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Affordable housing has declined in recent decades, yet limited research has examined the demographic and economic changes influencing place-level affordability—especially outside of large metros. In this study I examine the effects of county-level population growth and decline, population aging, and natural amenity development on rates of affordable housing, income, and housing costs across four types of counties. While declines in affordability from 1990-2016 were universal between rural and urban counties, population growth is associated with decreases in affordability in rural counties but increased affordability in large metros counties due to estimated decreases in housing costs. Population aging is estimated to improve affordability in large and small metro counties, despite the associated decrease in income and housing costs across all county types. The effects of aging vary greatly between owners and renters. Natural amenity development, despite its theoretical importance, is not associated with changes in affordability for rural counties.

Why do some urban governing regimes realize a more equal distribution of public goods than others? Local government interventions in Sao Paulo, Brazil, have produced surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goods — housing and sanitation — between 1989 and 2016. I use original interviews and archival research for a comparative-historical analysis of variation across time in Sao Paulo’s governance of housing and sanitation. I argue that sequential configurations of a) “embeddedness” of the local state in civil society and b) the “cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain why and when urban governing regimes generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods on a programmatic basis. I further illustrate how these configurations can explain variation in urban governing regimes across the world.

In the late 1930s, an agency of the United States government called the “Home Owners’ Loan Corporation” (HOLC) graded thousands of urban neighborhoods on the perceived risk they posed to mortgage lenders and property investors. To make these determinations, HOLC field agents collected vast amounts of socioeconomic, demographic, and housing data about these places and presented their findings in an impressive set of maps. While these “redlining” maps have received considerable academic and media attention, the data used to assign risk grades—available for most cities in their “area description” sheets—remain virtually unusable. Correcting this issue, I convert eight of the most consequential variables from 129 cities into an accessible and analyzable tabular format. These include the Black population percentage, “foreign-born” population percentage and group, family income, occupation class, average building age, home repair status, and mortgage availability. This data product will allow researchers to gain a more complete picture of the HOLC’s City Survey program, and it will provide a valuable new source of historical socio-demographic data at the neighborhood level.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted Americans’ daily lives by changing how and when they move. These changes could alter inequalities in mobility and therefore contribute to many forms of social stratification. Relying on SafeGraph cellphone movement data in 2019-2020 we focus on the 25 largest cities in the U.S. and measure inequality in mobility between census tracts by using two indexes proposed by Phillips and colleagues (2019). These measures capture the importance of hubs in a mobility network (Concentrated Mobility Index) and neighborhood isolation (Equitable Mobility Index). We find that the pandemic affected mobility inequality in all 25 cities. In the earliest phases of the pandemic, neighborhood isolation rapidly increased, and the importance of downtown central business districts declined. Mobility hubs generally regained their importance, whereas neighborhood isolation remained elevated started and to increased again during the latter half of 2020. Furthermore, we estimate linear regression models with city and week fixed effects predicting changes in neighborhood isolation relative to 2019 baseline. We find that larger numbers of new COVID-19 cases are positively and statistically significantly associated with changes in neighborhood isolation a week later. Additionally, we find that places with larger populations, more public transportation use, and greater racial and ethnic segregation all had larger increases in neighborhood isolation during 2020. Our results indicate that few cities returned to “normal” mobility patterns and that cities may remain more unequal than before the pandemic.

The dichotomy between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ ties is a common theme in sociological scholarship dealing with urban space, yet urban ethnographers have long been describing the prevalence of impersonal relations. Such relations can be described as fleeting encounters between complete strangers, while others – as in the case of ‘nodding’ relationships – are durable and have yet to be conceptualised. The notion of ‘invisible ties’ is proposed as a conceptual handle for studying typical urban relations that complement the established notions of strong and weak ties. Through an empirical study of four residential buildings in Geneva (Switzerland), these ‘invisible ties’ are revealed by means of a systemic approach to social urban life, from which two key actors emerge: ‘socialisers’ and ‘figures’. This research addresses gaps in the literature on interpersonal relations in urban contexts by focusing on the interplay between different types of social ties, encompassing the whole continuum from anonymity to intimacy.

Scholarly debate focuses on whether cultural capital reproduces existing inequalities or provides a path to upward mobility. Most research, however, focuses only on cross-sectional associations and is unclear about how disadvantaged adolescents can increase their amounts of cultural capital. Traditionally, most adolescents’ interactions with adults occur across two axes of socialization: families and schools. Families provide opportunities to increase cultural capital while schools value and reward cultural capital. Thus, if adolescents do not obtain cultural capital through their families, they may be at a significant disadvantage when navigating the education system. We hypothesize that adolescents may be able to increase cultural capital through valuable social capital access and exposure – their ties to and meeting frequency with other important adults with knowledge of the education system. We investigate this topic using experimental longitudinal data on mentoring relationships. We find that high levels of social capital access and exposure positively affect cultural capital, but only for adolescents with highly educated parents. Our findings suggest that cultural capital may not be an engine of social mobility if adolescents from low-SES households cannot acquire or increase their cultural capital.

Scholars have recently remarked upon the emergence of what Richard Florida has termed The New Urban Crisis, a global phenomenon whereby cities are being lumped into winners and losers, with inequality rising in the winner cities where real estate prices are pushing out those who most need access to the opportunities hoarded within. In this article, I argue that the new urban crisis is not a crisis of the city per se but is itself a symptom of greater crises occurring at the level of global capitalism. By revisiting Castells’ The Urban Question, I read the new urban crisis as a product of how the urban social structure fits into the reproduction of capitalism on a global scale, arguing that, under the regime of flexible accumulation, the urban social structure is asked to reproduce two distinct circuits of capital accumulation set loose by the transition to post-industrialism: accumulation via production and accumulation via finance. These distinct circuits of accumulation utilize the elements of urban social structures differentially, often at cross purposes. This produces continued crises in the reproduction of capitalism, as well as continually shifting relations between elements of the urban social structure, producing a plurality of urban forms.

