Abstract: The 606, a greenway in Chicago, has been lauded as a transformative revitalization project that provides diverse benefits and connects communities. However, the greenway has become a source...

Abstract: Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for rese...

Abstract: The Coronavirus Pandemic has altered the ways we use shared space fundamentally. Policymakers across the nation have enabled police to deploy the power of the state to limit unnecessary and dense u...

Abstract: Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small–city gay bars...

Abstract: Research on how neighborhood racial composition affects where gentrification unfolds yields mixed conclusions, but these studies either capture broad national trends or highly segregated cities. Dr...

Abstract: To introduce this symposium in City & Community on “Small Cities,” we discuss the absence of “small-ness” in empirical and theoretical analysis in urban sociology, explore the importance of scaling down urban analyses to this level, and present three important lines of inquiry that the following articles explore and that further the research agenda on small urban contexts. With a few notable exceptions, small cities, or cities that remained small at a time of rapid urbanization, have struggled to come into focus from the very moment urban sociology took hold in the United States. Since the time of the Chicago School, and especially Louis Wirth’s (1938) classic formulation of “urbanism as a way of life” thriving under ecological conditions of size, density, and heterogeneity, scholars have mainly focused on large cities, making them the yardstick for the urban/non urban divide. Small cities, on the other hand, were thought to lack in—or to even represent an antagonism to—the kinds of urbanity unfolding in the big cities that commanded and continue to command the overwhelming share of research attention. We argue that urban scholars step back from uncritical acceptance of large size as the arbiter of urbanity, and focus on how urban processes—for example globalization and immigration, intranational migratory patterns (i.e., gentrification and return migration), inequality, and technological innovation—are distinctly localized across a variety of regions and different-sized city settlements. These processes, we argue, that occur are having a range of impacts in cities of all sizes and types. The presumed lack of city-ness in small cities has unnecessarily narrowed the field of urban studies, constricting our understanding of diverse modes of urbanity. A renewed attention to small cities as empirical foci and the notion of scale as a significant component of urban theorizing can both put a much-needed spotlight on a variety of important urban topics (e.g., inequality, immigration, and political activity) as they exist in oft-ignored places and expand and sharpen our concepts and theories for explaining them.

Abstract: Research has repeatedly found that displacement is not more likely in gentrifying neighborhoods. Since the dependent variable—displacement—is difficult to measure, researchers resort to a variety o...

Abstract: Urban lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community research in sociology has largely ignored LGBTQ communities in the most common urban form: small cities. In this article, I ar...

Abstract: Previous research, primarily using survey data, highlights preferences about neighborhood racial composition as a potential contributor to residential segregation. However, we know little about how...

Abstract: How does the metropolis influence population change and amenity development in small cities of the adjacent hinterland? We examine one scenario in five cities of New York state's Hudson Valley, a r...

Abstract: Landlords are important gatekeepers in the rental market, and scholars have studied landlord perceptions across different markets. But differences between landlord logics within a market, w...

Abstract: In the United States, soaring rent burdens and a dearth of affordable housing leave millions of renters at risk of eviction. The eviction epidemic is particularly pronounced in California w...

Abstract: Existing studies on urban redevelopment and gentrification in China have documented neoliberal urbanism and state intervention as the driving forces transforming Shanghai into a global city (see, e.g., Zhang 2002; Zhang and Ke 2004; Chen 2009; He 2005; He and Wu 2007; Ren 2008; Xu 2004). However, nearly 30 years into building a globalizing Shanghai, how much do we know about the lives of Shanghainese after their displacement? The urban landscape in the new global Shanghai alienates and disorients native Shanghainese. This new Shanghai is a three-dimensional printout designed by the state, both the central and municipal levels, and is modeled after global cities in the West. Approaches in urban redevelopment and renewal in the West in the 20th century diverged, some built up in their central districts such as New York City or London, the two quintessential global cities according to Sassen (2001), while others sprawled out such as Los Angeles. It is the former that policy makers in China aimed at, to (re)build an awe-inspiring metropolis of global significance to showcase China’s rise (Greenspan 2014:18). In the process, millions of native Shanghainese households were displaced, and millions of internal migrants came to call the city home. The limited number of studies done on the housing quality of the resettlement neighborhood and displacees’ new homes generate positive responses based on quantitative studies (Wu 2004; Li and Yu-Ling 2009; Day 2013). A more qualitative approach employed by recent researchers painted a different picture: they acknowledge that displacees experienced a strong sense of loss (Li 2014), and a lingering pain as severe and embodied as domicide (Shao 2013; Zhang 2017). Taking recent researchers’ investigations into displacees’ emotional responses to the resettlement process, and debates on the settlement housing and new neighborhoods as a departure point, my work intends to answer the questions about how displaced Shanghainese have responded to the new urban built environment and strategically adapted to it at different scales. Peter Marcuse (1967) adopts Lefebvre’s formulation of the right to the city (p. 45) as “a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (Peter Marcuse 2012:35) when exploring answers to the question “whose right(s)to what city?” His solution lies in politicizing among the disadvantageous and the disenfranchised, which unfortunately is

