Essays
-
Cities and Sustainable Development - Cusack, Christopher
When considering the future of the world, one must first and foremost consider the future of its cities. Cities are currently home to more than half the world's population and are projected to encompass the preponderance of all future population growth. Cities also require vast inputs of energy and resources while producing vast outputs of waste. Recognition that these trends are not sustainable has generated a wealth of relevant research. How cities can be sustainably developed in such a way that meets present needs without limiting the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is the critical problem to solve. Research in a myriad of fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and geography, is active in its pursuit of the sustainable city. This essay explains the components of sustainable development and underscores the connection between sustainability and cities. Foundational research, which primarily takes a regional approach to urban analysis, is then explored. This, then, is followed by cutting‐edge research that highlights new ways to measure sustainability and new efforts to build sustainable cities. The essay concludes with an examination of some of the key issues for future research, including the need to consider the cultural diversity within and between cities, as well ways to generate sustainability through pioneering efforts of planning and governance. -
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development - Chen, Jondou
Research on neighborhoods and individual well‐being has produced a substantive body of knowledge over the past quarter century. Neighborhood conditions—especially socioeconomic status (SES), which is based on income and education and to a lesser extent on residential stability—are predictive of cognitive development. The strongest evidence controls for individual and family‐level characteristics or examines individuals clustered within neighborhoods in order to obtain estimates of within‐ and between‐neighborhood variance. Another line of research has focused on housing mobility projects, which allow for the experimental assignment of residents to more advantaged neighborhoods. Future research on neighborhoods will continue to blend methods and data from an increasing number of disciplines to better understand human development in context. -
Objects of Urban Security Part II: Emerging Trends - Molotch, Harvey
Security things––intrinsic aspects of the built environment––offer a way to understand an important subset of life encounters while offering up clues of surrounding social relations and political structures. Security projects inveigle citizens in pursuit of everyday goals. For authorities, they set up special challenges both for gaining public acquiescence and for dealing with those who oppose them. As with all public objects, including those as mundane as trash bins, outcomes––for better or worse––involve specific manipulations and negotiations, material as well as ideological. Especially when justified as “security,” they have––we argue––negative consequences on other individual and collective goals. We have detailed this argument in the companion piece to this essay (see Part I: Background & Research Starts by same authors in this volume; see also Molotch, 2012) and carry it forward here toward some larger implications. -
Objects of Urban Security, Part I: Background and Research Starts - Molotch, Harvey
Cities are populated by mechanisms of security. Notice the many intrusive devices and repertoires of control at airport departure gates, office reception, subways, and other sites of modern life. But the presence of security, at least more broadly construed to include infrastructures that channel, inhibit, and intrude, did not originate with 9/11 in America. -
Theorizing the Death of Cities - Eisinger, Peter
Although ancient cities often followed a trajectory of birth, prosperity, decline, and death, modern cities have more commonly exhibited a high degree of resilience. Yet some contemporary cities—notably some of the old industrial cities of the American Midwest—seem on an inexorable course toward death. Our understanding of urban dying and death, however, lacks theoretical elaboration. This essay suggests that an assessment of a city's morbidity can be accomplished by examining the condition of a city's three principal vital urban functions: its governance capacity, its economic stewardship, and its cultural production and preservation. By assessing these we can make a judgment about the course of urban dying, though urban death—the endstate—still eludes theoretical understanding. -
Urban Data Science - Law, Tina
Data on urban life are more accessible today than ever before. New sources of “big data” such as 311 requests, recorded police activity, digitized student records, and social media capture urban life on an unprecedented temporal and geographical scale. Combined with new and improved computational social science methods for harnessing data, they promise to change urban research in important ways. In this essay, we outline urban data science—an emerging, interdisciplinary approach to studying urban life using big data and computational social science methods. We discuss three key innovations that this approach offers for urban research: (i) a broader and more multifaceted definition of neighborhood activity, (ii) greater knowledge on the role of socio‐spatial interdependencies in urban life, and (iii) more dynamic understandings of urban issues and policies. We conclude by highlighting some challenges that urban scholars must collaboratively address as they engage in this new urban data science.