No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Reframing Social Tectonics with the Sociology of Everyday Life: Insights from the Public Spaces of a Mixed Housing Neighbourhood
Abstract
Social mix policies aim to integrate residents living in diverse forms of housing. While numerous studies have showcased the limitations of social mix in achieving this objective, explanations for this tendency remain incomplete. Accordingly, this qualitative case study adopts insights from the sociology of everyday life and interaction ritual theory to elaborate on academic understandings of (non)-interaction between disparate groups in mixed housing communities. It draws primarily from observational fieldwork and semi-structured interview data gathered in the public spaces of a transitioning mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. The findings report how everyday encounters among and between the urban poor and wealthier residents (re)produce patterns of group solidarity and conflict. The continued application of micro-sociological perspectives to housing mix research can chronicle and perhaps mend the gaps between government housing policy objectives and the experiences of residents living within relevant legislative jurisdictions.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
We explore the participation levels of NIMBY (‘Not In My Backyard’) proponents versus other voices at public hearings San Francisco, a city with an exceptionally dire housing crisis. Once very diverse, radical, and bohemian, San Francisco has become the most expensive city in the US, which caters to a wealthy minority—heavily connected to the tech industries of the neighboring Silicon Valley. Taking a qualitative approach, we review videos of planning commission meetings between 2018 and 2019 in San Francisco in which housing development proposals are considered. We find that NIMBYism continues to dominate the dialog at public hearings on development proposals. Planning meetings appear to be dominated by older, white, and financially stable residents, and this is a major (though not sole) barrier to the city’s social mix.
This study employs in‐depth interviews (n = 45) with men 25–34 years in age who live in a Philadelphia neighborhood heavily impacted by mass incarceration. It asks the following: 1) How do they perceive risk? 2) How do they organize their daily routines in response to it? 3) Are there racial differences in perceptions and adaptations to risk? Nearly all of the men of color in the study reported staying in their houses and avoiding public spaces, viewing them as unpredictable and posing an unacceptable level of risk. They worried about “drama” or the potential for interactions with others to lead to attention by the police. Their practice of “network avoidance” often meant a complete lack of engagement in their community. Network avoidance is a racialized adaptation to the expansion of the criminal legal apparatus and the unpredictable nature of men's interactions with its agents and enforcers. It reproduces the effects of incarceration by essentially turning their homes into prisons. Network avoidance effectively erases young men of color from the public sphere in the same way that incarceration removes them from their communities, with considerable costs for the men themselves and for their neighborhoods.
Face-to-face (F2F) embodied interaction is the initial ingredient of interaction ritual (IR), the buildup of shared emotion, mutual focus of attention, and rhythmic entrainment that produces interpersonal solidarity. What happens when a natural experiment (the COVID-19 epidemic) prevents most F2F encounters or limits the modes of micro-interactional communication by masking? The paper examines evidence of the effects of masking and social distancing on public behavior, family life, remote schooling and remote work, prohibition of large audiences and assemblies, and attempts to substitute non-embodied electronic media. Most effects are consistent with IR theory predictions.
Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate
neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric,
results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper
employs a hybrid spatio-temporal analysis at the intersection of political-economic theories
of gentrification and post-colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine
underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood
transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience
researching Over-the-Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction
between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations.
Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by
illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro-development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR’s socio-political landscape shifted
over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding
how inner-city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.
Over the past two decades, communitarian criticisms of the lack of public engagement and a sense of local belonging have inspired extensive debates across Western Europe on how best to govern deprived urban neighbourhoods. One governmental strategy has been to engineer neighbourhood communities as localised, collective spheres of belonging. In this article, we show how ‘governing through affect’ has been part of Dutch neighbourhood policy since the turn of the millennium. Through an in-depth study of a community participation programme in a deprived Amsterdam neighbourhood, we analyse how policy practitioners use ‘sensitising policy techniques’ to enhance social cohesion and encourage communitarian citizenship among neighbourhood residents. Although governments often speak of ‘communities’ as self-evident entities, we argue that communities are better understood as enactments where discourses of neighbourliness, proximity, intimacy and familiarity encourage a localised, collective sense of belonging – a governmental strategy that mimics the ‘pre-figurative’ politics of radical social movements.
