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analyze a group of which you’re a part, which is something you know if you’ve ever tried to figure out your own family — but it’s hard to imagine that Whyte would have been able to paint so rich a portrait if he had stayed at arm’s length from the people he was hoping to understand.
Changing Neighborhoods
Cities aren’t static — they’re always changing. If you’ve lived in a neighborhood even for a year, you’ve seen it change; and if you’ve lived there for longer, you’ve seen it change even more. Sociologists have long been interested in how and why neighborhoods change their character (and their characters). In this section, I explain how sociologists think about urban transformation.
It’s 10 PM. Do you know who your neighbors are?
Do you know who your neighbors are? Could you step out your front door, point at each house or apartment building, and say who lives there? When you walk down your street, do you know the names of the people you pass?
Based on sociological studies of neighborhoods, I’m going to guess that you probably don’t — and that you feel at least a little bad about it. TV shows, political campaigns, and Currier & Ives prints of community ice rinks send the message that your neighborhood is very important, and that your neighbors ought to be your bosom buddies. Your parents may talk about how, when they were young, everybody knew and trusted everybody on the block, how if you misbehaved in front of the neighbor lady, she’d punish you just like your own mom would.
There are indeed many communities that are tightly knit, but there are many more that aren’t. Most people today don’t identify with their neighborhoods as being important to their identities; it’s just where they happen to live.
They each probably know a few people who they happen to come across or who they’ve borrowed sticks of butter from, but they don’t really see their streets as being their streets.
The “good old days” shouldn’t be romanticized: people have always been mobile, and there has always been variety in the types of neighborhoods they’ve shared. In certain pockets, multiple families may have lived on the same city block for decades or even generations, but that kind of stability has never been universal, or even the norm — especially in urban neighborhoods as opposed to rural communities.
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Some aspects of urban life, though, have indeed changed over the past several decades:
Transportation and communications technology allows people to have much more frequent and meaningful interaction than in the past with others who are far away, and though in general this supplements rather than replaces interaction with people who they see in person, it is certainly true that sitting on the porch and watching the world go by isn’t quite as compelling as it was 50 or 100 years ago.
Immediate families are smaller and more independent than they once were.
Rising wealth and living standards around the world mean less sharing of community resources — including housing. It was once common for families to host unrelated, paying boarders in their private homes; that practice is much less often seen today.
From grocery shopping to entertainment, more activities are done at large urban or suburban centers and fewer are done at small neighborhood establishments. This is more efficient, and saves money for everyone.
For a number of reasons (both parents working, increased participation in educational programs, safety concerns), children are much less frequently encouraged to play in the areas directly outside their homes — especially unsupervised — than was formerly the case.
All these factors, and more, have contributed to the declining significance of neighborhoods as centers of activity. It’s very easy to know almost nothing about your neighbors — to come and go in your car and possibly even to live in a home for years without having any significant interaction with those living near you.
That said, it would be a mistake to think that this overall trend means that your neighborhood simply doesn’t matter any more!
There is tremendous variety among types of neighborhoods and types of communities. True, many neighborhoods are only loosely connected — but many neighborhoods are very tight-knit, with neighbors socializing and supporting each other. This is true for different reasons in different types of neighborhoods. In relatively wealthy neighborhoods, residents may have more resources to communicate among themselves, to host events, and to mobilize around causes like street repair and public safety . . . but in less wealthy neighborhoods, residents may have more incentive to band together and support each other.
The importance of your neighborhood goes beyond just the influence of the people you share it with. Your neighborhood impacts your access to transportation, utilities, and other resources; it impacts your safety as well as your
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educational and work options; it may even directly impact your health if pollution or housing quality are significant factors. Those things are, in turn, affected by the people who live around you.
Neighborhoods on the tipping point
You don’t need a sociologist to tell you that neighborhoods change over time. What’s a little trickier is knowing how and why they change. Urban sociologists have spent decades studying patterns of neighborhood change, and they’ve come up with some interesting theories about what’s going on.
