Urban Sociology Research Articles

Neighborhood as Theater: Building a Goffmanian Framework for Comparative Urban Ethnography

AbstractWhile the history of urban sociology features myriad detailed descriptions of neighborhood life reflecting various theoretical, political, and practical purposes, the field lacks general templates for conducting in-depth neighborhood research and comparison. In this paper, as a remedy, we propose a Goffmanian framework for qualitative neighborhood description and analysis which we call "neighborhood as theater." While revisiting previous ethnographic research of two neighborhoods in Hollywood, Los Angeles, conducted in the late 1990s, we argue that local social life operates along three main dramaturgical axes—sets, characters, and performances—each divided into several subcategories. These three focal points reveal observable, yet easily overlooked, key elements of neighborhood life besides illuminating broader, structural aspects and connections. We argue that conceptualizing neighborhoods “as theater" offers a general template for ethnographic urban research that can advance comparative and critical spatial analysis while remaining grounded in meaning-centered, embodied experiences of mundane local life.

Disgendered

In US literary history, the Great Depression stands as a wellspring of poetry and prose that imagines homelessness otherwise, that reads the embodiments and relationalities of homeless dispossession as an abolitionist horizon, cutting across the structural, epistemic violence of urban sociology, welfare bureaucracy, and the carceral state as well as practicing radical alternatives of relating to housing. Arguably influenced by discourses on subproletarian pathology, myriad Depression-era writers regarded the homeless as bereft of futurity, and they understood the condition of unhoused immiseration as a state of social death that marked the homeless as kinless. This literary vein conceived of homelessness as a disgendering experience in which the homeless body becomes an aberration from the heteropatriarchal gender binary. Alongside this literature of homeless nonfuturity, this article locates a literary countercurrent that explores how homeless persons continue to build kinships and collective futures that manifest through and exceed their bare existence. In particular, the article examines the poem “Homeless but Not Motherless” (1935) and the novel The Girl (ca. 1939), finding in both a recognition not only of the disgendering violence of homelessness but also of the potentialities for forging kinship across exclusions from labor, housing, family, and civil society.

GLEHWE ET ZUNME, UNE APPROCHE CRITIQUE PAR LA MONDIALISATION DU MIMETISME RURALISTE CARTESIEN MANICHEISTE. POUR UNE RUPTURE EPISTEMOLOGIQUE PAR LA REFLEXION MANTIQUE DU VODUN

Glehwe, called in Western jargon Ouidah, is a tourist town in the Republic of Benin, occupies a lagoon site, preceded by a sandy coastline that borders the Atlantic Ocean. The city is located 42 kilometers west of Cotonou. The city belongs to the historico-cultural triangle Abomey-Ouidah-Porto-Novo composed of three cities heavily involved in the slave trade, endowed with one of the most important pre-colonial architectural heritage in sub-Saharan Africa. At the heart of this city, there is Vodun and therefore the Hunkpame, one of whose connotations is Zun. It is a question here of carrying out an inventory of fixtures of mimicry in rural sociology opposed to a city-dwelling reserved for an urban sociology of Ouidah. The methodological approach adopted is purely qualitative, which satisfied the requirements for the construction and use of data collection tools: observation guide, interview guide and this, with 48 social actors formed from the sampling technique that is reasoned choice. The data collected converge on a certain number of codes with social cognitive sounds, all aspects of which remain to be determined in Glehwe: rituals of the yam.

Suspended in Time: De-Arresting Black Youth from the ‘Ethnographic Present’

Within urban sociology, the unpredictability of poor, urbanized space explains why black youth are “present oriented” and why they treat orientations to the future as futile. But where urban sociology suspends black youth in time and space, this research aims to de-arrest them from the “ethnographic present.” Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with thirty youth, I make the case that within “present orientations” there is prescience. This paper is based on over one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way – a center for youth in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With limited life chances and limited chances at life, youth at Run-a-Way saw the future as fugitive. Instead of being a paralyzing force keeping youth suspended in time, present orientations were marked by the production of nowness, in light of a prescient vision of what is to come. Because black youth chose not to entertain liberal futurities directed towards “rights” and “freedoms” associated with a post-raciality did not make them present oriented. It made them prepared. As prescience comes to serve as a more accurate signifier of black youth’s relation to the future, we come to see why the “ethnographic present” and the interpellation of blackness through abjection are both unsustainable and obsolete.

