Imagine a world where distance has died, where globalization and high-tech wonders have rendered place irrelevant, where the Internet, Blackberries, and planes are the coin of a global realm, not local difference. From the North End of Boston to the North Beach of San Francisco, imagine cities where neighborhood difference is an anachronism, a victim of “placelessness.”
On the surface this thought experiment matches common experience. Who doesn’t know a teenager wired to everything but her neighborhood? It seems everyone nowadays is traversing the urban metropolis while chatting away on a cell phone, plugged into an iPod, or perhaps even “tweeting.”1 As for the idyllic urban village said to characterize communities of yesteryear, few of us have the time or energy for dinner with our neighbors anymore. Americans are notoriously individualistic and roam widely, so what then is the relevance of place? Globalization is everywhere triumphant according to the dominant narrative, rendering us “elsewhere” rather than placed. Thus according to the social theorist Anthony Giddens, we need not imagine at all, for the very essence of high modernity and contemporary conditions can be captured in the idea of place as “phantasmagoric.”2 Neither does the public intellectual Thomas Friedman need a thought experiment, because for him the world is already “flat,” or at the very least, flattening.3
These influential thinkers and this common wisdom about the effects of technology are right at some fundamental level. Universal forces create places that are similar no matter where we go. The strip malls that line cities and suburbs across the country come quickly to my mind, uniformly ugly in the same way no matter where they alight. Even cities as a whole are thought by many to be interchangeable; if we can be anywhere, then nowhere in particular stands out. And even if we cannot literally be anywhere, we can be elsewhere aided by profound advances in technology.
Setting aside the suspicion that only the privileged elite enjoy a global playing field, there are also good empirical reasons to take seriously the questioning of place and concepts like neighborhood or community. Social-network theorists have shown us that urbanites create nonspatial communities that cross-cut geographic ones. Metropolitan dwellers might not know their neighbors on an intimate basis, but they are likely to build viable sets of social relations spread across the city, state, country, and increasingly the world.4 In an influential paper in the late 1970s, Barry Wellman referred to this as “community liberated,” or what might be thought of as community beyond propinquity.5 Perhaps place is phantasmagorical and community lost.
With all the emphasis on new forms of alienation from traditional forms of community, it may come as a surprise to learn that intellectual and public concern with the decline of community is longstanding and finds vigor in every historical period. Today’s manifestations might be unique but not the perceived problem. In the most abstract version the theme of declining community and yearning for renewal finds its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Eden became sin city and salvation still awaits. Karl Marx was secular but the promise of community after the overthrow of capitalism was unmistakable and launched societal revolutions. The entire discipline of sociology, in fact, was founded on the upheavals of the late nineteenth century widely thought to have frayed the social fabric of “Gemeinschaft” (community).6 The presumed decline of traditional forms of personal association in small towns besieged by the advance of widespread urbanization and industrialization became the central problematic for other noted scholars such as Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. Louis Wirth later expanded these concerns by arguing that large population size, density, and ethnic heterogeneity were socially disintegrative features that characterized rapidly changing cities. Wirth famously asserted in 1938 that these defining elements of urbanism made social relations “anonymous” (like Internet surfing? blog comments?) and “superficial” (like texting? Face-book?), with estrangement undermining family life and ultimately the bonds of solidarity thought to reflect community.7 One can read Wirth today, insert technology as the villain, and get a familiar result.
This classic thesis of decline—aptly described as “community lost”— thus posits the idea that the social ties of modern urbanites have become impersonal, transitory, and segmented, hastening the eclipse of local community and feeding processes of what became known as “social disorganization.”8 A well-known book in the middle of the twentieth century adroitly captured the collective urging of the times: The Quest for Community.9
The beat went on and never stopped. The contemporary manifestation of community lost is exposed by the intense attention focused on the notion of Americans “bowling alone” and “hunkering down.” Robert Putnam’s thesis of a decades-long decline in voluntary associations, trust, and informal neighborly exchange captured the imagination not just of social scientists but the public at large.10 The concept of community lost has also been frequently invoked in scholarly debates across a range of fields, including “social capital,”11 civil society,12 social movements,13 and in the public intellectual world of communitarians.14 As if to underscore these concerns, a widely reported and earnestly discussed finding in 2006 argued that the core discussion networks of Americans decreased by a third from the mid-1980s to the present, with notable declines for voluntary associations and neighborhood contacts.15 More recently came a warning of the “downside of diversity,” with evidence pointing to increasing immigration and ethnic heterogeneity as a potential source of mistrust in one’s neighbors.16
An interesting irony is that the placelessness and globalization critique finds an affinity with the longstanding narrative of community lost in the idea that personal ties to the local community have withered away.17 The difference is that the globetrotting modernist says good riddance (community liberated!), whereas “communitarianism” can be seen as a sort of resistance movement to counter the bowling-alone scenario of decline and inspire a renewal of community.18 Either way, the implication many public intellectuals and scholarly pundits alike have taken away is that places—especially as instantiated in neighborhoods and community—are dead, impotent, declining, chaotic, irrelevant, or some combination thereof.
Chicago is the great American city.
Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago.19
Enter contemporary and, yes, global Chicago.20 Logic demands that if neighborhoods do not matter and placelessness reigns, then the city is more or less a random swirl. Anyone (or anything) could be here just as easily as there. Identities and inequalities by place should be rapidly interchangeable, the durable inequality of a community rare, and neighborhood effects on both individuals and higher-level social processes should be weak or nonexistent. The effects of spatial proximity should also be weak. And so goes much contemporary scholarship.21
By contrast, the guiding thesis of this book is that differentiation by neighborhood is not only everywhere to be seen, but that it is has durable properties—with cultural and social mechanisms of reproduction— and with effects that span a wide variety of social phenomena. Whether it be crime, poverty, child health, protest, leadership networks, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, mobility flows, collective efficacy, or immigration, to name a few subjects investigated in this book, the city is ordered by a spatial logic (“placed”) and yields differences as much today as a century ago. The effect of distance is not just geographical but simultaneously social, as described by Henry Zorbaugh in his classic treatise The Gold Coast and the Slum.22 Spatially inscribed social differences, I argue, constitute a family of “neighborhood effects” that are pervasive, strong, cross-cutting, and paradoxically stable even as they are changing in manifest form.
To get an initial feel for the social and physical manifestations of my thesis and the enduring significance of place, walk with me on down the streets of this iconic American city in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I begin the tour in the heart of phantasmagoria if there ever was one—the bustling “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue, the highly touted showcase of contemporary Chicago.23 As we start southward from the famed Water Tower, we see mostly glitter and a collage of well-to-do people, with whites predominant among the shoppers laden with bags from the likes of Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, and more. Pristine stores gleam, police officers direct traffic at virtually every intersection throughout the day, and construction cranes loom in the nearby distance erecting (or in anticipation of) new condos. There is an almost complete lack of what James Q. Wilson and George Kelling famously termed “broken windows,” a metaphor for neighborhood disrepair and urban neglect.24 As I walked south on a midmorning in January of 2006, street sweepers were cleaning both sides of an already clean street as if to make the point. Whatever “disorder” exists is in fact socially organized, whether the occasional homeless asking for money in approved locations (near the river is common; in front of Van Cleef & Arpels or the Disney Store is not) or groups with a cause pressing their case with pamphlets, signs, and petitions. A favorite blip around the holidays is charity appeals mixed with the occasional hurling of abuse (or ketchup) at shoppers emerging from the furrier. I see nothing on this day but many furs. Other warmer times of the year bring out a cornucopia of causes.25 On a warm day in late March of 2007, a homeless shelter for women presses its cause alongside an anti-Obama crusader (the latter getting many glares, in this, Obama country).
As we near the Chicago River, Donald Trump announces his vision. It is not subtle, of course, but rather a symbolic shout; in the city of skyscrapers the cranes here are busy erecting the self-described world’s tallest future building, one in which “residential units on the 89th floor will break a 37-year world record held by the John Hancock Center for the world’s highest homes off ground level.”26 Chicago is once again a “city on the make,” as Nelsen Algren put it well,27 and so it seems perfectly fitting that Trump chose Chicago for this particular behemoth.28 On a cold day in March with barely a hole in the ground, international tourists were busily snapping pictures of the spectacle to be. A year later at fifteen stories and rising, and then later at almost ninety, the shutters of the tourist cameras continued to flap. In April 2009, only the height had changed and Trump’s vision was complete. Here, status is in place.
After crossing the Chicago River from the Near North Side into the Loop and passing the clash of classic architecture and Trump’s monument to the future in its midst, one begins to see the outlines of the new Millennium Park in the distance, the half-billion-dollar extravaganza long championed by the second Mayor Daley and built considerably over cost with cries of corruption and cronyism.29 Yet there is no denying the visual impact and success of Millennium Park, a Disney-like playground, all shiny and new. Even on a cold winter day there is public activity and excitement in the air. People mill about, skaters glide across the rink, and film-projected faces of average citizens stare out of the fountain’s facade. Looking west from the park the skyline and bustle of the Loop stand out in a different way than the Near North—more workers and everyday business activity against the backdrop of landmark buildings and institutions.
Continuing south along Michigan Avenue past Roosevelt Road one sees more action, but with a twist. The architecture and historical pulse of the southern part of Chicago has always been different from points north. Despite its proximity to the Loop, the community of the “Near South Side” was marked by vacant rail yards, vagrants, dilapidated SRO (single-room-occupancy) hotels frequented by transients, penny arcades, and warehouses. The latter are now being redeveloped for lofts and one old SRO building after another is being swept away for new condos and chic restaurants. Unlike the cumulative advantages being piled high atop the long-stable Gold Coast, renewal is the order of the day. Alongside and in some cases atop former railroad yards, the Near South development rose to prominence in the mid-1990s when Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife moved there from the storied political neighborhood of Bridgeport in 1994.30 Other developments soon took off and today flux is readily apparent where decay once stood. Few Chicagoans just ten years ago would have imagined eating smartly at South Wabash and 21st, the former haunts of hobos and the homeless.31 Whereas the Magnificent Mile has long anchored development and moneyed investment, the Near South Side tells a story of real change.32
Further down Michigan Avenue between about 35th and 47th Streets in the communities of Douglas and then Grand Boulevard, the scene is jarringly different. The transformation of the Near South has given way to what sociologists traditionally called the “slum.” In a walk down Michigan Avenue in 2006 I saw what appeared to be a collapsing housing project to the left, broken glass in the street, vacant and boarded-up buildings, and virtually no people. Those I observed were walking quickly with furtive glances. On my walk in 2006 and again in early 2007, no whites were to be found and no glimmering city parks were within sight. The cars were beat up and there was little sign of collective gatherings or public activity, save perhaps what appeared to be a drug deal that transacted quickly. Yet even here there were stirrings of change, symbolized most dramatically by vacant lots to the west of where there once stood hulking and decaying projects built expressly to contain the city’s black poor.
