On the Nature of Neighbourhood Galster, George
Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland),
11/2001, Letnik:
38, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The paper advances the conceptualisation of neighbourhood by specifying it as a bundle of spatially based attributes associated with clusters of residences, sometimes in conjunction with other land ...uses. There follows a discussion of how this 'composite commodity' definition relates to the planning challenge of spatially bounding neighbourhood. The paper then probes the myriad idiosyncrasies associated with the concept of neighbourhood: cross-attribute variation in durability and ability to be priced, relativistic evaluations of attributes and consumption impacts on attributes. It discusses how, within this new paradigmatic context, neighbourhoods are produced by the same actors that consume them: households, property owners, business people and local government. Finally, consideration is given to various aspects of the origins and nature of neighbourhood change and it is argued that neighbourhood dynamics are rife with social inefficiencies.
For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to ...everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly high murder rate. InDriving Detroit, author George Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half century. Galster invites the reader to travel with him along the streets and into the soul of this place to grasp fully what drives the Motor City. With a scholar's rigor and a local's perspective, Galster uncovers why metropolitan Detroit's cultural, commercial, and built landscape has been so radically transformed. He shows how geography, local government structure, and social forces created a housing development system that produced sprawl at the fringe and abandonment at the core. Galster argues that this system, in tandem with the region's automotive economic base, has chronically frustrated the population's quest for basic physical, social, and psychological resources. These frustrations, in turn, generated numerous adaptations-distrust, scapegoating, identity politics, segregation, unionization, and jurisdictional fragmentation-that collectively leave Detroit in an uncompetitive and unsustainable position. Partly a self-portrait, in which Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories,Driving Detroitoffers an intimate, insightful, and perhaps controversial explanation for the stunning contrasts-poverty and plenty, decay and splendor, despair and resilience-that characterize the once mighty city.
This paper analyses the degree to which the mixture of low-, middle-and high income males in the neighbourhood affects the subsequent earnings of individuals, and aims to test explicitly the degree ...to which these impacts vary across gender, age, presence of children, employment status or income at the start of the analysis period. An intertemporal differences specification of an econometric model is employed to eliminate the potential selection bias arising from unmeasured individual characteristics, utilising data on 1.67 million adults living in Swedish metropolitan areas 1991-99. It is found that there are important differences in the nature and magnitude of neighbourhood income mix effects in several dimensions, but many are statistically and economically significant. Neighbourhood mix effects are consistently stronger for parents and those who do not work full-time, independently of other individual dimensions, although a combination of personal attributes typically governs the vulnerability of the individual to the neighbourhood.
We conduct a panel analysis quantifying the degree to which the mixture of low-income, middle-income, and high-income males in the neighbourhood affects the subsequent labour income of individuals, ...and test the degree to which these effects vary by timing (lagging up to three years), duration (one to four years), and cumulative amount of exposure and to what extent these effects are persistent. We employ a fixed-effects model to reduce the potential bias arising from unmeasured individual characteristics leading to neighbourhood selection. The empirical study applies individual-level data for the working-age population of the three largest cities in Sweden covering the period 1991–2006. The analyses suggest that there are important temporal dimensions in the statistical effect of neighbourhood income mix: recent, continued, or cumulative exposure yields stronger associations than lagged, temporary ones, and there is a distinct time decay (though some persistence) in the potential effects after exposure ceases, though with some gender differences.
This paper analyses the relative merits of demand-side and supply-side strategies for attacking the housing problems faced by low-income renters. The analysis is distinctive in that it takes ...seriously the emerging consensus among international housing scholars about the centrality of housing quality sub-market dynamics and spatial considerations. Received theory about the nature of housing sub-markets and their adjustments to policy interventions is used to critique previous evaluations of supply-and demand-side approaches and to provide fresh insights into their ability to achieve a wide variety of programmatic goals. Numerous dimensions of spatial considerations-externalities, area-wide abandonment and revitalisation, local reinvestment psychology, racial and economic integration and freedom of household locational choice-are applied to a further consideration of these two strategies, again using several alternative goals. Finally, the paper argues for the importance of context-driven housing policy formulation. Problem definition, goal weighting, and metropolitan housing market, socio-economic, and governmental characteristics collectively must be considered before an unambiguously 'best' housing strategy can be identified. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that, with the typical context, the demand-side approach is superior to the supply-side approach.
