From the Ground Up: Translating Geography into Community through Neighbor Networks - Hardcover

Grannis, Rick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691140251 ISBN 13: 9780691140254

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Where do neighborhoods come from and why do certain resources and effects--such as social capital and collective efficacy--bundle together in some neighborhoods and not in others? From the Ground Up argues that neighborhood communities emerge from neighbor networks, and shows that these social relations are unique because of particular geographic qualities. Highlighting the linked importance of geography and children to the emergence of neighborhood communities, Rick Grannis models how neighboring progresses through four stages: when geography allows individuals to be conveniently available to one another; when they have passive contacts or unintentional encounters; when they actually initiate contact; and when they engage in activities indicating trust or shared norms and values. Seamlessly integrating discussions of geography, household characteristics, and lifestyle, Grannis demonstrates that neighborhood communities exhibit dynamic processes throughout the different stages. He examines the households that relocate in order to choose their neighbors, the choices of interactions that develop, and the exchange of beliefs and influence that impact neighborhood communities over time. Grannis also introduces and explores two geographic concepts--t-communities and street islands--to capture the subtle features constraining residents' perceptions of their environment and community. Basing findings on thousands of interviews conducted through door-to-door canvassing in the Los Angeles area as well as other neighborhood communities, From the Ground Up reveals the different ways neighborhoods function and why these differences matter.

About this title

About the Author

Rick Grannis is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

From the Back Cover

"This engaging book usefully articulates the geographic constraints on the formation of neighboring relations and the centrality of child-related activities to neighboring. It presents data from innovative empirical research and will interest those working in community and urban studies."--Peter V. Marsden, Harvard University

"With insight, Grannis conceptualizes neighborhoods as a chain of networks that form along predictable geographic boundaries linking local residents to one another. The data collected is extraordinarily rich and unique."--George E. Tita, University of California, Irvine

From the Inside Flap

"This engaging book usefully articulates the geographic constraints on the formation of neighboring relations and the centrality of child-related activities to neighboring. It presents data from innovative empirical research and will interest those working in community and urban studies."--Peter V. Marsden, Harvard University

"With insight, Grannis conceptualizes neighborhoods as a chain of networks that form along predictable geographic boundaries linking local residents to one another. The data collected is extraordinarily rich and unique."--George E. Tita, University of California, Irvine

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the Ground Up

TRANSLATING GEOGRAPHY INTO COMMUNITY THROUGH NEIGHBOR NETWORKSBy Rick Grannis

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14025-4

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables..............................................ixPrologue......................................................................xvChapter One Neighborhoods and Neighboring....................................1Chapter Two The Stages of Neighboring........................................17Chapter Three Reconceptualizing Stage 1 Neighboring..........................28Chapter Four Reconceptualizing Stage 1 Neighbor Networks.....................37Chapter Five Selection and Influence.........................................48Chapter Six Respondents, Interviews, and Other Data..........................59Chapter Seven Selecting Stage 1 Neighbors....................................73Chapter Eight Unintentional Encounters.......................................93Chapter Nine Stage 3 Neighbors and Tertiary Streets..........................109Chapter Ten The Importance of Neighbor Networks..............................129Chapter Eleven Network Influence Theory......................................148Chapter Twelve Influence Networks in a College Town..........................162Chapter Thirteen Influence Networks in a Gang Barrio.........................178Chapter Fourteen Implications................................................192Appendix Survey Instrument...................................................201Notes.........................................................................207References....................................................................219Index.........................................................................237

Chapter One

Neighborhoods and Neighboring

Geography and Community

Human behavior necessarily occurs within (or must transcend) physical space. Nowhere is this truer than in residential life. As real-estate agents and homeowners (especially those with children) often declare, where one makes one's home matters almost as much as what one does inside it. In the rapidly shrinking world of the twenty-first century, psychologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists still acknowledge the importance of the neighborhood context.