ABSTRACT
Critical realism (CR) is a useful philosophical framework for social science; however, little guidance is available on which precise methods – including methods of data collection, coding, and analysis – are best suited to applied
CR research. This article provides a concrete example of applied qualitative research using CR as a philosophical and methodological framework. Drawing examples from a study of Canadian farm women’s experiences
with agricultural policy, I suggest a flexible deductive process of coding and data analysis that is consistent with CR ontology and epistemology. The paper follows the typical stages of qualitative research while demonstrating
the application of methods informed by CR at each stage. Important considerations CR ontology and epistemology raise, such as the use of existing theory and critical engagement with participants’ knowledge and
experience, are discussed throughout. Ultimately, I identify two key causal mechanisms shaping the lives of farm women and suggest a future direction for feminist political economy theory to more effectively analyze women’s
work in agricultural contexts.
The idea of social mix in Western planning thought has fluctuated in popularity since it emerged in Britain in the 1800s. Support resurged after WWII, again in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1990s social mix emerged as part of a 'new' conventional wisdom in planning thought and practice. Most recently, appeals to social mix tend to justify the redevelopment of low-income communities and public housing projects. I have tried to show that recent applications of social mix ally more with neoliberal strategies of urban governance, and the principles espoused by neoliberal ideology, than they do with the progressive and equality-oriented principles behind historic promotion of the idea. The pursuit of social mix by agencies undertaking public housing restructuring (in Toronto and elsewhere) has successfully deflected criticism of their projects by appealing to this powerful planning ideal. Copyright © 2008 by the Institute of Urban Studies. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Research has shown that the last two decades has seen the rise of voluntarism and more particular a reframing and re-enactment of the ideal-type citizen as a moral subject of responsible communities. In this chapter I ask how citizens are enacted by policy practitioners through different policy practices. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a deprived urban neighborhood, I analyse the policy practices of neighborhood gatherings in an Amsterdam neighborhood that are part of a community participation programme called Neighborhood Circle. Through these gatherings policy practitioners try to stimulate and encourage residents to perform voluntary tasks in the neighborhood. I will argue that in these meetings policy practitioners arouse ‘profound coziness’: a sphere animated by fellow feeling and imagine residents to be activated by the capacity to feel and act upon these feelings, rather than the capacity to think and deliberate rationally. Through these practices different ‘citizens’ emerge. On the one hand the ‘respected citizen’ embodied by (post)migrant women who feel proud to finally be able to participate and recognized by policy practitioners. On the other hand the ‘resentful citizen’ embodied by autochthonous volunteers who feel unrecognized by practitioners and feel publicly displaced by (post)migrant women. I show that the ideal-type citizen that is enacted by policy practitioners singles out other expressions of citizenship, leaving some volunteers in the neighborhood to feel displaced unable to act and a sense of fellow feeling and community far away.
Policy makers tend to think that residential 'mixing' of classes and ethnic groups will enhance social capital. Scholars criticize such 'mixing' on empirical and theoretical grounds. This article argues that the critics may focus too much on neighbourhoods. Mixing within neighbourhood institutions might work differently, we argue, drawing on data from a mixed school in Berlin, Germany. While class boundaries are constructed, we also find class-crossing identifications based on setting-specific characteristics, highlighting the setting's importance and the agency of lower/working and middle-class parents. Parents create ties for exchanging setting-specific resources: child-related social capital. Institutional neighbourhood settings can hence be important for boundary work and social capital. Criticism of social capital and social mix should not overlook the role of networks for urban inequality.
The gentrification literature since the mid-1990s is reappraised in light of the emergence of processes of post-recession gentrification and in the face of recent British and American urban policy statements that tout gentrification as the cure-all for inner-city ills. Some tentative suggestions are offered on how we might re-energize the gentrification debate. Although real analytical progress has been made there are still 'wrinkles' which research into the 'geography' of gentrification could address: 1) financifiers - super-gentrification; 2) third-world immigration - the global city; 3) black/ethnic minority gentrification - race and gentrification; and 4) liveability/urban policy - discourse on gentrification. In addition, context, temporality and methodology are argued to be important issues in an updated and rigorous deconstruction of not only the process of gentrification itself but also discourses on gentrification.