The 21st century global city is in the midst of a new urban crisis: while it holds an increasing monopoly on employment opportunities, it has become harder to access. In this article, I argue that young urban aspirants are still accessing the global city in crisis through the practice of co-living. Co-living can be understood as an emergent collection of residential commoning practices employed by in-bound urbanites to access in-demand parts of the city and attain employment, housing and community. Through a relational ethnographic case study of the PodShare co-living space in the global city of Los Angeles, I argue that co-living is as an urbanism arising to stabilize the new urban crisis on both the level of the individual and the city, guiding individuals to grin at their condition and be increasingly mobile between multiple global cities in an attempt to maximize their chances of securing longer-term residency.

Sociological research has established the greater exposure of African Americans from all income groups to disadvantaged environments compared to whites, but the traditional focus in studies of neighborhood stratification obscures heterogeneity within racial/ethnic groups in residential attainment over time. Also obscured are the moderating influences of broader social changes on the life-course and the experiences of Latinos, a large and growing presence in American cities. We address these issues by examining group-based trajectory models of residential neighborhood disadvantage among whites, Blacks, and Latinos in a multi-cohort longitudinal research design of over 1,000 children from Chicago as they transitioned to adulthood over the last quarter century. We find dynamic consistency among whites and dynamic heterogeneity among nonwhites in exposure to residential disadvantage, especially Blacks and those born in the 1980s compared to the 1990s. Racial and cohort differences are not accounted for by early-life characteristics that predict long-term attainment. Inequalities by race in trajectories of neighborhood disadvantage are thus at once more stable and more dynamic than previous research suggests, and they are modified by broader social changes. These findings offer insights on the changing pathways by which neighborhood racial inequality is produced.

Gli interventi rivolti alle minoranze rom e sinta sono fortemente marcati da una scarsa conoscenza dei gruppi in questione, se non dalla presenza di informa-zioni errate, di stereotipi radicati e di forti pregiudizi. Non entreremo qui nel merito della fenomenologia degli stereotipi diffusi nella popolazione italiana o fra gli operatori sociali. Cercheremo semmai di definire alcuni caratteri di questi gruppi la cui conoscenza è essenziale ai fini di una corretta programmazione sociale. Procederemo con estrema sintesi e per punti. 1. Il mistero rom: la varietà. 2. La condizione giuridica. 3. I conflitti locali con la società maggioritaria. 4. Il razzismo e la discriminazione. 4.1. Criminalizzazione e criminalità. 5. La debole rappresentanza e la frammentazione degli interventi. 6. La scolarizzazione. 7. Avvertenze di metodo nella costruzione di politiche per i gruppi zigani. 8. (False) Controversie in vista della programmazione di interventi

La problématique de cet article est relative à la difficulté des penser et mettre en œuvre des politiques sociales différentiés, par rapport à la multiplicité des situations et compétences des personnes dites Roms dans les villes de l’Europe occidentale. Le cas des innovations dans les politiques locales italienne sera mobilisé pour développer des réflexions valables aussi en France pour le travail social et les politiques locales en directions de ces groupes. 1. Une représentation homogénéisant. 2. La vulnérabilité des groupes Roms. 3. Création et mise en place de politiques à l'endroit des groupes tziganes : questions méthodologiques et de design. 4. La variété d’instruments comme principe de design. 5. (Fausses) Controverses en vue de la programmation d'interventions sociales. 6. Construction du consensus, volonté politique et formes de médiation. 7. L’action collective des Roms comme levier de l’action publique locale

The housing market is replete with intermediaries—individuals whose work constructs, maintains, or expands a market. A sociology of housing requires analytic attention to these myriad housing market intermediaries since they affect whether and under what conditions individuals and households can access and maintain access to housing as well as help determine the affordability and quality of that housing. In this chapter we aim to show the utility of intermediaries as a wide category of analysis, particularly for understanding how housing inequality interacts with other forms of social stratification across axes such as gender, class, and race and ethnicity. We summarize recent research and unpack how the work of public and private-sector intermediaries—such as housing developers, building inspectors, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, appraisers, landlords, housing authority case workers, mobile home park operators, and property managers—leads to more or less stratification in the housing market.

The association between local ethnic composition and social cohesion has received widespread scholarly attention. Studies consistently find negative associations between neighborhood-level ethnic diversity and neighborhood cohesion indicators. However, hypotheses are formulated statically, empirical analyses rely mostly on cross-sectional data, and scholars worry about potential selection effects into and out of neighborhoods. This study presents a way to overcome these issues. The article derives hypotheses about how individuals' contact with their neighbors develops over time. Then, it examines trajectories of contact experiences by asking a clearly defined causal question: How would contact develop due to ethnic composition if households did not leave their neighborhood? The findings show a substantial increase in perceived contact quality and the probability to visit neighbors after staying in a neighborhood for five years, particularly in neighborhoods with high shares of ethnic minorities. These findings are at odds with theoretical accounts that suggest “hunkering down” in diverse contexts. However, findings also suggest that perceptions of a cohesive community do not increase in diverse neighborhoods. Taken together, the findings indicate that basic social interaction guided by reciprocity and close individual contacts are possible in ethnically diverse contexts.

