Urban Social Science Research Articles

Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change

One of California’s most pressing social and environmental challenges is the rapid expansion of the wildlands–urban interface (WUI). Multiple issues associated with WUI growth compared to more dense and compact urban form are of concern—including greatly increased fire risk, greenhouse gas emissions, and fragmentation of habitat. However, little is understood about the factors driving this growth in the first place and, specifically, its relationship to urban–regional housing dynamics. This paper connects work in urban social science, urban and regional planning, and natural sciences to highlight the potential role of housing crises in driving displacement from the urban core to relatively more affordable exurbs, and with this, WUI growth. We analyze this relationship in California, which leads the nation in lack of affordable housing, scale of WUI growth, and many associated WUI hazards, including wildfire. We offer three related arguments: first, that California’s affordable housing crisis, with its effect of driving migration to exurban areas, should be recognized as a significant urban form-related sustainability challenge; second, that to understand this challenge scholars must expand the spatial scale and analytic toolkit of both urban and WUI analysis through relational, mixed methods research; and third, that political and programmatic efforts to address California’s housing crisis should undergird efforts to address WUI growth and climate change. Ultimately, we argue that expanding access to affordable urban housing can produce a more sustainable and just urban form that mitigates WUI-related climate and environmental impacts and reduces the vulnerability of growing numbers of WUI residents living in harm’s way.

Segregated by design? Street network topological structure and the measurement of urban segregation

Racial residential segregation is a longstanding topic of focus across the disciplines of urban social science. Classically, segregation indices are calculated based on areal groupings (e.g., counties or census tracts), with more recent research exploring ways that spatial relationships can enter the equation. Spatial segregation measures embody the notion that proximity to one’s neighbors is a better specification of residential segregation than simply who resides together inside the same arbitrarily drawn polygon. Thus, they expand the notion of “who is nearby” to include those who are geographically close to each polygon rather than a binary inside/outside distinction. Yet spatial segregation indices often resort to crude measurements of proximity, such as the Euclidean distance between observations, given the complexity and data requirements of calculating more theoretically appropriate measures, such as distance along the pedestrian travel network. In this paper, we examine the ramifications of such decisions. For each metropolitan region in the U.S., we compute both Euclidean and network-based spatial segregation indices. We use a novel inferential framework to examine the statistical significance of the difference between the two measures and following, we use features of the network topology (e.g., connectivity, circuity, throughput) to explain this difference using a series of regression models. We show that there is often a large difference between segregation indices when measured by these two strategies (which is frequently significant). Further, we explain which topology measures reduce the observed gap and discuss implications for urban planning and design paradigms.

The poet of LA's urban: Mike Davis

Mike Davis's relationship to urban studies involved a combination of positivist analysis, history, and poetics. His contribution to the City of Quartz is assessed from this triple perspective. His role as the poet of LA's anguishing and complex nature takes its place alongside more conventional academic scholars, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. His contribution to urban social science in general, and to LA studies in particular, will be enduring.

Social strategies for urban management and urban-environment development in the works of T. M. Dridze and in contemporary Russia

In the pre- and early post-reform Russian urban sociology, the works of T.M. Dridze, a prominent Russian sociologist and psychologist, are of a great importance. Her concepts of urban development, social participation and urban environment reflect the democratic approach to urban development and urban social management. Under the dominant liberal, market-oriented urban regulation, this approach was considered almost marginal. However, after the adoption in 2016 of the federal project for developing a ‘comfortable urban environment’, the rhetoric of ‘environment’ and ‘participation’ started to prevail in both society and urban social sciences. The question is whether the ideas and theoretical models of the democratic urban planning started to determine the contemporary urban development. To answer this question, the author clarifies the content of the basic terms used by T.M. Dridze and her interpretation of the relationships between the environment, society and participatory technologies; reveals the methodological role of social participation and defines it as a scale of social practices - from the grassroot ‘activism’ to the ‘participation from above’ initiated by the authorities. The author conducts a conceptualterminological analysis to compare three strategies of urban development: urban construction, urban regulation and urban arrangement, and only the last one seems to be consistently democratic. The analysis of the texts and methods of the federal project allows the author to make conclusions about the certain qualities of this project. Thus, the project replaces the democratic socialenvironmental type of social participation in urban development - planning, implementation, assessment of results - by the improvement of urban areas as controlled by the authorities. This means that the works of T.M. Dridze are still relevant for the democratic urban studies and urban development.