Driving environmental inequality: the unequal harms and benefits of highways

ABSTRACT Highway construction projects have created extensive environmental and social burdens on racially segregated neighborhoods in urban areas in the U.S. However, few studies examine how some places benefit from highways and contribute to the harms in highway-adjacent communities. This paper aims to fill this gap by (1) conducting a case study of three highway projects in Omaha, Nebraska, and (2) using location-based services data to compare the neighborhood racial demographics of highway drivers to the racial demographics of highway-adjacent neighborhoods. In doing so, our paper heeds the call for more research on relative distribution environmental inequality and environmentalized urban sociology. Our historical case study elucidates how highway planning differed across three highway projects in racially segregated Black, Hispanic, and White neighborhoods. Further, the descriptive statistics show that modern-day drivers on highways in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are from disproportionately more White neighborhoods compared to the neighborhoods bordering the highways. However, the reverse is not true: drivers using the highway in a majority White neighborhood are from neighborhoods that largely match the demographics of bordering neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of these results for future studies of transportation-related environmental and social inequality and current policy initiatives to remedy these harms.

Developing age-friendly cities: critical perspectives from urban sociology

Developing age-friendly cities: critical perspectives from urban sociology

The Conception of the Urban, 1800-1875

Many writers in northwestern Europe circa 1800 to 1875 attempted to grasp the dual dynamic of industrialization and urbanization. They contributed to a genre that we would now recognize as urban sociology. They attempted to grasp new social phenomena and to develop categories adequate for them. The writers who contributed to this body of literature mediated their experience through psychological, social, and cultural understandings, but they nonetheless partially grasped their world. In so doing, they developed historically specific categories. Their writing simultaneously recognized and misrecognized their world; it both affirmed the new dynamics of capitalism and urbanization and criticized them, pointing to a different and better world beyond them. This analysis will draw out of this body of literature avant lettre foundational ideas of sociology and social theory including ones more fully developed later by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tӧnnies, and Georg Simmel.

Spacial Choices of Queer Urban Space: A Look into Queer Nightlife Establishments in China

This study examines the dynamics of queer public space in Chengdu, a major Chinese city. Considering the availability of access to different queer public spaces in China, we focus on Chengdu's night venue, entertainment, and digital public space and investigate their significance in creating queer community and sense of belonging. Observation, interviews, case studies, and document review is used to explore the queer space in Chengdu and reveal the obstacles queer community face when constituting safe queer space under the relatively oppressive ideology of the country. Investigating the problems through the lens of multi-disciplines such as urban sociology and gender studies, we take a view of the queer public space itself from an urban planning perspective which examines its design rationality as pure space constitution and analyzes the driving force for such design in gender studies perspective which involves discussion of intersectionality and analysis of patriarchal society. The queer urban space serves a critical function for the queer community by gathering the scattered population and providing a safe space to express their identities. By investigating the contemporary queer public space in Chengdu and making comparisons with that in other countries, this study uncovers the struggle and efforts of the queer community to establish their safe public space in combat with the heteronormative society.

“No woman's land?” The gendered patterning of urban street names in Romania

The gendered patterning of urban street names as part of the spatial production of broader male-centric memorial landscapes has been documented in a growing body of scholarship. Scholars from various cognate fields, such as cultural geography, gender and memory studies, and urban sociology, have unraveled the stark gender disparities favoring men inscribed into symbolic landscapes through place names, public monuments, and other memorial artefacts. This article sets out to overcome some of the limitations characterizing this strand of research – namely, the lack of statistical sophistication and the preference for case studies based on singular cities – by developing a multi-level modelling of gendered street nomenclature at the national level. The approach developed in this paper employs the complete collection of urban street names in Romania to assess the empirical adequacy of five hypotheses regarding the gendered structuring of the country's urban namescape. This analysis highlights the factors underpinning the variation of gender disparities in terms of Romania's historical regions, ethnic demographics and local ethnopolitics, city ranking within the national territorial administration and intra-urban stratification of the road network, as well as the effects brought about by postsocialist transformations.

