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LSE: Public lectures and events
Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: social order revisited
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My name is Richard Wright. I'm one of the editors of the British Journal of Sociology. On behalf of the entire BJS editorial team, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the LSE and to the annual BJS Lecture. I know you didn't come here to listen to me, and neither did I, but before I introduce tonight's speakers, I'd like to take just a moment to make a couple of brief announcements. First, I'd like to remind you that tonight's Lecture and Response will be published in the March issue of of the bjs, along with commentary from a number of internationally prominent urban theorists and policymakers. It promises to be a fascinating and provocative issue, which I'm very much looking forward to, and I hope that you are too. The second thing I'd like to announce is the recent establishment of the BJS Prize. The prize, which will include a 500 pound honorarium, will be awarded biannually to recognize an article published in the BJS during the previous two years, which the editors and the editorial board consider to have made an especially outstanding contribution to sociology. The recipient of the first BJS Prize will be announced at next year's BJS Lecture. With those announcements made, it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, Rob Sampson, and tonight's respondent, Paul Gilroy. Rob Sampson is the Henry Ford II professor of the Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, He taught for 12 years at the University of Chicago and for seven at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Professor Sampson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the U.S. national Academy of Sciences. His research centers on four interrelated areas, including the life course Crime, Neighborhood effects, and the social organization and disorganization of cities. He has written widely and influentially in each of these areas. Tonight's respondent, Paul Gilroy, is the Anthony Giddens professor in Social Theory at the lse. He's best known for his work on racism, nationalism, ethnicity, and for his approach to the history of the African Diaspora. Prior to taking up his post at the LSE in 2005, Professor Gilroy taught at South Bank Polytechnic, Essex University, Goldsmiths College, and Yale. His most recent book, which was published in 2007, is Black A Photographic History. The order of tonight's lecture is as follows. Professor Sampson will speak for approximately 50, 55 minutes. Professor Gilward will then respond to Professor Sampson's talk. We'll then give Professor Sampson a moment to respond and there will be some time at the end for questions from the audience. It's expected that the event will end at approximately 8pm, after which you're all invited to a post lecture reception.
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Now, I'm not supposed to tell you.
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Where that reception is until after the lecture is over, but someone tells me it's just right outside the door, so you're going to find it pretty easily. Anyway, tonight's lecture is being recorded and it's hoped that a podcast will be made available online. Please take a moment now and turn off your cell phones. With that, it's my pleasure to welcome tonight's speaker, Rob Sampson, who will speak on Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City Social Disorder Revisited Professor Sampson.
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Thank you Richard, for that kind introduction. Try to stay on time here. It's a pleasure to be here. London is one of my favorite cities, so it's always a treat to come and wander around a bit. It's also the case that London was an early leader in urban studies, as you will see, so it's fitting on that count that I'm here to talk about issues with regard to the social order of the contemporary city. Now, scholars of the city have long interpreted signs of disorder in public spaces in ways that constitute powerful forces of differentiation. From observers in London in the 1800s, going back a ways such as Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew, to authors of modern classics such as Jane Jacobs, the Death and Life of Great American Cities published in the United states in about 1961 to present day, concerns over broken windows in crime famous theory you may have heard about signs of disorder and cues in public space have been central to our understanding of city life. Now by social disorder and I'll go into this more most observers mean behavior involving strangers and considered somewhat threatening, harassment on the street, open intoxication, and so forth. Physical disorder refers to markers of deteriorated urban landscapes such as graffiti on buildings, abandoned cars, garbage in the streets, and of course, broken windows. Booth's detailed investigations and resulting maps of Victorian London served as an early illustration of disorder's role in the social ranking of places. His painstaking portrayal of the streets of this global city included color coded schemes for its economic and social makeup. I'll give you an example. I'm told the hot wasn't easy. Appears to be correct, No. So I'm going to use the other one as you suggested, because it's not.
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If you want to give me notes I couldn't.
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No. Do you want to do it? Go forward and back?
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Yeah. If you not give me a nod, I can do that.
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Okay, yeah. This one, as you predicted, doesn't work. Okay, so Charles Booth. Now remember the time period. This is 1800s. Pretty much every street in London he coded. This is just pretty much a random neighborhood along a bridge street. But if you go to the archive at lse, you'll see the entire city. And it's coded according to various schemes with regard to the general condition, as he put it, of the inhabitants. And if you read the legend, it's kind of interesting the way that he described it. The lowest classes coated in black, were not just poor, but they were described as living in squalor with rampant displays of public alcoholism. Expressing a common view that many probably still hold, even if silently. Booth unabashedly labeled the lowest class category as vicious semi criminal. As you can see in the upper left corner of the legend. He also noted that they were primarily occasional laborers, loafers and semi criminals. The elements of disorder. End quote. You don't hear loafing too much anymore, but he got disorder in there. So what he accomplished then was an ecological classification and spatial difference fused with a subtle yet powerful moral evaluation based on behavior. What might be considered the precursor to contemporary understandings of the underclass. Now, this was a consequential intellectual move, for the designation or stigmatization of areas as disreputable and disordered, as I shall argue, can set in motion long term processes that reinforce the initial undesired state and therefore help continue with the production of inequality. Now, the relative stability of concentrated disadvantage and advantage for spatial difference is a rather remarkable and surprising finding. In 2006, as I was preparing this lecture, I came across an article the Economist did, which I found intriguing, where they showed the similarity of neighborhoods in the London neighborhood from 1898 to 2001. It's a pretty long period of time. It was in the Chelsea neighborhood. Go to the next slide. This was the map that was produced in Chelsea. I'm comparing, and it's a little fuzzy, but I think you can read it. Wealth by sub area within this particular larger neighborhood of Chelsea. With the orange areas, the wealthier ones, as you go down to the green, middling and poor. Now, what you can notice here is considerable heterogeneity. There's evidence of change over the period of 100 years. I mean, obviously we would expect some change. We also know that cultural changes swept through the area, especially during the swinging 60s, replete with a Mick Jagger in tow. And as the Economist notes, today Booth would be a surprise, perhaps at the designer clothing shops and high concentration of Porsches and BMWs. Yet considering the gap of over a century, one would not have gone wrong, at least too far wrong. Predicting that pockets of poverty would remain robust, evil looking, drink sodden, old Irish women quote from Booth have been replaced by the merely struggling or down and out. Now, being a good urban sociologist, when I got here on Sunday, I couldn't resist. So I got on the tube and went down to Chelsea to check out to see what it looked like today and see if we could find the same distinctions before the next one. So 2008, Sunday, approximately 1500. This is in the middle area, the ramp area, the middling to poor areas. And what we see here is a little garbage. Not too bad. Probably waiting for pickup Monday or Tuesday. And keep clear of the midwife's garage. Needs a little paint perhaps. Moving on, next slide, please. We see graffiti along Sloan Street. Not bad, but there. And kind of characterize it as drab. Pretty consistent actually with the kind of the Boothian notion of middling, struggling. Next. Yet areas in transition. This is an interesting street. I think it's. I wrote this down, Inc. You'll note a couple things. One, you probably don't notice, but I noticed it right away in the lower left hand corner here. This is actually a door, a car that had been taken off and just left there, which I found interesting. Some dog poop that has been thrown in the street. A Mercedes Benz and across the street a police station. You notice the three police cars. So this is sort of a. What you might think of as a transitional area on the edge of some of the better off areas. And I want you to note two things. Just outside the police station was the following. Next slide, please. They were proud of the fact that street crime is down yet. Can you go back 1 slide? 3 cars in front of the police van. On that side was the following. Go forward too, please. This, I know I didn't plan this, but this is broken windows. This was sitting there. I was walking down. I saw some people say, oh, it must have happened about a minute before I got there because people were gathering around the car. I took a picture and then got away quickly because I thought maybe that they wouldn't quite understand that. Yeah, I study neighborhoods and I'm taking pictures of cars that are broken into. I'm not sure about the London police on that one, but broken window. So this is dicey. A little bit dicey. Next. Nell Gwynne house is now on one side, looks a little drab. Next side you can buy a condo for. I forget how much but it's getting pretty expensive. And then if you go further down the street to Elston. Next slide, please. Ralph Lauren, which at least in the U.S. i mean, this is yuppydom to the max. And I don't know if you notice that this woman has many boxes of. With so many that he had to help her put them into her Mercedes. And then finally, coming around the corner on Fulham Road, Nicole Fatri. I took this picture mainly because you probably can't quite see, but the reflection on this goes back. Next slide to Pelham Crescent. Now this is nice. Now this is all bounded with that same neighborhood. Spatial difference. Heterogeneity works even at the micro level. Moving south of the Thames to Stockwell. In the nearby Brixton neighborhood lie some of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in London. Home, the Stockwell strangler in the mid-80s and several police raids after the 2005 bombings. Racial tensions have flared in these neighborhoods. A century ago, Booth and his research team found a pocket of filth and squalor with rowdy residents and broken windows. Again, it was, he said, far the worst place in the division. The Economist, in the same report notes that since then the area has been transformed, but in a way that replicates important features of the past. Dismal two story cottages have been swept away and replaced by grass in the apartment blocks of Stockwell Place Estate. Next, please. But the appearance, and this is quoting now from the Economist, of the neighborhood has changed more than its character. Julie Fawcett, who lives in the neighborhood and one of the blocks, characterizes her neighbors as the mad, the bad and the sad. Perhaps Booth's crude distinctions are not so antediluvian. After all, in the current era of globalization, the alleged placelessness of place and place even as phantasmagorical as Giddens has argued, seems to me quite wrong. Durability of place.