Ethnische räumliche Segregation in Großstädten stellt eine mögliche Dimension der sozialen Abgrenzung zwischen Bevölkerungsgruppen dar und kann weitere Dimensionen der Ungleichheit in anderen Bereichen der Gesellschaft beeinflussen. Aufgrund unterschiedlicher räumlicher Einteilungen ist es oft jedoch schwierig das Ausmaß an Segregation über Stadtgrenzen hinweg zu vergleichen. Basierend auf Daten des Zensus 2011 verwendet dieser Beitrag räumliche Segregationsmaße auf verschiedenen geographischen Ebenen um so einen vergleichenden Überblick über die räumliche Segregation und deren Formen in Deutschland zu geben. Die Ergebnisse zeigen erhebliche Variation in der Stärke der räumlichen Trennung von Minderheiten. Außerdem verdeutlicht der Beitrag, dass verschiedene deutsche Städte unterschiedliche Muster der Segregation aufweisen. Während manche Städte besonders auf der kleinräumigen geographischen Ebene segregiert sind, erfolgt die Trennung in anderen Städten auf einer großräumigen Ebene. Dadurch zeigt der Beitrag, dass räumliche Segregation auch in Deutschland unterschiedliche Muster und Dimensionen annimmt, die mit unterschiedlichen Folgen und Ursachen verbunden sein können.

A recent study by UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute (Menendian, Gailes, and Gambhir 2021) came to an astonishing conclusion: Of large metropolitan areas in the U.S., 81% have become more segregated over the period 1990-2019. This finding contradicts the recent sociological literature on changes in segregation in the U.S., which has generally found that racial residential segregation has slowly declined since the 1970s, especially between Blacks and Whites. The major question then is: What accounts for this difference? This paper answers this question in two parts. First, it shows that the preferred segregation measure of the Berkeley study, the “Divergence Index” (Roberto 2015), is identical to the Mutual Information Index M (Theil and Finizza 1971; Mora and Ruiz-Castillo 2009; Mora and Ruiz-Castillo 2011), a measure that is mechanically affected by changes in racial diversity. Given that the U.S. has become more diverse over the period 1990 to 2019, it is not surprising that this index shows increases in segregation. Second, by making use of a decomposition procedure developed in Elbers (2021), the paper shows that once the changes in segregation are decomposed into components that account for the changing racial diversity of the U.S., the findings are in line with the sociological literature. Residential racial segregation as a whole has declined modestly in most metropolitan areas of the U.S., although segregation has increased slightly when focusing on Asian Americans and Hispanics.

The book was written to provide information about the plague that is now attacking the world. From a historical point of view author connects the afflictions of the past and the curses that strike the world today. From the Spanish flu, bird flu to Covid-19 can kill at least 40 million people until now is still growing. Through this historical approach, the information submitted can be used as the latest reference about Covid-19 or previous outbreaks, as an analysis so that they can survive in the pandemic.The book is intended for anyone who is really interested in the latest issue that is shaking the world. Because this book not only contains the Covid-19 outbreak, but also contains histories of previous outbreaks and is related to today's situation. The author writes from the health or medical side, historically, anthropology to philosophy critically. So it is clear that the book will be very suitable for those who like to think critically, those who want to study the latest information about the outbreak, they are beginners of biotechnology research and everything that is related to the Covid-19 outbreak research and previously without an age benchmark this book will match those who are interested in this issue.The book, at least it provides new information regarding research on the Covid-19 virus. Especially the conditions in America before and during Covid-19, in fact, almost all chapters must describe the requirements and policies of the American government both in the Covid-19 pandemic or previous pandemics. The author provides many information and data from research by experts on outbreaks and pandemics that may still be unknown in developing countries.The author explains about the pandemics that have shocked the world until the pandemic that we are facing today. By reviewing, it is hoped that many people, especially the younger generation, will find out about the conditions we face today. By reviewing it, you can also describe the book's contents a little to be more interested in this book. Because the content conveyed is in accordance with the current state of the world, this review can be used as the latest analysis and study about outbreaks and pandemics in several decades.

Since the 1960s, social scientists, fair housing agencies, and the federal government have conducted hundreds of in-person and correspondence housing audits. Researchers use these covert experiments to make strong causal claims about difficult-to-detect behavior, such as racial, gender, and other types of discrimination. These studies have consistently uncovered discrimination in multiple stages and contexts of the housing exchange process. The housing audit literature is broad and robust, and a number of in-depth reviews already exist. In this chapter, we build on those reviews by focusing attention on emerging areas of inquiry and suggest new avenues of research pursuits. We begin by briefly reviewing the long history of housing audits including in-person HUD audits and correspondence audits of home sales and housing rentals. Next, we discuss three emerging areas of housing audit research – housing choice vouchers, short-term rentals, and roommate searches – and highlight important findings, new innovations, and areas of weakness. Finally, we conclude with a discussion about future directions of housing audits including using experiments to test for ways to reduce discrimination, using additional data to examine the mechanisms of housing discrimination, and designing modified audits to explore discrimination in other stages of housing exchange.

Poverty scholarship in the United States is increasingly reliant upon the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) as opposed to the Official Poverty Measure of the United States for research and policy analysis. However, the SPM still faces several critiques from scholars focused on poverty of non-metropolitan areas. Key among these critiques is the geographic adjustment for cost of living employed in the SPM, which is based solely upon median rental costs and pools together all non-metropolitan counties within each state. Here, we evaluate the current geographic adjustment of the SPM using both microdata and aggregate data from the American Community Survey for 2014-2018. By comparing housing costs, tenure, and commuting, we determine median rent is likely an appropriate basis for geographic adjustment. However, by demonstrating the wide variability between median rents of non-metropolitan counties within the same state, we show that the current operationalization of this geographic adjustment is sorely lacking.