In fact, the South Side of Chicago once housed the most infamous slum in America. Chicago showed it knew how to build not just skyscrapers but spectacular high-rises for the poor; the Robert Taylor Homes alone once held over twenty-five thousand residents–black, poor and isolated,33 outdoing Cabrini Green, another national symbol of urban despair. As described by the Chicago Housing Authority itself, Robert Taylor apartments were “arrayed in a linear series of 28 16-story high-rises, which formed a kind of concrete curtain for traffic passing by on the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway.”34 The wider neighborhood of the projects—“Bronzeville,” as it was named by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton in Black Metropolis—became infamous as one of the most dangerous and dispossessed in the country in the latter half of the twentieth century.35 Yet in a short ten-year span the Robert Taylor Homes have been demolished (literally, blown up with dynamite) and former residents scattered throughout the metropolitan area. The tragic mistake of designed segregation became too much for even the Chicago City Council to ignore. Officially recognized as a failed policy, the last building of Robert Taylor was closed at the end of 2006.
I visited the area in March 2007 after the last building was destroyed. It was eerily quiet as I paused to contemplate and observe vast open spaces where grinding poverty once reigned amid families making the best they could out of an unforgiving environment. An especially haunting reflection came to mind, a visit in 1992 to the Robert Taylor Homes in the same exact block. Passing inoperable metal detectors and walking up urine-stenched stairs because the elevators were broken, the physical signs of degradation were overwhelming. Yet a group of us entered an apartment that was immaculate, where we met two single mothers who told a story of survival and determination to see a better day. Both of their sons had been murdered and they had knitted a quilt with one-foot by one-foot squares honoring every other child who had also been murdered in the projects. The unfurled quilt extended nearly the length of the room. Shaken, I remember thinking at the time that surely anything would be an improvement over the prisonlike towers. On this spot one sees almost a verdant green expanse, with downtown far in the distance (fig. 1.1). The “problem” is now out of sight and for many, including city leaders, out of mind.
Heading slightly east and progressing toward the lake, one sees the emergence of a thriving black middle class amid the rubble and vacant lots adjacent to the former projects. Hard as it might be to imagine, $500,000 homes are being erected next to boarded-up buildings at the center of what was a low-rise slum just years earlier. Riders arriving by train into Chicago between the 1960s and the recent past would witness concentrated poverty up close—abandoned buildings and all the signs of decline appeared to the west of the tracks on the South Side in the small community of Oakland, which sits just north and east of Grand Boulevard. Nearby at the corner of Pershing and Langley, new homeowners are beckoned by a sign for the “Arches at Oakwood Shores”—a country club–like name where prostitutes once roamed freely and physical destruction was rampant.36 Vacant lots serve as reminders of the transition still in progress. At Drexel and 43rd on a day in March of 2007, a group of homeless men sit around a fire on a trash-strewn lot. At 47th and Wabash sits a huge boarded-up building, menacing in feel. Although still a work in progress, the areas in Oakland and around parts of Bronzeville represent one of the most stunning turnarounds in urban America today.37 How and why this happened takes on significance considering that most slums in Chicago, as shown in chapter 5, remain slums.
FIGURE 1.1. In the former shadows of the projects: where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. Photo by the author, September 13, 2007.
Soon after heading south from this surreal transformation to the likely “Black Gold Coast” of the future, one finds stately mansions in Kenwood and then the integrated and stable community of Hyde Park, home to passionate intellectuals and a dense organizational life. Adopted home and inspiration to President Barack Obama and other movers and shakers, almost nothing happens in Hyde Park without community input and institutional connections, visible in signs, churches, bookstores, petitions, and a wide variety of community organizations. People instantly know what you mean when you say you live in Hyde Park; the name swims in cultural meaning. It was no accident that Obama was a “community organizer,” as chapter 8 explains.
Just west of Hyde Park, however, stark differences appear again. Across Washington Park sits a community of the same name that has seen hard times and still struggles mightily. Along the major thoroughfare of Garfield Boulevard stand burned buildings, gated liquor stores, and empty lots. At the corner of Michigan Avenue, we could not find a more apt portrayal of the second part of Zorbaugh’s contrast. The inverse of Michigan Avenue north of the Loop, here we find dead spaces permeated by a sense of dread. At midday, groups of men hang out, bleary eyed and without apparent purpose. As we head further south into Woodlawn we see block after block of what most Americans would consider the classic ghetto. Black, visibly poor, and characterized by physical disrepair, west Woodlawn looks bleak to the eye. Zorbaugh might not have imagined the Black Gold Coast and the Slum, but today it is apparently here.
Continuing the patchwork quilt, if we head eastward to the area south of the University of Chicago, renewal announces itself once again. First one witnesses a stretch of open land where tenements once stood. Then east of the elevated tracks and former strip of decay on 63rd Street, new homes start sprouting. Around 63rd and Kimbark it looks almost like a suburb with back decks, grills, and lawns on display. On Kenwood Avenue, just south of 63rd, sit more new homes in a row. Tidy and neat, the middle class is moving in to reclaim the slums.
Heading further south to Avalon Park and Chatham we find the neighborhoods where a stable black middle class has existed for decades. Along street after street south of 79th and west of Stony Island one can see neat brick buildings, myriad neighborhood associations, and children playing happily in the streets. No new developments, no dramatic changes, and little media glare like that chronicling the disrepute of the slums. For years and like many neighborhoods across the U.S., this area has seen families raising their kids, tending to their homes, and going about quietly living the American Dream. At almost every block a sign announces a block club and shared expectations for conduct.38
If we head west past the Dan Ryan Expressway we find more stability, albeit an impoverished one. Here we confront concentrated poverty stretching for hundreds of blocks. Outsiders are often surprised at how far one may drive in certain areas of Chicago’s South Side and see marked signs of deterioration. Stability of change thus rules again, where neighborhoods maintain their relative positions in the overall hierarchy. Why these neighborhoods and not the ones like Oakland?