The invasion-succession model: Make room, make room!
Sociologists in — and influenced by — the Chicago School likened neighborhoods to biological ecosystems. Robert Park, a major figure in that crowd, espoused a model that became known as the invasion-succession model.
According to the invasion-succession model of neighborhood change, a neighborhood — like a forest or a prairie — hosts a number of “species” that exist together in harmony. In my neighborhood in Minneapolis, for example, you might say that there is one social “species” of older, wealthy people who own large homes. With more space than they can use, they rent their extra rooms and carriage houses to members of a second social “species”: young, single adults who are upwardly mobile but don’t yet have the means or desire to buy their own houses. These two “species” exist together in harmony.
But what if a new “species” moved in — say, entrepreneurs who wanted to run businesses out of their houses? That might spur conflicts over parking, traffic, and the neighborhood’s historical character. Any of the following things might happen:
The neighborhood might somehow find a way to accommodate this new “species” of resident.
The current residents might band together to drive out the “invaders,” and the neighborhood would remain as it is.
The entrepreneurial “invaders” might cause the longtime residents to move out, making more room for new business-oriented “invaders,” who would ultimately succeed the former residents and create a new local “ecosystem.”
This way of thinking about neighborhood change has been of great interest to sociologists hoping to understand transitions in neighborhoods’ racial composition. If a neighborhood has predominantly residents of one race, then if residents of another race move in, the existing residents may feel threatened
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and try to make the newcomers feel unwelcome; if more and more of the newcomers move in, though, the neighborhood may reach a tipping point where the previous residents simply decide to leave.
This model of neighborhood change seemed to make a lot of sense in the early 20th century, when open racism was still common; in some ways it’s still useful today, whether it’s used to describe changes in neighborhoods’ racial composition (unfortunately, many neighborhoods are still racially segregated, and residents of a different race may feel unwelcome) or changes in the occupation or income level of residents. Sociologists today, though, realize that neighborhood change happens for more reasons than simply
because of “invaders” changing a neighborhood’s demographic composition.
For an interesting and controversial look at neighborhood change today, take a look at Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Bishop believes that people’s tendency to move to neighborhoods where people share their political beliefs and cultural interests is damaging to the larger community because it means there’s less opportunity for exchange and dialogue. Others would argue that it’s for the better if people feel they have a lot in common with their closest neighbors. What do you think?
The life and death of neighborhoods
Another influential theory of neighborhood change was the “life cycle” theory, in which neighborhoods are thought of as being more like organisms themselves than like ecosystems.
The sociologists who invented the life cycle model believed that neighborhoods went through repetitive cycles of change. First, a neighborhood would be developed, and people would start to move in. As it attracted more residents and more development, a neighborhood would enter its prime — but eventually, the neighborhood’s infrastructure would start to decay, the quality of life there would start to decline, and residents would move out in pursuit of newer, nicer neighborhoods. Eventually, the neighborhood would be in bad shape, and would need to be redeveloped, starting the cycle all over again.
This model makes a lot of sense: If you think about your own city, you can probably identify neighborhoods that seem to be in each of the “stages” of neighborhood life. There’s the shiny new suburban community or downtown development where everybody seems to want to move; there’s the vital neighborhood with popular businesses and longtime residents; there’s the declining neighborhood where another business seems to close every day; and there’s the dangerous neighborhood where crime is frequent and where no one lives unless they can’t afford to live anywhere else. In the case of the latter neighborhood, you have probably heard calls for “renewal” and “redevelopment.”
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This way of thinking about neighborhood change acknowledges that urban life is more than just a big game of Risk, with “invading armies” of different groups trying to “take over” different neighborhoods. In fact, many of the healthiest, most vibrant neighborhoods have incredibly diverse social “ecosystems” and can easily accommodate newcomers without making the longtime residents feel threatened. The life cycle model also takes into account the importance of neighborhood infrastructure: building quality, local services and amenities. It’s true that when buildings, streets, and other humanmade artifacts reach a certain age, they start to decay, and many people find it easier to just move away than to replace the old stuff.