Food startups, small-scale artisanal food preparation enterprises, have proliferated in many global cities since the 2008-2009 financial crisis. In the United States, specialty food sales in 2019 had a 10.7 percent increase since 2017 (Specialty Food Association, 2020). In New York City, food manufacturing added 3,753 jobs or a 27 percent increase during the period between 2005 and 2015, providing opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurs (Center for an Urban Future, 2016; Evergreen, 2015; Schrock et al 2019). Mass layoffs in the 2008 economic crisis sped up the sector’s development, which provided a way for a diverse group of business founders including immigrants, expats, and recent college graduates to capitalize on their knowledge, skills, and networks. The current COVID-19 pandemic, a global public health crisis, has put a pause to this decade-long development, sheds lights on precarious conditions that food entrepreneurs face, and shows the important role that the city government plays in supporting this group.

Neighborhoods and neighbors are important sources for people's life chances and well-being. Their importance is highlighted in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic: Neighbors helped vulnerable and at-risk groups by providing small services and a sense of community. Using panel data from Switzerland, this study investigated how and for whom relations with neighbors changed to the better or worse during the pandemic. In a second step, changes in subjective well-being and trust in other people, both of which dropped considerably during the pandemic and social confinement, were linked to changes in neighborly relations. The results show that the negative impact of the pandemic on people's subjective well-being and trust was much less pronounced for those who improved their relations with neighbors during the pandemic. At the same time, those with more resources prior to the pandemic were more likely to improve neighborly relations. Consequently, this study finds evidence for a social gradient in subjective well-being and trust during the crisis that partly works through changes in neighborhood networks. Robustness analyses further show that the documented effects are indeed attributable to changes induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding social confinement measures.

White-Black wealth gaps have widened in the wake of the Great Recession, suggesting that White households have disproportionately benefited from the post-Recession economic recovery. In this paper, I explore the role of rising house prices over this period in explaining widening White-Black wealth gaps. I combine geocoded longitudinal data on household wealth from the nationally-representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics with Census tract house price index data to estimate how the distributions of White and Black household wealth would have changed under a counterfactual scenario where house prices did not appreciate from 2013 to 2019. I find that rising house prices account for most of the increase in the White-Black wealth gap over this period. While Black homeowners did benefit from greater Census tract-level house price appreciation than White homeowners, White households benefited more from rising house prices overall due to having greater rates of homeownership and higher house values than Black households. Given the important role of institutional racism through the 20th century in explaining White-Black gaps in homeownership and house values, these findings demonstrate a pathway through which the legacies of institutional racism contribute to present-day racial inequalities.

In this article, I rethink the spatiality of square occupations. I will first reflect on how space, place, presence, and territoriality are constituent conceptual notions of square occupations’ spatiality. Building on de Certeau’s notion of “Making Do”, and drawing heavily from Syntagma and Tahrir as examples, what follows then is an elaboration on the role of policing strategies and protest tactics as means of tabulating and imposing, or diverting and manipulating space. The cases of the 2011 occupations of Syntagma Square in Athens, and Tahrir Square in Cairo will serve the purpose of anecdotal evidence to exemplify the aforementioned concepts empirically.

This study explores the relationship between offline and online contexts in social movement discourse. We test whether local place character—the cultural reputations, values, and ideals associated with a particular location—predict support for feminism expressed on Twitter. Applying topic modeling to a unique corpus describing cities’ cultural reputations, we identify five cultural attributes of U.S. cities that constitute their place character. Then, we use these measures to predict the percentage of tweets that are positive toward feminism in each location. The results indicate that while social media may connect people from geographically distant areas, online discourse is still heavily influenced by the local spaces where users reside. Cities with a place character of Revitalization have more positive Twitter sentiment toward feminism, while areas known as Local Hubs for shopping and leisure are more negative. These findings contribute to social movement scholarship by highlighting one way that offline and online contexts are connected. Far from transcending local geographies, social movement discourse taking place online remains shaped by the cultural environment where it originates.

The growth of the food and beverage service industry in the 2010s obscured the decline of one of its sectors: bars and drinking establishments with limited food offerings. This research notepresents 2006-2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns, a time periodthat captures industry peaks on either side of the Great Recession of 2008. Data show that whilethe food and beverage service sector as a whole grew by 17.7%, the bar sector decreased by10.5%. City-level data from the 30-largest municipalities show much internal variation in both sectors, but the bar sector’s share of the food and beverage service industry declined in 28 of 30 municipalities under study. Restaurant industry growth in this decade ranged from 5.0% to 48.4%, while bar sector change ranged from -37.7% to an increase of 56.5%. The implications of this changing industry mix and its municipal variation are discussed for future research into the changing food and drink service industry, its role in urban revitalization, strategies for publichealth and safety, and the likely acceleration of these trends due to COVID-19.

U.S. urban sociology continues to be dominated by the Chicago School’s theories and methodological approaches. While yielding valuable insight regarding the importance of place, this body of work reproduces racism through explicit and implicit appeals to White-centered sensibility and desirability. In this chapter, we examine two specific Chicago School-inspired theories and related empirical work—spatial assimilation and place stratification. We draw from Du Boisian, racial capitalism, and other critical perspectives to illuminate the racial logics buoying this research. Where urban sociology underscores linear progression towards or digression from Whiteness, we emphasize urban heterogeneity and the intentional, non-linear or cyclical production of urban communities. Further, we argue that urban sociology must reckon with the racist roots of some of its most popular theories and methods, and recommend that future work explicitly center the mutually constitutive racism-capitalism-urbanization processes that have long shaped cities in the U.S. and around the world.