And so it goes as one continues on through the highly variegated mosaic of twenty-first-century Chicago—or Boston, New York, Los Angeles, or any other American city. Venturing down the streets of our cities, the careful observer sees what appear to be “day and night” representations of community life. There are vast disparities in the contemporary city on a number of dimensions that are anything but randomly distributed in space. Perhaps more important, the meanings that people attribute to these places and differences are salient and often highly consensual. Our walk also reveals that important as was Zorbaugh’s work, the Gold Coast and the slum is not the only contrast. No matter which direction one turns in Chicago, the result will be to encounter additional social worlds—perhaps the teeming immigrant enclave of Little Village, bohemian Wicker Park, white working-class Clearing, yuppified Lincoln Park, the upper-class white community of Norwood, the incredibly diverse Uptown, or the land that time forgot, Hegewisch.
Thus while some things remain the same from Zorbaugh’s day, other things have changed. The intersection of West Oak and North Cambridge in the west part of the Near North Side was considered “Death Corner” in the 1920s by Zorbaugh.39 That maintained for decades and the area around the infamous Cabrini Green homes was still dicey on multiple visits in the decade of the 2000s, a swelter of contradictions. Decay was present in many blocks with a large number of boarded-up buildings near Oak and Hudson. On Locust near Orleans it was common until recently to see high-rise projects with unemployed men hanging out during the day. Yet the Cabrini Green projects are in the process of being razed to be replaced by low-rise, hopefully mixed-income housing. The area sends mixed messages and its future is one to watch, however painfully. On a brisk day in March of 2007 I witnessed a clearly emaciated and drug-addled woman begging for money a short stroll from Cabrini units near a large sign announcing new condos and a gym on North Larrabee St. with the unsubtle proclamation: “Look Better Naked.” I revisit Death Corner in 2010 in the final chapter.
For now it is clear that Chicago possesses neighborhoods of nearly every ilk—from the seemingly endless bungalow belt of working-class homes to the skyscrapers of the Loop, the diversity and disparities of Chicago are played out against a vast kaleidoscope of contrasts. Indeed, The Gold Coast(s) and the slum(s)—and everything in between represent a mosaic of contrasts that reflect the twenty-first-century city and its diversity of interrelated parts.
A Bird’s-Eye View
Neighborhoods differ dramatically in their quality, feel, sights, sounds, and smells—that much is experienced in our walks. But equally remarkable is the diversity of behaviors and social actions that cluster together in space and that define the social organization of the city. At a macro level the inverse of placelessness is ecological concentration and disparity. Layering independent empirical data on top of the street observations above, I thus zoom out to take a bird’s-eye view.
Consider first the apparent anomaly of the ecological concentration of disparate aspects of wellbeing across the neighborhoods of Chicago.40 Whether the measure is homicide, low birth weight, infant mortality, teen pregnancy, physical abuse, or accidental injury, there is compelling evidence pointing to geographic “hot spots” of compromised health. Figure 1.2 provides a vivid example, displaying the geographical ordering of homicide incidents and the expected health outcomes of infants over six years (2000–2005) based on the poverty rate of each of seventy-seven community areas in Chicago.41 At first blush, what could be more different than a woman giving birth to a baby weighing less than 2,500 grams and the murder of another human being, typically by a young male? Yet homicide is highly concentrated in the same communities scoring low on infant health, with a clustering or corridor of compromised wellbeing on the Near South Side (e.g., the Grand Boulevard and Washington Park communities of our walk earlier), Far South Side (e.g., Riverdale, West Pullman, Roseland), and West Side (e.g., North Lawndale, West Garfield Park, and, to their south, Austin). By contrast, neighborhoods on the north and southwest sides fare much better, including some working-class communities (e.g., Portage Park), diverse communities (e.g., Lakeview), and some geographically close to high poverty and violence (e.g., Beverly, McKinley Park, and Clearing).
FIGURE 1.2. The ecological concentration of compromised wellbeing in Chicago communities: homicide predicts poor infant health, 2000–2005, poverty adjusted. Stars are proportional to homicides per hundred thousand population. Adjusted child health scores are classified into equal thirds.
The reader may suspect that this spatial pattern is simply a poverty story. It is not: the infant health classification in figure 1.2 is adjusted for concentrated poverty, and alternative procedures replicate the basic pattern.42 And as we shall learn in later chapters, other commonly invoked suspects—from individual attributes and vulnerabilities on the one hand, to race/ethnic composition on the other—are insufficient to explain this stark phenomenon.43 Equally impressive, the concentration of “death and disease,” as Drake and Cayton put it over a half century earlier in Black Metropolis, is longstanding.44 As shown in their original publication in 1945, whether manifested through insanity, infant mortality, delinquency, tuberculosis, or “poverty and social disorganization,” the city of Chicago was highly stratified by disadvantage and ecological risk, with many high-rate communities then overlapping with those in figure 1.2. The specific communities may change but the broader pattern of concentration is robust.
The modernist critic might give ground but view crime and disease as outliers, something out of the old “social disorganization” playbook of urban sociology.45 So let us turn things around and look instead at the American political equivalent of “apple pie”—collective civic engagement. Figure 1.3 displays the enduring association and neighborhood concentration of collective civic events such as community festivals, fund drives, parades, blood drives, and PTA meetings over three decades.46 The data suggest that civic life is not dead but rather highly differentiated and spatially ordered, with clear evidence that the clustering of civic engagement goes well beyond chance and keeps reappearing in the same places. Areas that generate traditional civic engagement appear host to public protests as well, such as marches against the Vietnam or Iraq wars and protests against police brutality. Moreover, the intensity or rate of activity from 1970 to 1990 (classified into thirds) strongly predicts the initiation and location of collective civic events in 2000 that are represented as dots in figure 1.3. As will be shown later, this pattern of collective civic action is best explained not by race or class but the density of organizations in the community. Modern society writ large may well be an organizational one, but its manifestation has clear local imprints that are anything but random.
