Hasil untuk "Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology"

Lorien Nesbitt, M. Meitner, C. Girling et al.

Abstract This research examines the distributional equity of urban vegetation in 10 US urbanized areas using very high resolution land cover data and census data. Urban vegetation is characterized three ways in the analysis (mixed vegetation, woody vegetation, and public parks), to reflect the variable ecosystem services provided by different types of urban vegetation. Data are analyzed at the block group and census tract levels using Spearman’s correlations and spatial autoregressive models. There is a strong positive correlation between urban vegetation and higher education and income across most cities. Negative correlations between racialized minority status and urban vegetation are observed but are weaker and less common in multivariate analyses that include additional variables such as education, income, and population density. Park area is more equitably distributed than mixed and woody vegetation, although inequities exist across all cities and vegetation types. The study finds that education and income are most strongly associated with urban vegetation distribution but that various other factors contribute to patterns of urban vegetation distribution, with specific patterns of inequity varying by local context. These results highlight the importance of different urban vegetation measures and suggest potential solutions to the problem of urban green inequity. Cities can use our results to inform decision making focused on improving environmental justice in urban settings.

S. Fainstein

Justice has always been a major topic within political philosophy, but scholars in the behavioural sciences have largely avoided normative statements. After the urban uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, however, leftist scholars adopted a critical approach that, while not specifying a concept of justice, injected a moral dimension into their work. Within urban studies, the argument of Henri Lefebvre, who defined space as a social construction and who maintained that all groups should have a ‘right to the city’, became particularly influential. During the 1990s, scholars began to be more explicit about the concept of justice. Three main approaches to urban justice were developed: (1) communicative rationality; (2) recognition of diversity; (3) the just city/spatial justice. Differences between the communicative and just city approaches revolved around emphasis on democracy versus equity, process versus outcome. I argue that democracy, diversity, and equity are the three governing principles for urban justice but also recognize the tension among them. Although structural transformation cannot be achieved at the municipal level, a change in the rhetoric around urban policy from a focus on competitiveness to a discourse about justice can improve the quality of life for urban residents.

Daniel A. Silver

This commentary responds to Justus Uitermark's call for renewed engagement with the Chicago School of Sociology, arguing that such engagement should be interpretative as well as selective. While Uitermark urges contemporary urbanists to draw selectively from the School's legacy, I suggest that this risks flattening the internal tensions and conceptual richness that animated its founding figures. Through a close rereading of Robert E. Park, I show that his thought was neither biologically reductionist nor politically naïve. Park's concepts of human ecology, social control, group identity, and politics reveal a pragmatist framework that treats social life as a process of continual transformation rather than fixed order. His use of naturalistic metaphors was not an uncritical borrowing from biology but an attempt to integrate evolutionary reasoning into a human science of communication, opinion, and adaptation. Recognising these complexities requires situating Park's urban writings within the broader sociological context of the Introduction to the Science of Sociology and the intellectual milieu of early 20th-century pragmatism. I conclude by suggesting that a genuinely interpretative engagement with the Chicago School should also attend to its global receptions and recover its unresolved questions about the relation between nature, culture, and social order. These remain vital to the ongoing task of theorising the city and the human sciences today.

P. Tryjanowski, Ł. Jankowiak, Peter Mikula et al.

Detecting rare bird species is an essential aspect of ornithological culture. The pursuit of observing rare bird species is not only a key facet of birdwatching tourism but also a fascinating intersection between ornithology and sociology. However, patterns in birdwatcher gatherings around rare birds and the factors affecting these patterns in situ are largely unexplored. We directly asked 50 birdwatchers and analysed available photos to obtain details on birdwatcher gatherings at the occasion of 103 observations of 71 rare species recorded in 1996–2022 in Poland. Our analysis revealed that the number of people participating in rare bird observations was influenced by the rarity status of the species (rarer species attracted larger groups), the year (with an increase in recent years) and the interaction between these factors (there was an increasing trend for birdwatchers to ‘twitch’, that is participate in sightings of very rare bird species, in recent years). Furthermore, distance to urban centres significantly negatively affected the size of birdwatcher groups. In addition, we found that the proportion of observers who successfully saw a birding rarity at each site decreased in recent years but increased during the weekend. We also found that the proportion of women in these crowds has grown in recent years and that female birdwatchers were more willing to participate in observations of more common rarities than male birdwatchers. Our results indicate that birdwatching gatherings around bird rarities can be impacted by several factors, including the general rarity of species, year and distance to cities. A dynamic increase in the proportion of females participating in birdwatching in Poland resembles trends reported in other countries. Increased female engagement in observations of more common rarities may be potentially influenced by distinct motivations. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