Despite the common public image of homelessness (read: a single “vagrant” person), families with children represent one-third of the homeless population—an especially-serious social problem, since family homelessness has long-term negative impacts on two generations simultaneously. This interdisciplinary study examined the complexities of family homelessness in Fort Worth, Texas. A literature review outlined pathways into family homelessness, shared experiences, and common intervention strategies. An original qualitative study followed, employing a phenomenological approach to interview families in a local rapid-rehousing program. Open-ended question allowed free description of personal realities. Audio-recorded responses were analyzed for relevant themes, commonalities, and variations. Findings suggested that Fort Worth families’ pathways into homelessness are consistent with “life shock theory,” whereby those already financially-strained suddenly experience compounding stresses, leading to homelessness. The study found local and national experiences to be similar; however, it was limited by a convenience sample exclusively comprised of women nearing a housing goal, potentially coloring their outlooks. Finally, the study raised the question whether rapidly-rehoused Fort Worth families are well-positioned for stability. The similarity of participants’ concerns pre- and post-homelessness suggested that some families may transition to a status still “at risk,” rather than “stably-housed.” Considered in the context of previous research, findings supported further interdisciplinary inquiry into how longer-term, post-housing support might promote housing stability.

As a key actor in housing the poor, the private landlord plays an important role in America’s poverty governance, with profound effects on poor families and their neighborhoods. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 127 landlords in Baltimore, Dallas, and Cleveland, we ask how landlords think about their role as purveyors of affordable housing. We find that landlords think about their tenants in moral terms, drawing upon cultural categories to describe and define their tenants. Landlords see renting to the urban poor as a social good insofar as it facilitates a civilizing mission that houses those in need on the condition of their moral reform. We identify two components of this strategy: exclusion and reform. On the one hand, landlords pursue profit through exclusionary tactics such as screening and eviction. While recent research has focused on this component, this article explores how landlords also invest resources in “training” tenants, attempting to mold them into a profitable ideal, rather than replacing them. Using both incentives and surveillance, landlords seek to create a tenant class that conforms to mainstream notions of responsibility and self-reliance. We argue that exclusion and reform are two sides of the same coin, that is, complementary components of paternalistic poverty governance. Landlord paternalism carries special salience in today’s increasingly privatized federal housing policy, where landlords have a great deal of discretion and little oversight.

The majority of Blacks, Latinxs, Asians, and whites now live in suburbs in the United States. Concurrently, the majority of the nation’s poor also live in suburbs. These trends suggest that the diversification of suburbs has immense consequences for the geography of racial (in)equality. Using Census data, we ask whether racial residential diversification and integration disproportionately occur in advantaged or disadvantaged suburban contexts. We conceptualize diversity as the racial and ethnic composition of a place; a suburb is highly diverse if it contains multiple racialized groups represented in equal proportions. We conceptualize integration as the spatial arrangements of racialized groups—a place is integrated when different racialized groups live near each other. We find that suburbs with higher levels of racial diversity are more disadvantaged than more racially homogeneous places. At the same time, integrated suburbs are substantially more advantaged than the average suburb independent of levels of diversity. This work contributes to a nascent critical research agenda on racial processes in U.S. suburbs by providing insight into the socioeconomic conditions and potential outcomes of racial diversification and integration.

This assignment asks students to use the ubiquitous cellphone to take pictures of their neighborhoods, where they live, work, study and play. Then they engage with the pictures in a sociologically critical way. It encourages critical thinking and analysis and promotes a better understanding of urban processes.

Social scientists know that technologies, new or old, do not inherently constitute community. A town hall is, after all, just a building; its walls take on meaning when people breathe social life through its doors, establish a shared purpose, and form relationships with one another. But so far scholars have not well evaluated existing theories of how digital technologies do, or do not, aid in the development of community. What’s missing is a reconciliation of contemporary manifestations of social interaction with classic sociological theories of community. Taylor Dotson tackles this challenge head-on, bolstered by a staunch critique of Barry Wellman’s theory of networked individualism, or the idea that digital technologies have transformed community life to sets of relationships are less local, more global, and centered on interests rather than local necessity. “Try getting a Facebook status update to help move a couch or stay for dinner,” Dotson huffs, in an early hook. Technically Together assembles a wealth of “technology” cases – not just digital devices or internet environs, but woodstoves, bars, cooperative business, and zoning structures – and applies a framework for evaluating whether each abets, or depresses, core tenets of community. Dotson denaturalizes assumptions of not only what counts as technologies (any structure, really) but also injects a perspective as to which are technologies of community.

Housing discrimination has long been thought to contribute to the persistence of racial segregation, yet evidence indicates that explicit forms of housing discrimination have waned. We argue that past work has not fully considered the role of racial steering in maintaining segregation. To explore patterns of steering, we use the 2012 Housing Discrimination Study along with Census data on the neighborhood racial and socioeconomic composition of housing units shown to testers. We leverage the experimental design of the audits to examine how neighborhoods of homes shown to auditors change dynamically throughout the search process and to assess the conditions under which steering is most likely. As with past research, we find no evidence of steering in Asian-White or Hispanic-White audits. However, we find consistent evidence that Black testers are steered away from White neighborhoods and toward Blacker ones, particularly for female homeseekers and those with children. We also find that steering occurs relatively early in the search process and is heightened when searches begin in racially-homogenous neighborhoods. These findings support arguments that the steering of Black homeseekers serves as a modest but stubborn mechanism by which segregation is maintained, and highlight the intersectionality of race and gender in determining outcomes.