There is a growing contemporary literature that seeks to explore the apparent benefits for socio-economically disadvantaged residents of living in neighbourhoods with a diverse range of social mix. The anticipated benefits include providing low-income residents with middle-income role models and access to broader social networks that may lead to employment-related opportunities. These goals are predicated on propinquity in space providing an important context for facilitating social interaction between residents across income levels and housing tenures. The findings of the current research project, which explores social mix policies implemented in three neighbourhoods in South Australia, imply that scale of implementation, residents' lifestyles and the stigma attached to social housing are critical factors in determining whether or not social interaction occurs. Overall, the findings suggest it is critical to continue to interrogate social mix policies and the social engineering agendas that they engage in. At the very least, if policy makers persist in implementing such policies, then we need a better understanding of the consequences of operationalising social mix at different spatial scales, such as the street, block or neighbourhood. Social mix is likely to have different consequences at different scales of operationalisation and a too fine-grained social mix, especially given the current stringent targeting arrangements for social housing, may increase the potential for conflict rather than the anticipated social cohesion.
Very little research has focused on how age factors into gentrification processes and how place branding helps drive gentrification. Scholarship on gentrification has engaged with the ways that race and class intersect to marginalize long‐time residents politically and economically in the context of gentrification, but rarely analyzes the important role that age plays in exclusion, or how it is represented materially in the branding of changing neighborhoods. To address this gap, this article aims to present a better understanding of how age plays into representation in new developments through the branding of downtown Detroit as a young, hip place to live, work and play. The article outlines how older adults are excluded from the reimagining of the ‘new Detroit’ using a content analysis of media articles, social media, promotional materials and downtown redevelopment strategies. This analysis showed limited representation of older adults in new developments, activities and public spaces downtown. Instead, images focused on younger people, young families and young professionals enjoying downtown amenities, often highlighting their perceived economic contributions. Biased representations of changing neighborhoods create barriers to developing an age‐friendly city. These findings inform the article's recommendations directed at planners and developers on how older adults can be better accommodated and included in the development boom of downtown Detroit.
Urban scholars increasingly contend that local police departments play a central role in facilitating neighbourhood change. Recent critics warn that ‘order maintenance’ policing and other low-level law enforcement tactics are deployed in gentrifying areas to displace ‘disorderly’ populations. Despite influential qualitative case studies, there remains scant quantitative research testing this relationship, and few studies that evaluate the link between policing, displacement and gentrification. We address this lacuna, drawing on new citation data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and employing a measure of neighbourhood change that focuses on the displacement of low-income residents. Examining policing patterns in 978 US Census tracts in Los Angeles over four years, our analysis reveals that tracts experiencing gentrification – defined as the simultaneous increase in non-poor residents and decrease in the number of people in poverty – experience a greater number of citations compared with other tract types. Similar patterns emerge in our analysis of citations that explicitly target homelessness and extreme poverty. In post-hoc analyses, we found that Census tracts characterised by a decrease in the number of people in poverty experienced greater numbers of total police citations and of citations targeting homeless individuals, compared with other tract types. These findings carry important theoretical implications for understanding the divergent manifestations of, and potential mechanisms driving, order maintenance policing. Methodologically, we contend that police citations provide a more precise measure of order maintenance policing compared with previous studies, and that classifying neighbourhoods in terms of relative displacement of residents in poverty provides much-needed interpretive clarity.
Does low‐level policing increase during gentrification? If so, are police responding to increased crime, increased demand by new residents, or are they attempting to “clean up” neighborhoods marked for economic redevelopment? To address these questions, I construct a longitudinal dataset of New York City neighborhoods from 2009 to 2015. I compile data on neighborhoods’ demographics, street stops, low‐level arrests, crimes, 311 calls to the police, and—using a novel measure—property values. Maps, spatiotemporal modeling, and fixed effects regressions compare changes in stops and low‐level arrests to changes in several measures of gentrification. I find, on average, calls to the police increased after a neighborhood's middle‐class population grew. Calls did not translate into more stops or low‐level arrests, however. Net of crime and spatial autocorrelation, police made more order‐maintenance and proactive arrests following real estate market growth, suggesting development‐directed policing. Property value growth in wealthy and already gentrified neighborhoods was not associated with an increase in arrests, underscoring policing's role in early‐stage urban “renewal.” The article includes an analysis of three sources of property value data.