Three challenges confront statistical researchers of neighbourhood impacts on individual behaviours: (1) operationalising 'neighbourhood processes'; (2) potentially non-linear relationships between ...neighbourhood characteristics and outcomes; and (3) the selection bias problem. To better comprehend these challenges and overcome them, the paper proposes an overarching conceptual framework wherein outcomes of interest are affected by neighbourhood interacting in a mutually causal fashion with housing tenure, housing wealth, household socio-economic status, and mobility behaviour. It advances a five-equation, simultaneous system for home ownership, mobility expectations, housing wealth, household socio-economic status and neighbourhood character. Although current US census data do not provide perfect proxies for neighbourhood processes, there is evidence that a battery of them could represent reasonable operationalisations. Tests for non-linearity could be conducted in this framework. This model could use a sufficiently robust set of instrumental variables to overcome the issue of neighbourhood selection bias, and thereby produce considerably more precise estimates of neighbourhood impacts on individual outcomes of interest. Implications for qualitative research approaches also are drawn.
Differences in immigrant economic trajectories have been attributed to a wide variety of factors. One of these is the local spatial context where immigrants reside. This spatial context assumes ...special salience in light of expanding public exposure to and scholarly interest in the potential impacts of spatial concentrations of immigrants. A crucial question is whether immigrants' opportunities are influenced by their neighbours. In this paper we contribute statistical evidence relevant to answering this vital question. We develop multiple measures of the spatial context in which immigrants reside and assess their contribution to the average earnings of immigrant individuals in the three large Swedish metropolitan areas, controlling for individual and regional labour-market characteristics. We use unusually rich longitudinal information about Swedish immigrants during the 1995–2002 period. We find evidence that immigrant men and women paid a substantial penalty during 1999–2002 if in 1999 they resided in areas where a substantial number of their neighbours were members of the same ethnic group. The evidence suggests that own-group concentrations can initially pay dividends for immigrants, but these benefits quickly turn into net disadvantages over time.
We investigate patterns of residential and nonresidential land use in 311 United States metropolitan (Extended Urban) areas in 2000 using four measures: intensity, compactness, mixing, and ...core-dominance. A cluster analysis revealed four distinctive groups of land use patterns: (1) Most-Intense, Least-Compact, Least-Mixed, More-Monocentric Development, (2) Less-Intense, Most-Compact, Less-Mixed, Less-Monocentric Development, (3) Least-Intense, Less-Compact, Most-Mixed, Most-Monocentric Development, (4) More-Intense, More-Compact, More-Mixed, Polycentric Development. Bivariate statistics demonstrated that geographic, historic, economic, demographic, and transport variables differentiate land use pattern types. Based on their multidimensional distinctions, we label the four types of metropolitan areas: Ascendants, Insulars, Redevelopers, and Cosmopolitans.
We investigate spatial patterns of residential and nonresidential land use for 257 United States metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan ...areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far, the largest changes in our land use metrics occurred in the realm of employment, which became more prevalent per unit of geographic area, but less spatially concentrated and farther from the historical urban core, on average. Our exploratory factor analyses reveal that four factors summarize land use patterns in both years, and remained relatively stable across the two years: intensity, compactness, mixing, and core-dominance. Mean factor scores vary by metropolitan population, water proximity, type, and Census region. Improved measurement of metropolitan land use patterns can facilitate policy and planning decisions intended to minimize the most egregious aspects of urban sprawl.
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