Urban social movements as extended class actors: struggles over reproduction in Buenos Aires, New York City and Hamburg

Along with a resurgence in urban social movements (USMs) since the Global Financial Crisis in 2007–08 has come renewed interest in what form(s) of social struggle these movements represent. This is because USMs cannot be straightforwardly explained by the contradiction between capital and labour, as they happened outside the workplace. With the aim of conceptualising USMs, a comparative and empirical case study was conducted on urban development and protest in New York City, Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Approaches ranging from spatial theory to urban sociology and political economy informed the theoretical framework. The study was empirically based on 47 interviews with activists, as well as the observation of participants at protest events and document analysis (both of publications by urban protest initiatives and urban development statistics). Emerging similarities regarding the relational and cognitive structures of investigated protests suggest that contemporary USMs are collective actors counteracting urban dispossession and are thus linked to the capitalist mode of accumulation. Therefore, the article argues for an understanding of USMs as extended class struggles over social reproduction in the city. This terminology is intended not only to highlight that USMs are expressions of the crisis of social reproduction in cities, but also to categorise the characteristic features of USMs – which represent struggles for the use value of a city. USMs can, moreover, contribute to social change, especially if they are able to provide alternative means of social reproduction through the appropriation of urban space.

Legitimising displacement: Academic discourse, territorial stigmatisation and gentrification

This article explores the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus and how it is advanced by an intellectual pipeline between academics and policymakers in the USA. Despite much research revealing the pathologising narratives latent within displacement-inducing urban policies, little work has explicitly sought to underscore the influence of academic discourses in promoting these policies. Centring a triad of discourses surrounding concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects – emergent namely from the academic fields of urban sociology, criminology, urban planning and urban economics – I provide an evidential linkage between academic discourse and displacement-causing US policymaking by conducting a document analysis of official reports related to two major US government programmes: the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) Demonstration programme and the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI programme. I suggest that these academic discourses operate to legitimise displacement via neighbourhood-centric framings which advance territorial stigmatisation and related gentrification. These discourses, I argue, reinforce the real estate state and the destructive capitalist force of uneven geographical development while working to facilitate the disregard of propositions that would effect structural change. I conclude with an explanation for the present configuration of the academy-to-policy pipeline and why it has failed to onboard critical, macro-structurally orientated scholarship, and issue a call for a direction forward.

THE MEMORY OF IASI MONUMENTS RESTORED AFTER 1989: ELEMENTS OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY AND RESTORATION

The monuments of Iasi, from the perspective of urban sociology, are part of the social life, with human interactions, specific to congested urban areas. From the viewpoint of this discipline, the structures, changes, and problems of the Iași urban community provide elements for the planning and elaboration of urban conservation policies and the restoration of several monuments. In this sense, urban sociology uses a variety of analytical tools such as sociological observation, social theory, interviews, as well as other methods and techniques for the study of specific subjects, such as the relationships between individuals in the urban socialization process, demographic and economic trends, poverty, the effects of urbanization with all the negative aspects regarding the destruction of some monuments on feelings of social alienation and anonymity (elements studied in the Chicago School by Max Weber and George Simmel). The purpose of this paper is precisely to capture the feelings and their perception by the subjects investigated in this study.

Building Equity: Exploring the Impact of Sustainable Urban Policies on Social Welfare and Inclusivity

This study, "Building Equity: Exploring the Impact of Sustainable Urban Policies on Social Welfare and Inclusivity," investigates the relationship between sustainable building policies in urban areas and their impact on social welfare, with a focus on protecting low-income households from utility shutoffs. Employing Urban Sociology and Welfare Theory, it examines how these policies influence urban social dynamics and residents' well-being. The research utilizes descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and multinomial logistic regression to analyze the correlation between sustainable building policies and social welfare measures, finding a significant link. The study emphasizes the need for integrated urban policies that cater to both environmental sustainability and social welfare. It highlights the importance of enhancing social safety nets, continuous policy evaluation, community involvement, and data-driven policymaking. The research points out its limitations in scope, methodology, and generalizability, suggesting the necessity for broader, more context-specific future studies. Overall, this study sheds light on how sustainable urban policies can promote both environmental and social equity.