Gentrification has become a central pillar of urban policy in cities around the world. Proponents often frame it as a necessity and the sole alternative to neighbourhood decline. Critics call this a ‘false choice’ as it ignores other possibilities for improvement without gentrification. But how do working-class residents who live through the process of gentrification view the impact it has on their neighbourhood? Do they see it in such a stark binary way? This article addresses these questions by using qualitative interviews with long-term residents of the Afrikaanderwijk, a multicultural neighbourhood in Rotterdam where municipally-led gentrification is taking place. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon literature on experiencing gentrification, our respondents had far more mixed, complex and ambivalent perspectives on the process. To some extent, this was due to the neighbourhood’s recent history as a stigmatised ‘ghetto’ and the expectation that the arrival of white, ethnically Dutch middle-class people would help to improve the neighbourhood, which was ranked worst in the country in 2000. We also stress the role of local context, such as the early phase of gentrification and the comparatively strong social housing sector and tenant protection laws in the Netherlands, in contributing towards a more nuanced experience of gentrification.
This article considers how strangers who use public transportation initiate conversations and how disruptions of the transportation system affect interactions among strangers. How conversations are initiated has rarely been discussed in the literature because the majority of research takes the initiation of talk for granted. Building on Goffman, the article tests two hypotheses that explain how strangers initiate conversations. The first hypothesis states that travelers rely on interactional rituals if they have to talk with others because of a rule against opening talk with strangers, a rule that can be relaxed if travelers are faced with disruptive events. The second hypothesis states that a conversation can be initiated without introductory remarks if a traveler’s focus of attention is discernible to another traveler, irrespective of the circumstances travelers find themselves in. I argue that the latter hypothesis better explains how strangers initiate conversations and discuss how this finding may be generalized.
The ‘Celtic Tiger’ years (1995-2007) saw prosperous economic growth in the Republic of Ireland and an intense period of housing construction and urban development. In 2008 Ireland entered into recession, which resulted in a collapse of the property market and the construction industry. This collapse left just over 2,000 housing developments unfinished across the country. Since 2008, the Irish Government, in conjunction with local authorities, has been developing strategies and plans to finalise these unfinished estates. This paper reports on the current practices for resolving issues in unfinished housing estates in the Republic of Ireland, with a particular focus on the plans to utilise empty housing for social housing purposes. The paper critiques the ways in which this imposed tenure mix threaten housing policy objectives for sustainable and balanced communities. It is the contention of this paper that this housing practice needs urgent review, as the recent hasty reversal of housing policies in Ireland, without due consideration for the consequences, has had a detrimental effect on neighbourhood cohesion. © 2017, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Sociology. All rights reserved.
Studies of gentrification in London have shown that some groups of middle-class people have been attracted to poor and multi-ethnic areas of inner London in part because of their social and ethnic mix. However, the attraction has often not translated into everyday interaction. In an earlier account of gentrification in Brixton this de facto social segregation was typified as a process of ‘social tectonics’. In this paper we compare two ethnically and socially mixed neighbourhoods, Peckham and Brixton, that at different times have represented the ‘front line’ of gentrification in London. We examine the extent to which the gentrification of Brixton in the late 1990s is being mirrored by the gentrification that is occurring today in Peckham – a similarly mixed and counter-cultural area of South London. Whilst we identify continuities between the gentrification process in these two areas separated by a decade of boom and recession, we suggest that the Peckham example demonstrates the need for a more developed approach to the issue of social mixing than that implied by the social tectonics metaphor. Specifically, we argue that there is a need to explain how the presence of classed and ethnic ‘others’ can be central to the formation of identities within some middle-class fractions in such enclaves in the inner city, and how attitudes and neighbourhood practices can change over time.