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Is a puzzle.
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As A quote by Ms. Fawcett reveals, it's not just economic or racial status, but identities and moral evaluations that in many cases remain sticky. What mechanisms sustain the hierarchy of places? Anecdotes notwithstanding, how stable are disorder and related neighborhood dimensions now? The general thesis of this lecture and the longer paper from which it derives is that perceptions of disorder constitute a fundamental dimension of social inequality at the neighborhood level and perhaps beyond. At first, this might seem an odd thesis, considering that dominant stratification theorists take a structural stance in analyzing the materialistic constituents of inequality. Demographers do likewise in analyzing urban change, whether expressed by Charles Booth or our Stockwell contemporary Perceptions of disorder are likely to be dismissed in favor of presumed weightier causes. By contrast, I argue that the grounds of disorder and how they're perceived are contextually shaped and consequential, molding reputations, reinforcing stigma, and influencing the future trajectory of an area. Now, to assess this general position, I move away from London and present a set of empirical evidence based on over a decade worth of research in Chicago with a number of colleagues. This is a quintessentially American city, the site of much seminal work on poverty. My hope is that the current analysis will spur new insights into stability and change in urban inequality. And also I will not only analyze inequality and its effects, I will, at the end of the talk, come back to related themes of immigration and diversity and disorder and end actually on a positive note on where I see cities going. Before getting into empirical patterns, I'll just briefly lay out some historical understandings of disorder, and I'm going to gloss over details in terms of the presentation, but they will be in the longer version of the paper that Professor Gilroy has seen. Now, theorizing disorder, many of you probably know, is one of the themes that comes out of the Chicago School. In the early part of the 20th century, scholars such as Louis Worth and others talked about disorganization. It was a famous theory, really, of the city, and disorder was a piece of it. Richard Sennett argues in the Uses of Disorder that that kind of concern with disorder really stems from an attempt to regain control, or for residents, sense of control over the environment and the urge to restore what he called the myth of the purified community to keep disorderly events at bay. That the community of solidarity never really existed makes the obsession with controlling disorder all the more interesting from a theoretical manner. Others have written on this at different levels of analysis, such as Benedict Anderson, in terms of imagining community, even at the national level. More tangible manifestations of disorder, such as graffiti, such as order in terms of public space, was also theorized by Irving Goffman, another Chicago School theorist. More in the middle part of the century, he wrote a wonderful work. I'm going way back even to medieval times, to the notion of how people were supposed to keep their pigs out of the street in a particular way. Norms regulating order were not just social, but they revolved around the physical structure of places. He also studied how shared expectations formed about the maintenance of sidewalks and keeping streets free of refuse. Now it's important to note that these thinkers did not consider disorder in essentialist or literal terms, and it doesn't mean that disorder is random or chaotic. Disorder can be socially and spatially patterned, highly organized even. What's important are the expectations and perceptions surrounding the cues, the rules and functions of order, as it were. These rules or these expectations are crucial and motivate empirical and theoretical interrogation. Perhaps more generally, I'm arguing that our way of seeing and visual cues are important to our understanding of the city. This was made, a point made well by the American theorist Lynn Laughlin. Go to the next slide. Next slide, I think, yeah. Where she writes the answer to the city life. The question of how city life was to be possible is this. City life is made possible by an ordering of the urban populace in terms of appearance and spatial location, such that those within the city could know a great deal about one another just by looking. And as hopefully you saw in our Chelsea pictures, you could learn a lot just by looking, systematically. In particular, okay, I love intellectual history, but what about the present? Well, the current scene, in a short statement is the following. Diversity continues to elicit passion, argument and debate. Diversity and increasing presence of minority and immigrant groups in cities around the world has led to a growing social anxiety, with some scholars proposing a direct link between diversity and declines in public trust. Disorder in cities has produced a similar anxiety and institutionalized action. Wilson and Kelling argued that public incivilities, even if relatively minor, like graffiti or broken windows, directly lead to more crime. At its core, broken windows theory sees visual cues as objective and natural in their meaning. Signs of disorder are negative, and they serve as a signal of the unwillingness of residents to confront urban problems. Few ideas have been more influential than broken windows. It's a major policy initiative, although what that policy is changes depending on who you ask. But the idea of broken windows theory has been picked up by many cities, New York probably the most famous, claiming it's responsible for declines in crime. The tactics of broken windows policing and a neoliberal approach to order have also been exported around the world, even to liberal Paris, where I was just at a conference, and visibly so, to England. The government's attempt to, quote, soothe the savage beast and tamp down antisocial behavior has led to a declared war incivility in the Stockwell neighborhood. A recent article noted that the London police keep an ever aggressive watch, which is apparently, and I quote from a recent report, proven a comfort to many, many Londoners, yet provoked anger within the neighborhood. The concept of disorder has penetrated other areas of social inquiry as well, including, for example, a study of health, where there's a claim that disorder gets under the Skin, so to speak, and influences depression and sickness and health, and a number of other notions of well being. So even if we don't like it, what seems to be happening according to many accounts. Next slide. Is that at least according to received wisdom, this is an oversimplification. But disorders out there, it's obvious it's bad. It causes all sorts of bad things. Crime, decline, powerlessness, poor physical health and any number of other things. So let's probe this now a little bit more and move it, step it up a level to try to consider a little bit more. What I'm thinking of is the collective meaning of disorder. Now, on the one hand, I give broken windows theory a lot of credit. I mean, obviously we want to pay attention to cues. And isn't it obvious that graffiti or drug addled revelers are a problem? Most would say yes. But imagine a situation where the same cues are not evaluated negatively. Perhaps the partiers are basically bankers on a bender. Or maybe the graffiti is on a side street in Soho. What then? Or maybe the disorder is scrawled on a side street in Chelsea. Would disorder then cause decline perception, stigmatization of that area? Perhaps not. Despite the largely taken for granted nature of disorder, there remains a first order question which I would like to explore about what triggers our shared perceptions of it in the first place. Now, in addition to the straightforward, seemingly broken windows theory of it's there, we see it as sort of a correspondence theory of disorder sociologically. We can ask further questions about context and social order. Namely, is disorder or perceptions of it filtered through the presence of context in the form of stigmatized groups and reputations of areas? And furthermore, does collective understandings of disorder reinforce those very perceptions? Now, just want to make a point to recognize subjective variations in disorder, which I'm doing does not give up systematic social inquiry. You could say, well, that's just subjective. I think that's a misleading way to think about it. Quite to the contrary, I argue that perceptions, especially when collective or inter subjective in nature, that is to say, between individual variations in subjectively perceived disorder, form a causal ingredient that can constrain or enable social behavior. This is in part a cultural stance. Michelle Lamont makes a general cultural point in her call for studies to assess social meaning in the form of institutionalized cultural repertoires and publicly available categorization systems. What is the mad, the bad and the sad printed in the Economist if not a cultural repertoire? Something that people can refer to that can stigmatize and perhaps even prove consequential? It turns out however, that most research on disorder doesn't get at any of these issues. And I've reviewed that literature elsewhere. And I've also weighed in on the debate over whether disorder, that is the cues of disorder, lead to further crime. I'm going to set that aside here and move more into trying to understand what is it about the characteristics that influence our perceptions. Challenging, in other words, are the social factors that happen on the pathway, as I think about it, to our formulation of social perceptions. Cultural attributions about disorder are prevalent in American society and increasingly in our cities. Stereotypes in particular become tempting when, as is almost always the case, residents are not trained as systematic or neutral observers. But it's not just any stereotype, it's not just any thing out there in the world. We tend to be influenced by the larger culture. We also tend to work, I would