LAND-USE FILTERING FOR NONSTATIONARY SPATIAL PREDICTION OF COLLECTIVE EFFICACY IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT.

Collective efficacy-the capacity of communities to exert social control toward the realization of their shared goals-is a foundational concept in the urban sociology and neighborhood effects literature. Traditionally, empirical studies of collective efficacy use large sample surveys to estimate collective efficacy of different neighborhoods within an urban setting. Such studies have demonstrated an association between collective efficacy and local variation in community violence, educational achievement, and health. Unlike traditional collective efficacy measurement strategies, the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) Study implemented a new approach, obtaining spatially-referenced, place-based ratings of collective efficacy from a representative sample of individuals residing in Columbus, OH. In this paper we introduce a novel nonstationary spatial model for interpolation of the AHDC collective efficacy ratings across the study area, which leverages administrative data on land use. Our constructive model specification strategy involves dimension expansion of a latent spatial process and the use of a filter defined by the land-use partition of the study region to connect the latent multivariate spatial process to the observed ordinal ratings of collective efficacy. Careful consideration is given to the issues of parameter identifiability, computational efficiency of an MCMC algorithm for model fitting, and fine-scale spatial prediction of collective efficacy.

The food-gender-cities nexus: a research agenda

ABSTRACT Social sciences are paying increasing attention to the questions of gender equality and food systems. Both topics are recognized to have a strong urban dimension. However, urban sociology has not yet attempted to create a theory on how food, gender, and cities interact with each other. Rather, recent literature is quite rich in studies investigating either the relationship between food and cities, gender and food, or gender and cities. This paper connects the most relevant studies on these relationships with the aim of structuring a research agenda on the threefold intersection that literature already hints at, albeit implicitly, in support of the argument that interdisciplinary research focusing specifically on the food-gender-cities nexus is relevant and might lead to useful insights on how gender roles in food-related duties shape daily lives, on how social formations and food practices shape the urban space and, in turn, how the urban space impacts on social roles and practices, and on the potential of the urban scale for integrated policy intervention on food and gender matters.

Inside a Safe Place:

The influence of LGBTQ+ spaces in defining the urban experience of people belonging to the LGBTQ+ community has become the subject of a growing literature in the field of urban sociology. Our present research focuses on the perception of these urban spaces by their attendants and analyses how different LGBTQ+ spaces shape a sense of identity, community, and security among them. Using the tools of ethnographic research, such as participant observation and in-depth interview, we analysed two LGBTQ+ friendly spaces located in Padua, an Italian medium-size city with a noteworthy LGBTQ+ history. The selected spaces each have a different social function: political or recreational; one space is the headquarters of a political association, and the other one is a club. Our results show that an LGBTQ+ urban space, especially the political one, can have a positive influence on the perception of a sense of identity, community, and security. This is both thanks to its social function, because it allows for the creation of solid bonds inside a safe place, and thanks to its history, which makes it a point-of-reference for the local LGBTQ+ community.

Passing or Dropping the Baton? Local Area Deprivation, Volunteer Leadership Succession and the Survival of Charitable Organisations

Institutional theories of ‘local area effects’ hypothesise that local area differences in organisational resources are an important feature of inequality in individuals’ residential environments. However, while the organisational dimension of local areas has been identified as an important research priority within urban sociology, empirical work remains limited, with charitable organisations particularly under-researched. Therefore, a key question remains unanswered: why do charities in more deprived local areas have higher dissolution rates, reinforcing a lower prevalence of charities compared with less deprived areas? This article focuses on this research problem. It shows that volunteer leadership succession is less prominent in more deprived local areas, and that this more limited leadership succession helps explain why charities in more deprived areas experience higher dissolution rates. The results promote understanding of a mechanism underlying local area differences in organisational dynamics that lead to persistent differences in institutional resources between more and less deprived local areas.

