Please join us to hear Ben Merriman present at the Workshop on City, Society and Space this Tuesday, February 19, 12:00-1:20, Social Science Research Building, Room 401. He will present for 25 minutes. Anjanette Chan Tack, Department of Sociology, will serve as the discussant. Then, we will open for questions and discussion. Please email akhare@uchicago.edu if you would like a copy of the paper.

Spatial Scales as Social Processes: Propositions for an Ecology of Scales

ABSTRACT:
The concept of scale has been widely employed and hotly debated in the social sciences, and the advent of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial statistics has created a boom in empirical analysis that has, at times, run ahead of underlying theory. This paper offers a perspective on spatial scale that may clarify theoretical problems and aid several lines of empirical research. A spatial scale contiguously covers a relevant physical space, and divides this space into finite units, which are both variable and comparable. This is a restrictive definition of scale that emphasizes the importance of processes of bounding. Spatial scales, while sharing formal properties, are defined by processes that vary in their temporal extension and stability, their degree of institutionalization, and the salience and subjective validity of the scale for persons living within it.

Spatial scales often arise from an ecological process of clustering and constraint. Scales themselves, however, also exist in an abstract ecology of linkages of a kind commonly used to describe professions. Scales emerge and disappear. Scalar processes compete over the regulation of particular spaces. Linkages develop across nested scales containing the same physical space, or between distant local units of a given scale. Studying the organization of a social space, then, must involve historical and comparative investigation of the scalar process that define the space.
Viewing the system of spatial scales as the result of constrained processes may be useful in several ways. It may help integrate novel spatial phenomena arising from globalization within traditional spatial theories. Theorizing underlying scalar processes may improve the specification of quantitative spatial analyses and models, and lend more concrete meaning to the results. An ecological perspective may also produce more robust understandings of regions and cross-regional inequality.

Ben Merriman is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Ben is currently developing a dissertation that examines the growing importance of regions in the US economy after World War II. This project builds upon previous work on the economic and political linkages between the Great Plains and the Midwest, and assigns particular importance to the interactions between processes operating at different spatial scales.

Respectfully,
Amy Khare
Jeffrey Parker
Co-coordinators of the Workshop on City, Society and Space

The Uses of Foursquare: Location-Based Online Social Networking in Both Online and Offline Social Experience

ABSTRACT

New technologies, such as smartphones that contain both GPS and Internet capability, are connecting physical and online social realms. One type of platform that makes use of this connection between physical and virtual social space is the location based social network (LBSN). This paper asks: how do people integrate the use of LBSNs into their online and physical social lives? I use semi-structured involved interviews with users of Foursquare (a popular LBSN) and online social network platform developers to understand this evolving technological space for social interaction. Participants in this study used Foursquare in five main ways gaming, creating a sense of belonging, engaging in conspicuous consumption, arranging in person meetings, and marketing. Foursquare users also differ in the extent to which they engage in passive or directed communication. Studies of traditional online social networks suggest that specific types of computer mediated communication have different implications for mental health.

Nora graduated from Swarthmore College in 2008 with a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology and Political Science. She received my M.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2011 and am currently in the Sociology PhD program there.

Jan Doering will serve as the discussant.

Please Note: This year’s last workshop will be held in PICK 016 instead of the regular Cobb 107!!

David Thore Gravesen is a PhD Student at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen.

TITLE: Youth And Social Polarization: An urban sociological study of the life chances of Danish adolescents in 2010

ABSTRACT:

This paper is about a neighborhood study in Denmark – or to be more accurate; a three- neighborhoods study in Denmark. In this research project I look at three different neighborhoods in the city of Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. I use quantitative data1 as objective context variables, but consider my qualitative in-depth lifehistory interviews with 24 respondents from the three neighborhoods (8 respondents from each neighborhood) as my key empirical source. The three neighborhoods differ in key socio-economic characteristics such as income levels, educational levels, housing types and employment rates. One neighborhood is farely rich, one is considered poor and one is somewhere in between with internal variations on the selected variables.

On the basis of an empirically driven analysis, the paper argues, that young people’s educational and employment choices are affected by their experiences in their childhood neighborhoods. The key theoretical tool in this analysis is the concept of the habitus – the notion that new experiences are structured in accordance with past experiences.

I am in the process of writing my PhD-dissertation about neighborhood effects on young peoples educational choices and in this paper I will present some of the preliminary results from my work. To begin with, however, I will present my primary aims in the project, the so-called research questions and let the reader in on matters regarding my research design – that is the methods used in the research process and how those comply with the epistemological basis in the project.

Rick Moore is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Formal Cooperation Among Urban Congregations: The Council of Hyde Park Churches 1911-1933”

ABSTRACT:

The existence of religious coalitions calls into question some of the assumptions underlying how we study congregations, especially the common analytical focus on single independent congregations as the appropriate unit of analysis.  Religious coalitions, i.e. formal organizations comprised of religious organizations from diverse religious traditions, have been a feature of the American religious landscape throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries yet remain virtually ignored by sociologists.  A case study of a Protestant religious coalition in Chicago from 1911-1933 illustrates the impact of coalitions and their behavior.  This coalition worked to coordinate congregations’ activities on both a practical and symbolic level, served as an information clearing house and undertook multiple projects aimed at improving the group’s urban environment.  The effect of the coalition on members’ activities complicates sociology’s existing models of urban religious organization and suggests that researchers should be more attuned to the coordinated behavior of diverse religious groups.

Please join us in welcoming our distinguished guest speaker Erik Swyngedouw on on Wednesday April 20th, 3PM-4.15PM in Cobb 107.