argue, a bit like Bayesians, which means we often rely on our priors when we're in uncertain situations. When you're in a neighborhood, perhaps you don't know that well, or even when you are knowledgeable about prior information takes over. So it follows that individuals may draw on this kind of implicit information system in drawing inferences. Now, long series of research in psychology suggests that categories or categorical distinctions are essential for the organization of information in everyday life. And these categories are hardly random. Research suggests that Americans anyway hold persistent beliefs linking blacks, disadvantaged minorities and recent immigrant groups to many social images. Most notably crime, danger, violence, welfare, undesirability. These kinds of images. I suspect many a Brit has similar connotations. Beliefs about disorder are reinforced by historical situations. After all, it is the case that disorder is higher and low income in minority neighborhoods in an over time historical sense. Especially for example in the United States when we consider non voluntary segregation peak at the mid to later part of the 20th century. Disinvestments in neighborhood decline have driven a certain kind of structural correlation that's real. So people are not just naive, they are making inferences to the best of their knowledge. But going I would argue beyond that. In other words, the use of racial and ethnic context to encode disorder does not mean that people are necessarily prejudiced in the sense of group hostility, I.e. individual animus toward a group. But rather this is what has been termed implicit bias. It works essentially beneath the radar screen of consciousness. Automatic racial stereotypes can persist regardless of conscious stereotypes. Even those that may feel feel that they are anti racist. In the full paper, I note an interesting study where participants were asked to do a little vignette where they were Supposed to shoot an arms target. I don't know if any of you have done these, where a person will jump up on the screen on a street, perhaps dark at night, and if they're armed and you're the cop, you're supposed to shoot them. I played this game once and basically killed everyone that was, did everything wrong, shot the wrong innocent person. It's terrible. But in the racial one, they found that people made the correct decision to shoot the armed target more quickly if the target was African American. In other words, it was correct decision to shoot armed. But the timing differed, and the authors argued that had to do with the split second decision of the association of dangerousness with race. Okay, so that's sort of at the racial group level. But I think what I'm also getting at and what's perhaps even more important is when we then link that to the profound nature of segregation and spatial difference as we have seen. In other words, let's think about the neighborhood level. And particularly I'd like to argue that racial stigma, when linked to ecological notions, is particularly powerful. This contextual stance was actually taken in excellent research on policing in the 1960s in several cities in the United States where several scholars noted this phenomenon of the ecological contamination of places. They argued that basically police officers, anyone who was encountered in a, quote, bad neighborhood, they sort of divided up the world into bad and good neighborhoods were considered to be morally liable. In other words, no matter what you did basically in a bad neighborhood, you were going to be arrested. This stigmatization is an enduring mechanism, perhaps going back even to Charles Booth's lower class London with its loafers and semi criminals. Now again, the average city dweller is not necessarily irrational or merely ignorant. That's not what I'm claiming. And I'm not claiming sort of holier than thou position. In fact, as I note in the paper, visual cues of disorder can be disturbing even for those who study it for a living. I give the example of one morning, this was about three years ago, I stepped outside condo in Boston area to notice a nice freshly painted swath of graffiti on the apartment house across the way. And I was damn angry instantaneously. I'll never forget it. I was upset, angry, and figured out maybe my wife and I had made a mistake, moved into the wrong neighborhood, it's going down right. All the things that they, they say about realizing it was what I thought was a stable neighborhood, Discussed it with local authorities, they cleaned it up. Okay, not bad. Two weeks later, appeared again, got angry again, talked to authorities again. Cleaned it up 4 to 5 graffiti, then cleanup episodes later, the problem went away. It's never reappeared. I've often thought about that because it led me to reinforce a couple things. One, that the cues of disorder are powerful, especially when it occurs near your own property or perhaps on your property. But secondly, it's not inevitable what happens that broken window or that graffiti did not inevitably lead to decline. In fact, it led to collective action in the sense of I wasn't the only one people reacting to it and taking on a move that actually I would believe got rid of it in the sense of institutionalized action. So basically then, in a nutshell, we can have the next slide. I'm arguing that racial composition and one other factor, immigration, which links into racial composition. But I think this is the new panic factor perhaps. And this is a quote by thankfully a former US presidential candidate who 12 million illegal immigrants later, we are living in a nation that's beset by people who are suicidal maniacs who want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world. Immigration, I suspect, is not just a concern in the United States. So the concentration next of racial groups and immigrant groups lead in my argument to the perception of disorder. Now what's important about this is, is that it's not just about what's going on in the street because the independently or what we might think of as actual disorder, as I said, is important and we will measure that. And individuals positions are also important. Now you ask yourself how do you look at all these different things? And I'm not going to have time to explain all the details of the analysis. But I just want to walk you through a couple findings that link to prior research and also the method that we use. Next slide please. This stems from. This can be very quick, but you can get this material elsewhere. Project in Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, which is a long term collaborative project obviously in Chicago, designed to understand context. And in short, it's two studies in one, a multi method study of neighborhoods and a longitudinal study of children. The first part is all I'm going to talk about today. Survey, systematic observation and archival records. So the first thing we did was to interview residents door to door in person in Chicago. About 9,000 of them asked detailed questions about their own life, their ties with neighbors, their feelings, perceptions, values and also perceptions of of disorder. We collected archival data from the block level to larger levels on crime rates, on violence, on poverty, on immigration, on all kinds of structural characteristics. But in order to make progress on this sort of argument that I'm Talking about and also to advance a notion of independent observation, we have to have some sense of what's actually going on in the streets. Well, if you think about the Chelsea photographs I took, one can actually go out into the streets and do that on a systematic basis. And that's what we did. We called it Systematic Social observation, or SSO for short. And what did we do? Well, we had a lot of different blocks, lots of Chelsea's. So we hired, rented a sport utility vehicle, mounted two video cameras in the back, had two people manning those video cameras. Then we had two observers that took notes on observer logs and then drove very slowly down the sides of the streets and videotaped from one corner to the next. That was a unit of analysis. Then stopped, recorded the information, took that back to the social laboratory, if you will. And we videotape, took movies of 22,000 street blocks, encoded all sorts of information. What was there on the street, Garbage, you name it. And I think I speeded up. If you can go to the next one, let's try just click on the middle. This is speeded up from a poor quality. Nonetheless, stop for a second. This led to basically still shots of every space in Chicago. If you can get it going, oh, well, that's all right. You got to see it. The idea is that if you go, I just let it run for a little bit. The actual speed was about two miles an hour. And at any particular spot, for example, in the. Whether it was a car, where you could tell whether it was abandoned and you could speed it forward and go zoom in on that. Literally people on the streets, the names of the stores, what church it was, and so forth. It was actually a lot of fun to watch these. You see garbage in the street, condoms in the street, drug deals, arrests. Just click on it, stop it, and then go to the next slide. Yeah. What we did then was to assess the level of disorder on every single block and then the larger neighborhoods in the city. So the simple idea is to say, what do people perceive? What do they think about it? What do we see? How do they stack up? Well, one thing we found out, and this is a replication of the original study, is that people living in the exact same block see things a bit differently. Namely, whites in Chicago always perceive more disorder than Latinos. First generation immigrants compared to second, third generation immigrants and blacks put differently in the way to think about this is imagine we all live here in London, the exact same block, and we ask about perceptions of disorder that we all differ. So obviously something's going on in this case, the argument is that whites norm things differently. They perceive disorder to be more problematic than minority groups. Next. Secondly, however, and this is, I hope, easy to interpret, but I will just describe it verbally, It's a little disturbing. What this shows is that once we take into account the crime rate, other characteristics of the neighborhood and all the characteristics of the person such as their education, their age, whether they own a home, how long they lived in the neighborhood, we adjust that and we simply compare along the bottom the proportion black portion, African American in the neighborhood and its effect on perceived disorder. That's the lines going up. And then the other comparison is actual disorder and its effects on perceived disorder. And what I've done to try to show in a simple way is just to show the movement from the 25th to the 75th percentile on racial composition, which is left to right along the bottom. And that's where you see this huge effect. And standard deviation of perceived disorder is about 0.25. So that's a big effect. And the gap between the red and the blue line is essentially the effect of observed disorder. What's in the streets? 