Still, sociologists realize that this way of thinking about neighborhood change also has its limitations. Failed experiments in “urban renewal” (see sidebar “Out with the old and in with the new . . . for better or worse”) have made clear that you can’t just hit the restart button on a neighborhood — that neighborhood change is a complex process that involves location, infrastructure, demographic change, social networks, and many other factors.
The rise and fall of the suburbs
I teach at a college in Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. Eagan is only a short drive from the central city; it’s green and hilly, parking is copious, and a big shopping area near the freeway has one of just about every big chain store you can name. Life is relatively easy in Eagan, and that’s why most Americans prefer to live in communities a lot like it.
Ever since there have been cities, there has been a market for housing at their outskirts, accessible to the commercial activity and entertainment in the cities’ centers but with more affordable space. Many inner-city residential neighborhoods started out as suburban areas when the cities were smaller, and older cities like London and New York City have inner-ring suburbs that are themselves hundreds of years old, with beautiful (and hugely expensive) historic houses.
Most neighborhoods that are now called “suburbs,” though, are products of the highway system, which allows people to drive great distances at high speeds. The highway system means that a person can reasonably commute to work in, say, St. Paul from not only Eagan, but from a city like Hugo — which is 20 miles away.
The suburbs built in the United States after World War II seemed to promise “the American dream”: on a single income (usually the father’s), a family could have a freestanding house with its own yard. For reasons of both efficiency and style, many suburbs built at that time — and since — have featured houses that are very similar in appearance.
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Out with the old and in with the new . . .
for better or worse
The life cycle model of neighborhood change (see section “The life and death of neighborhoods” earlier in this chapter) inspired a wave of calls for “urban renewal” in the middle of the 20th century. The idea behind urban renewal was that decaying or dangerous neighborhoods could be reinvigorated with massive investments in development. Sometimes this worked, but often it didn’t. In downtown Boston, a successful example of urban renewal sits right next to an unsuccessful example.
Starting in the early 19th century, Boston’s Scollay Square neighborhood was a buzzing hub of commerce and entertainment — including, especially after 1940, the kind of “entertainment” that involved women wearing lots of sequins and feathers with not much underneath. By the 1960s, the neighborhood was seen as seedy and was completely torn down; in its place went what is now called Government Center, a vast plaza that houses Boston’s City Hall and other government buildings. The development has been widely criticized for replacing
a vibrant neighborhood with a cold, windswept expanse where no one really wants to go.
Right across the street, though, an aging fish market next to the historic Faneuil Hall was turned into an outdoor shopping mall in 1976; the resulting Faneuil Hall Marketplace was instantly hailed as a triumph of urban renewal and has been packed with residents and tourists ever since. People come from all over to stroll among inviting gift shops, entertaining street performers, and vendors selling seafood and other local specialties.
Why did Faneuil Hall Marketplace work so well in rejuvenating a troubled neighborhood, and Government Center fail? There are many answers, but one answer is that no one was displaced in the building of the marketplace. A lesson from Boston’s experiences is that just because a neighborhood strikes some people as unsavory doesn’t mean it’s “dying,” and that when a neighborhood is destroyed, you can’t grow a new one overnight no matter how much money you spend.
Sociologists have always been fascinated by suburbs: Although it’s clear that many families find them highly desirable as places to live, sociologists have often been troubled by certain aspects of suburban life:
In his bestseller The Lonely Crowd, sociologist David Riesman worried that suburban life was helping to turn Americans into “other-directed” people who did what everyone else was doing instead of what their “inner compasses” told them to do.
Sociologist William H. Whyte made a similar argument in The Organization Man, which painted the suburbs as cookie-cutter neighborhoods where people lived bland, interchangeable lives.
In The Levittowners, a study of the first new-model American suburb, sociologist Herbert J. Gans observed how racially and economically homogeneous the suburbs were, and wondered whether suburbs were contributing to social segregation.