Мышь-бензопила, или Почему нам всем пора притормозить

Abstract? Summary? Dude, I’ve got no time to explain: 24 hours a day is already too little — no need to waste it any further. We need time to do the laundry, time to ride the metro, time to study, time to work. Add “time to defeat all the demons” to the list in case you work at the bureau of national security from the Chainsaw-man manga series. Throughout the story a highly relatable dilemma unfolds. I invite you to look at it through the lens of urban sociology and thus find a new — more practical, but less hopeful — answer.

The Effects of Migration to Istanbul on Urban Sociology: The Case of Afghanistan and Syria

Göç, insanların varoluşuyla birlikte süreklilik arz eden başta ekonomik ve siyasi durumlardan etkilenen önemli bir toplumsal olguyu oluşturmaktadır. Ülkemize göç eden Suriye ve Afganistan uyruklu vatandaşların göç etmelerinin en önemli sebebi ülkelerinde yaşanan siyasi ve ekonomik krizlerden kaynaklanmaktadır.
 Bu çalışmada, çoğunluğu Afganistan ve Suriye uyruklu göçmen öğrencilerin, çeşitli sorular karşısında vermiş olduğu cevaplara binaen, İstanbul’a yapılan göçlerin bu şehrin sosyolojik yapısı üzerindeki etkilerinin belirlenmesi hedeflenmektedir. Afganistan ve Suriye uyruklu göçmenlerin İstanbul ili özelinde şehrin sosyokültürel yaşam düzeyini, eğitim sistemini, ekonomik durumunu ve dini yapısını hangi açılardan ve ne düzeyde etkilediğini veya göçmenlerin ne düzeyde etkilendiklerini belirlemek amaçlanmaktadır. Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi’nde “2021 Yaz” döneminde katılımcı öğrencilerin çeşitli sorulara cevap vermesi istenmiştir. Araştırma, üniversitenin her bölüm, her branş ve her sınıfından 18-25 yaş arasındaki kız ve erkek öğrencilerinin sorulan sorular karşısında vermiş oldukları cevapların analiz edilmesiyle oluşmaktadır. Toplamda 146 üniversite öğrencisine yapılandırılmış açık uçlu sorular yöneltildikten sonra vermiş oldukları cevaplar yorumlayıcı yöntem doğrultusunda analiz edilmiştir. Araştırma sonucunda; yapılan göçlerin en temel sebebinin ekonomik, siyasi ve eğitim açısından az gelişmiş veya gelişmemiş ülkelerin daha gelişmiş düzeyde olan ülkelere ulaşmak isteme çabaları olduğu belirlenmiştir. Katılımcıların büyük bir kısmı ise göç alan-veren toplumlarda kültürel çeşitliliğin arttığını ve bu durumun ülkeler açısından olumlu sonuçlandığını lakin katılımcıların büyük bir kısmı ise şehrin sosyal yapısında çeşitli sorunların yaşanabileceğini vurgulamıştır

Connecting to Community: A Social Identity Approach to Neighborhood Mental Health

Academic Integrative theorizing is needed to advance our understanding of the relationship between where a person lives and their mental health. To this end, we introduce a social identity model that provides an integrated explanation of the ways in which social-psychological processes mediate and moderate the links between neighborhood and mental health. In developing this model, we first review existing models that are derived primarily from a resource-availability perspective informed by research in social epidemiology, health geography, and urban sociology. Building on these, the social identity model implicates neighborhood identification in four key pathways between residents’ local environment and their mental health. We review a wealth of recent research that supports this model and which speaks to its capacity to integrate and extend insights from established models. We also explore the implications of the social identity approach for policy and intervention. Public We need to understand the connection between where people live and their mental health better than we do. This article helps us do this by presenting an integrated model of the way that social and psychological factors affect the relationship between someone’s neighborhood and their mental health. This model builds on insights from social epidemiology, health geography, and urban sociology. Its distinct and novel contribution is to point to the importance of four pathways through which neighborhood identification shapes residents’ mental health. A large body of recent research supports this model and highlights its potential to integrate and expand upon existing theories. We also discuss how our model can inform policies and interventions that seek to improve mental health outcomes in communities.