Where have we been?

January 19, 2011 at 9:00 pm | Posted in news, what to read, what to watch | Leave a comment

You’ve probably noticed that we have been quiet for the last several months.  We’ve been working hard designing and creating the content for a completely revamped website.  In the coming weeks, we’ll announce the (beta?) launch of an online portal designed to be a resource for social scientists, journalists, activists, practitioners, policy makers, and others interested in urban social science.  Much of the work of UrbaOrgs will transfer to that site, which will be hosted by the University of Chicago.  Stay tuned for more!

City and Community article encourages new thinking on African American residential patterns before the Civil Rights Era

September 29, 2010 at 6:28 pm | Posted in cities, geography, housing, neighborhoods, race, what to read | Leave a comment

In the newly published article, “African American Locational Attainment Before the Civil Rights Era,” (City & Community, volume 9, September 2010), Lance Freeman challenges conventional wisdom that prior to the Civil Rights era, blacks of all classes lived side-by-side due to intense discrimination. According to this view, individual socioeconomic status did not translate into improved locational outcomes. By analyzing individual-level data from the 1910-1950 Public Use Microdata Samples, Freeman reveals how individual-level socioeconomic status translated into neighborhood-level outcomes for blacks. Among blacks, individual-level socioeconomic status played no role in determining residential proximity to whites. However, individual-level socioeconomic status for blacks was an important determinant of other neighborhood outcomes. His ground-breaking research suggests that upper-stratum blacks did indeed live in neighborhoods set apart from poorer blacks.

More information about this article available at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6040.2010.01329.x/abstract

Why many approaches to building social capital probably won’t work

September 24, 2010 at 5:54 pm | Posted in childcare centers, new books, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment

A new paper by Mario L. Small in the Royal Society of the Arts journal makes the case that many of the suggestions put forth to build social capital have little hope of success.  The reason?  Today, most people are too busy to build social capital, even if they think doing so would be a good idea.  Figuring out how to build social capital requires seriously reconsidering how people actually create and sustain those social bonds that end up being useful, trustworthy, and productive.  Based on his research on the unanticipated roles childcare centers played in structuring the networks of mothers, he suggests that would-be social capitalists shift attention from the individual to the routine organization.  As Matthew Taylor puts it, the best way to build social capital may be “by accident.”  See also commentary in the Social Capital Blog.

Study finds that neighborhood organizations are strong predictors of social capital

August 24, 2010 at 11:08 am | Posted in amenities, grocery stores, neighborhoods, social organization, social service agencies, supermarkets, what to read | Leave a comment

In a new study published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Alexandra Curley studies social capital levels among participants in a Boston housing relocation program.  From the abstract: “This article examines the social capital available to low-income households which were relocated to different types of neighborhoods with the HOPE VI program, an initiative aimed at redeveloping U.S. public housing developments into mixed-income communities. Along with improving the living environment, HOPE VI is thought to improve residents’ access to social capital by changing the economic mix of their neighborhoods. This article contributes evidence from multivariate analyses of survey data of Boston HOPE VI residents in their post-HOPE VI neighborhoods. Findings indicate that rather than neighborhood socioeconomic mix, neighborhood resources, such as libraries, recreation facilities, parks, grocery stores, and social services, followed by place attachment and feelings of safety,were the strongest predictors of social capital….”

A new frontier in the analysis of urban nightlife establishments

July 9, 2010 at 2:57 pm | Posted in amenities, cities, consumption, culture, geography, race, reading list, social capital, what to read | 1 Comment

In “The Nightly Round: Space, Social Capital, and Urban Black Nightlife,” sociologist Marcus Hunter uses participant observation and semistructured interviews to consider the ways in which nightlife is used to mitigate the effects of social and spatial isolation, complementing the accomplishment of the daily round. Through an analysis of the nightly round—a process encompassing the social interactions, behaviors, and actions involved in going to, being in, and leaving the club—Hunter demonstrates that understanding the ways in which urban blacks use space in the nightclub to mediate racial segregation, sexual segregation, and limited social capital expands our current understanding of the spatial mobility of urban blacks as well as the important role of extra-neighborhood spaces in such processes. Further, the article highlights the ways that urban blacks use space in the nightclub to leverage socioeconomic opportunities and enhance social networks. While Hunter found that black heterosexual and lesbian and gay patrons used space in similar ways, black lesbians and gays were more likely to use the club as a space to develop ties of social support. The article can be found in the June 2010 issue of City and Community (volume 9, number 2).