7:1 differential. Now we can argue about, well, what else didn't we control? And I can go into details about bars and liquor stores, which we also measure physical disorder, time of day, which we control. We can talk about all those sorts of things. But at some level our argument is that we've got to face up to the fact that there seem to be pretty powerful cues that are being sent off with regard to composition of the population. That's driving perceptions that goes way beyond what we can actually see. I did not put up an overhead on this. But the proportion foreign born or immigrant status also independently predicts perceptions of disorder. Skip ahead here a little bit. Another we're doing time wise. Another factor that I want to talk about is collective perceptions of disorder, which I think is perhaps even more interesting than predicting these individuals. So what we did further is we now have the assessment of the collective beliefs of residents in the neighborhood at two points in time in our study from the mid-1990s to 2002 and created an overall scale of the proportion, or the measure here is basically just how high people are on their scale of perceiving disorder in the neighborhood. Go to the next slide. What we see is an unbelievable stability in disorder. I started the lecture talking about stability over long periods of time in poverty. We now see that collectively perceived disorder independently measured. These are complete separate surveys of different people now, not the same people. Followed up different people, you see the same pocket, some change, but a dramatic stability in disorder. What about poverty? Next slide. You know what? Poverty is also stable in Chicago, in this case, over four decades. This is very simple. Let me just point out, so that we're clear here. This is the percentage of families in poverty in 1960, percentage of families in poverty in 2000. Over this time, we've had race riots, we've had economic depression, we've had gentrification, We've had, you name it, all the social factors. But what do you see? That neighborhood up there that was poor 40 years later is still poor. There's not a lot of change in poverty in Chicago. What's driving that next slide? Well, this was one of the more interesting. When I saw this, I almost fell out of my chair, because in social science, the correlation of 0.9 is pretty high, even at the community level. What this is is socially perceived disorder predicting poverty. It's not even about just the stability of poverty itself. Collective perceptions of disorder in the environment predict a neighborhood's level of poverty at a later point. Now you can say, well, what about prior poverty? What about race? I've just said there's all these things that are confounded. Well, thankfully, I'm not. You'll be thankful that I'm not going to show you the regression and other things that we did to adjust for that. It turns out that even when we control for prior poverty, racial composition, and a number of other things, we still see this effect. That was in the full paper, but I'm not going to present that here. Go to the next slide. Further evidence, I think, is that we can show very simply. I always think that simple ways to present data are often the best, that this connection is more tenacious in the black community than the white community. In other words, if we just divide the communities in Chicago between predominantly white and predominantly black, what we see is that collectively perceived disorder is more strongly related to later poverty, which, by the way, is adjusted for initial poverty levels, than it is in white communities. So you're beginning to hopefully get the notion that. Well, it does, or at least appears to depend on context. That is to say, the meaning of disorder and its effects is related not just in a direct way, but in an interactional way with the composition of the population. The same sense of disorder in this case is predicting a downward spiral. It's steeper, in other words, in black communities than white communities, and the correlation is approximately double in magnitude. Therefore, the data suggests that perceptions are more consequential for a downward trajectory when they intersect with communities of color. Okay, so what are some conclusions? Now I've tried to underscore the relevance of social psychological mechanisms interacting with cultural and structural processes for understanding urban inequality, an area that's dominated by structuralist research. These need not be separate research enterprises in crime. And the study of disorder has something to offer, I think the study of cities, stratification and even demography. Historically resilient correlations based on our past have led to connections of disorder and crime that have deep roots particularly in American social stratification. And these are unlikely to be overcome through short term interventions because people act on their perceptions of disorder. The contributions of racial composition and concentrated poverty are tied reciprocally to the actions of observers. In other words, social perceptions form a meaningful aspect of the neighborhood environment. Now, it's clear too that if we look at the US history, and I'm not going to go into it, there's differences across areas of the country that I think further support the argument. I'm going to skip over that, but I will say that I think this is an underappreciated cause of decline or lack of decline in certain areas of cities in the United States. At the very least, perceptions of disorder, which in a way goes the opposite of Moyhan in the sense of defining deviance up, appear to matter for reasons that extend far beyond broken windows. Now, the implications of this argument appear probably to be kind of grim, right? Stability, poverty, things look stable, same over time. But I'm going to end on a positive note, believe it or not. Go to the next article or next overhead on a positive prognosis. In the last five minutes here, we'll have kept on time, I believe, which is shocking. I wish to explore an optimistic forecast for a number of reasons. While the narrative of disorder and decline will always be with us, the desire for control over the urban environment will always be with us. I believe that things are changing mainly through the diversification of society through immigration, differential fertility by race, ethnicity, and increasing intergroup unions of all sorts, whether it be friendship, workplace, marriage, cohabitation, and on and on. That is, a countervailing process is breaking down distinctions that have forced so long served as the flashpoint for classifications of disorder. As my distinguished discussant Paul Gilroy has argued, the increasing mixing and heterogeneity within racial groups works against race, as it were, which can only help to further elide the basis for social distinctions that are inscribed in space. That's the key point I'm arguing. I wholly agree with Gilroy's argument that racial categories are becoming ever more uncertain and that ratiology is in a form of crisis. Even in the US we're about to elect black man as president. Things are changing. There's increasing mixing of the source that I'm talking about now in the US it's also the case that we have demographic changes that are going on. The so called creative class, artists, more educated people are moving, moving to cities. Cities are returning. Even 15, 20 years ago, there were headlines. The cities were dying. The famous quote, president in New York City dropped dead. This is all changing. Outer suburbs are now dying and withering away. People are moving to the city. The creative class is attracted to, not repelled by diversity. Former student of mine at Chicago, Richard Lloyd, who's now at Vanderbilt, just published a book Neo Bohemia and argues that former decaying but still disorderly neighborhoods are in many cities, but especially Chicago, which is what he studied, are the sites of attraction for artists and leading to artistic communities. And what he calls grit is the new glamour in his particular neighborhood. Wicker park is a Neo Bohemia. It's a hot neighborhood that is teeming with artists and professionals seeking an edge where and I quote, figurative representations of disorder are translated in the beacons of a new symbolic order. So cities are back. And I believe that part of the reason is the value that diversity holds and the effect of diversity on attracting those against race. I would add to this the consequences of immigration, which is one of the biggest drivers of structural change. And I'll make a simple point I've published on this elsewhere. The relationship between immigration and crime and violence is negative, not positive. It is negative in the United States, and I would venture to argue in many other places as well, that is to say, the relationship between crime goes down. Go to the next slide. As immigration goes up. This is a measure of diversity. There's many measures of diversity. The language one, I think is one of the most interesting ones. It draws from something like 100 different countries. And this is a Herfendahl index for those of you that like those kinds of details. Basically, the higher that goes, the more