Perhaps collective civic engagement, even impassioned protest, is not fully modern either. Maybe networks are where globalization instantiates the potential to destroy community differences.47 As a preview of results to come, I display in figure 1.4 the pattern of “connectivity” among people to whom key leaders in two Chicago communities go to in order to get things done. Each dot in the figure represents a leader, and connecting lines denote a direct or indirect tie between them.48 In South Shore, the ties among relevant actors are either absent, as are the “isolates”along the left (almost half of the entire set), or they collapse into one of three distinct “cliques” that are disconnected from each other. By contrast, in Hegewisch ties are very dense, with only three isolates and over 90 percent of leaders deeply embedded in an overlapping structure of ties. Chicago is composed of marked variations in structural configurations such as these, with consequences for key dimensions of city life, especially including political power and the allocation of resources (e.g., funds for economic development, parks, and cultural affairs).
FIGURE 1.3. Spatial concentration and long-term endurance of collective civic engagement in Chicago communities, 1970–2000
As a further and distinctly contemporary example, figure 1.5 maps the distribution of income-adjusted Internet use in 2002 alongside the concentration of “bohemians” (artists and related workers, designers, actors, producers and directors, dancers and choreographers, musicians, singers, writers and authors, and photographers) in Chicago in 2000. The economist Richard Florida posits bohemians as a leading indicator of the “creative class,” that group of intellectuals, writers, artists, and scientists who seek to live alongside other creative people.49 According to Florida, the creative class is the driving engine for economic growth—one that is transforming work, leisure, and community. Whatever one makes of this causal claim about growth, figure 1.5 clearly reveals that they cluster together—cyberspace use and the creative class reflect residential sorting into distinct spatial communities. Like the other social phenomena considered so far, this concentration is highly nonrandom and the story is not reducible to economics. One might worry about differential access to the Internet, for example, the so-called digital divide. But figure 1.5 shows the frequency of Internet use that is expected based on the community’s income level and median rent. When we remove these economic correlates in further analysis, a persistent connection remains.50 A form of cultural sorting appears to be present. Even the distribution of Starbucks in Chicago is similarly clustered and tracks closely the density of bohemians, perhaps much to their chagrin.51
FIGURE 1.4. Community variation in network connectivity of leadership
FIGURE 1.5. Local cosmopolitans: income-adjusted Internet use and “Bohemia.” Communities classified in equal thirds according to Internet usage reported in 2001–2 community survey, from 0–9 percent (light), 9–17 percent (medium), and 17–50 percent (dark) using Internet more than five hours per week. Internet use rate adjusted for median income and median rent of the community in 2000. Circles proportional to “bohemians” per hundred thousand, defined as artists, designers, actors, producers and directors, dancers and choreographers, musicians, singers, writers and authors, and photographers.
A final example takes us out of the Windy City. Even though my earlier observations of neighborhood disparity and social distance by place reflect several dimensions, and despite the bird’s-eye maps of the city thus far, the stubborn reader might still object that this is just a Chicago story. Or perhaps a peculiar “state” effect of American policy rather than a neighborhood effect.52 So let us peek ahead and compare Chicago to an exemplar of modern efficiency, cultural sophistication, state planning, and cutting edge technology—Stockholm, Sweden. It is hard to imagine two cities more different than Chicago and Stockholm, not to mention the countries within which they are situated. Stockholm certainly doesn’t have concentrated poverty the likes of Chicago, and more people are murdered in Chicago in a single year than over the last fifty years in Stockholm. But surprising similarities emerge despite the radical differences in state policies.
As an initial demonstration, I assess whether concentrated poverty is similarly related to violence, each defined the same way, in both cities. Figure 1.6 shows a similar decreasingly positive association of violence with disadvantage in both cities. To be sure, there are many more disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago, where the association with violence begins to tail off. There are also more concentrated affluent neighborhoods in Chicago as well (note the areas to the left of the graph). In this sense, figure 1.6 reflects “inequality compression” in Stockholm, characterized by restricted variation in disadvantage and lower violence. Indeed, Chicago “sits atop” Stockholm at virtually every level of disadvantage, and its extended range of concentrated disadvantage is pronounced. Yet as disadvantage rises, violence does as well in both cities in a nonlinear way, a distinct pattern unlikely to arise by chance.53 Detailed research by Swedish criminologists further shows the concentration of homicides (albeit fewer in number, of course) in a disproportionately small number of neighborhoods, just like Chicago.54
These distinct ecological patterns provide a tantalizing hint that larger principles of societal organization, such as equality of housing and racial stratification, are etched in place and that they may explain city differences in violence. It remains to be seen how well this framework stands up to further tests, but it appears that there is something fundamental about place stratification and violence that cuts across international boundaries and yet is locally manifested in its distributional form. The larger point is that Chicago is not just a lens through which to view contemporary American cities; instead it can provide a platform for investigating cross-national or comparative questions as well. I will revisit Stockholm later in the book to explore other social characteristics and look to emerging research from Australia, England, and other countries for further patterns.