Why scholars of urban poverty should take culture seriously again

May 10, 2010 at 11:24 pm | Posted in culture, neighborhoods, poverty, reading list, what to read | Leave a comment

A new volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences reexamines the relationship between culture and poverty. The volume takes contemporary researchers on poverty to task for largely abandoning the study of culture. At the same time, it challenges dated and discredited perspectives that suggest that the poor are poor because of their cultural values. Instead, it calls for scholars and policy makers to take advantage of new research in anthropology and cultural sociology that forces us to broaden our understanding of culture, poverty, and anti-poverty policy.  See the uncorrected proofs of the introductory article by Mario L Small, David Harding, and Michele Lamont.

State of Metro America report finds dramatic transformations in U.S. cities

May 9, 2010 at 8:39 pm | Posted in data, economic development, geography, neighborhoods, race, what to read | Leave a comment

The report, by the Brookings Institution, argues that a decade of transformation and turmoil has resulted in “five new realities”: the rapid growth and outward expansion of metropolitan areas;  a dramatic diversification of the nation’s ethnic composition; the sharp growth of the 55-64 year-old population; a highly uneven increase in educational attainment; and a continuing rise in income inequality.  Bruce Katz and Judith Rodin discuss some of the implications of these trends.

New article highlights the power of ethnic entrepreneurship

March 10, 2010 at 11:30 pm | Posted in immigrants, neighborhoods, reading list, social capital, what to read | Leave a comment

In the new article, “Noneconomic Effects of Ethnic Entrepreneurship: A Focused Look at the Chinese and Korean Enclave Economies in Los Angeles,” Min Zhou and Myungduk Cho aim to develop a conceptual framework from a community perspective to examine the noneconomic effects of ethnic entrepreneurship. They pay close attention to the linkage between entrepreneurship and community building using ethnographic data from comparative case studies of the Chinese and Korean enclave economies in Los Angeles. They argue that it is the social embeddedness of entrepreneurship, rather than individual entrepreneurs per se, that creates a unique social environment conducive to upward social mobility. This study suggests that ethnic entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in immigrant adaptation beyond observable economic gains. The analysis contributes to the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship by shifting the focal point from ultimate mobility outcomes—earnings or employment opportunities—to intermediate social processes—community building through the consolidation of ethnic social structures, the creation of ethnic social spaces, the return of the co-ethnic middle class, and social capital formation. In this respect, the enclave economy concept is superior for investigating specific social contexts and processes of group-level social mobility.

The piece appears in Thunderbird International Business Review, Vol. 52, No. 2, March/April 2010

New book examines the historical mechanisms behind residential exploitation

February 24, 2010 at 3:31 pm | Posted in housing, neighborhoods, new books, race, reading list, what to read | Leave a comment

Rutgers University History Professor Beryl Satter, highlights the financial mechanisms of residential segregation in her new book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America.  The daughter of Mark Satter, a Chicago lawyer who uncovered redlining tactics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Satter highlights the history that is buried in the minds of so many Chicago families, especially hers.  Placing the story of a young African American couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, at the center of the book, Satter provides personal examples of the hardship endured by African Americans during the Great Migration. The book goes into depth about contract selling, the practice in which landlords sold African Americans overpriced homes, kept the titles until black homeowners paid them off, and charged excessive interest rates to insure they never could. Contract selling cost thousands of migrating blacks their livelihoods and solidified many of the economic disparities in housing and access to credit that social scientists are working to understand today.

Neighborhood patterns of Netflix rentals

January 9, 2010 at 1:31 pm | Posted in amenities, consumption, geography, NYT, personality, scenes, what to read | 1 Comment

The New York Times has an excellent interactive feature on the distribution of 2009 rentals of particular films across neighborhoods, for New York, Chicago, Boston, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and a few other cities.   For example, in the Hyde Park zip code (site of the University of Chicago), the most rented film in 2009 was Slumdog Millionaire.  Yet in 3 of the South Side zip codes that surround it, the most rented film was Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys.  MadMen Season 1 made the top 50 in many of the zip codes in Manhattan and in those sections of Brooklyn nearest Manhattan; it was virtually absent in the rest of the metropolitan area.   Relationship to Terry Clark’s amenity-based scenes indexes?  To the neighborhood distribution of personality types?  Long live the spatial sociology of consumption….

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