diversity of international groups, obviously, the more diversity of language and cultures and mixing and so forth. As that goes up, what you see in those two lines is the primary coming down. And the red dots are communities that are above the median in disorder. So interestingly enough, what it's suggesting is that not only is the relationship negative, the relationship is stronger in higher disorder neighborhoods. It's actually a particular protective factor. And finally, this map shows the relationship again between Diversity and homicide, although it allows it to vary by community. And the green areas are where the relationship between immigration and violence is the strongest, meaning it's the most negative. And they are historically the areas of greatest segregation, the black south side. And moving into the west, it's only in the relatively small remaining pocket on the north side that's primarily white, where you don't see the protective effect of immigration. That's not too much of a surprise now, is it? Because those are the areas that have long been resistant to integration. So yet again, we're seeing this relationship. So if diversity and immigration are implicated in re energized cities in the decline in crime, this may help to work against the pernicious associations that have been demonstrated between diversity and lower perceived trust. And I think those are real. But as we've seen here, these patterns of disorder that are, I think, deep and they've been around for a long time will not go away easily. But given the changes that are going on, I think there is some reason for hope. And again, the next picture, particularly with regard to immigration and the notion that immigrant groups are making this known, this is one of my favorite pictures. This was captured in Chicago during March about a year ago, 100,000 or so marching in favor of immigration rights. This was before we thought a bill was going to be passed in the Senate. That did not happen. We'll see where the election goes. Now. The uk, you tell me. Picture seems potentially bright. Although there's an immigration panic in Europe, particularly in continental Europe, Netherlands, Italy do not seem to be having such a good time. They're outstripping the US Actually in immigration panic, but in the UK anyway, the crime rate for the most part, last time I looked, was going down. And London has been for some time one of the most diverse cities on earth. The concentration of poverty by racial and immigrant groups here is not as severe as in many American cities. So while the narrative of community decline and disorder will never go away, even here, I think things look positively. So in conclusion, the late sociologist Peter Blau once remarked that there's too much inequality, but that there can never be too much heterogeneity. If heterogeneity ultimately serves to reduce disparities of the city through the blurring of boundaries and the slow dissolving of categorical distinctions that to date have been so pervasive, perhaps theorists of urban disorder can help lead the way through efforts such as the present to elucidate what in fact is the social order of the city and the increasingly diverse City, along with the irreducibly social basis for the collective perceptions of disorder in the first place. Thank you.
- [55:33]
A
We're going to have a response from Gilroy.
- [55:47]
B
Well, I'm extremely grateful to Professor Sampson and to the bjs for giving me the honour. Kicking the glass the honour of replying to his extremely interesting presentation. It offers, I think, a valuable state of the art snapshot of the professional sociologist craft and addresses a number of issues of great concern, especially as he pointed out in the run up to the forthcoming US election. His methodological innovations are surely significant and likely to prove influential, and his focus on durable inequality and the social ranking of places is something I find stimulating and instructive, even if those dynamics are gravely complicated, as they are in contemporary London, by increasing inequality, by the effects of privatization and by the adjustments in the inflated market in housing. Above all, Professor Sampson's concern to show where he calls the prevailing. Where what he calls the prevailing structuralist analysis of these matters might be productively supplemented and perhaps even integrated with a greater concern with matters of culture is of course, to be applauded. And that commitment is something I share and endorse wholeheartedly. And that was evident, I think our convergence was, I hope, apparent from his conclusion. The quote from Ralph Ellison that he used in his PowerPoint functions as the epigraph for the version of the paper that was shown to me in advance. And the fact that he's drawn his epigraph from that inspirational fiction is something I take as a warrant align my response to Rome in some different directions than the one he has himself followed. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ralph Ellison's Invisible man, his mid 20th century novel was in a deep and quiet dialogue, I think, with philosophical and sociological and political concerns. A rare, stimulating conversation between the humanities, literature, psychology and social theory can be traced, I think, back through the intervening figures like Ellison and Richard Wright, the other one, one of several, actually, but let's not go into that. To the towering influence of Du Bois, who, we should remember, had been trained in Germany as well as in Cambridge, as a historian, economist and sociologist. Now, that intellectual breadth is something, I think, that can enrich the contested domain of social science, even as the dominance of rational choice models and mechanistically applied quantitative methods stifle and seek to undermine other strategies of inquiry and academic reflection. The balance of forces, though, in that struggle over what sociology can be, is very different in Europe than it is in the United States. And that difference and its relationship to US exceptionalism is registered and US exceptionalism, registered inside and outside of the exception academy, provides the background to what I want to say in reply. Ellison's picaresque tale centres on the currency of visible, I.e. phenotypical differences and the special place of phenotype within the US racial nomos, the spatial and legal order of racialized forms of power and inequality. I think Ellison has much to teach us about those two totalizing categories, blackness and whiteness and the Manichean system into which the history of racial slavery organized them, even though, as Professor Sampson pointed out, even though today that arrangement is retreating in favor of a more complex multipolar arrangement in which African Americans no longer are the largest racialized minority and the United States traditional one drop of blood rule has lost something of its historical authority. Ellison, I think in this anticipated critical work on sight, science and social life, undertaken by writers like Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary at Columbia, and our own Tony Woodywiss and others who distinguish sharply between vision and visuality. Ellison was a humanist concerned to challenge the common sense obviousness of racial type and to emphasize that the I had to be educated, to be trained, to be schooled, to be sensitized, to be habituated, if it was going to see the world and interpret bodies according to the inhuman logic of racial hierarchy. From this perspective, then race as political ontology is anything but a natural outcome. For Ellison and his other Cold War interlocutors, there could be no such thing as what Professor Sampson calls, and I'm quoting, the human tendency to categorize racial and ethnic groups despite their lack of scientific separateness. That tendency then had to be accounted for. It could be, given a history, its foundational significance for social life in the United States had to be explained and not assumed. Indeed, rather like Fanon, who explored these points a few years later and complicated them with a further reflexive fold in which the infra human objects of an intrusive white gaze see themselves being seen. Ellison emphasized the sociogenesis of racialized difference, inviting us to understand it as an effect of alienation deeper than anything known within the tradition of Hegel and Marx. Here what is called in the US race corresponds only to the amputation of humanity. It is to be interpreted from, through the apparatus of a dynamic nominalism, as racism's product rather than its catalyst or its precursor. Now Professor Sampson's paper and this special occasion also furnish us with an important opportunity to explore, not only to deal with his substantive arguments, of course, but also to reflect upon the discipline of sociology and those institutional mechanisms like bjs that have a bearing upon its likely future in a world of metric indicators of esteem and research quality. If he forgives me for sounding parochial, then for a moment he appears before us as an example, with the imprimatur of the sociology department lodged in the world's greatest university. And we are therefore obliged to ask what his arguments reveal about the practice of sociology in in the US idiom which is increasingly offered to us as the benchmark of our professional worth. The globalization then, of US intellectual power is a potent factor in what has become, despite all sorts of hand wringing about public intellectuals, a timid and deeply conservative academic culture. Other elements, of course, have contribute to this situation. I don't want to sound even more parochial, but I should not name them. You're not responsible for, let me emphasize that an ever more strictly formalized research culture, a new academic division of labour that has hived off our teaching and stratified those who are locked into it below those who buy themselves out the abbreviation and acceleration of the PhD degree itself and the difficulties involved in pursuing open ended truths when the imperatives of security and of securitocracy intervene increasingly to diminish and to mediatize public and scholarly