Efficient regionalization for spatially explicit neighborhood delineation

ABSTRACT Neighborhood delineation is increasingly relied upon in urban social science research to identify the most appropriate spatial unit. In problems of this type, the true number of neighborhoods (typically called the k parameter) is unknown and analysts often require algorithmic approaches to determine k endogenously. Existing approaches for neighborhood delineation that do not require pre-specification of a k-parameter, however, are either nonspatial or lead to noncontiguous or overlapping regions. In this paper, we propose the use of max-p-regions for neighborhood delineation so that the geographic space can be partitioned into a set of homogeneous and geographically contiguous neighborhoods. In addition, we developed a new efficient algorithm to address the computational challenges associated with solving the max-p-regions so that it can be applied for large-scale neighborhood delineation. This new algorithm is implemented in the open-source Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL). Computational experiments based on both simulated and realistic data sets are performed and the results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.

An open-source framework for non-spatial and spatial segregation measures: the PySAL segregation module

In human geography and the urban social sciences, the segregation literature typically engages with five conceptual dimensions along which a given society may be considered segregated: evenness, isolation, clustering, concentration and centralization (all of which can incorporate or omit spatial context). Over the last several decades, dozens of segregation indices have been proposed and studied in the literature, each of which is designed to focus on the nuances of a particular dimension, or correct an oversight in earlier work. Despite their increasing proliferation, however, few of these indices remain used in practice beyond their original conception, due in part to complex formulae and data requirements, particularly for indices that incorporate spatial context. Furthermore, existing segregation software typically fails to provide inferential frameworks for either single-value or comparative hypothesis testing. To fill this gap, we develop an open-source Python package designed as a submodule for the Python Spatial Analysis Library, PySAL. This new module tackles the problem of segregation point estimation for a wide variety of spatial and aspatial segregation indices, while providing a computationally based hypothesis testing framework that relies on simulations under the null hypothesis. We illustrate the use of this new library using tract-level census data in two American cities.

Relying on the Census in Urban Social Science

Census data have long been a key tool for urban research, and the approaching 2020 Census offers a natural moment to reflect on how we use it. The highly partisan plan to include a citizenship question has recently captured our attention. I suggest that its short–term effects may be modest since immigrant communities already are suspicious of government surveillance and many will prefer to stay hidden regardless of the census questionnaire. I raise several other kinds of questions about the reliance of urban researchers on census data. These include concerns about how we treat census tracts as neighborhoods, how we accept census statistics at face value, and how readily available and increasingly useful quantitative data sources may be crowding out ethnographic research. I also comment on new approaches such as spatial analysis and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and opportunities for linking individual and place–level data with one another and following both over time.

Going Small: Urban Social Science in the Era of Big Data City & Community Forum on Census Data

Going Small: Urban Social Science in the Era of Big Data <i>City &amp; Community</i> Forum on Census Data

A Burmese taxi in the Black Forest? Stuck mobility and the possibility of dwelling

ABSTRACTWe reformulate Heidegger’s question in “Building Dwelling Thinking” to ask – What is the state of dwelling in our precarious and mobile age? – and consider the “politics of dwelling” in relation to the “politics of mobility”. Drawing on interviews with taxi cab drivers in Yangon (Rangoon) while stuck in traffic, we argue, drawing on Dwyer’s (2009) formulation for waiting, that while the taxi drivers engage in situational dwelling they do not and cannot engage in existential dwelling, due to the environmentally unsustainable “system of automobility” in which they are enmeshed. This article contributes to a discussion of the relationship among im/mobility, dwelling and sustainability, to research within mobility studies on marginalized mobile subjects and to an emerging urban social science within Burma.

