been adopted by the national government and local organizations. This paper studies the coincidence of the two main culture‐based urban development strategies and its implications in the same physical urban place. Drawing on geospatial mapping techniques and archival data, we aim to illustrate how the two cultural urban redevelopment strategies manifest and interact in urban space. We find that stakeholders draw on each strategy to counteract the excesses of the other, given their different aims and audiences, so as to regulate the interaction between the two and achieve balance among competing interests in the neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Pudong Is Not My Shanghai": Displacement, Place-Identity, and Right to the "City" in Urban China Existing studies on urban redevelopment and gentrification in China have documented neoliberal urbanism and state intervention as the driving forces transforming Shanghai into a global city (see, e.g., Zhang 2002; Zhang and Ke 2004; Chen [7]; He [20]; He and Wu [21]; Ren [34]; Xu [48]). For anyone who has traveled to Shanghai, or seen the city in newspapers or on TV, the landmarks in our view at that lunch are easily identifiable symbols of Shanghai; especially the TV tower in the left of the photo, and the Shanghai world financial center in the center with the then under-construction Shanghai tower on its right. When my native Shanghainese interviewees mentioned that Pudong does not look like Shanghai and refused to recognize Pudong as part of their Shanghai, they meant that Pudong does not share the Shanghai place-identity that was associated with Puxi's urban history. For the purposes of this paper, I regard those born and raised in Shanghai, with both a Shanghai household registration status and Shanghai dialect as their mother tongue as natives, while internal migrants who settled in Shanghai after the loosening of the household registration system in the early 1990s and do not speak the Shanghai dialect as their mother tongue are considered nonnatives, regardless of their household registration status. [Extracted from the article]

My sociological imagination was ignited in a small New England town, complete with rolling hills, farm fields, and forest, a three-classroom-schoolhouse, Methodist church, general store, and Town Hall. Given how much of the U.S. population resides outside of big city neighborhoods, I suspect that I am not alone in having first stretched my sociological muscles in terrain outside of the big city neighborhoods responsible for generating so many of the concepts and theories of community and urban sociology. In this context, Mattson's paper powerfully calls us to consider: what is an "urban sociology" of sexualities that does not just focus on big cities and their institutions? Forstie builds a very compelling argument about what we have missed by focusing on sexualities in the context of big cities and, secondarily, in rural areas. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four "great cities." This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small‐city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small‐city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red‐state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small‐city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big‐city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of mass incarceration in the United States, neighborhood context plays a significant role in demographic patterns of imprisonment. This paper examines the preprison neighborhood environment of racial and ethnic groups within the Massachusetts prison admission population. The data include over 12,000 prison records of individuals sentenced to state prison for a criminal offense between 2009 and 2014. Findings indicate significant spatial variation across racial groups: The most disadvantaged preprison neighborhoods exist in small cities outside of Boston. Whites and Hispanics who enter prison from small cities, suburbs, and rural towns in Massachusetts lived in significantly more concentrated disadvantage than their counterparts in Boston. However, black men and women coming from Boston and small cities lived in the greatest concentrated disadvantage among the black admission population. Black‐ and Hispanic‐incarcerated people lived in significantly higher levels of concentrated disadvantage as compared to the average neighborhood of white‐incarcerated people. Results indicate that the prison population is drawn from a diverse set of communities, and suggest that an understanding of the full picture of differences in neighborhood context may play an important role in understanding community‐level conditions of mass incarceration and inform interventions aimed at ameliorating the community‐level impacts of imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alternative food supporters claim that food produced outside the corporate system can improve the wellbeing of communities. A closer look at these claims raises the question: How are members of the alternative food movement defining "community" and who is being included in and excluded from these definitions? We draw from in‐depth interviews with (1) urban famers and their supporters and (2) neighborhood members of gentrifying East Austin to examine irreconcilable disputes on the process of rewriting Austin's urban farm code. We use Stanley Fish's concept of "interpretive communities" to understand competing definitions of "community" and theorize beyond this point by noting that when communities feel at threat, they come together as coalesced communities to gain support for their stance. The discussions in this paper can be situated within dialogues of critical geography, gentrification, alternative foodways, and public health to show how class, race, and ethnicity remain tied to environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positioning itself against arguments that claim that the Model Cities program (initially known as the 1966 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act) was either an unmitigated failure, an attempt to co‐opt activists, or an effort to introduce the "carceral state" nationwide, this paper examines the implementation of Model Cities in a historically integrated suburb and argues that while