The increasingly disputed concept of gentrification-induced displacement is combining with the argument that the poor benefit from social mix to produce a theoretical case for ‘positive gentrification'. The notion that new middle-class residents not only attract more investment but bring opportunities for ‘upward social mobility' to low-income people who manage to stay in gentrifying areas has become policy orthodoxy. While there are scholarly challenges to the extent of these benefits, the disadvantages of imposed social mix on low-income communities even where they are not physically displaced remain under-researched. This article helps to fill this gap by reporting on research into the experience of long-term low-income residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods who managed to stay put. The research explores notions of social mix, place and displacement among residents of secure community housing in Melbourne, Australia (the equivalent of small-scale social housing in Europe and North America) with the object of establishing whether the absence of physical displacement is sufficient to ameliorate gentrification's negative impacts. The findings demonstrate that transformations in shops and meeting places, and in the nature of local social structure and government interventions, cause a sense of loss of place even without physical displacement.
The physical and social organization of the urban environment plays a central role in the formation of individual perceptions of crime. This paper examines how the presence of rental housing is constructed as a risk to neighbourhood safety by urban homeowners. The presence of the ideology of homeownership fosters a social context in which renters are constructed as disinvested and irresponsible individuals. As a result, renters are perceived to pose both an indirect and direct threat to the safety of a neighbourhood. Data from 23 semi-structured interviews with urban homeowners are used to illustrate this process. The paper concludes by considering how these perceptions adversely affect tenants and perpetuate spatial patterns of inequality.
Based on two years of observations and engaging in informal conversations with passengers on Greyhound Line buses, this article describes the long-distance bus journey and the ways in which people actively disengage from others over the course of the ride. Using the Greyhound buses and stations as a microcosm of other such public spaces, I examine its unspoken rules and behavior. I paint a picture of the buses and stations, the patrons, the employees, and the transactions that take place between them. Using ideas from Goffman's civil inattention theory, Lofland's thoughts on strangers, and symbolic interactionism, I explain what I call “nonsocial transient behavior” and “nonsocial transient space.” The reasons nonsocial transient behavior emerges and thus encourages disengagement are identified as follows: uncertainty about strangers, lack of privacy or absence of a personal space, and exhaustion.
This article examines the experience of social interaction in Toronto's Don Mount Court community, the first socially mixed public-housing redevelopment site in Canada. Similar to the American HOPE VI program, redevelopment involved the demolition and mixed-income reconstruction of the community to include both public housing and new market condominiums with a neo-traditional redesign. Based on participant observation, this article describes four struggles that emerged over the course of a series of mixed-income community governance meetings intended to promote social inclusion. These struggles related to (1) unequal power relations in shaping local priorities; (2) the power to brand the community and define its aesthetic characteristics; (3) the power to define and use public space; and (4) power over modes of surveillance and exclusion. The findings challenge the myth that the ‘benevolent’ middle class will use their political influence and social capital to the benefit of their low-income neighbors in mixed neighbourhoods. Instead, the research found that public-housing tenants were often on the receiving end of antagonism. It is argued that policymakers intent on ameliorating problems related to residence in disadvantaged communities should focus on funding for social programs and transformative change, rather than on public-housing demolition and state-driven gentrification via mixed-income redevelopment.
Over the last two decades decision makers have sought to address problems with large concentrations of poverty and minority ethnoracial groups in the cities of Western Europe and the Anglo-American world that are the direct result of the manner in which public housing was built in the early postwar era. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia have developed programs that introduce “social mix” into such public housing developments. These initiatives are designed to alter the social dynamics of places with high levels of concentrated poverty and ethnoracial minority groups that are believed to magnify the disadvantages of poverty and marginalization. In this paper, I argue that this is a destigmatization strategy, but not the same kind of destigmatization strategy that has been described in the literature. Using the example of Toronto's Regent Park, a large public housing development near downtown, I develop a research agenda for understanding the gap between a quasi-state agency's efforts to destigmatize public housing sites (“place destigmatization”) and the everyday destigmatization practices and experiences of residents (“personal destigmatization”). The paper begins with a review of the putative mechanisms linking socially mixed public housing redevelopment and outcomes for residents, including social capital, social control, role modelling, and changes to the political economy of place. This review finds little evidence of these effects in the literature. Consequently, I argue for an inductive approach to the study of the outcomes of social mix, rather than the common practice of judging such outcomes against the benchmark of close, intimate relationships between new, middle-class residents and existing public housing residents. I further argue that the “normalization” of the built form that is a major part of socially mixed redevelopment is a form of place destigmatization, and may alter both material practices and representational practices related to stigma, which have very real effects on the everyday experience of residents.