BIG DATA AND BIG CITIES: THE PROMISES AND LIMITATIONS OF IMPROVED MEASURES OF URBAN LIFE

New, “big data” sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables at higher collection frequencies and more granular geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big urban data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar imagery data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services. (JEL R1, C8, C18)

Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life

New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar image data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services.

Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures for Urban Life

New, data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar image data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services.

Theses on Urbanization

In the early 1970s, a young Marxist sociologist named Manuel Castells, then living in exile in Paris, began his soontobe-classic intervention, The Urban Question, by declaring his “astonishment” that debates on “urban problems” were becoming “an essential element in the policies of governments, in the concerns of the mass media and, consequently, in the everyday life of a large section of the population” (1977 [1972]: 1). For Castells, this astonishment was born of his orthodox Marxist assumption that the concern with urban questions was ideological. The real motor of social change, he believed, lay elsewhere, in workingclass action and antiimperialist mobilization. On this basis, Castells proceeded to deconstruct what he viewed as the prevalent “urban ideology” under postwar managerial capitalism: his theory took seriously the social construction of the urban phenomenon in academic and political discourse, but ultimately derived such representations from purportedly more foundational processes associated with capitalism and the state’s role in the reproduction of labor power. Four decades after Castells’s classic intervention, it is easy to confront early twentyfirstcentury discourse on urban questions with a similar sense of astonishment — not because it masks the operations of capitalism but because it has become one of the dominant metanarratives through which our current planetary situation is interpreted, both in academic circles and in the public sphere. Today advanced interdisciplinary education in urban social science, planning, and design

Pricing accessibility: Urban morphology, design and missing markets

Urban design happens at a variety of scales—individual sites, streets, neighbourhoods, infrastructure projects, whole cities. At any of these scales, the benefits of good design spill over to a wider set of individuals than those with a direct interest in the project—land owners, developers, financiers, consultants, government officials, residents, neighbours, pedestrians, road users and so on. Indeed, urban design becomes an issue precisely because of these wider benefits. So we would like, in principle, to maximise the quantity of well designed urban morphology. One way of achieving this would be to attach a price to the benefits of urban design. The purpose of the paper is to take this argument as far as it will go in various directions. To facilitate this, the idea of well designed urban form is translated into the idea of accessible urban form; accessibility being a somewhat easier concept to deal with, there being a well established scientific literature to draw upon—in the fields of economic geography, spatial economics and spatial analysis. The term also has a singular common sense meaning. When applied to urban social science, it breaks down into a small number of more specific and equally well-defined concepts. The paper explores these in turn, considering the following: the role of markets in allocating scarce resources; accessibility as a scarce resource that planners and urban designers seek to supply; approaches to enhancing urban accessibility; the tricky problem of securing collective action; the idea of missing markets; the property rights ambiguities at the heart of collective action and missing market problems; mechanisms for pricing accessibility and organising its enhancement; the example of urban open space; and the distinction between general (geometric) and specific (economic) accessibility.

The New Urban Paradigm: Critical Perspectives on the City

Chapter 1 The New Urban Paradigm: Urban Social Science for the Twenty-First Century Part 2 I. Cities in Global Perspective Chapter 3 Cities and the New International Division of Labor: An Overview Chapter 4 The Global Context of Metropolitan Growth: Houston and the Oil Industry Chapter 5 Extractive Regions in Developed Countries: A Comparative Analysis of the Oil Capitals/ Houston and Aberdeen Part 6 II. Powerful Economic Actors in City Development Chapter 7 Cities in Conflict Chapter 8 Urban Real Estate Speculation: Implications for Social Science and Urban Planning Chapter 9 Irrationality in Real Estate Investment: The Case of Houston Part 10 III. The Political Dimension of City Development Chapter 11 The Corporate Center Strategy: The State in Central Cities Chapter 12 Arenas of Conflict: Zoning and Land-Use Reform in Critical Political-Economic Perspective Chapter 13 Are Planners Collective Capitalists? The Cases of Aberdeen and Houston Part 14 IV. Race, Racism, and City Development Chapter 15 Slavery Unwilling to Die: The Background of Black Oppression in the 1980s Chapter 16 The Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places Chapter 17 The Continuing Significance of Racism: Discrimination Against Black Students in White Colleges Chapter 18 Changing Black Americans to Fit a Racist System? Part 19 V. Review and Reprise Chapter 20 Urban Sociology: Feagin Style Chapter 21 The New Urban Paradigm: Feagin's Contributions