the program was assuredly only a "limited success," it did provide both funding and social space in which residents could forge intergenerational and cross‐racial alliances, as well as launch challenges to federal urban renewal policy and notions of community control. As such, this case is illustrative of the role of federal monies in responding to urban dislocation and unrest, and exemplifies the ways in which urban residents can forge bonds of solidarity even in the face of bureaucratic regulations and political obstructions meant to discourage citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replicates and extends Sampson et al.'s () collective efficacy explanation of civic action events to ethnic communities formed through international migration. It examines political, social movement, and civic collective action of Hmong Americans in Minneapolis-St. Paul through a content analysis of events reported in one of the community's ethnic newspapers from 2002 to 2011 (N = 541). Initially a dispersed group of refugees from Laos, by the early 2000s, 25 percent of all Hmong Americans lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Most (68 percent) of their collective action is for civic engagement, not politics or protest. This civic engagement is mostly for socioeconomic improvement (53 percent) but also social solidarity (47 percent). As Sampson et al. found in Chicago, the spatial distribution of Hmong collective action is shaped more by the location of ethnic and public institutions than by ethnic residential concentration. The paper concludes that the analysis of collective action events in ethnic communities should combine social ecology, institutional, and interactional models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a mixed-method analysis of the municipal-level consequences of an affordable housing development built in suburban New Jersey. Opponents of affordable housing development often suggest that creating affordable housing will harm surrounding communities. Feared consequences include increases in crime, declining property values, and rising taxes. To evaluate these claims, the paper uses the case of Mount Laurel, New Jersey-the site of a landmark affordable housing legal case and subsequent affordable housing development. Employing a multiple time series group control design, we compare crime rates, property values, and property taxes in Mount Laurel to outcomes in similar nearby municipalities that do not contain comparable affordable housing developments. We find that the opening of the affordable housing development was not associated with trends in crime, property values, or taxes, and discuss management practices and design features that may have mitigated potential negative externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contexts of entrenched metropolitan inequality and limited local resources, organizers and community activists often feel a sense of urgency to target higher levels of government. This paper offers one such case from Detroit, of local organizing projects that 'scaled up' in the mid-1990s to pursue a regional equity agenda. Drawing on participant observation, archival data, and interviews, the paper examines the process of unification and identifies key shifts in purpose, relational base, approach to leadership, and strategy for empowerment. While scaling up enabled members to engage in more sophisticated actions and influence higher levels of policy making, it also challenged the organization to maintain its member base. This research suggests that the process of scaling up poses tradeoffs for grassroots organizations, between responsiveness to existing members and building a regionally representative organization, capable of transcending divisions of the political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the scholarly debate on cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity of urban poor families. While authors such as Lewis (1959) or Wacquant (2000; 2001) claim that structural disadvantages are linked to a particular type of identity or culture, others such as Hannerz (1969), Anderson (1999; 2002), or Portes (Portes and Manning, 1986; Portes and Jensen, 1989) believe that it is possible to find different behaviors, expectations, decision-making processes, and outcomes among people living in seemingly identical structural conditions (Small et al., 2010). Using Santiago, Chile, as a case study, we differentiate five different cultures or identities among the poor. Those identities seem to be the product of different historical and political circumstances, as well as of different types of public policies. The paper ends with a discussion of the need for poverty reduction policies to consider these differences among the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing number of natural disasters around the globe, limited research exists on post‐disaster patterns of neighborhood change. In this paper, we test two theories of neighborhood change, the "recovery machine" and "rent gap," which predict opposing effects for low socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods following damage from hurricanes, tropical storms, and other natural hazard events. The recovery machine theory posits that after natural hazard events, local communities experience patterns of recovery based on their pre‐disaster SES and access to resources, suggesting that wealthier neighborhoods will recover robustly while lower status neighborhoods languish. In contrast, the rent gap theory suggests that developers will identify a profit opportunity in the depressed values created by damage from natural hazard events, and seek to redevelop low SES areas. We use fixed effects models with census data from 1970 to 2015 to test the impact of damage from natural hazards on neighborhood change. We find substantial recovery and change in low‐income neighborhoods, but not in the high‐income neighborhoods supporting the rent gap theory. We conclude that natural hazard events resulting in damage produce uneven recovery by socioeconomic status of neighborhoods, potentially leading to displacement of low SES groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent research has illustrated the frequency and deleterious consequences of eviction, the number of executed evictions