Just as the beginning of Western civilization is marked by the permanent settlement of formerly nomadic peoples in the Mediterranean basin, so the beginning of what is distinctively modern in our civilization is best signalized by the growth of great cities. Nowhere has mankind been farther removed from organic nature than under the conditions of life characteristic of great cities. The contemporary world no longer presents a picture of small isolated groups of human beings scattered over a vast territory, as Sumner described primitive society1. The distinctive feature of the mode of living of man in the modern age is his concentration into gigantic aggregations around which cluster lesser centers and from which radiate the ideas and practices that we call civilization.
Social capital has been used extensively in recent years to examine issues of social exclusion. Following Bourdieu, the concept is reintegrated into social theory alongside cultural and economic capital to examine the variations in the upgrading of gentrified areas of inner London. Three neighbourhoods in south London are compared and it is argued that their differences can, to a limited extent, be understood in terms of the differential deployment of cultural, social and economic capital by their middle-class residents. These neighbourhoods have acquired distinctive characters as a result and it is argued that the gentrification process in inner London is leading to heterogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods which contrasts with the perceived homogeneity of the traditional suburban area.
The importance of engaging communities is increasingly recognized within area-based regeneration programmes. There is also an acceptance within evaluation theory and the wider policy making and practitioner community that local people's involvement in the process of identifying and researching community needs and aspirations offers the potential to generate meaningful data while also facilitating a subsequent increase in community capacity and capital. However, there are a number of difficulties involved in negotiating a participatory approach which relate to the constraints of national policy, tensions in partnership structures, levels of commitment to community empowerment and community capacity. This paper explores the extent to which these barriers can be addressed by drawing on a number of projects undertaken in the Tyneside conurbation in north-east England which sought to encourage community involvement in evaluation by employing, training and supporting local residents to carry out a range of baseline and impact surveys. It shows that a model of participation can be developed which allows local people to play a successful role in the research process, while also delivering a range of data that will assist partnerships in the planning and analysis of services to meet local needs and facilitate regeneration. It is a model which is underpinned by a concern to facilitate empowerment, to foster inclusivity, and to ensure flexibility in research design and feedback to communities. It also has the potential to impact on institutional capacity within area-based partnerships, structures and environments, and as such it will be of interest to policy makers, practitioners and communities with a genuine commitment to adapting the principles of local people's participation in the process of change.
Detailed microsociological studies of everyday life activity raise the challenge of making macrosociological concepts fully empirical by traslating them into aggregates of micro-events. Micro-evidence and theoretical critiques indicate that human cognitive capacity is limited. Hence actor facing complex contingencies rely largely upon tacit assumptions and routine. The routines of physical property and organizational authority are upheld by actors' tacit monitoring of social coalitions. Individuals continuously negotiate such coalitions in chains of interaction rituals in which conversations create symbols of group membership. Every encounter is a marketpace in which individuals tacitly match conversational and emotional resources acquire from previous encounters. Individuals are motivated to move toward those ritual encounters in which their microresources pay the greatest emotional returns until they reach personal equilibrium points at which their emotional returns stabilize or decline. Large-scale cha...
The article examines aspects of middle-class life by a group of 75 gentrifiers in Islington in north London. The study demonstrates that in their day-to-day lives almost all the respondents lived quite apart from non-middle-class residents in Islington. This was demonstrated by their educational strategies which involved finding schooling for their children out of the borough in both the private and state sectors. Their children had almost no contact with children from other social backgrounds. It is suggested that, despite a strong rhetoric in favour of social integration, the current gentrifiers of Islington, unlike the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, are unwilling to invest social capital in the area and that their relationships are almost entirely with 'people like us'. It is suggested that this is likely to lead to an increasingly polarised social structure in which the middle classes and their children inhabit entirely separate social spaces from other, and more disadvantaged, groups. The long-term consequences of this are uncertain but are unlikely to lead to greater social cohesion.