A. Papachristos, James P. Murphy, Anthony A. Braga et al.

Abstract:The salience of neighborhoods in shaping crime patterns is one of sociology's most robust areas of research. One way through which neighborhoods shape outcomes is through the creation and maintenance of social networks, patterns of interactions and relationships among neighborhood residents, organizations, groups, and institutions. This paper explores the relationship between network structures generated through acts of co-offending—when two or more individuals engage in an alleged crime together—and patterns of neighborhood gun violence and gun availability. Using arrest data from New York City, we create co-arrest networks between individuals arrested in the city between 2010 and 2015. We analyze these network patterns to, first, understand the overall structure of co-offending networks and, then, assess how they impact neighborhood levels of gun violence and gun availability. Results show that local and extra-local networks play a central role in predicting neighborhood levels of shootings: neighborhoods with a greater density of local ties have higher shootings rates, and neighborhoods that share social ties have similar rates of violence. In contrast, the network dynamics involved in gun recoveries are almost entirely local: co-offending patterns within neighborhoods are strongly associated with the level of gun recoveries, especially the clustering of co-offending networks indicative of groups. Contrary to previous research, spatial autocorrelation failed to predict either shootings or gun recoveries when demographic features were considered. Social-demographic characteristics seem to explain much of the observed spatial autocorrelation and the precise measurement of network properties might provide better measurements of the neighborhood dynamics involved in urban gun violence.

Şeyma Ayyıldız

The Maraş-centred earthquake that occurred in Turkey on February 6, 2023, was the disaster of the century, causing fifty thousand deaths and affecting nearly ten million people. In addition to highlighting the problems that need to be resolved in the management of this process, the research will attempt to show practitioners and policymakers how culturally different the "home" of survivors is from the place and region in which they are resettled. Therefore, the main objective of the study is to find out how earthquake survivors will adapt to the cities they move to. In order to evaluate this, we will first look at post-disaster studies conducted globally. The discussion revolves around the production of emotional spaces and sustainability of cultural practices, the reproduction of social capital in urban context, and future expectations. These three main diacussion in the literature show that migrants are active agents to integrate into the new urban space post-disaster conditions. However, migrants’ integration efforts will be understood through the concept of "weak adaptation," which has been developed in this study. This concept, which expresses this immigrant group's effort to hold on to the city, is a contribution to the literature to explain the positionalities of migrants who feel in limbo.

Vanessa Wittemann, Gordey Yastrebov

In this study, we explore how educational differences in demographic behavior – in particular, mating patterns and fertility – mediate the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality in twelve European countries. Although this research interest itself is not new, we contribute to this debate by adopting a prospective approach and scaling it to include multiple countries and cohorts. To this end, we leverage a series of complementary datasets and the inferential method developed by Song and Mare (2015) and advanced by Skopek and Leopold (2020) to estimate the components of a stylized educational reproduction model. We then employ a simple decomposition analysis to quantify the contributions of different pathways to prospective educational reproduction rates across educational backgrounds and explore the differences across cohorts and countries. We report several findings. Most notably, (1) the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality persists in all twelve countries and is barely offset by small (and declining) negative educational gradients in fertility, (2) educational differences in selection into partnership are small and do not account for much inequality, and (3) the role of assortative mating, where present, is ambiguous because it both reinforces inequality via its effects on resources within the family and offsets it via its effects on fertility. * This article belongs to a special issue on “Changes in Educational Homogamy and Its Consequences”.

Dalila García Hernández, Salvador Adame Martínez, Carlos Alberto Pérez Ramírez et al.

La sociedad actual enfrenta una susceptibilidad que demerita la compleja construcción de la percepción del riesgo ante situaciones que, por su frecuencia, se normalizan. Estas se interiorizan hasta dejar de ser consideradas como negativas o peligrosas, ya que forman parte de la cotidianidad. Por ello, el objetivo de este artículo es analizar la transformación de la realidad desde los principios de la antropología, sugiriendo cómo la carga moral se presenta en la percepción que cada sistema social tiene sobre el riesgo. Esto se explica a través de la revisión y análisis derivados del mapeo sistemático disponible sobre la percepción de las inundaciones. El enfoque del estudio es analítico-reflexivo, a partir de la argumentación de los aspectos claves que inciden en la transformación del entorno. La aceptación o rechazo generado mediante el ejercicio de la percepción, independientemente del grado de vulnerabilidad que la sociedad ha concebido. Este análisis se centra en el contexto del sureste mexicano, donde se destaca cómo las inundaciones pueden generar pérdidas socioeconómicas de alto impacto. Desde la antropología, se logra profundizar en el argumento de la dinámica social real mediante, ejercicios analíticos. Esto se plantea a partir de la necesidad de responder a la pregunta: ¿Cómo se desarrolla la percepción del riesgo en un escenario de vulnerabilidad real, vinculándola con la incidencia de la realidad empírica?