FIGURE 1.6. Similar prediction of violence rates by concentrated disadvantage in highly divergent contexts: Chicago and Stockholm neighborhoods
Thesis and Plan of This Book
Our walk through Chicago, layered with a bird’s-eye empirical view, communicates with images the central thesis of this book. Despite globalization’s march and plausible claims about the death of distance and place, neighborhood differentiation remains durable in American society. Any real estate agent will tell you that it is still about location, location, and location, but even for Starbucks what matters is location. Not only is this symbol of globalization concentrated in contemporary cities the world over, bad locations mean bad business and thus franchises are concentrated in particular parts of cities as well.55 Social ecological differentiation is everywhere.
Fascination with globalization has tended to deflect attention from the persistence of local variation, concentration, and the spatial logic of inequality. The popular belief that the world is “flat,” in particular, has clouded our thinking on neighborhood effects.56 This is not to say that globalization theorists are wrong about economic markets or that the facts of ecological concentration are incompatible with the placelessness of many aspects of life. To the contrary, one strand of globalization theory suggests that, if anything, the reverse is true. As Manuel Castells puts it boldly, “most of New York, in fact most of Manhattan, is very local, not global.”57 The key to theoretical progress is to recognize that the stratification of people and resources across urban areas remains entrenched and evolves in new ways as globalization proceeds. Paradoxically, in fact, inequality among neighborhoods in life chances has increased in salience and may have been exacerbated by globalization.58 As noted above and documented in chapter 2, the concept of community more generally also thrives despite the global turn.59
I thus reject the common idea that technology, dispersed social networks, state policy, and the accoutrements of (post)modernity explain away neighborhood inequality and a focus on spatial forms of social organization and community. The implication I draw instead is that the main storyline to be explored is enduring neighborhood inequality and the community-level manifestations of social change that persist and may be accelerating. In this sense I argue that a durable spatial logic organizes or mediates much of social life, with neighborhoods and local communities a key component. In so doing I expand the traditional definition of neighborhood effect: 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. As motivated by the images of this chapter, neighborhood effects are thus simultaneously local and extralocal in nature, and reciprocally related to individual actions.
At the broadest level, then, the present study is an effort to show that neighborhoods are not merely settings in which individuals act out the dramas produced by autonomous and preset scripts, or empty vessels determined by “bigger” external forces, but are important determinants of the quantity and quality of human behavior in their own right. It is, in other words, an effort to specify the structural and cultural dimensions of neighborhood effects. The term “effects” is meaningful in both verb and noun forms—at least in theory, neighborhood is consequence and cause, outcome and producer. In the following chapters I will expand on this theoretical claim through concepts and analyses that reveal the multiple layers of the neighborhood-effects picture.
The Nature of the Challenge
At this point the reader might plausibly ask: Neighborhood effects on what? Is it not impossibly broad to think of the social structure and spatial logic of the city? Here I must confess. Although I am not much of a TV watcher, an episode of Seinfeld came to mind in thinking about describing the content of the chapters to follow. In pitching their idea to TV network bureaucrats, Jerry and George blurted out the idea for their show—it was to be “about nothing.” This book is nearly the opposite—it is more about everything, or at least almost everything social about the city. Admittedly this is still a tall order. Unlike the Seinfeld episode, this thought is more frightening than funny, possibly even foolhardy in that the division of labor in the academy is one of specialization. The common approach is to divide problems by disciplines that set a priori “master variables”—demographers study infant mortality and low birth weight, criminologists study crime, social movement researchers study protest events, medical sociologists and public health researchers study health, network aficionados study networks, political scientists study political participation and community power, and so on. When one starts with a set paradigm or variables, answers are often automatic.
I reject this approach by giving priority to the spatial nature and larger social ordering of the phenomena themselves rather than a prior commitment to the hypotheses of a single discipline or theory. Although in some sense radical, I seek an opportunity to draw together, in one analytic framework, the diversity of the contemporary city. This move requires me to transgress the narrow confines of disciplinary fields and canonical variables, and embrace instead a more holistic and systemic approach that gives priority to general social mechanisms and processes. It implies an empirical approach that will be pursued in later chapters, where I draw on demographic, criminological, organizational, social movement, cultural, network, and other perspectives to investigate how things “hang together,” rather than only splitting them apart artificially. The goal of a “neighborhood-based” rather than variable-based approach is to understand the configuration of social dynamics and causal processes—the “everything” of the city. This is not just a Sein-feldian conceit; rather, the data introduced in this chapter show that any lesser motivation risks intellectual error. It is better to forge ahead and fail than to ignore the hard questions.
This book shows that a “kinds of people” or compositional explanation of neighborhood disparities and social processes that turns on individual selection fails to answer the questions. While taking individuals seriously, my approach focuses on social mechanisms and processes that are supraindividual in nature, perhaps even crossing cultural and societal boundaries as figure 1.6 suggests. This approach highlights a class of contextual questions. What, for example, accounts for the ecological stratification and social ordering by place of multiple and seemingly disparate phenomena like crime, collective civic engagement, the allocation of public goods, altruism, poor health, protest, and disorder? How do we account for neighborhood stability and social reproduction? What explains neighborhood change? What neighborhood factors best predict the civic health and wellbeing of citizens? How do individual choices combine to create social contexts that then constrain choices? In short, what are the social pathways by which neighborhood effects are transmitted in the contemporary city?
These are big questions, to be sure, but the data presented to this point motivate a sustained effort to provide answers. At the very least they undercut the common wisdom of placelessness and the death of distance by painting an initial picture of city life as a multidimensional mosaic. As Thomas Gieryn puts it, “social processes (difference, power, inequality, collective action) happen through the material forms that we design, build, use, and protest.”60 The goal of this book is to paint the big picture of a broad class of “neighborhood effects,” accomplished through a systematic examination of the continuing (if not increasing) significance of place in a global and iconic American city.
Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods
To assess these arguments I present an integrated set of original data sources that I helped design in order to address the questions and puzzles highlighted in this chapter. The book’s empirical base builds on a large-scale interdisciplinary study launched in the early 1990s—the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)— and continuing today in new forms. From its early planning phase to the present, the entire project was designed and carried out with a core theoretical idea in mind—to test neighborhood effects and developmental processes simultaneously, hence motivating the project’s name. By embedding individuals in context, and insisting on the study of neighborhood context as a goal in its own right, the project, but especially this book, seeks to reject the increasing reductionist thrust of much of modern social science that starts and ends with individuals.61 If the 1990s comprised the scientific “decade of the brain” with all the advances in neuroscience and genomics, maybe with a nudge from this book and the data produced from PHDCN we will look back on the early decades of the twenty-first century as the “era of context.”
As described in more detail in the chapters to come, 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”
These data sources were combined with archival records on health (e.g., mortality, birth weight, and teenage pregnancy), crime, violence, housing, organizations, and a wealth of population characteristics from the U.S. Census across several decades. I also spent many years observing and thinking about the city during my daily rounds, and I conducted interviews with community leaders up to 2008. The PHDCN and its several spin-offs represent a long-term commitment and collective investment of labor to a larger theoretical vision. That so many people stepped up to the plate and sacrificed considerable time and energy was no small feat, propelled largely by a shared vision of the importance of social context to our understanding of human development. Add to that a Chicago can-do attitude and the recipe for a study that many thought could never get off the ground was born—a “project on the make.”62
Roadmap
Following this chapter’s introduction of my theoretical orientation and proposed empirical solution to the problem, chapter 2 provides an assessment of the evolution of one of the book’s animating ideas: neighborhood effects. This idea has considerable import for understanding PHDCN and the connections among multiple urban phenomena like those shown in the figures presented in this chapter. It also serves as the flashpoint for an ongoing debate in the social sciences over the proper unit of analysis—“micro” (individual) or “macro” emergent properties (such as neighborhood and nation)—and level of causal explanation. The idea of neighborhood effects is often confused in recent literature, not least by what seems to be a collective amnesia about the past and interference of a related idea: community. Chapter 2 corrects this oversight by commencing with the innovative work of European epidemiologists in the 1800s, reviewing key theoretical developments and empirical findings, and offering a historically situated analysis of how ecological approaches to the city evolved to the present day. Fortunately, there are many intellectual giants on whose shoulders I stand.
In part 2 I turn to the principles and methods that underlie the book’s contribution. Chapter 3 builds on past research on neighborhood effects and community to articulate a theoretical and analytic approach to the study of the contemporary city. It lays bare the theoretical underpinnings that guided and continue to guide the PHDCN. Chapter 4 presents the making of PHDCN and its sequelae. Because of the central importance of the PHDCN to the book and its goal to provide data to the wider public for scholarly use, I provide an intellectual history of its origins along with details of the data collection and evolution of the project to its present-day form. Consistent with the idea that all data are theory, I thus subject the project itself, which was a huge undertaking, to a form of social analysis. In so doing I also answer head on the question of “Why Chicago?” Norman Mailer is only one in a long line of observers who have claimed Chicago as the great American city, but I argue that what is 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 guts of the empirical and theoretical contributions to this goal are found in parts 3 and 4. Part 3 focuses on social phenomena that vary across neighborhood and community levels of analysis (“side by side”), with a focus on social processes and mechanisms. Chapter 5 examines legacies— the surprising stability of neighborhood inequality across a diverse array of phenomena and across multiple decades, along with the systematic nature of change. Chapter 6 continues to probe the dynamics of inequality but with a new look at the powerful concept of disorder in recent urban discourse and social policy. Contrary to the influential “broken windows” theory that asserts disorder as a cause of crime, I probe the conditions under which disorder (and our perceptions of it) emerges. I take a cognitive turn, as it were, in thinking about how we observe the city, which in turn leads me to conceptualizing disorder as a key mechanism helping to explain why the stability of inequality described in chapter 5 is typically strong.
Chapter 7 begins with the classical concept of social disorganization promoted by the early Chicago School, an idea not far from disorder theory. However, I build on the legacy of disorganization theory and offer instead an elaboration of a newer concept—collective efficacy— defined as social cohesion combined with shared expectations for social control. I describe a measurement scheme for neighborhood-level processes—ecometrics— and analyze collective efficacy in multiple ways that extend beyond Chicago to Stockholm, Sweden, as a means of assessing its generality as a neighborhood concept. Chapter 8 lays out the organizational and civic dimensions of neighborhood effects and in the process one answer to the question of where collective efficacy comes from. The organizational side of the story has been largely neglected in neighborhood studies, but chapter 8 shows, as President Obama discovered in Hyde Park and earlier on the Far South Side of Chicago, that the organizational life of a community is central to our understanding of collective action and dimensions of community-level collective efficacy. I show how collective efficacy is formed and that it is related to organizational history more than the makeup of its current residents. This chapter corresponds to a recent move to bring organizations back into the picture of urban studies.63
I conclude part 3 of the book with a consideration of justice, social altruism, and the “good community.” Once we grant that neighborhoods and community reflect a fundamental feature of urban social organization, it behooves the social scientist to think about how or whether they better humanity and contribute to the common good. In chapter 9 I thus explore philosophical notions of the good community and how they might connect to the empirical findings of the book. To ground the argument, I examine novel data on other-regarding behavior linked to social mechanisms of collective efficacy derived from previous chapters. Informed by the philosophy of John Rawls, I argue that the provision of CPR to heart attack victims and the mailing of lost letters constitute an unambiguous public good, albeit one that varies systematically across place and that constitutes a fundamental part of a community’s social character. This framework provides a way to conceptualize and operationalize the good community, its interrelated parts, and its structural antecedents. Key features of neighborhood social structure introduced in prior chapters contribute to the altruistic character of a community and thus wellbeing.