pales in comparison to the number of poor families threatened with eviction. This paper uses interviews with 127 randomly sampled landlords and property managers in Baltimore, Dallas, and Cleveland to examine their strategies related to eviction, with a focus on the extended process of evicting rather than the discrete instance of eviction. We find that landlords generally try to avoid costly evictions, instead relying on the serial threat of eviction. By redefining renters as debtors, filing assists in rent collection by leveraging the state to materially and symbolically support the landlord's debt collection. At the same time, housing tenants in small amounts of arrearage aggravates the power imbalance within the landlord–tenant relationship. It gives landlords the legal pretext to remove a tenant for any reason and prevents tenants from exercising their legal rights regarding code enforcement. These findings emphasize the importance of examining the precarious and power‐laden relationship of landlords and tenants while they are still in residence. Poor families live under constant threat of eviction, facing housing insecurity, fees, and legal sanction, with negative impacts for their sense of home and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have long viewed spatial assimilation as a measure of minorities' socioeconomic progress. While assimilation increases as socioeconomic status (SES) improves, blacks remain more highly segregated than any other race/ethnic group. I use the locational attainment model to determine whether black immigrants—like their U.S.‐born counterparts—are highly segregated. This paper broadens the segregation literature by determining: (1) black immigrant segregation patterns after controlling for individual‐level characteristics, (2) the extent to which segregation varies by location, and (3) if racial segregation has the same socioeconomic consequences for U.S.‐ and foreign‐born blacks. I find that black immigrants face high racial and socioeconomic segregation in mainly Caribbean settlement areas. However, black immigrants in all but two predominantly African settlement areas experience no segregation. Essentially, I find that there is a great deal of diversity in black immigrants' segregation patterns stemming from differential treatment in the housing market based on African immigrants' higher SES and/or African immigrants' residential choices. Results in the two outlier African settlement areas (Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.) suggest that entry visa may play an important role in black segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in two historic, attractive, and socially mixed neighborhoods, Kumpula in Helsinki and Malasaña in Madrid, this paper examines what makes people feel at home (or not) in their neighborhood. Marrying the literatures on social belonging and materiality, we analyze the interactions through which local places, people, and materials become familiar and personal. We identify the house in Kumpula and the plaza in Madrid as "everyday totems" that weave local life and community together. In both neighborhoods, the testimonies of home are accompanied with an attachment to the local totem and related lifestyle, but the house and the plaza generate different everyday politics of belonging. House‐based belonging in Kumpula requires resources and long‐term engagement that over time contributes to a personal, but rather exclusive web of belonging. Plaza‐based belonging in Malasaña is more inclusive and elastic, but joining the web of belonging requires time and sociability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although diversity has become a cherished ideal for Americans, a growing literature suggests that many are also ambivalent about lived experiences of diversity. Focusing on three historically homogeneous neighborhoods in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, this paper explores the "civic talk" used to express this ambivalence through interrelated frames of social order and civic engagement. In all three neighborhoods, long‐term residents and neighborhood association members speak fluently about race, class, and other forms of diversity in their neighborhoods. Yet when they assess who "belongs" in the neighborhoods, the discussion is coded in civic terms. This framing enables neighborhood association members to act as gatekeepers, wielding civic discourse in ways that reinforce traditional neighborhood boundaries and social hierarchies, while maintaining structural inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines possible sources of urban disorder and their impact on social disorganization in two times periods in Latin America. The first period is that of the region's rapid urbanization (c. 1950-1980) and the second is the current period of low rates of urbanization and slow urban growth, particularly true of the largest cities. Unlike in the US, Latin American urbanization in the first period produced social disorganization that in turn gave rise to social organization and local cohesion. The paper focuses on the intervening factors that mediate the link between poverty/inequality and social cohesion. These include the pattern of settlement of the city through different types of migration, the pattern of residential segregation in the city, and the nature of poverty. Social cohesion is defined in terms of the nature of social relationships and in terms of feelings of trust and identity with others at both neighborhood and city level. The spatial, demographic, and economic sources of disorder are hypothesized to have a positive impact on social cohesion in the first period relative to the second period when the impact is more negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a hierarchy among cities has long been part of the theoretical tool kit of urban sociologists, geographers, and economists. Reviewing the evolution of the urban hierarchy concept, this paper empirically demonstrates a hypothesized transition in the U.S. urban hierarchy during the twentieth century, from size based to network based. Three urban types, following distinct trajectories during this shift, are explored: the primate city, the offline metropolis, and the wired town. Data on the economic structure, population size, and