Abstract: This paper examines food access disparity in relation to neighborhood diversity, especially race/ethnicity and poverty in a changing intrametropolitan spatial structure, using the Atlanta M...

Abstract: Citizens’ active involvement in the community is aimed at improving their welfare and addressing social needs and other urban issues. The current study investigated factors that contribute to such ...

Abstract: Expanding scholarship on urban farming has not systematically examined what spurs the proliferation of cultivation practices, especially when the city is undergoing economic and social tran...

Abstract: This study aims to examine feelings of safety and the correlates to feelings of decreased worry toward crime within individuals’ proximate environments. Data from adults living in Southeast Queensl...

Abstract: Research on American secondary cities has largely focused on so–called “rust belt” cities and has found that they tend to have economic stagnation, racialization, and urban decay in their urban cor...

Abstract: Mediterranean style houses, mansions, and villas are found in elite enclaves around the world. There is a large literature on gated communities. However, the ubiquity of this Mediterranean style as...

Abstract: Two cities loom large in the history of American urban restructuring. New York City's 1975 technical bankruptcy and Detroit's 2013 Chapter 9 bankruptcy have played an oversized role in urban theory...

Abstract: In 2020, protests erupted around police brutality and other forms of institutional and systematic racism within the justice system. These same forms of structural racism exist in the medical and healthcare industries, and explain fundamentally, why we have large, ongoing, racial health disparities in all health outcomes including COVID-19 (Harris et al. 2006; House 2002; Matthew 2015; Washington 2006). COVID-19 is an acute (short-term), infectious illness that has become an epidemic in the United States. COVID-19 spreads through the air; therefore, it ought to affect people equally. Unfortunately, we are already seeing substantial racial inequality in COVID-19 infections. African Americans are experiencing three times the rate of COVID infection and nearly six times the death rate of White majority counties (Garg et al. 2020; Scott 2020; Webb et al. 2020; Yancy 2020). In this essay, we examine Black–White racial health disparities and their social determinants. We argue that racism, whether called systematic, structural, or institutionalized (for the sake of this essay these terms are interchangeable), is the primary cause of both explicit and implicit race-based discrimination. Furthermore, we will present and refute biological, behavioral, and social class explanations for racial health disparities. Next, we use the institutionalized racism framework to examine COVID-19. We finish with a set of proposals designed to interrupt the association of racism with health outcomes. There is a large body of research on racial disparities in chronic health conditions. Chronic conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension are life-long illnesses and syndromes managed through medical treatments. Today, they are the top causes of death (Rana et al. 2020). African Americans have more chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and lung disease than Whites, increasing their risk of death from COVID-19 (Garg et al. 2020). What causes African Americans to have more chronic conditions and be more likely to contract infectious diseases such as COVID-19? Dressler et al. (2005) find that most research looks to five types of explanations for racial health disparities, genetic, behavioral, socio-economic, structural-constructivist, and psychosocial stress. We can dismiss the genetic explanation because race is socially constructed as W. E. B. Dubois demonstrated back in 1906. He found that from 1725 to 1853, while Whites lived longer than Black folks, life expectancy improved similarly for both populations, and that differences in mortality rates among Black folks living in different cities were due to environmental differences. Therefore, genetic inferiority could not explain Black peoples life’ span (DuBois 2003).

Abstract: In an era of mass incarceration in the United States, neighborhood context plays a significant role in demographic patterns of imprisonment. This paper examines the preprison neighborhood environme...

Abstract: Emerging attention to the spatial dynamics of political contention points to the spatially situated nature of mobilization, and, in turn, how space is socially produced through collective a...