Violence often induces white flight to the suburbs and traps blacks in high-crime cities, shaping black-white suburbanization inequality. This study examines the emergence of the crack epidemic in the mid-1980s and city-to-suburb mobility between and within ethno-racial groups. Using the 1980 and 1990 IPUMS data, I compare the mean and dispersion of city-to-suburban mobility before and during the period of the crack epidemic in cities with high intensity of the epidemic relative to cities with low intensity. The results suggest that the crack epidemic increased black and Hispanic flight to the suburbs, but it did not increase white flight. Furthermore, the crack epidemic increased disparity in city-to-suburb mobility among blacks. I find that the source of this heterogeneity is middle-class black migrants who fled to the suburbs. Supporting evidence is consistent with the idea that the crack epidemic changed the location of business establishments from the inner-city to the suburbs, which results in greater economic returns to city-to-suburb migration among selective demographic groups who were heavily affected by the crack epidemic but had resources to migrate. Given the historically lower rates of suburbanization among blacks and Hispanics, the results suggest that the crack epidemic decreased suburbanization inequality between minorities and whites but increased suburbanization inequality among blacks.

Cities have long been the object of fascination within sociology. Key portions of sociological literatures on inequality and globalization, for instance, have focused on urban spaces as essential sites for the production and reproduction of social life, and urban sociology itself is one of the oldest fields in the discipline. For all of this prominence, however, locating the city itself in these literatures can be difficult. Much of our understanding of urban life and urban social problems is derived from a relatively small number of American cities. Moreover, cities are often relegated to a supporting role as a research site rather than an institution worthy of interrogation. This article reviews the path that has brought a specific set of cities to the fore of American sociological analyses. In response, broadening literatures to cities in the literal and figurative American South and producing deeper literatures of specific cities can give sociology the opportunity to produce more representative and contextually rich analyses of inequalities, urban social life, and urban form. The literature on St. Louis, Missouri, is presented as an example of what such a broader and deeper literature could encompass.

There has been a vibrant community gardening movement in New York City since the 1970s. The movement is predominantly located in working class communities of color and has fought for decades to turn vacant land into beneficial community spaces. However, many of these communities are struggling with gentrification, which has the potential to transform access to and use of community gardens in the city and the politics around them. Drawing on separate multi-year ethnographic projects, this article compares two community gardens in food insecure communities in Queens and Brooklyn: one that is undergoing gentrification and one that is not. We analyze how race and class transformations in each community shape the trajectories of urban agriculture spaces, specifically the ideologies, agricultural practices, and daily interactions among gardeners and as well as between gardeners and nongardeners. We find significant differences in how the two sets of community gardeners conceptualize the purpose of their gardens, particularly in constructing them as green spaces, agricultural production sites, and tools for achieving food justice. We argue that these differences can be best understood at the intersection of the personal histories of individuals, the organizational settings in which the gardens are embedded, and each neighborhood’s history of urban renewal and gentrification. Our findings show why some community gardens in food insecure communities adopt a food justice vision, while others do not, and how gentrification can amplify racial and class tensions within community gardens and between gardeners and nongardeners.

Between-school ability tracking—the assignment of students to different school types based on their prior achievement—is usually associated with increased ethnic segregation across schools. This article argues that stronger between-school ability tracking is not only associated with stronger ethnic sorting into school types, thus increasing segregation. At the same time, it hampers majority flight, majority members’ avoidance of exposure to minority members, thus decreasing segregation. To identify the two-fold effect of tracking the article exploits a unique feature of the German secondary school system: regional variation in the strength of between-school ability tracking. Analyses rely on administrative data entailing geocoded information on all secondary schools in Germany in 2008/2009. Results corroborate expectations of a two-fold effect: there is indication that between-school ability tracking increases segregation via more sorting into tracks while at the same time decreasing it via less school sorting within each track and via less spatial sorting. This suggests that school reforms changing tracked school systems into more comprehensive school systems may have a weaker desegregating impact than expected.

As part of a larger project to understand the relative health and disorder of St. Louis City neighborhoods, this paper presents estimates of the number of vacant parcels in the city. These estimates, which are considerably higher than previously published ones, are heavily concentrated in the city's disinvested and segregated North side. We term this heavy concentration of vacancy as "urban prairie". After accounting for other factors as well as possible sources of statistical error, we identify both long-term population loss since 1970 and the proportion of African American residents as significant covariates associated with the amount of urban prairie land per neighborhood. These high levels of concentrated vacancy lead us to critique the City's existing approaches as being too limited in scope, and to suggest a range of possibilities for revitalizing portions of North St. Louis while allowing prairie land to continue to exist in others.

Neighborhoods may contribute to the maintenance of inequality in well-being across generations. We use restricted geo-coded National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data (NLSY 1979 and NLSY Child and Young Adult) to estimate the association between multigenerational exposure to childhood neighborhood disadvantage and subsequent adult exposure. Invoking cousin fixed effects models that adjust for unobserved legacies of disadvantage that cascade across three generations, we find that families where both parents and their children are exposed to childhood neighborhood disadvantage are likely to pass on the legacy of neighborhood disadvantage to successive generations, net of observed and unobserved confounders. Second, we find a direct intergenerational neighborhood association, net of observed and unobserved confounders. Third, we find that unobserved confounders nested in the grandparent generation explain away the intragenerational neighborhood association. These findings reorient neighborhood theory to more seriously attend to the interdependence of neighborhood-level and individual-level antecedents of inequality across generations.