airline passenger traffic of 64 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1900 to 2000 are used to test the hypothesis of a hierarchical transition. Results suggest that a size-based hierarchy dominated in the early twentieth century but was replaced or augmented in the mid-1940s with a network-based hierarchy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study's limitations and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using interview data from two groups in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago's South Side—mothers of young children and neighborhood merchants—this paper suggests a way of connecting two dominant ways of conceiving of physical disorder in urban spaces, one of which focuses on physical disorder as a root of social disorder and another that focuses on physical disorder as an economic prerequisite for gentrification. Specifically, elites can deploy signs of disorder in moral and reputational terms in the urban political arena to gain economic advantages for themselves. While people in the neighborhood might suffer serious consequences because of their neighborhood's bad reputation and the attendant ecological contamination, elites can exploit it. This new paradigm, in which broken windows enter the service of the growth machine, is called the opportunistic disorder paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residents of urban neighborhoods derive a sense of place and connection to their neighborhoods through their engagement with the neighborhood, including both the people in it and its amenities. In addition, one's perception of a neighborhood shapes one's sense of safety and fear of crime. In this paper, we analyze data from 84 interviews with residents in three Boston neighborhoods that varied on demographics, crime levels, and association to stereotypes about crime. Across the three neighborhoods, long‐term residents derived a sense of safety through their social ties among their neighbors, particularly other long‐term residents. Newer residents, especially White residents who were attracted to a neighborhood because of aesthetics or amenities, relied on their perceptions of social and physical disorder. These perceptions were raced and classed, with newer White residents associating danger with perceptions of the proximity of lower income and Black or Latino neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent neighborhood crime research suggests that increased mortgage investment in local communities can help reduce street crime by defending against physical decline and improving perceptions of the neighborhood, which make informal social control more likely. Unfortunately, the neighborhoods that could benefit the most from this relationship are the least likely to get private mortgage investment, as mortgages tend to flow towards neighborhoods that are already stable. In this paper, we examine whether public investment, which can be targeted at disadvantaged neighborhoods, can play a similar role as private investment in influencing neighborhood outcomes. Specifically, we examine whether Seattle's Neighborhood Matching Fund program, a municipal initiative that provides matching funds to local organizations planning neighborhood improvement projects, is associated with reductions in crime, both directly, through community‐building and physical improvements, and indirectly, by encouraging increased private mortgage investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many scholars have demonstrated that entrenched racial residential segregation perpetuates racial inequality, the causes of persistent racial segregation continue to be debated. This paper investigates how geographically and socioeconomically mobile African Americans approach the home‐buying process in the context of a segregated metropolitan region, by using qualitative interviews with working‐class to middle‐income African American aspiring homebuyers. Homebuyers use three principal search strategies to determine suitable neighborhoods: avoiding decline, searching for improvement, and searching for stability. The findings suggest that despite these strategies African American homebuyers end up in areas that may not retain characteristics they desire in terms of racial demographics and amenities, in large part because such neighborhoods remain rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores "hidden" ways by which cities may inadvertently undermine access to decent, stable, affordable housing—especially for vulnerable renter households—through regulations that sanction landlords for tenant activities on their property. In‐depth semistructured interviews and ethnographic observations with 57 small‐ and medium‐sized landlords in Cleveland, followed over 28 months, show that perceptions of risk, flowing specifically from "nuisance" and water regulations that rendered landlords accountable for tenant activities over which they perceived little control, were common. To manage perceived precarity, landlords reported measures that undermined tenants' housing security—including excessive screening, hassling, elevated rent amounts, proclivity to evict, and divestment from the lower end of the housing market whose stock continues to dwindle across many cities. City regulations—meant to bolster housing security, community vitality, and infrastructure—appear to be understudied factors that paradoxically reinforce problems of housing insecurity and community decline many vulnerable tenants, and cities, continue to face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the United States, communities are increasingly interested in the spatial structure of opportunity. Recently, several federal programs have promulgated opportunity mapping as a tool to help increase disadvantaged communities' access to neighborhood opportunity. The increasing institutionalization of opportunity mapping raises questions about how opportunity is defined and by whom. This paper analyzes data from community engagement events held for a regional planning process throughout the Baltimore metropolitan area. During these events, over 100 residents were asked what it means to live in neighborhoods that provide opportunity. The results showed similarities as well as remarkable differences in residents' definitions