Rethinking Ethnic Concentration: The Case of Cabramatta, Sydney

The concentration of Indo-Chinese-Australians in and around the vicinity of Cabramatta in Sydney, NSW, has been unfavourably depicted by most media, policy-makers and academics. Positive aspects of ethnic concentration in Cabramatta are rarely ever discussed. It has been axiomatic in much of the urban studies literature that ethnic concentrations were manifestations of societal malady. This assumption was based upon the premise that social distance equated with spatial distance. However, a just system of urban and social planning requires a perspective which does not automatically pathologise cultural difference. Such a system should not enforce cultural assimilation through strategies such as migrant residential dispersal. To this end, urban researchers require fresh perspectives for the analysis of ethnic concentration. One such perspective is the 'politics of difference' approach proposed by Iris Marion Young and others. A politics of difference approach celebrates institutional practices which give rise to diverse cultural expressions, and rejects the previous denial of difference which was dominant in much of urban social science. This perspective allows urban scholars to adopt a more progressive position in contemporary urban political debates about migrant settlement. It also provides a less partial assessment of ethnic concentration by seriously theorising the advantages and the dynamism of unassimilated cultural difference in a place like Cabramatta.

New trends in urban social science

Abstract The paper looks critically at the lines of development of international urban social science research, and specifically at the role and significance of international networks and defines a research agenda for the present through a closer look at the UNESCO MOST programme on the ‘Management of Social Transformation’ which places an emphasis on urban research.

Bringing space back into urban social science: The work of David Harvey

some of the scholarship expended in its behalf, but voices deep skepticism about the theories of individual and social change the authors invoke. The new discipline of emotionology called for by Stearns, he concludes, will not survive, but the problems it addresses will continue to challenge us. In history and in contemporary social analysis, the relationships among observable events, human experiences, and theories of social processes remain debatable, and eminently worthy of attention.

A Review Essay on Recent Urban Social Science in West Germany

Editors' Note: The following essay was originally submitted as a book review. As John Walton notes in his introduction, modern urban sociology has its roots in German and French traditions. Since this essay reviews the most important recent developments in German urban social science, we have taken the unusual step of treating this review essay as an article in the context of this symposium on European urban social science.

Recent Neo-Marxist Urban Analysis

Despite Castells's (1976a,b,c) critique of the concept of and his call for a major reformulation of the subfield, many of the phenomena and issues studied by conventional urban researchers are also central to neo-Marxist urban research. These are studied with different analytical concepts, and often new results are produced; but as will be shown, there are also areas of agreement and convergence with conventional work. Neo-Marxist urbanists are critical of studies done by others, especially when the city or some aspect of it is viewed as separate from and independent of the larger society, when urban problems are viewed as discrete isolated phenomena, or when certain urban forms or processes are considered inevitable or universal. According to the neo-Marxists, conventional urban social science explains urban phenomena only partially, failing to identify fundamental causes. For example, a conventional explanation of US urban growth (Borchert 1967) emphasizes two factors, major changes in technology and population migrations, as principal causes of urban structural change. In a neo-Marxist analysis, however, these are not the underlying causes but instead are intermediate factors produced by something more fundamental, the basic requirements and social relations of capitalist production. In a neo-Marxist interpretation, important technological innovations, mass migration, and the urban transformations that accompanied them are all explained as results of capitalists' need for a large, cheap, easily controlled labor force and ever increased production. Another difference between conventional and neo-Marxist urban sociology lies in the latter's stress on the importance of class conflict. Conventional sociologists have emphasized urban communities' complex division of labor, which differentiates the population into interest groups, vocational types, and