City & Community

Much recent scholarship has focused on inequality in the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods in which different racial and ethnic groups are concentrated. However, the most widely used measures of residential inequality merely describe the extent to which groups are nominally differentiated in residential space. I use 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census data to calculate levels of and changes in residential stratification—the degree to which members of one group tend to live in more advantaged neighborhoods than members of another group—between whites and blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Results both confirm and qualify conventional interpretations of residential inequality when measured as nominal–level segregation. For example, although in 1990 Latinos and Asians were similarly and only moderately segregated from whites, Asians experienced dramatically lower levels of neighborhood disadvantage. I also find that although levels of segregation were nearly identical in central cities and suburban rings, residential stratification was much lower for suburban residents than for their central city counterparts. I conclude by discussing implications of the findings for theoretical and empirical research on residential inequality.

Recent critiques of conventional poverty research have highlighted the need to move beyond the conceptual limitations of “neighborhood effects” models and the use of the tropes of “adaptation” or “resistance” to explain the behaviors and actions of the urban poor. We use ethnographic field observations and interviews with public–housing residents to address these limitations in the poverty literature, assess competing explanations of poor people’s agency, and provide insight into the importance of space as a mediating link between macrostructural constraints and locally situated behaviors. We theorize agency and identity as spatial phenomena—with spatial attributes and spatial influences—and examine how different spatial meanings and locations enable or constrain particular forms of social action and behavior. Our ethnographic and interview data depict several strategies by which residents “use space” to provide a measure of security and protection, to designate and avoid areas of criminality and drug activity, and to challenge or support the redevelopment of public housing. From these data we show that urban space is not a residual phenomenon in which social action occurs, but a constitutive dimension of social life that shapes life experiences, social conflict, and action.

In this article, we generate a “middle–ground” perspective to interrogate the range of interactions between political economic processes and everyday practices in the study of urban redevelopment. Focusing on the contested redevelopment of residential, commercial, and public spaces in the Spandauer Vorstadt neighborhood of Berlin, we examine how institutions and individuals incorporated certain local everyday practices and behaviors into renewal agendas. Such processes of incorporation were neither uniform nor homogeneous but disputed; state actors, planners, and developers, as well as residents, focused on certain existing neighborhood practices (and ignored others) in an effort to manage and control the course of neighborhood redevelopment. Conversely, everyday practices influenced redevelopment processes in ways often not intended by residents or other stakeholders. Finally, while our findings pertain to the case study of Berlin, we suggest that similar processes are at work in other cases of urban redevelopment in Western cities.

Books Reviewed:

Robert J. Chaskin, Prudence Brown, Sudhir Venkatesh, and Avis Vidal (eds.), Building Community Capacity

Mark R. Warren (ed.), Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy

Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950

Peter Evans (ed.), Livable Cities? Urban Struggles for Livelihood and Sustainability

Adam S. Weinberg, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg (eds.), Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development

David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography

Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky (eds.), The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States