Residential preferences are often treated as exogenous causes of social and ethnic segregation. In this paper, this assumption is challenged. Instead, this contribution proposes and evaluates how residential preferences are shaped by the conditions of one's neighbourhood. This approach acknowledges the mutual dependence of experienced neighbourhood and housing conditions, residential preferences, and segregation patterns. Doing so, an alternative explanation for the often documented ethnic preferences in housing decisions is elaborated and tested by applying multilevel generalized linear latent and mixed logit models to unique, geocoded data from a choice experiment. Results indicate that people differ in their evaluation of the social and ethnic composition of housing alternatives' residential surroundings. Moreover, these heterogeneous evaluations are largely independent of respondents' own ethnic background. Instead, the observed taste heterogeneity varies over respondents' bespoke neighbourhoods. However, the evaluation of the social and ethnic composition of the housing alternatives does not vary over larger administrative neighbourhoods. This result highlights the importance of proximate, small-scale geographic processes in shaping people's residential preferences.

While scholars have long recognized the importance of symbols to nationalism, most analyses examine relatively unambiguous symbols. I seek to understand how such processes function when symbolic meaning is contested, analyzing how organizations on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland deployed representations of Cú Chulainn to support conflicting political programs. I argue that movements in Northern Ireland imbued symbols with meaning by emplotting them within ideological narratives. In return, these symbols provided evidence that strengthened and supported the ideological narratives of the movements that produced them, serving as potent reminders of the worldview such narratives advocate.

This article examines the relatively widespread trend toward racial residential integration within suburbs in the 21st century across metropolitan areas in the United States. I investigate the racial and ethnic compositions of stably integrated communities as well as the characteristics that distinguish these places. Using the information theory index (H) among stably diverse places, I identify cities and suburbs that were racially integrated between 2000 and 2010. Integrated places cluster in highly diverse, coastal metropolitan areas and almost entirely within suburbs. Moreover, integration is firmly patterned along racial lines. Reflecting the antiblack nature of segregation in the US, the rate of black-white integration remains remarkably low (10.5%), but in multiethnic communities with Asians and Latinxs, the probability of black-white integration nearly quadruples (40.1%). Several critical features of place are positively associated with integration: military and public sector employment as well as public university enrollment; new housing stock; and metropolitan political fragmentation. This study shows that suburbs are at the leading edge of American diversification and integration and illuminates the existence of communities where American society transgresses persistent forms of racial discrimination.

With reduced hours, decaying infrastructure, and precariously positioned staff, local public libraries provide much needed services in cities devastated by inequality and slashed safety nets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research of a small public library in a diverse, mostly working class neighborhood in Queens, New York. I show that in addition to providing an alternative to the capitalist market by distributing resources according to people's needs, the library serves as a moral underground space, where middle–class people bend rules to help struggling city residents. Although the library occasionally replicates hegemonic ideologies about immigrant assimilation, it provides a striking example of cross–class and interclass solidarities and resistance to the neoliberal social order. I conclude by discussing the potential of public libraries as everyday spaces of subversion and emancipation, as well as research sites for urban scholars.

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of applications of Henri Lefebvre’s theorizations on space in the Turkish context. Through an intensive search and screening of the literature, this paper ‘maps’ relevant studies in terms of research topic, geographic and historical scope and the conceptual framework and concepts used while presenting the general trends and patterns of applications of Lefebvrean space frameworks in the Turkish context. According to the main argument of the study, although there have been intensive applications of various Lefebvrean conceptualizations on space for the case of Turkey, in most of the relevant scholarship, the focus has been on the spatial triad framework or its various components, rather than on a systematic and comprehensive contextualization of the theory.

I use 28 (1986-2014) years of restricted geocoded NLSY tract-level data and find positive associations between exposure to childhood neighborhood disadvantage and adult obesity and BMI among individuals growing up and entering adulthood during the rise of obesity in the United States. Sibling fixed effects and cousin fixed effects models partially address unobserved confounding nested in the nuclear as well as extended family. Furthermore, exposure to neighborhood disadvantage in adolescence is most salient, providing insight into when policy intervention may be most effective. Results are robust to alternative specifications for neighborhood disadvantage, ages of exposure, and to alternative sampling strategies.

Often described as an outcome, inequality is better understood as a social process -- a function of how institutions are structured and reproduced, and the ways people act and interact within them across time. Racialized inequality persists because it is enacted moment to moment, context to context -- and it can be ended should those who currently perpetuate it commit themselves to playing a different role instead. This essay makes three core contributions: first, it highlights a disturbing parity between the people who are most rhetorically committed to ending racialized inequality and those who are most responsible for its persistence. Next, it explores the origin of this paradox – how it is that ostensibly antiracist intentions are transmuted into ‘benevolently racist’ actions. Finally, it presents an alternative approach to mitigating racialized inequality, one which more effectively challenges the self-oriented and extractive logics undergirding systemic racism: rather than expropriating blame to others, or else adopting introspective and psychologized approaches to fundamentally social problems, those sincerely committed to antiracism can take concrete steps in the real world – actions which require no legislation or coercion of naysayers, just a willingness to personally make sacrifices for the sake of racial justice.

This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state's social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson's “cosmopolitan canopy.” Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and pleasure in difference coexist with conflict and reproduction of inequalities that are inextricable because the space is embedded within larger structures, institutions, and cultural paradigms. By focusing on meaning–making in interaction, I analyze situated accomplishment of diversity and consider the implications for other types of urban spaces.