Vernon Grant, Deborah Mekiana, Jacques Philip

Physical activity (PA), sleep, and weight are important factors for youth health. However, data about these factors are unknown in youth living in isolated Alaska Native communities. This study aims to assess PA, sleep, height and weight in elementary through high school students living in Anaktuvuk Pass. Fourteen children (<12) and 24 youths (12–20) volunteered to participate in this study. PA and sleep data were collected with actigraphy. Height and weight were assessed with standard procedures. Demographics were collected via survey. Results show that 10.53% and 18.42% of participants were overweight and obese, respectively. Average bedtime was 00:15 am and wake time 08:23 am. Total sleep time was 498.21 min. Participants averaged 477.64 min in sedentary activity, 297.29 min in light activity, 150.66 min in moderate activity, and 18.05 min in vigorous activity. Adjusted models suggest that high school students engage in significantly more sedentary activity, and significantly less light, moderate, and vigorous activity compared to those in middle and elementary school. All students engaged in less moderate and vigorous activity on the weekend compared to the weekday. Data suggest that as children age they become more sedentary. Future studies should focus on increasing daily PA in high school students while considering other obesogenic factors.

W. Boterman, S. Musterd, C. Pacchi et al.

Social and social-spatial inequality are on the rise in the Global North. This has resulted in increasing segmentation between population groups with different social and ethnic backgrounds, and in differentiated access to cultural and material assets. With these changes, the relation between segregation in the educational sphere and segregation in the residential sphere has become crucial for understanding social reproduction and intergenerational social mobility. However, knowledge about this relation is still limited. We argue that the institutional and spatial contexts are key dimensions to consider if we want to expand this knowledge. The institutional context regards the extent of public funding, the degree to which parental choice and/or geographical proximity drive school selection, the role and status of private schools and the religious and pedagogical pluralism of the educational system. The spatial context refers to the geographies of education: the ethnic and social composition of school populations and their reputations; the underlying levels and trends of residential segregation; and the spatial distribution of schools in urban space. In this introduction to the special issue we will address these interrelated dimensions, with reference to theoretical and empirical contributions from the existing body of literature; and with reference to the contributions in this special issue. School segregation emerges from the studies included in this special issue as a relevant issue, differently framed according to the institutional and spatial contexts. A comparative typology will be proposed to illustrate how school segregation is peculiarly shaped in different national and local contexts.

I. Stas

The article analyzes the formation and development of Urban History as a branch of historical science before and immediately after the era of the Urban Crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of the article suggests that urban history was formed in a constant dialogue with the social sciences. At the beginning, academic urban historians appeared in the 1930s as opponents of American “agrarian” and frontier histories. Drawing their ideas from the Chicago School of sociology, they reproduced the national history of civic local communities that expressed the achievements of Western civilization. However, in the context of the impending Urban Crisis, social sciences, together with urban historians, have declared the importance of generalizing social phenomena. A group of rebels soon formed among historians. They called their movement ‘New Urban History’ and advocated the return of historical context to urban studies, and were against social theory. However, in an effort to reconstruct history “from the bottom up” through a quantitative study of social mobility, new urban historians have lost the city as an important variable of their analysis. They had to abandon the popular name and recognize themselves as representatives of social history and interested in the problems of class, culture, consciousness, and conflicts. In this situation, some social scientists have tried to try on the elusive brand ‘New Urban History’, but their attempt also failed. As a result, only those who remained faithful to the national narrative or interdisciplinary approach remained urban historians, but continued to remain in the bosom of historical science, rushing around conventional urban sociology and its denial.

