The New Urban Sociology by Mark Gottdiener Ray Hutchison Michael Ryan

Author:Mark Gottdiener, Ray Hutchison, Michael Ryan [Gottdiener, Mark; Hutchison, Ray; Ryan, Michael T.]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813349572
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

THE SOCIOSPATIAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Social problems are ubiquitous across the metropolitan areas of the United States. Cities do not have an exclusive hold on divorce or domestic violence, and suburbs are now almost as likely as cities to be afflicted with family disorganization, deviant subcultures, drug use, and gang activity (Barbanel, 1992). Many suburban areas have crime rates comparable to those of the central city. As the suburban settlement spaces have matured, differences in poverty levels, crime rates, and other measures of social disorganization have become less. If it appears clear that urbanism by itself is not a generator of social problems, it is also clear that cultural approaches can no longer identify unique differences between city life and life in other developed places.

We know from our earlier explorations of the sociospatial approach that the spatial environment plays an important role in human interaction. The social background factors associated with population groups are also important. The variety of lifestyles found across urban and suburban settlement spaces result from social factors such as race, class, and gender. Social problems in particular are caused by poverty, racial exclusion, gender differences, and the severe patterns of uneven development within settlement space that results in differential access to resources and determines a person’s life chances. On the other hand, spatial forms still matter. Environments intensify or dissipate these compositional effects of uneven development. In short, ways of life result from an interaction between social factors and spatial organization.

Cities are not unique in having acute social problems, but the spatial nature of large cities and densely populated suburbs makes the uneven development resulting from the inequities of race, class, gender, and age particularly severe. According to the sociospatial approach, the following factors are the most significant.

First, the principal effect of the city as a built environment is that it concentrates people and resources (Lefebvre, 1991; Engels, 1973). Thus, social problems such as drugs and poverty have a greater impact in large central cities and densely populated suburbs than in less dense areas. In confined urban space under the jurisdiction of a single municipal government, it is the sheer numbers, such as the frequency of murders and rapes or the number of “crack babies,” that turn social problems into grave concerns.

Second, over the years urban populations have been disproportionately affected by the internationalization of the capitalist economies. For example, large metropolitan regions such as Los Angeles or New York are the destinations of choice for most immigrants from poorer nations who have left their countries in search of a better life. With the flow of immigrants comes specific problems, such as the need for bilingual education, that affect these areas more than other places.

Changes in the global cycles of economic investment also affect metropolitan regions because of the scale of activities in the largest places. For example, after the beginning of the Great Recession in December 2007, the American economy shed 8.8 million jobs through February 2010 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). It started

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