Gentrification beings a host of economic and social changes. Changes in community culture do not directly impact residents’ livelihoods or homes, but these differences in lifestyles shape peoples’ experiences of their homes. I examine rhetoric in three gentrifying neighborhoods in Atlanta, GA to see how it expresses both the uncertainty that new and long-time residents feel about their communities, and how it is indicative of boundary-work residents engage in to distinguish their group from the “others.” Residents express concern about the safety and happiness of children in demographically changing communities. I find that residents focus on threats to children as a socially acceptable way to object to the different class, and sometimes race, background of their neighbors. This boundary maintenance activity serves to calcify divisions between groups of residents, and obscures the underlying schisms between the privileged and less-privileged residents in gentrifying neighborhoods.
While he did the research for this book, Gerald Suttles lived for almost three years in the high-delinquency area around Hull House on Chicago's New West Side. He came to know it intimately and was welcomed by its residents, who are Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Negro. Suttles contends that the residents of a slum neighborhood have a set of standards for behavior that take precedence over the more widely held "moral standards" of "straight" society. These standards arise out of the specific experience of each locality, are peculiar to it, and largely determine how the neighborhood people act. One of the tasks of urban sociology, according to Suttles, is to explore why and how slum communities provide their inhabitants with these local norms. The Social Order of the Slum is the record of such an exploration, and it defines theoretical principles and concepts that will aid in subsequent research.
In this article we contrast the experience of middle-class life in two areas of South London. We hypothesize that different sections of the middle class will live in different areas. Whilst these differences partly reflect economic capabilities and occupational divisions (such as public versus private employment sector, professionals versus managers), we suggest these divisions are becoming more complex. We develop a threefold model based on the work of Savage ct al. (1992) and hypothesize that each group will tend to live in different and distinct areas of the city. In our comparison of two areas in which we have completed fieldwork (Telegraph Hill and Brixton), we are able to show very different accommodations to metropolitan life which provides initial support for our hypothesis. We characterize middle-class life in Brixton as being essentially unstable, which is largely compensated for by the frisson of living in a cosmopolitan and mixed area. Telegraph Hill is a more stable area, with residents building a long-term relationship with the area and forming substantial social networks with other residents; it, however, lacks the cultural infrastructure of Brixton. We argue that 'circuits of education' are of prime importance for middle-class families living in London: in comparison to Brixton, our respondents in Telegraph Hill have developed sophisticated educational strategies which have enabled them to come to terms with living in London.
The cosmopolitan canopy: Race and civility in everyday life
- E Anderson
Anderson, E. 2011. The cosmopolitan canopy: Race and civility in everyday life. WW Norton
& Company.
- R Collins
Collins, R. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Modelling the Interaction Ritual Theory of Solidarity
- R Collins
- R Hanneman
Collins, R., R. Hanneman 1998. 'Modelling the Interaction Ritual Theory of Solidarity.' Pp.
213-237 in P. Doreian, T. Fararo (eds.) The Problem of Solidarity: Theories and Models.
London: Gordon and Breach.
Oshawa Social and Economic Trends & Challenges
- B Earle
Earle, B. 2018. Oshawa Social and Economic Trends & Challenges. Retrieved June 28, 2023
from https://app.oshawa.ca/agendas/city_council/2018/12-04/presentation_b_earle.pdf
One night in Oshawa: Overdoses and dramatic rescues offer a glimpse at the opioid crisis
- M Gee
Gee, M. 2023. 'One night in Oshawa: Overdoses and dramatic rescues offer a glimpse at the
opioid crisis.' The Globe and Mail. Retrieved June 30, 2023, from
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-one-night-in-oshawa-overdoses-anddramatic-rescues-offer-a-glimpse-at/
Soulside, Washington D.C. in the 1960's: Black Ghetto Culture and Community
- U Hannerz
Hannerz, U. 1974. 'Soulside, Washington D.C. in the 1960's: Black Ghetto Culture and
Community.' Pp. 149-174 in Bell, C., H. Newby (eds.) Sociology of Community: A Collection
of Readings. Milton Park: Frank Cass and Company.
A World of Strangers
- L H Lofland
Lofland, L. H. 1973. A World of Strangers. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press.
The Concept of Position in Sociology
- R E Park
Park, R. E. 1926. 'The Concept of Position in Sociology.' Papers and Proceedings of the
American Sociological Society 20: 1-14.
City of Oshawa Housing Monitoring Report
- P D Ralph
Ralph, P. D. 2018. 2017 City of Oshawa Housing Monitoring Report [DS-18-16].