V. Babintsev, K. Khripkov, D. Khripkova et al.

The purpose of the article is to assess the impact of digitalisation of the urban environment on the consolidation processes taking place in urban communities. The authors emphasize that digital technologies and services, social networks and messengers integrated into the urban space contribute to the development of alternative types of sociality, solidarity, subjectivity and consolidation of urban communities. The empirical basis of the article is the data of the sociological study “Social consolidation of urban communities: opportunities and limitations in the conditions of digitalisation of the urbanised environment”, conducted by a team of authors of the Belgorod State National Research University in 2022. As part of the study, N=1500 residents of the cities of Belgorod, Voronezh and Kursk regions were interviewed. To gain in-depth knowledge about the subject of the study, an expert survey was conducted (N=50), as well as a series of focus group interviews among 6 social groups: entrepreneurs, pensioners, municipal employees, youth, state employees and the unemployed. The total number of focus group participants is 57 people, the age range is 18-69 years, the gender composition is 34 women and 23 men. The theoretical analysis carried out, as well as the empirical data obtained, allowed us to identify some of the most significant risks of digitalisation that have negative consequences for social consolidation in an urbanised space: digital inequality, blurring of identity boundaries, multiplication of social statuses, technostress, increasing the possibility of controlling the private lives of citizens, loss of live communication, expansion of manipulative practices (dissemination of misinformation, unreliable rumors, post-truth or half-truth).

Daniel Arribas-Bel, Miguel García-López, Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

This paper proposes a novel methodology for delineating urban areas based on a machine learning algorithm that groups buildings within portions of space of sufficient density. To do so, we use the precise geolocation of all 12 million buildings in Spain. We exploit building heights to create a new dimension for urban areas, namely, the vertical land, which provides a more accurate measure of their size. To better understand their internal structure and to illustrate an additional use for our algorithm, we also identify employment centers within the delineated urban areas. We test the robustness of our method and compare our urban areas to other delineations obtained using administrative borders and commuting-based patterns. We show that: 1) our urban areas are more similar to the commuting-based delineations than the administrative boundaries but that they are more precisely measured; 2) when analyzing the urban areas’ size distribution, Zipf’s law appears to hold for their population, surface and vertical land; and 3) the impact of transportation improvements on the size of the urban areas is not underestimated.

S. Frank, M. Ristić

In March 2015, an activist movement ‘Rhodes must fall’ from the University of Cape Town initiated a new form of global socio-political protest, which spread in cities worldwide and was characterized by spatial practices of occupying, modifying and pulling down monuments in public space. Presenting key theoretic points of this special feature in City, this introduction explores the phenomenon of ‘urban fallism’–the ways in which the action of contesting, transforming and/or removing a monument from urban space operates as a means of political struggle and as a form of political engagement in urban contexts. It outlines and integrates the contributions to this special feature, which covers a range of historic and contemporary cases in different urban, geographic and socio-political contexts, including: post-colonialism in Africa and the Americas; post-communism and post-imperialism in Europe and Asia; and wars in the Middle East. Drawing on original research and analyses from the fields of archaeology, history, art history, heritage studies, architecture, urban design, and sociology, the papers in this special feature highlight how the fall of monuments operates as a tool for political resistance against marginalization, discrimination and exclusion, a catalyst for democracy and social justice, and a means of dealing with contested heritage. As such, contributions of this special feature speak about the urban politics of race and identity and raise questions about the role of collective memory in the struggle of opposing and/or marginalized social groups for their right to the city and their place and recognition in society.

Lars Mewes, Tobias Ebert

Promoting entrepreneurial activities is crucial for regions to facilitate innovation and economic development. Yet, becoming an entrepreneur is not aspired by all people, and regions may differ considerably in their entrepreneurship potential. Assessing and providing accurate estimates of the entrepreneurship potential across fine-grained spatial scales is thus crucial to inform regional policymakers, but it still remains a major challenge due to data availability. Here we used the lab data set from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) covering 368,364 individuals and providing high-resolution data about their residences to map the entrepreneurship potential across 9271 postcode sectors in Great Britain. We used a novel mapping approach that relies on a spatial smoothing function based on distance weights to utilize the most fine-grained spatial level available in the data. Our detailed maps show substantial difference in entrepreneurship potential across postcode sectors in Great Britain and within the largest cities: London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Julio Cesar Morales Hernández, Ana Lexie Montes López, Oscar Frausto Martinez et al.

