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This paper first reviews the descriptions and structural explanations for variations, in urban population densities in the United States over several decades. The research reviewed focuses on shifts in the technology and economics of travel as being the major influences on urban density distributions. These variables appear to be somewhat less adequate as explanations of the process in recent decades. After reviewing these findings and suggesting several research questions, we attempt to assess the evidence relating variations in population density to several other aspects of human behavior. A review of the research relating high population densities to various "social pathologies" indicates that little of the variance in rates of these pathologies can be attributed to density independently of other social structural variables. Some important consequences of population density have been reported, however, and possible research directions are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of public apprehension about crime indicate that people hold conflicting orientations regarding the nature and extent of the problem (McIntyre, 1967). On the one hand, they feel that throughout the country as a whole and even elsewhere in their own communities, the threat of crime, especially violent crime, is severe and increasingly so. On the other hand, however, they feel that people and property in their own neighborhoods remain relatively safe, this being the case even among residents of high crime risk areas. The issue of crime deterrence, particularly in residential areas, involves a number of dimensions, depending partly on threatened and partly on actual apprehension of offenders by actions of residents and police. The threat of apprehension exercised through informal channels has been demonstrated in the work of Maetoby et al. (1958) which shows that the crucial factor differentiating high from low delinquency areas of the same lower socio-economic level is the shared expectations among neighbors that residents would intervene to prevent the commission of offenses. More recently in a study of ghetto riots, Warren (1969) has demonstrated the importance of actual informal intervention in crime deterrence, finding that the more cohesive the neighborhood, the more likely that residents attempted to prevent looting, burning, and disorder. The significance of formal controls as deterrents to crime is somewhat more problematic. Even though crime prevention is a major manifest function of police (Banton, 1964; Bittner, 1967; Wilson, 1968), one is left to assume the degree to which formal controls do deter crime, and as Blumstein (1967), for one, has stated, "although the question (of what people are deterred from eommitring what crime by what actions of the criminal justice system) is central to much of the operation of the criminal justice system, and especially to police operation, there has been no systematic attempt to answer it." Some light is shed on this issue in studies of police response to citizen complaints which show the mutual dependence of formal and informal structures for the control of crime. Black and Reiss (1970) report that the majority (72 percent) of police encounters (at least with juveniles) stem from citizen calls rather than from police-initiated action, yet the results of victimization studies reveal that this still represents only a limited proportion of all offenses reported by citizens to police (Biderman, This paper is concerned with the issue of how people view the nature and extent of crime in their own neighborhoods, and whether they attribute their area's safety (or dangerousness) to the exercise of formal or informal controls, comparing rural, suburban, and central city residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indicators of 29 of Oscar Lewis' poverty traits were examined to see if poor and nonpoor families differed significantly in frequency of demonstrating the traits. Families representing six ethnic/residence population types were considered: metropolitan white, nonmetropolitan white, metropolitan black, nonmetropolitan black, metropolitan Spanish speaking, and nonmetropolitan Spanish-speaking. Of the 29 traits investigated, for 24 traits a significant difference was found between poor and non-poor in at least one ethnic/residence group. Significant differences between poor and non-poor in the two Spanish-speaking groups existed on considerably fewer traits than in the case of the two black or the two white groups, suggesting that the traits examined may be more broadly based in Spanish culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines attitudinal manifestations of anomia and militancy among the Negro populations of three lower-class neighborhoods. Translating these ideas into the present research context, the basic question asked is: What is the relative impact of ecological setting and of the social characteristics of persons (such as social participation and socioeconomic status) in predicting attitudes? The two attitudes studied are anomia, measured by the Stole Anomia Scale, and militancy, measured by a recently published Militancy Scale. The study focuses upon anomia and militancy at two levels of analysis—the neighborhood level and at the individual level. The neighborhood analysis is directed toward measuring the impact of a given ecological setting on the attitudes of those residing in the area. The individual analysis centers around the social attributes of the respondent (the standard socioeconomic indicators, as well as several social participation measures) and their association with militancy and anomia. While sociologists have examined the effect of social context, they have seldom separated the consequences of social conditions from those of a person's own attributes, principally because most sociological data furnish information about social aggregates rather than individuals, (Blau, 1960:179; Coleman, 1969:86-114). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author briefly considers some of the changing imagery of American cities and suburbs. Today's urban imagery is no longer concerned with the imagined polarity of countryside and city, which for so long preoccupied Americans. This polarity was succeeded some decades ago by a presumed polarity of city and suburb, a polarity which followed in the wake of a vastly increased sub-urbanization of American cities, and the flight of great numbers of city dwellers to the suburbs in search of fresh air, safe and quiet streets, genuine communal life, better standards of domestic living, and, as American sociologists have so often stressed, more prestigious locales in which to live. But the imagined polarity of suburb and city is already breaking down, and new imagery is beginning to take its place. Americans are now being told in their mass media that soon they will be living in fifteen great, sprawling, nameless communities, which are rapidly changing the human geography of the entire country. They are beginning to have spread before them maps of these vast urban conglomerations, which are not cities but are nevertheless thoroughly urban: super-cities and strip cities. They are being warned that the United States' urban regions are already entering upon a new stage of development, even before most people are aware that urban regions exist at all.