Not all neighborhoods are alike, however. Some neighborhoods are characterized by high levels of effective community. They offer social capital to their residents, a social organization that facilitates and coordinates cooperative action for mutual benefit, which allows them to deal with daily life, seize opportunities, reduce uncertainties, and achieve ends that would not otherwise be possible. This social organization is a resource that is not individually attainable because social capital is not a characteristic of individuals; it is a supraindividual property of social structure, and it seems to be particularly well grounded in neighborhood communities. Sources of social capital tied to the neighborhood community are analytically distinct from, and are as consequential as, the more proximate family processes and relationships occurring in the home. Some neighborhoods develop a further layer of mutual trust and shared norms, values, and expectations, beyond the resource potential of neighbor networks, which allows them to use these networks to achieve desired outcomes. Collective efficacy occurs when members of a collectivity, with social capital resources, believe they are mutually able and willing to use them to achieve an intended outcome. The distinction is a subtle, but important, one. A neighborhood may have social capital resources available for its constituent residents to use, but they may not trust the willingness or ability of their fellow residents to use these resource networks for the collective good, or they may not even be certain that they agree on what the collective good is.

From a less positive perspective, neighborhoods show remarkable continuities in patterns of criminal activity. For decades, criminological research in the ecological tradition has confirmed the concentration of interpersonal violence in certain neighborhoods, especially those characterized by poverty, the racial segregation of minority groups, and the concentration of single-parent families. Even in neighborhoods with less socioeconomic or racial isolation, crime rates persist despite the demographic replacement of neighborhood populations. In addition, neighborhoods not only determine one's exposure to crime and violence, but also a host of less tangible deleterious factors that contribute to the development of an urban underclass, signs of social disorder that lead residents to perceive their neighbors as threats rather than as sources of support or assistance.

Researchers have taken a growing interest in the role of neighborhoods in shaping outcomes for children, families, and neighborhood residents in general. These "effects" have included phenomena ranging from child and adolescent development (e.g., abuse and maltreatment, school completion and achievement, drug use, deviant peer affiliation, delinquency and gangs, adolescent sexual activity and pregnancy, childbearing and parenting behaviors, etc.) to concentrated disadvantage and its many corollaries (restricted economic attainment and labor market failure, crime and violence, physical disorder, the perpetuation of racism, to name just a few). The conclusion reached by all of these studies is that neighborhoods influence our behavior, attitudes, and values. They shape the types of people we will become and expose us to or shield us from early hazards that might restrict the opportunities available to us later in life. After our homes, and in conjunction with them, neighborhoods are where we first learn whether the world is safe and cooperative or inchoate and menacing. The neighborhood one lives in matters.

Neighborhoods matter, but different neighborhoods matter in different ways. Different neighborhoods have different effects, of different magnitudes. Some neighborhoods have almost no effect. For the researcher, neighborhoods cluster outcomes that cannot be accounted for in terms of the characteristics of the individuals or households currently residing in them. It is as if neighborhoods have personalities, enduring characteristics that survive the replacement of their constituent residents. These neighborhood effects, however, necessarily involve a geographic context. Thus, to analyze and understand them, neighborhoods necessarily require a geographic equivalent.

Researchers have used a wide variety of such equivalents. In fact, "urban social scientists have treated 'neighborhood' in much the same way as courts of law have treated pornography: a term that is hard to define precisely, but everyone knows it when they see it."

Apparently, however, researchers often don't know it when they see it. Miller's (1999) survey suggests that the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) exists primarily because analysts decide beforehand on the spatial units they will use when they study a phenomenon. Having done so, they reach conclusions about the phenomenon that are hopelessly prejudiced by their choice of spatial unit.

While many statistical techniques and error-modeling approaches have been used to counteract, reduce, or remove the effects of MAUP, Miller argues that the ultimate solution has to involve a behaviorally oriented definition of neighborhood for use in the practical measurement of neighborhood factors. One needs better intuitions about the general nature of neighborhoods, not better statistical methods. The very existence of the modifiable areal unit problem evidences that theory has taken a back seat. Those researchers who have developed methods for creating optimal analytic units with respect to predefined objective functions note correctly that MAUP would be irrelevant if neighborhood equivalents were chosen for theoretical reasons rather than administrative convenience.