debate. All of these developments help to generate, I think, a stronger sense of which questions one is allowed to ask and which methods one is allowed to use while remaining part of the official sociological conversation, and which questions are to be excluded, producing responses along the lines of that's all very well, but it's not all sociology. I would suggest that there has lately been a marked contraction of the imaginative space in which the training we provide can operate and the narrowing of the idea of science is a result. I submit that these general problems have a particular significance for work on racial divisions in the city, where questions of security arise in a pure form and where issues like the crisis in public education and the effects of mass incarceration are sometimes hived off into specialized sub disciplines of dubious provenance. For a long time, of course, the United States was wrongly, in my view, touted as the destination of race relations on earth. In British government and academic life we quarreled at length over how far ahead the United States might be thought to be. There were disputes over whether the US future should be embraced or avoided. The introduction of our anti discrimination legislation, for example, in the mid-1960s was seen at the time as a means to avoid that destination, though lately, under New Labour, a US future seems to be the only one that our rulers and our official punditocracy seem to be able to Imagine, I think you will have noted, as I did last week, that the Ministry of Love is now reporting they're going to be issuing US style report cards for school students, which are the latest innovation deployed to repair our incorrigible system of state education. The idea then, that the US Is ahead of everybody else on earth is currently resurgent and has some common, well, I suppose has been common to contemporary political pronouncements on racial division. Barack Obama, who's already been mentioned, comprehends his own candidacy as proof of that very proposition and notes, I'm quoting the fissures of race that have characterized American experience, unquote, before qualifying that observation by drawing attention to the fluid state I'm quoting again, of identity, the leaps through time, the collision of cultures that mark our modern life, unquote. Of course, the election will provide a sort of test of that theory. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, you'll probably recall that Condoleezza Rice did delivered her analysis of the continuing place of racial inequality in US Society. That too had a comparative aspect, but the basis on which her evaluations were made was a convenient and conventional measure in which the United States embodied the future while everybody else was mired in the past and those who were trapped in that past forfeited their right to criticize the United States. I'm quoting her now the United states is about 100% ahead of any place else in the world in issues of race. And I say that absolutely and fundamentally. You go to any other meeting around the world and show me the kind of diversity that you see in America's cabinet, in America's foreign service, in America's business community, in America's journalistic community. Show me that kind of diversity anyplace else in the world, and I am prepared to be lectured about race. We will make a mistake if we let people jump to the conclusion that the United States has therefore not dealt with the issues of race, particularly if you look at how issues of race are dealt with in most of the world. I think that defensive flourish in the final sentence qualifies Rice's sense of US Uniqueness by making the country's supposed triumph over racial inequality into a relative rather than absolute victory. Her words suggest that she well understands her nation's vulnerability before a global public opinion that cannot fathom its peculiar. I was going to say post colonial and post slavery difficulties in this area. Now the situation becomes more complicated because the last few years have witnessed US racial technologies being offered as the best way to understand and manage racialized politics and to govern the problems created both by racial hierarchy and ethnic plurality. Hence the rather cryptic allusions to the impact of Professor Putnam's work, which has been so much in vogue in our own governmental system of late. I'm not going to deal with Putnam this evening because I think Ben Fine has absolved me of that particular task. And I commend you all to Ben Fine's interesting book on social capital or social theory, which I think carries this sort of nugget of my own feelings on this question, the fact that racial hierarchy. Okay, in other words, I think. Let me emphasize the point so I'm clear. The US which is the world's principal example of successful settler colonialism, provides the foundational norms for discussion of the perils of cultural heterogeneity and, of course, the negative impacts of diversity and immigration, which is what Professor Sampson is challenging. U.S. history and political culture have been used to generate ideal types that specify the future for everybody else on earth when it comes to race and racism. And those US derived models are advanced as if they reveal a desirable balance between discreetly separable civic and ethnic versions of nationalism. The debate on social cohesion is the result in our polity. The fact that racial hierarchy underpins the persistently segregated social and spatial order of the US Is viewed either as an accident or some sort of unfortunate byproduct and a natural outcome or the result of economic pressure. Again, Condoleezza Rice, and I take so many cues from her, follows Francis Fukuyama, another influential figure, in describing racism as their country's birth defect, a metaphor which suggests to me that though it may not be easily overcome, it was an outcome of the nation's establishment rather than its belligerent precondition. They're common in attention to the actual history of US racism, a word I'm sorry to say Professor Sampson found rather difficult to utter this evening. And racial hierarchy enhances the appeal of cultural divisions as a privileged explanation of local, national, and indeed geopolitical conflict. And this is something that haunts all of those who, like he does in his paper, though not the same evening, sometimes slips into using race and ethnicity interchangeably. Now, of course, I am not suggesting Professor Sampson is an advocate of the export of US Racial technologies to other governments and polities worldwide. He notes that possibility in his paper ruefully, I think, as part of a suggestion that research in Chicago may have a wider relevance, but he's no ideological proponent of that view. But there is, I think, to. To borrow from him, if you'll allow me, what might be termed an implicit teleological flow to his presentation, he suggests not that Camden and Chelsea are or London's unusual degree of diversity of things to teach researchers and policy makers in Chicago, though that may of course be the case, but certainly seems to imagine the influence happening the other way around. And I'm sure there are things to learn from that environment. However, the particularities of of U.S. city life, I think I found them passed over too quickly and quietly for my liking. It's intimated that these patterns, particularly where they do bear upon questions of race and ethnicity and migration, could be universal patterns. And I want to dispute that idea. Residential segregation along racialized lines, the block system, the stark opposition of suburbs to ghettos are all components of a particular historical and and social achievement. It's not some spontaneous outcome of generic metropolitan development. Chicago, after all, was only founded in the 1830s. And we know from our reading of Cronon you know that the only the only radial streets in Chicago's were trails of Native Americans who inhabited the area before. I'm unclear, I must confess, about the extent to which Professor Sampson regards the of segregation along racial lines as a problem in its own right, or how he views the articulation of racial and class divisions. Had to go elsewhere in his work to find that not in Sydney's presentation. And let me repeat and emphasize that we agree culture and meaning are important and they're especially salient in the forms of popular and common sense knowledge that bear upon cities and what I, but not he apparently would want to call the history of antagonistic class relationships. So we disagree over class, which doesn't fare well in his hands, and we disagree also about racism, which appears only in a very brief quote from Professor Sampson's colleague Larry Bobo. Both class and racism are touched upon in his presentation, but have not been incorporated into its scholarly fabric. The problematic he favors as a means to manage the nexus of race and class relationships borrows the idea of implicit bias, bias from social psychology. Mahzarin Bernardi, colleague of both of ours, actually. And it functions in his enterprise as a polite surrogate for the term institutional racism, which has been at the center of our political debate here, if not since Hamilton and Carmichael, then since Lord Scarman denied it was part of the causal chain of our 1981 riots. So whether we like that term or not, that's the term that's embattled and engaged in our political system with regard to the relationship between space and social order. Sampson takes his initial cues from the symbolic interactionism of Lynn Laughlin. I Think good European that I am, I think I prefer the more conceptual approach laid out at about the same time interestingly, by the French sociologist and phenomenologist of the everyday, Henri Lefebvre, in his classic production of space, particularly those strategies suggested by his stimulating distinctions between spatial practice, representations of space and spatial representations. My great appreciation of his work aside, my differences with Professor Sampson are amplified by the fact that my London and the version of the city that emerges from his sketch of its persistent cultural geography do not align.