of opportunity across race, income, and geography. Racial and ethnic minorities, low‐income groups, and those living in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to identify job accessibility, employment, and job training as key components of and pathways to opportunity, whereas White, higher income groups, and wealthier neighborhoods placed a stronger emphasis on a sense of community, freedom of choice, education, and retirement savings. These differences challenge urban policymakers and planners to consider how greater flexibility in mapping tools, qualitative data, and community‐engaged processes might better reflect the diversity in the ways that residents view and experience opportunity in their everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of the U.S. urban population has increased dramatically in recent decades, yet the processes through which population diversity may be driving neighborhood change remain insufficiently understood. Building on Claude Fischer's subcultural theory of urbanism and other classic sociological insights, this article makes the case that population diversity shapes the character of place and drives the spatial clustering of artists and art organizations. Contributing to recent debates on Richard Florida's "creative class" thesis, the paper proposes a reorientation of the conceptual and analytical focus from the predominant metropolitan area level to the neighborhood level. Analyses map and examine population and organizational data from over 850 neighborhoods in Chicago over two decades and spatially model neighborhood change. The results indicate that neighborhood diversity predicts over time an intensification of the creative scene, as reflected in rising hotspots of artists and nonprofit art organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide use of social media has facilitated new social practices that influence place meaning. This paper uses a double case study of two neighborhood blogs in gentrifying communities, to explore the role of social media in sharing place associations and community formation. Drawing on Collins' theory of interaction ritual chains, this research project investigates how the intertwining of online and offline interaction around the blogs creates interaction chains whereby the place associations of participants in the blog become more aligned, creating an alternative place narrative. Analyses of the dynamics of involvement with the blogs show how social interactions spurred by the blogs generate emotional energy, group solidarity, feelings of morality, meaningful symbols, and feelings of place attachment among the participants. This article illuminates how the emerging process of place (re)making spurred by interaction with the blog emerges from both everyday unplanned behavior and strategic aims of the actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about place making in Jerusalem, an important city at the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It examines how place making in Jerusalem has had the consequence of shifting what is known as the Green Line. The Green Line represents the armistice or ceasefire boundaries following the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Development of different parts of captured territories after the 1967 War has shifted and rendered unstable perceptions of the Green Line and has wreaked havoc with prevailing conceptions over what constitutes Jerusalem. Symbolic and social boundary reconstruction is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a powerfully organized mechanism that tilts power to Israel with the use of bulldozers, bricks, and cranes as well as tanks and weapons. The shifting Green Line represents a battle line of an idea war over Israel's ability to claim legitimacy over a new Jerusalem. This paper examines the dynamic processes of how boundaries are being shifted through narratives of various actors involved in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is fundamentally reorienting how cities are connected to one another through trade, migration, communication, and representation. Whereas most existing research has concentrated on unambiguously global cities, in this paper I discuss the positions of cities lower down in the urban hierarchy. I argue that “second cities” constitute a type characterized by distinct patterns of global integration. This second city pattern is constituted by the following: globally active firms in nonfinancial industries; a common migration pattern; a tradition of innovation in political ideologies and professional/expert cultures; a common historical trajectory due largely to transportation projects that integrate the city more deeply into global flows; and the growth over time of a second-city identity. The paper is primarily theoretical; the empirical background, from which some examples will be drawn, is Philadelphia (United States) and Manchester (United Kingdom), across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports based on data collected from the 2000 U.S. Census reveal a dramatic transformation in the landscape of poverty and inequality in the United States in the 1990s. U.S. central city areas have witnessed considerable decreases in rates of poverty while, at the same time, suburbs have experienced significant increases in rates of poverty. Indeed, the outcome of this shift has resulted in demographic trends, quality of life issues, economic and social outcomes, and signs of physical deterioration that we often associate with deteriorating inner cities now being found in a number of American suburbs. Beyond basic demographic information, however, little is known about daily life in these areas. This paper explores the conceptual, analytical, and methodological contributions of Herbert Gans, specifically, his ethnographic study of the suburban community Levittown, for the study of these changes. The paper reviews the literature on suburban poverty in order to identify the ways in which Gans's work contributes to future suburban scholarship as students of the suburb grapple with trying to understand and examine this transformation and the impact that this suburban change has had on the daily lives of the poor living in these recently turned poor suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]