Despite this need for a conception of neighborhoods that is tied to the behaviors and interactions of residents that produce these effects, however, when a geographic definition of neighborhood is required for the purpose of quantitative analysis, "most social scientists and virtually all studies of neighborhoods ... rely on geographic boundaries defined by the Census Bureau or other administrative agencies ... [that] offer imperfect operational definitions of neighborhoods for research and policy." Administratively defined units such as census tracts and block groups do not directly measure, nor were they designed to measure, the potential for interaction among residents, the primary process hypothesized to produce neighborhood communities and their effects. In most cases, the sheer ubiquity of data gathered by the Census Bureau or other administrative agencies (e.g., school districts, police districts) proves an overwhelming temptation for researchers. Theory succumbs to the preponderance of data.

As a result, sociologists often treat neighborhoods as if they were only colored boxes on a map or sets of geo-referenced variables for use in a geographic information system (GIS). This approach often proves productive, but, like all plans, it emphasizes some aspects of what we are studying and de-emphasizes others. A focus on maps, especially maps based on census or administrative geography, emphasizes those aspects of neighborhoods and their residents that can be effectively displayed or associated with administratively defined polygons and ignores those that cannot. To understand the social-interactional aspect of neighborhoods, we may not have to think outside the box, but we do have to think about what's inside it.

In this book, I explore neighborhood communities and attempt to develop a more theoretically grounded neighborhood equivalent. Undoubtedly, neighborhood effects involve a geographic context. Neighborhood effects, however, are not produced by neighborhood geography. Nor are they—at least most of them—merely spatial effects, a by-product or spurious confound of the geographic location of residents with particular demographic characteristics or psychological profiles. I argue that cataloguing neighborhood effects, by definition, hypothesizes that there exists a thing, a social entity, a neighborhood community, that has effects. Neighborhood effects are the product of these neighborhood communities. I argue that neighborhood communities and their effects emerge from neighboring interactions among their constituent residents.

It's the Kids, Stupid!

Neighborhood communities and their effects involve children (e.g., child development and abuse, school achievement, delinquency, the development of racist attitudes) or adolescents (e.g., gangs, sexual activity and pregnancy, drug use) either exclusively or primarily. For example, collective efficacy and segregation most powerfully affect children and adolescents. Furthermore, most discussion of neighborhood effects is developmental in nature, focusing on how neighborhoods, in addition to households, may manifest to us a world that is predictable and helpful or one that is capricious and dangerous. In doing so, they help mold the character of the adults we become.

The relationship between neighborhood communities and children is a problematic topic, however, because social researchers are adults and, despite their attempts at objectivity, view neighborhoods first through their own adult eyes. Another obstacle is that protocols for treatment of human subjects typically prevent researchers from interacting with non-adults. Thus, the scholarly view of neighborhoods often reflects adults theorizing about neighborhoods, adults observing neighborhoods, and adults talking to other adults. Children, however, do not relate to neighborhoods in the same ways that adults do.

Neighborhood communities are more relevant for households with children for at least three important reasons. First, households with children constitute about half of the population of American neighborhoods. According to the 2004 American Community Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau, slightly over half of all persons reside in households with children under 18 living in them. Of these households with children, almost half have very small children under six living in them. Thus, a majority of Americans live in households with minor children in them, and about a quarter of all Americans live in households with preschool children in them. Furthermore, researchers have consistently found that the number of neighbors known is higher for households with children. Thus, these households with children are involved in a much larger majority of neighborly interaction.