- [73:23]
C
Now.
- [73:23]
B
This may be because I've spent most of the last 30 years in and around Finsbury park, an area vast that thanks to Campbell Bunt, claimed more pages in Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London than any other district. It's a place, as I'm sure many of you who are local will know, still draws the unwanted attention of Anne Widekind and a number of other would be media scourges of hoodies, druggies and antisocials who cluster in the grimy shadows of the terror mosque that looms so ghastly over the polluted penumbra of the Arsenal shop. I expect that, like Sampson's pocket of poverty in Chelsea, Finsbury Park's continuity as a place of danger and disadvantage and disrepute could indeed draw the attention of a publication like the Economist. However, that apparent intractability conceals a number of stories of discontinuity that demand sociological and anthropological answers precisely because both population and built environment have been so totally transformed. How were the Irish, the Maltese, the Caribbeans and the Cypriots to be succeeded by Bangladeshis and Pakistanis who were then in turn replaced by Algerians, Brazilians and Eastern Europeans. So it's not just here. Identity is not sticky, actually, and those things are reinvented where we I suddenly found I went away to the States for six or seven years. I've come back to my neighborhood, which is another term doesn't translate easily into our idiom of social scientific speech, I must say, and I found myself in Little Algeria when I went to the post office. So I don't think things are as sticky in this city as they are in other places, and for reasons I will explain in my conclusion, which is imminent. Certainly those changes can't be mapped without altering the way the area was seen and represented to outsiders. Another word which didn't come up was Islam, of course, and when I speak of security and securitocracy, something of that is what's in mind, certainly in that area. Anyway, one crime problem moved across the Seven Sisters Road from Jerry White's Campbell Bunk to Siri and Blair's Blackstock Road home, I am told, to one of the capital's major markets in stolen property. If you want to get your mobile phone back, by the way, those of you who are not local, that's where apparently you have to go. Well, as a denizen of that neighbourhood, I would have thought the Old Kent Road and a number of other places might be more helpful. But there we are other. You know, I mean, thinking about the persistent social geography of that, it's been very interesting, having been away and come back to find that the sex work has been moved out of that area, actually, although the bed and breakfast accommodation is still there and still very much booked in bulk by local authority authorities seeking to house refugees and other homeless people. There's something else, though. I mean, and that's to do with growing up in a bombed city, as I did. And many of you here, I suppose, will recognize that experience. A bombed city where sort of rampant buddleia and mountains of rubble were fenced off by endless stretches of corrugated iron. I've always regarded graffiti rather differently from Professor Sampson's other signs of disorder, public drunkenness, rubbish and broken wind windows. I don't know if this is because grit's the new glamour, but I suppose it could be. Certainly. I make no apology for seeing graffiti still as something that can beautify and enhance urban environments by ennobling them with art rather than disorderly confirmation of their dangerous, if not pathological character. My own memory tells me that graffiti, not all of it politically acceptable to me, I should emphasize, was part of what brought our broken city back to life. ENOCH for peace, p.m. clapton is God. Remember Bloody Sunday, White riot, Zulu nation, no war, but class war. That's one of my favorite ones. And now these glorious multicolored embellishments of post industrial community drawn from the global aesthetic, rooted in another US export, hip hop culture, the new lingua franca of global youth. How that graffiti becomes part of a chain of signification that connotes decline, racial objection and disorder is a story that cannot, I think, be divorced from an account of black America's post black power forms of culture and political resistance from migration stories and transnational interculture which changed the value and the meaning of the South Bronx. From a more obviously sociological perspective, I'm disinclined to recognize a sub discipline that operates under the banners of disorder. Theory, disorder and order cannot, I think, be absolute states. And though I greatly appreciate Professor Sampson's argument against the reification of disorder and the patients and the care with which he directs attention towards questions of culture, meaning and symbol. These discrepancies lead me to wonder about the size and the strategic calculations in his targets when they are transposed out of the US conditions to which they correspond so closely. Representations of poverty and inequality are made material in cultural ecology of built environments. That discursive process bears upon the relative value of dwelling space and what he calls neighbourhood. I've already mentioned there are a number of key terms in his presentation that I don't think translate neighbourhoods. One, diversity is another. Certainly with regard to neighbourhood, I think questions of scale intervene. I'm not sure we would think of Chelsea as one neighbourhood. I think there are a number of issues about the scaling of neighbourhoods which have a bearing upon this. And actually I'd want to argue that they were methodologically significant too, in drawing attention to how fear and stigma diverge from what people actually see. Professor Sampson, who is really more concerned with the predictive power of those stereotypes that tempt residents who haven't benefited from a training as neutral observers rather than the sources of those stereotypes, refers us to what seem to be some old and familiar problems. Those chestnuts reappear shrouded in a novelty that derives largely from the fact that the style of sociological thought with which he's imminently, and I think productively and impressively in such polite dispute, generally refuses concern with cultural factors because it is judged to be inadequately scientific. Now, making those cultural inquiries respectably scientific is no mean achievement, and I absolutely applaud him for it this evening. But the underlying issue of how those cultural factors that are independent of the agency of individual racists or openly prejudiced behavior, how they came to impact in this area of urban politics and political economy, was, as that Ellison epigraph revealed, recognized as a problem by African American analysts, many of them in Chicago, incidentally, a very, very long time ago. Similarly, the question of how the perception of social problems might diverge from their actual incidents has, as I've already said, usually been interpreted by introducing the idea of racism as a concept, a concept which helps to account for how rationality and irrationality become articulated together in systematic patterns that restrict recognition as human to specific groups and then iterate natural difference as the interpretive key to unequal social relations. Now, Professor Sampson has not pursued that course. There has to be a division of labor. Instead, his project uses the idea of race in many, many circumstances where I, and if I may be so bold, even the dubious mainstream of British sociological writing would want to speak instead about racism. And perhaps for him, the reification of race is the inevitable price to be paid for the de reification of disorder. Some thinkers for whom the city of Chicago occupied the greatest amount of interpretive space have been most acute at driving home this point. That degraded and degrading metropolitan impression environment was memorably explored, for example, by the other Richard Wright in 12 Million Black Voices, his historic 1941 photographic collaboration with Edwin Rosscamp Wright. I suppose you know him as a novelist, but he's also a kind of autodidactic philosopher, sociologist, and renegade postal worker, as well as a writer of literature, the first African American to reach for the concept of modernity, to make sense of what he was seeing around him in the iconic kitchenettes and alleys of Chicago's south side. And that combination of text and images sought to combat and to intervene in the process that yields those persistent and tempting stereotypes, a process that included public and private interests, included the media and the law as well as the government. Wright's introduction to the Chicago School volume by Drake and Caton of 1945, Black Metropolis, sets out the parameters of his own ecumenical inquiry which discovered the origins of 20th century social problems in the area of race in the United States, deep in the country's colonial history and with his analysis in mind, I think Sampson's concern with durable inequality tempts me into another long dure speculation endorsed by my reading of Patricia Seed's brilliant Ceremonies of Possession, a book which examines the varying rituals whereby wild nature in the New World was made over and became private property within the rules specified by John Locke and other English apostles of improvement. Their understanding of nature, of labor, of slavery, freedom, and of property might also, I think, be recognized as part of a history of relationships and definitions which, though the conquest of Chicago, the place of wild garlic, came much later than the acquisition of New England, might even now be an unspoken factor in in the naturalization of inequality and the axiology of urban spaces. Order and disorder, good neighborhoods and bad. The colonial monos was racialized from its inception. It was legitimated by conquest and purchase and then consolidated in the institution of the plantation. It was bounded and fenced with the sharpened pails and pikes of English enclosure which had been exported to the New World and set to work there again by those improvers who made the exercise of enclosure integral to their claims upon the earth. In time those boundaries would eventually become those iconic white picket fences of US subdivided suburbia. Whereas the Kefalus study that Professor Sampson reports. The fastidiousness, the peculiar fastidiousness of residents has to be explained in relation to what Louis Quackon has told us about. About the history of the ghetto and I might add about the history of the prison. The battle of civilization. The battle for civilization, excuse me, and against the encroachments of wild nature and social disorder does persist in US cities. Something I learned on the streets of pistol waving. New Haven as it is known. We still need to understand why some categories of people fall out of that history and back into the world of scarcity more easily than. Than others do. Stereotyping and implicit bias will not account for that recurrent outcome in the absence of a theory of racism and its practical and institutional consequences. Thank you.