Part 4 moves beyond “local” neighborhood-level processes to explore interlocking mechanisms that knit together, or keep apart, the varied segments of the American city. I begin in chapter 10 by recasting the findings of the previous chapters in spatially informed ways, beginning with the concept of spatial interdependence. I show that for many important social processes, what happens in one neighborhood is tightly connected to adjacent neighborhoods, creating a “ripplelike” effect that encompasses the entire city. Moreover, using new methods, I am able to show how some social processes work differently in different spatial areas of the city, creating a form of spatial heterogeneity of causal processes. Spatial spillover and heterogeneity provide insights on how regimes of spatial advantage and disadvantage are reinforced.
The next three chapters push the logic further by analyzing the sources and consequences of residential mobility. The movement of individuals across neighborhoods over time is quite prevalent and a crucial part of how the social structure of the city is created and inequality reproduced. Chapter 11 revisits the influential Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment in Chicago that randomly assigned vouchers to families that subsidized moving to low-poverty neighborhoods. I show what happened to these families and how the experiment reshapes our understanding of the social reproduction of inequality. Unlike in the movies, trading places takes on new meaning in a stratified metropolis because opportunities are predefined by a larger structure and not just individual choices. Individual moves also transform the social context—in this case the treatment itself. I compare the moves of the MTO participants to the PHDCN as well and find surprising commonalities in basic processes of residential mobility.
Chapter 12 expands the PHDCN analysis to the sources and consequences of residential mobility. I examine not only race and social class but how previously unexplored factors such as an individual’s depression and criminality shape residential mobility and have a bearing on hypotheses about “drift” and neighborhood selection on vulnerability. Results on upward and downward mobility do not conform to standard accounts that emphasize individual choice. Moving itself is also shown to have detrimental consequences depending on the larger geographical location of the destination and not just the internal neighborhood characteristic.
In chapter 13, I push the logic a notch higher by considering the structure of residential mobility as a key mechanism that lies behind urban stratification and hierarchies of place. I do so by examining neighborhood networks of residential exchange that are produced by individual mobility. Analyzing dyadic relations among neighborhoods in the citywide networks of residential migration, I find that similarity in social processes such as perceived disorder and friend/kinship ties predict interneighborhood connections beyond the more standard sorting mechanisms of racial composition and income. In chapters 11 through 13, selection is a social process with emergent outcomes. My ultimate argument is thus that selection is not a “bias” but rather part and parcel of a dynamic social process—another form of neighborhood effect.
The last contribution in part 4, chapter 14, examines organizational and political networks among elites that cut across community boundaries in ways that go beyond spatial proximity, helping to explain the larger structural context of how resources and information are differentially allocated by place. I create new measures of elite social networks that can be compared across time, community, and type of organizational domain (e.g., politics, law, and education), allowing me to examine networks not just as a metaphor but as a property of communities that defines both their internal structure (e.g., the cohesion of ties within a community) and location in the wider social structure (e.g., the centrality of contacts of a given neighborhood in the citywide playing field). I show that leadership networks to key actors vary widely across communities and are not determined simply by material resources or composition, but the nature of shared expectations and social cohesiveness. Both internal characteristics and external ties that differentially connect communities to the outside world thus matter. Importantly, I also examine how spatial networks of neighborhood residential exchange defined in chapter 13 are linked to the informational and organizational networks created by community elites. They are directly related in a way not explained by internal composition, providing a crucial piece of evidence on the previously hidden ways that the American city is structurally interconnected.
Part 5 concludes the book with an eye to present and future implications. In chapter 15, I revisit the core theoretical principles laid out in chapter 3 and synthesize the analysis in chapters 5–14. I do so by highlighting the guiding ideas that tie together the individual chapters and that taken together define the book’s contributions. Drawing on the book as a whole I also take a unifying stance on social inquiry that motivates a pragmatic understanding of “contextual causality” in a way that respects but is not subordinated to individual choice. The logic of social inquiry cannot be divorced from the nature of how the social world works, which means ultimately a change in how we construct and evaluate explanations. I thus offer the foundations of a theory of neighborhood effects and the city, with implications for the development of a contextual social science.
I then return in chapter 16 to the streets and neighborhoods encountered in this introduction. Not only do I revisit the same places in 2010, I collect new data from communities across the city in an effort to examine how the social organization and structure of Chicago has changed (or not) after the economic crisis of 2008 and the massive public-housing transformation that occurred in the middle part of the decade. I combine my personal observations and community-level variations gathered in 2010 to ground the more abstract concepts that I analyzed in empirical depth with the PHDCN for the years leading up to the social “shocks” that Chicago and other cities faced in 2008–9. I show that in multiple domains—including housing foreclosures, violence, poverty, and altruism—the neighborhood social ordering of Chicago endures, helping us better understand how external or “outside” forces are mediated by context and experienced on the ground.
Chapter 17 completes the story based on multiple returns to the most famous contrast of all, the twenty-first-century Gold Coast and slum of Zorbaugh’s Near North Side. Here the multiple meanings and mechanisms of this book take palpable form and provide insight into the future of the American city. Equally important, they suggest novel directions for community-level (and higher) interventions that counteract the individual-level dominance of current policy. I thus hope that the alternative ideas of this book provide the motivation for the next generation of research and policy on neighborhoods, the city, and human behavior generally understood.