Second, neighborhoods are especially important for households with children because children are less mobile, and thus more geographically dependent, than adults. Children and their playful interactions depend upon proximity much more than do adults and their interactions. Since children cannot drive and have little, if any, voice in decisions on where to live, they are forced to share lives with neighboring children even more than are their parents. For children, the street in front of their home is "the mediator between the wider community and the private world of the family." This is where children first learn about the world. They often play games in the middle of these streets and use them to walk pets and to ride bicycles, and the majority of their recreational activity occurs there. Sidewalks provide access between residence and schools and parks. As a result, the relationships children form primarily depend upon the opportunities to interact provided by walking arenas immediately surrounding them. Especially for young children, neighboring children are the most likely to become their playmates. Children are even affected by the extremely subtle geography of rain gutters and hedges. Thus, the networks of relationships they form will be much more dependent upon passive contacts occurring along them. Unlike children, adults have many venues for social relationships beyond their neighborhood, including work and voluntary activities. School-age children may have some of these opportunities, to the extent their parents allow. Preschool children, however, have few, if any, of these alternative social venues. Their lives are tightly bound by geography.

Households with children are far more influenced by the norms and values of surrounding households with children than households in general are influenced by the norms and values of their surrounding neighbors. Your neighbors' children are predisposed to become your children's playmates and friends, your neighbors may become some of the role models they emulate, and thus the character of those living in neighboring households is a potentially powerful influence on your children.

Neighboring parents may become intimately involved in the socialization of your children. Neighbors rear children side by side and together have the potential to co-create a safe and value-laden environment. Parents monitor their own children as well as those of their neighbors. Some neighborhoods expect residents to share values and to be willing and able to intervene on behalf of children. In these neighborhoods, residents expect each other to actively cooperate in the support and social control of children. Parents get to know the parents and families of their children's friends, they observe children's actions, both their own and their neighbors, in a variety of circumstances, they talk with other parents about their children, and they establish norms. Such structural and normative adult-child closure gives children social support, provides parents with information, and facilitates control. The choice to live in a neighborhood is to some extent a choice to rear children together with one's neighbors.

Ultimately, a community of parents may develop around the community of children, mirroring it. People whose children play together form friendship relations based in part on that fact. While it is the children who are immobile, confined to neighborhoods, and most immediately affected by them, children's geographic dependence encumbers their parents as well.

A third reason neighborhoods are important for households with children is that most school-age children attend schools in their neighborhood. This pattern affects households because school quality plays an important role in the decision on where to live, both for families who currently have children and for those who think they might some day. Spatially defined neighborhoods typically determine the quality of the public schools one's children have access to. For households with children, the quality of its school district may be one of the most important aspects of a residence under consideration. Parents often choose their neighborhood (and even pay more in housing and taxes)56 to gain access to particular school districts. Furthermore, school catchment areas may complement any effect of walking arenas, onto which they may be intentionally mapped, since children often walk to school.

In review, when one considers neighborhood communities, most of the effects researchers concern themselves with involve children or adolescents. This results in large part because households with children constitute the majority of American households; because children are much less mobile than adults and this affects both them directly, their parents, and their families; and because most school-age children attend schools in their neighborhood. Children and their families are the quintessence of neighborhood life.

During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, Democratic Party strategist James Carville hung a sign with three bullet points on it in Clinton's Little Rock campaign office to keep everybody "on message." The most famous, reminiscent of the KISS principle, was "It's the economy, stupid!" When we study neighborhood communities and their effects, it is worth hanging an imaginary sign in front of us to keep us on track.

"It's the kids, stupid!"

Overview of the Book

The neighborhood one lives in matters. Neighborhoods influence behaviors, attitudes, and values; they shape outcomes for families, and they provide (or fail to provide) resources for residents to achieve or avoid outcomes collectively. While it is the community aspect of neighborhoods that influences norms and values and that generates social capital and collective efficacy, to analyze and understand neighborhoods requires a geographic equivalent for them. Many current neighborhood equivalents, however, imperfectly map onto the interactional processes generating the geographic outcomes being measured. In this book, I attempt to develop a more theoretically grounded neighborhood equivalent, mapping the neighboring interactions that produce neighborhood communities.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691140251
• ISBN 13: 9780691140254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264