Abstract: It is now well established that the concentric zone model, developed by Ernest Burgess and elaborated by others in the Chicago School of Sociology to explain the distribution of social groups in metropolitan areas, was wrong. In the past several decades, immigrants have not only moved out of the centers of U.S. metropolitan areas, many have bypassed central cities altogether and settled directly in suburbs. Increasingly, they have done so in nontraditional gateway cities, such as those in the American South and Rustbelt, and in smaller metropolitan or nonmetropolitan areas (Singer et al. 2008). Suburban settlement has also not clearly been associated with immigrants’ “move up” or integration into the so-called Americanmainstream, as Chicago school authors argued. In many rapidly growing metropolitan areas, rising housing prices have pushed many immigrants out of their historic urban neighborhoods. While post-World War II visions of the American Dream may still pull immigrants to suburbia, the communities into which many have settled hardly reflect that dream.While Asian immigrants have high rates of settlement in middle-class, affluent, and white suburban neighborhoods, other immigrants more commonly settle into suburbs with relatively high rates of foreclosure, poverty, segregation, and other measures of disadvantage (Farrell 2016; Logan 2014). These are not the touted “opportunity neighborhoods” that provide pathways to economic mobility. In fact, compared to central city ethnic enclaves, many provide less of the social, cultural and institutional supports that have traditionally promoted the economic advancement of immigrants and their children. Chicago School scholars also failed to account for the politics within suburbs that challenge not only immigrants’ ability to settle within particular communities, but also to achieve their own purposes and pursuits within them. My research on immigrants in suburbia has sought to fill some of these gaps. It has investigated the struggles of educated, professional Asian immigrants to establish a place for themselves within largely white, middle-class suburbs in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, DC suburbs, I have examined how lower-income, primarily Latino and African immigrants have fought to maintain a presence within redeveloping neighborhoods with rising gentrification and displacement pressures.

Abstract: Scholars define emerging gateway metropolitan areas in the United States as regions in which immigrant communities settled after the 1990s. Historically, immigrant and minority neighborhoods are ch...

Abstract: The introduction and progressive consolidation of the paradigm of sustainability, and specifically that of social sustainability, has led to changes in the content attributed to the idea of...

Abstract: Public spaces serve as an important site of social interaction. They allow people to gather and socialize away from home and work. This article discusses the meaning of urban public space a...

Abstract: I used to be a faithful supporter of the Policeman Benevolent Association. For just a $25 contribution, the local PBA would issue a decal with a badge-like insignia that you could affix to the driver’s side backdoor window. It signaled that you were a “tax paying citizen,” employed, and on the right side of the law. As a young black man, I suspected at the time that the decal also signaled that I had connections, through family or friends, to law enforcement. Which I did. My father was a parole officer in the South Bronx, and I grew up with respect for the law and the people who enforced it. But that’s not why I made a point of supporting the PBA. Getting a decal served as a talisman, distinguishingme, hopefully, from other blackmen that the police would pull over, providing me with some measure of protection from potential abuse. I mademy first donation to the PBA when Imoved to the suburbs of Yonkers in my late twenties. I continued payments into my thirties, when I joined the faculty at Yale University in New Haven, and then into my forties, when I crossed coasts to join to faculty at the University of California, Davis. Although I’ve been stopped dozens of times over the years, often without any clear reason, I’ve never been roughed up or bullied by the police. Some of my friends have not been so lucky. Back in 1995, the year I defended my doctoral dissertation, Earl G. Graves Jr.—my basketball buddy and the senior vice president for advertising and marketing at Black Enterprise magazine—was shaken down at New York’s Penn Station. Dressed in full business attire, holding an orange juice in his hand, and stepping off a Metro-North train on an early workday morning, Graves somehow aroused the suspicions of the police. The New York Times reported that Graves was accosted and quickly hustled to a nearby wall by two Metro-North police officers as they “...lifted my arms in the air, relieved me of my briefcase and frisked me from top to bottom.” Growing up black in the city, you had to learn to circumvent unwelcoming (and often white) neighborhoods as well as crooked beat cops in your own neighborhood, some of whom who took their “license to kill” personally. Yet as a cocky teenager from Harlem, I used to feel like the entire city was my playground. In my mid-teens, many a time my

Abstract: High Point, North Carolina, once known as the “Home Furnishings Capital of the World” for its vast manufacturing complex, has suffered intense deindustrialization over the past 60 years. During thi...