CityReads│You Are Where You Live

CityReadsVol.79

You Are Where You Live

Robert Sampson’s Great American City： Chicago and the Enduring Neiborhood Effect will not only change the way we think about neighborhood effects, it also sets a new standard for social scientific inquiry.

Robert J. Sampson, 2012.Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, University of Chicago Press.

Source: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo5514383.html

Is place irrelevant in the face of global economic forces and information technologies in the 21st century? Is geography dead? Is community dead?

Numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed.

Great American City set out to examine community-level influences on individual development. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Sampson argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live.

He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, poverty, child health, protest, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, community efficacy and immigration.

Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century. This book is at once an intellectual history of an idea, the story of a major research project, the tale of an iconic city, a systematic theory of neighborhood effects, an empirical account of community-level variations in a range of social processes, an analysis of competing schools of social inquiry, and a sustained empirical analysis that was designed to uncover new facts while adjudicating and integrating existing hypotheses.

William Julius Wilson wrote in the preface, “Robert Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect will not only change the way we think about neighborhood effects, it also sets a new standard for social scientific inquiry”.

 Core Concept：Neiborhood Effect

At the core of Sampson’s book is a concept that’s been hotly debated in the social sciences recently: “neighborhood effects.”

While the 21th city has been declared spatially liberated, Sampson argues that it remains place-based in much of its character. The persistence of segregation in particular areas of the city is proof of there being a defined neighborhood effect

Sampson conceptualizes neighborhood in theoretical terms as a geographic section of a larger community or region (e.g., city) that usually contains residents or institutions and has socially distinctive characteristics.

Neighborhood invokes two meanings in the literature--physical proximity or distance(as in "neighbor") and variable social interaction, usually considered in face-to-face terms.

neighborhood effect can be understood as we react to neighborhood difference, and these reactions constitute social mechanisms and practices that in turn shape perceptions, relationships, and behaviors that reverberate both within and beyond traditional neighborhood borders, and which taken together further define the social structure of the city.

Sampson summarizes a core set of themes of neighborhood effects at the 21st century.

First, there is considerable social inequality between neighborhoods, especially in terms of socioeconomic position and racial/ethnic segregation.

Second, these factors are connected in that concentrated disadvantage often coincides with the geographic isolation of racial minority and immigrant groups.

Third, a number of crime- and health-related problems tend to come bundled together at the neighborhood level and are predicted by neighborhood characteristics such as the concentration of poverty, racial isolation, single-parent families, and to a lesser extent rates of residential and housing instability.

Fourth, a number of social indicators at the upper end of what many would consider progress, such as affluence, computer literacy, and elite occupational attainment, are also clustered geographically.

Why Chicago？

Chicago was to urban sociology what Edinburgh was to economics or Vienna was to psychology.

Norman Mailer is only one in a long line of observers who have claimed Chicago as the great American city. What are most important to this book are the corollary advantages that Chicago offers as a site of social science research and a platform on which to build a contextualized theory about contemporary urban life.

The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)

The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) is an interdisciplinary study of how families, schools, and neighborhoods affect child and adolescent development. It was designed and carried out with a core theoretical idea in mind to test neighborhood effects and developmental processes simultaneously. It was launched in the early 1990s.

The PHDCN research enterprise consists of multiple interweaving approaches that include, among others:

• a longitudinal cohort study of 6,500 children and families followed wherever they moved in the United States over approximately seven years

• a representative community survey of more than 8,000 Chicago residents in 1995 and another survey in 2002 of over 3,000 residents

• a systematic social observational study (through videotaping) of more than 20,000 street segments in a sample of neighborhoods purposely chosen to vary by race/ethnicity and SES, along with a follow-up observational study by raters seven years later across the entire city a Network Panel Study of more than 2,800 key leaders in forty-seven communities, interviewed in 1995 and again in a 2002 follow-up of over 1,000 leaders

• a study of more than 4,000 collective action events in the Chicago metropolitan area from 1970 to 2000

• a “field experiment” in 2002 and 2010 designed to measure community-level differences in the propensity of people in public settings to mail back “lost letters”

Major Findings: Place Matters and Neighborhood Effect Endures

A durable spatial logic organizes or mediates much of social life, with neighborhoods and local communities a key component.

Three findings that undermine conventional wisdom stand out in Sampson’s book. First, the concentration of new immigrants lowers crime in urban neighborhoods, with a ripple effect in surrounding neighborhoods with small immigrant populations

Second, “the density of churches is negatively related to collective efficacy and one of its core indicators—trust.” By contrast, neighborhoods with a large concentration of secular non-profit organizations are more likely to organize collective action to improve neighborhood life.

Third, despite aggregate shifts in the racial composition of metropolitan areas, both segregation and concentrated poverty have remained remarkably durable by place

His point, with each of these cases: place matters and its effects are deep-rooted.

Conclusion: the Spatial Logic of the City

Spatial inequality constitutes a fundamental organizing dimension of everyday life, with neighborhoods and local communities a durable and contemporary manifestation of difference.

Neighborhoods are not merely settings in which individuals act out the dramas, or empty vessels determined by “bigger” external forces, but are important determinants of the quantity and quality of human behavior.

The city is ordered by a spatial logic and yields differences as much as a century ago.

The effect of distance is not just geographical but simultaneously social. Spatially inscribed social differences constitute a family of neighborhood effects that are persuasive, strong, cross-cutting,and paradoxically stable even they are changing in manifest form.

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