- [84:17]
A
For a couple questions. Why am I of surprise?
- [84:19]
C
We ran a little long. Yeah, we want to have time for questions. So I'll just make this very brief. Appreciate very much Professor Gilroy's response. I actually agree with a fair amount of it. Although I would say I'm not sure I want to be held responsible for all of us sociology in terms of discipline. And the other thing I would say is that when I go to the American Sociological association meetings, I can't figure out what a sociologist is because it's all over the map as far as I can tell. So that's either a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not sure. But I do agree that the sociogenesis of racial classification is crucial. The tendency to categorize, I think is the crucial point of the argument that in the US historical situation anyway has linked to a racial categorization which I do not view as somehow inevitable or innate. If that was unclear in terms of the particularities of the situation, whether it's London versus Chicago, that's a really important point. That there's interesting debate going on at many other cities as well. I would just say that one additional reference you might want to take a look at. There was an interesting exchange among scholars from the LA School of Urban Sociology and Geography and the Chicago School that came out in Urban Geography, I believe was the journal. And there, I mean, the debate was, well, is Chicago distribution? Chicago has anything to say about la? It looks very different. And well, it depends on your view. You might argue that the surface manifestations are quite different. But certain social mechanisms and processes, which is what I would argue in terms of segregation, in terms of concentration effects and so forth are the same. I think what we really need to do is to split those out. And I think there would be an agreement There, which would be to say that we need to separate out what are truly structural differences from sort of deep processes and surface manifestations. Also, I would argue that in my other work, and even in this work, I'm really concerned with stability and change, and I've laid that out more explicitly elsewhere, that I do not assume any teleological sort of problem process, that it's going somewhere. It's inevitable. I do think that the empirics tell us that certain aspects of social structure in the city are quite durable. And I think perhaps in terms of character, in terms of the larger order, not necessarily at the micro level, but in terms of character of areas even here in London. We'll have a good discussion over dinner, I guess, are pretty stable. Certainly it's true in Chicago. I mean, the Gold coast in the Slum was written by Henry Zorbo in 1929. There is no difference, pretty much. I mean, yes, certain areas around there have changed, but the fundamental idea of difference and the rich separating themselves off and where that happens is a very stable phenomenon in many cities around the world. That's interesting and it's worth studying. It doesn't mean there's not change. I wholly agree that graffiti can be artistic, as noted, and in an interesting way, I think it actually supports my thesis, although not the way it was articulated. In other words, as Professor Gilroy knows, and you didn't read the full paper, part of what I was trying to do is to say, okay, let's start from the logic of what we'll call the disorder theory, the Wilson Kelly theory, and then work through that logic and the implications. That doesn't mean that I necessarily accept that. And as someone who spray painted a fair amount of graffiti as a youth myself, I don't reify or assume, of course, in my case it wasn't artistic, but that's another story. I even broke a few windows. I don't think that that's necessarily inevitably disorder. So I agree with you there, but it's not in this paper, so fair enough. Glad you brought up Richard Wright. Great stuff. I think the racism one, that's too complicated to end on here. I've had long discussions with my colleague Larry Bolo on this, who insists that institutionalized racism, which I think in part is true in the debate in the US Sometimes, depending on how you label something, it's hard to make analytic progress. I don't think implicit bias is denuded of concerns with racism. And the reason I think implicit bias is important in this particular context has to do in part with the effect of the process that we see, at least in Chicago, on all racial groups. I'm not sure it came out here, but Latinos, Hispanics, Asians, whites, blacks, all perceive more disorder. As the racial concentration of blacks increase, that tells us that there's something going on. It's not just prejudice because one doesn't expect blacks to be prejudiced against other blacks. So I guess what I would say is it's not simple prejudice or racism, but it's deeper. And if we want to call that institutionalized racism, I'm comfortable with that. I think implicit bias is one analytic form of that, but that's a longer story and I don't want to take up any more time. Thank you again for your comments.
- [90:07]
A
Okay, just to keep my word, we've got time for a couple of quick questions and that's about all.
- [90:12]
B
Yes.
- [90:15]
A
I'll bring a microphone down.
- [90:19]
B
Hello. Thank you both professors for your interest, insightful and very erudite presentations. My question's directed to you, Professor Sampson. I was wondering whether your positive prognosis at the end, I'm just wondering whether that will be tested as we lurch towards an economic recession. I'm particularly interested in your thoughts about how relations, particularly between immigrants grew. Groups will possibly be challenged as those particular groups compete for limited resources. Just wondered what your views are.
- [91:00]
C
It's an excellent question. In fact, I did feel a little foolish as I was writing this and the stock market was dropping a thousand points thinking that long term economic prognosis is not so great and that could lead to trouble talking. On the other hand, I still maintain for a couple reasons. One, taking a US centric perspective, if you think about the immigrant story in the US it's been sort of a long history and even during the 20s and 30s, tremendous period of immigration depression came out of that continued to be an immigrant country. So I think there's reasons for positive beliefs there. But also even today, economic revitalization in many US cities, particularly areas that were the site of deep concentration of poverty, has come about in large part through immigration. So it's part of, I suspect one of the the wheels of recovery will be immigrant and immigrant labor and the continuing strength of immigrant economies, even though everyone there's a secular hit. In other words, everyone's taking just to give you an example, in Chicago, the second most vibrant economic district outside of the so called numerical mile long Avenue with all the boutiques is in the burial along 26th Street. So I don't think that's going to go away. And I also don't see, again, using the election as an example, sort of the turns that we've seen in the past to racial categories and xenophobia just doesn't seem to be happening. I think people recognize what's going on for the most part. So call me to a continue to be non.
- [92:59]
A
Any more questions? Well, let's join me then. Thanking tonight's speakers.