El Material Particulado es un conjunto de materia dispersa en la atmósfera, este contaminante pone en riesgo la salud pública, específicamente en vías respiratorias debido a las concentraciones que se observan en diferentes zonas urbanas. El objetivo fue evaluar la concentración de PM10 y PM2.5 y su relación con los sistemas atmosféricos. Se realizó un monitoreo en el periodo de estiaje del 2018-2019 en 10 puntos diferentes de la ciudad. Las mediciones se realizaron en el horario de 8:00-10:30 am, cada 10 minutos con el monitor en tiempo real PM2.5/PM10 HoldPeak HP-5800F. El sitio con mayor concentración de PM2.5 fue El Pitillal con 13.7 μg/m3, y la menor concentración fue Mojoneras con 7.6 μg/m3, siendo la tendencia hacia el centro de la zona urbana. En el caso de la concentración de PM10, los valores más altos fueron en el CUC con 66.4 μg/m3, mientras el de menor valor fue El Centro con 23.9 μg/m3, siendo la tendencia hacia el noreste. En cuanto al IMECA, la zona se encuentra dentro del nivel bueno, aunque se pudo observar en algunas zonas, específicamente en Las Juntas, las concentraciones medias de PM10 sobrepasan el valor máximo que establece la Norma Oficial Mexicana.

T. Shibuya

Johannes Kisser, Maria Wirth, Bart De Gusseme et al.

Our modern cities are resource sinks designed on the current linear economic model which recovers very little of the original input. As the current model is not sustainable, a viable solution is to recover and reuse parts of the input. In this context, resource recovery using nature-based solutions (NBS) is gaining popularity worldwide. In this specific review, we focus on NBS as technologies that bring nature into cities and those that are derived from nature, using (micro)organisms as principal agents, provided they enable resource recovery. The findings presented in this work are based on an extensive literature review, as well as on original results of recent innovation projects across Europe. The case studies were collected by participants of the COST Action Circular City, which includes a portfolio of more than 92 projects. The present review article focuses on urban wastewater, industrial wastewater, municipal solid waste and gaseous effluents, the recoverable products (e.g., nutrients, nanoparticles, energy), as well as the implications of source-separation and circularity by design. The analysis also includes assessment of the maturity of different technologies (technology readiness level) and the barriers that need to be overcome to accelerate the transition to resilient, self-sustainable cities of the future.

Richard Hu

In this essay, I employ a crisis-opportunity perspective to approach the practice of smart work and the making of collaborative space in responding and adapting to COVID-19. These trends have been emerging at a faster pace in the recent decade, facilitated by a growing knowledge economy and information technological advancement. COVID-19 provides an extreme setting to test and trigger changes, and are likely to translate these emerging trends into a new normal in the way we work and the way we use space. This new normal, once established in the post-CVOID-19 world, will necessitate a new thinking about workplace management and space design to disrupt many norms rooted in an industrial age.

Zachary Levenson

There are so many layers and facets to The New Noir that it’s hard to believe it fits within the covers of just one book. Clergé recounts history from the colonial era to the present, charts the migrations of Jamaicans, Haitians, and Black Southerners, does a multi-sited ethnography, and conducts 60 interviews with residents of neighborhoods in Queens and Long Island, New York. The New Noir is a work of urban sociology, and also of migration studies, Black Studies, comparative ethnic studies, and the sociology of culture. The book packs a powerful sociological punch, and it is also appetizingly readable. Clergé keeps the reader’smouth watering with each chapter title: Fish Soup, Callalloo, Children of the Yam, and Vanilla Black. These titles are not just empty flourishes. The chapter entitled “Blood Pudding,” for example, recounts not only the house bombings and racial terror that Black people endured when they moved to Queens and Long Island in large numbers in the mid-20th century, but also the erasure of Native Americans, and the 17th and 18th Century presence of 1,300 enslaved Black people in Queens, and 1,000 enslaved Black people in Nassau County. The food references offer rich cultural metaphors for the complex social process that Clergé analyzes in the book. A primary argument of The New Noir is that local places cannot be understood without adopting a global lens. Hence, although the book is about the “Black diasporic suburb”— as illustrated by a section of Queens pseudonymously called Cascades, and a section of Long Island called Great Park—the story reaches far beyond New York. As Clergé writes: “The racial caste system of Charleston, the uneven industrialization of Kingston, and the dictatorship politics of Port au Prince are interrelated global processes that have shaped Black migrant experiences and perspectives” (13). Of course Clergé could have also added sending cities and villages in Ghana, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia, but the book is already impressively comparative. The insight gained from integrating these groups and histories is a clear understanding of the contours of racial capitalism and its effects on traveling systems of stratification. For example, Clergé uses the label of the “brown middle class” to highlight similarities in skin tone stratification in Jamaica, Haiti, and the United States, but also to show how this bodily currency lost much of its power in the trip to the United States, especially for Haitians. Formerly upper class Haitians—driven out by the Duvalier regime—soon found themselves in the same