Professor Erik Swyngedouw is Professor in Geography at the University of Manchester. Over the past two decades, he has published several books and over a hundred research papers in leading journals in the broader fields of political economy, political ecology, and urban theory and culture. His aim is to bring politically explicit yet theoretically and empirically grounded research that contributes to the practice of constructing a more genuinely humanising geography.

Major publications include Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water: Flows of Power. (2004) and Swyngedouw E, P Cooke, F Moulaert, O Weinstein, P Wells. Towards Global Localization. London: University College Press (1992). Edited books include Swyngedouw, E., F. Moulaert and A. Rodriguez. The Globalized City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2003), Swyngedouw, E., N. Heynen, M. Kaika. In the Nature of Cities. Routledge, (2006) and Swyngedouw, E, F Moulaert, F Martinelli and S Gonzalez. Can Neighbourhoods Save the City?. London: Routledge (2010).

At the City, Society and Space workshop, Professor Swyngedouw will present on:

“CITY or POLIS? Antinomies of the Post-Political and Post-Democratic City”

The extended abstract can be found here: Swyngedouw_Extended Abstract

Please join us in welcoming our distinguished guest speaker Harvey Molotch on Wednesday April 6th, 12PM-1.15PM in Stuart 101.

Harvey Molotch is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University. His areas of interest include urban development and political economy; the sociology of architecture, design, and consumption; environmental degradation; mechanisms of interactional inequalities. Major publications include Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (1987) and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (2003).

At the City, Society and Space workshop, Professor Molotch will present on:

“Default to Decency: Subways, Airports, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger”

ABSTRACT:

Paying close attention to both physical artifact and states of anxiety, Harvey Molotch examines how citizens and workers, in accomplishing their routine activities, help secure urban environments. He recommends, in light of contrasting efforts by authorities, specific (and material) policies that would provide more benign outcomes.

Below you can find the City, Society and Space Workshop schedule for the Spring 2011 Quarter:

April 6th (12PM-1.15PM, Stuart 101)

Harvey Molotch, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis/Sociology, New York University

“Default to Decency: Subways, Airports, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger”

April 20th (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester

“CITY or POLIS? Antinomies of the Post-Political and Post-Democratic City”

May 4th (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

Rick Moore, PhD student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“Urban Religious Coalitions Re-examined: The Council of Hyde Park Churches 1911-1930”

May 18th (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

Naomi Bartz, PhD Candidate, Department of Human Development, University of Chicago

“The New Stigma of Public Housing Residents: Responding to Challenges to Social Image in Mixed Income Developments.”

June 1st (3PM-4.15PM, Cobb 107)

David Gravesen, PhD Student, PhD student, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

“Youth and social polarization: An urban sociological study of the life chances of Danish adolescents in 2010”

———-

Please note that the regular meeting time this quarter will be from 3PM till 4.15PM (Cobb 107).

If you have any additional questions, please contact the student coordinator, Thomas Swerts (tswerts@uchicago.edu).

Eleonora Elguezabal is a PhD candidate in sociology, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.

TITLE: “The Production of Urban Boundaries: Naming Conflicts, Property Management and the Division of Labor in the New Luxury and Secured Buildings in Buenos Aires”

ABSTRACT: This presentation is based on my research for my PhD dissertation at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. My PhD dissertation explores the construction of urban boundaries at the crossroad of different social worlds. It discusses the dual-city theories by a double strategy: 1/Doing fieldwork in some places that symbolize the socially homogeneous upper-class constructed communities of equals, chiefly in fortified buildings in Buenos Aires (close to the American gated communities); 2/Approaching these places by focusing the fieldwork on their employees and their work -in order to study their relation to the urban and social space and to their employers, and also the way these buildings run. The aim of my research is to analyze the construction of urban boundaries and to reintroduce an approach in terms of domination in the study of an object that is most usually seen in terms of exclusion. My methodology is mainly ethnographical, completed by statistics and library methods. I will focus my presentation on the first part of my dissertation, which deals with the social construction of these fortified buildings in Buenos Aires as particular and distinctive objects or institutions. This construction of difference is a subject of dispute at the crossroad of different social worlds: architecture and urban politics, the hierarchy of residential models in the residential space, building management and unions. The aim of this first part is to draw up a symbolic plan of the city using these categorization conflicts as a source. By doing this, I show how the critical positions (especially the dominant scholarly approach) as well as the legitimizing positions towards these buildings tend to identify spatial with social boundaries, but the limits of the category distinguishing these buildings (called “torres” or “complejos”) are flexible according to the position of different actors and the result of the conflicts about them.

Julia Burdick-Will is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Violence and the Chicago Public Schools.”

ABSTRACT:

Recent research on neighborhoods and educational attainment suggests that exposure to frequent and unpredictable violence may be an important mechanism through which neighborhood residence influences adolescent academic achievement. Parents in unsafe neighborhoods are more likely to use restrictive and authoritarian parenting techniques that are associated with lower achievement and students experiencing fear and stress may be less able to concentrate in the classroom and more likely to act out.  At the same time, living in a violent neighborhood may reduce interpersonal and institutional trust in a way undermines students’ relationships with their peers and teachers, thereby reducing their emotional engagement in the schooling process. This presentation uses geographically detailed crime data along with administrative and survey data from the Consortium for Chicago School Research to estimate the average impact of short-term (semester to semester) changes in neighborhood violence on high school student academic outcomes as well as heterogeneity in that effect across different types of students, schools, neighborhoods.

Dear workshop attendees,

Starting next week, we will meet in Cobb 102 (12PM-1.15PM) instead of Stuart 101. Cobb 102 will be our new meeting place for the rest of the Winter quarter.

You can find details about Cobb Lecture Hall here: http://maps.uchicago.edu/mainquad/cobbhall.html