For close to a century, researchers from across the disciplines of Urban Studies have developed empirical models for understanding the spatial extent and social composition of urban neighborhoods--and how these dimensions change over time. Unfortunately, however, these techniques have often been developed within disciplinary silos and without broad exposure to other potentially interested constituencies. In this paper, we traverse the literatures of social science, computer science, and statistics to examine a variety of modeling techniques for understanding neighborhood dynamics. We begin our review by examining early concepts of spatial structure first outlined in the Chicago School and discuss how the notions of social ecology and quantitative neighborhood analysis permeated the urban studies for several decades to come. Our survey continues by reviewing contemporary statistical approaches for identifying urban neighborhoods, culminating with the state of the art in subfields known as `geodemographics' and `regionalization'. Following this review, we offer insight into the field's persistent conceptual issues, identify areas ripe for additional research, and highlight newly-developed computational methods that can inform more just and socially equitable public policy, community development, and accountable governance.

Unlike most American cities, St. Louis, Missouri has a highly bisected street grid. Where intersections would typically be open to two-way traffic, in hundreds in cases in St. Louis they have been closed using concrete barriers or cul-de-sacs. These street closures are the outgrowth of a 1970s-era “defensible space” strategy to address rising crime rates. Oscar Newman, who is most closely associated with this paradigm, developed it while a faculty member in St. Louis. The city therefore is not only the birthplace but also one of the most significant test cases for its implementation. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive data set of closures available, evaluate their location in the city, and assess their association with contemporary violent crime patterns. We find that barriers are located in neighborhoods that lost significant population between 1970 and 2016, particularly in North City and the northernmost reaches of South City. Critically, though the barriers are imagined as crime reduction tools and justified as such in City legislation, we find that they are associated with elevated violent crime rates at the neighborhood-level. This finding suggests significant limitations with “defensible space” strategies in St. Louis and elsewhere for addressing crime.

Las comunidades marginadas en Puerto Rico presentan cicatrices sociales por la estigmatización, desigualdad y falta de oportunidades experimentadas durante décadas. Está obra recoge expresiones de este sector tradicionalmente marginado por el gobierno, mercado y la misma sociedad puertorriqueña. Dos son los principales propósitos del libro: (1) realizar un análisis histórico del desarrollo e institucionalización del Estado de bienestar emergente en Puerto Rico, y (2) examinar las relaciones del bienestar y la distribución de riesgos sociales entre los principales actores garantes del bienestar en las comunidades marginadas del archipiélago caribeño.Para cumplir el primer propósito se realiza una revisión histórica sobre el desarrollo de las instituciones y programas del bienestar puertorriqueño. El segundo objetivo del libro se materializa mediante la exposición de datos y relatos recopilados mediante entrevistas semiestructuradas y encuestas en siete comunidades marginadas del país (Daguao, Dulces Labios, El Rabanal, Playita Cortada, San Antón, Toro Negro y Tras Talleres).El valor añadido de este libro a los estudios de regímenes de bienestar es la conceptualización de la comunidad como uno de los principales actores garantes del bienestar junto a la familia, Estado y mercado. Asimismo, se demuestra el grado de (des)mercantilización, (des)familiarización y estadocentrismo/residualismo de los programas de bienestar puertorriqueños en las áreas de vivienda, maternidad/paternidad, educación, alimentación, salud, incapacidad, (des)empleo y vejez. Los resultados demuestran la existencia de un Estado de bienestar limitado y estratificado, el cual sigue el tipo de régimen de bienestar residual aunque con un gran peso en la familia tradicional en el área de cuidado y con programas subsidiarios de tipo corporativista para la población trabajadora en el mercado formal.

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know about them in the U.S. comes from outliers: gay neighborhoods in four big cities. This essay explores the similarities of 52 small-city gay bars to each other, and their differences from big-city gayborhood bars. Small-city gay bars are surprisingly integrated with straight people in their often red-state communities and are as racially diverse than the counties in which they reside. They are subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions. I conclude with an argument for the importance of small cities to understand urbanism generally. Small cities are a key analytic object to disentangle urban effects from modern life generally. They reveal the way in which contemporary urban scholars often implicitly define urbanism in terms of commercial diversity at the expense of the reasons why many people prefer to live in small cities: proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that most big-city pleasures can be found everywhere. Studying small cities provides one way of integrating studies along the urban-rural interface and developing a more holistic, empirically rich, and theoretically sound sociology of place.

As the rental housing market moves online, the internet offers divergent possible futures: either the promise of more-equal access to information for previously marginalized homeseekers, or a reproduction of longstanding information inequalities. Biases in online listings’ representativeness could impact different communities’ access to housing search information, reinforcing traditional information segregation patterns through a digital divide. They could also circumscribe housing practitioners’ and researchers’ ability to draw broad market insights from listings to understand rental supply and affordability. This study examines millions of Craigslist rental listings across the USA and finds that they spatially concentrate and overrepresent whiter, wealthier, and better-educated communities. Other significant demographic differences exist in age, language, college enrollment, rent, poverty rate, and household size. Most cities’ online housing markets are digitally segregated by race and class, and we discuss various implications for residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, housing voucher utilization, and automated monitoring and analytics in the smart cities paradigm. While Craigslist contains valuable crowdsourced data to better understand affordability and available rental supply in real time, it does not evenly represent all market segments. The internet promises information democratization, and online listings can reduce housing search costs and increase choice sets. However, technology access/preferences and information channel segregation can concentrate such information-broadcasting benefits in already-advantaged communities, reproducing traditional inequalities and reinforcing residential sorting and segregation dynamics. Technology platforms like Craigslist construct new institutions with the power to shape spatial economies, human interactions, and planners’ ability to monitor and respond to urban challenges.