Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited 1
2009; Wiley; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01211.x
ISSN1468-4446
Autores Tópico(s)Homelessness and Social Issues
ResumoWhen they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me. Scholars of the city have long interpreted signs of disorder in public spaces in ways that constitute powerful forces of social differentiation. From observers of London in the 1800s such as Charles Booth (1889) and Henry Mayhew (1862), to authors of modern classics such as Jane Jacobs's (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, to present day concerns over ‘broken windows’ and crime, signs of disorder – especially when linked to the poor – have been viewed as central to understanding city life. By social disorder, observers commonly mean behaviour involving strangers and considered potentially threatening, such as verbal harassment on the street, open solicitation for prostitution, public intoxication and rowdy groups of young males in public. Traditional conceptions of physical disorder typically refer to markers such as graffiti on buildings, abandoned cars, garbage in the streets and the proverbial broken window. 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 this great city included colour codes for the economic and social make-up of its many streets (LSE 2008). The lowest classes, coded in black, were described as not just poor but living in ‘squalor’ with public displays of alcoholism. Expressing a view that many today probably still hold (if silently), Booth unabashedly labelled the lowest-class category as ‘vicious, semi criminal,’ with the lowest grade ‘inhabited principally by occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals – the elements of disorder’ (Pfautz 1967:191). What Booth thus accomplished was a merger of ecological classification and spatial difference with a subtle yet potent moral evaluation based on behaviour, what might be considered the precursor to contemporary notions of the ‘underclass’. This was a consequential intellectual move, for the designation of areas as disreputable and disordered, as I shall argue, can set in motion long-term processes that reinforce the initial stigmatized state and thereby contribute to the social reproduction of inequality. The relative stability of concentrated disadvantage is a rather remarkable and surprising phenomenon. In 2006 The Economist provided intriguing examples of the similar nature of neighbourhoods in London from Booth's day to the present, even at a micro ecological level. Figure I reproduces a map of a section of the Chelsea neighbourhood, comparing 1898 with 2001 on the dimension of residential wealth. There is evidence of change, of course, with a general upgrading along the southernmost edge of the neighbourhood and on the west. We also know that cultural changes swept through the area, especially during the swinging sixties replete with Mick Jagger in tow. As The Economist notes, today Booth would notice designer clothing shops and a high concentration of Porches and BMWs (Economist 2006b). Yet considering the gap of over a century, one would not have gone wrong predicting that pockets of poverty in the area bounded roughly by Fulham, Sloane and Cale streets would remain robust. ‘Evil looking drink-sodden old Irish women’ (Economist 2006b:52) have been replaced by the merely down and out or struggling. Chelsea, London: Across a century Source: ©The Economist Newspaper Limited, London (May 4, 2006) Seven years later, I set out on October 19, 2008 to observe Chelsea myself and update Figure I. Camera in hand, I took note of the internal differentiation of the area. Consistent with Figure I, there was a ‘middling’ character and evidence of graffiti on the interior streets (II, III; all photos by author), and on one transitional street I spotted an abandoned car door and litter near a sharp Mercedes Benz (Figure IV). Although a poster outside the police station across the street boasted that crime was down (Figure V), I came across a car metres away that had just been broken into on the driver's side (Figure VI). But there was clear evidence of gentrification in the neighbourhood (e.g., see Figure VII) and near Fulham Road I observed all the trappings of wealth in the form of chic shopping outlets with apparently well-to-do shoppers stocking up to the point of needing assistance (Figure VIII) and posh residences replete with BMWs lined up in front (Figure IX). Chelsea side street of ‘middling’ character Graffiti on drab building Abandoned car part and litter by a Mercedes across from police station entrance ‘Street Crime Down’ figures, posted outside Chelsea Police Station Just metres away, a freshly broken into car Gentrification in action on other side of building with graffiti Shopper emerging with bounty of goods from Ralph Lauren Upmarket residences a block away on other side of Fulham Road Moving south of the Thames to Stockwell and nearby Brixton lie some of the most racially mixed neighbourhoods in London. Home of the ‘Stockwell Strangler’ in the mid 1980s and several police raids after the 2005 London bombings, racial tensions have flared in these neighbourhoods over the years. A century ago, just east of Stockwell Road, Booth and his research team ‘found a pocket of filth and squalor, with rowdy residents and broken windows’. It was, ‘far the worst place in the division’. The Economist reports that since then the area has been transformed but in a way that replicates important features of the past: Dismal two-storey cottages have been swept away and replaced by grass and the apartment blocks of the Stockwell Park Estate. But the appearance of the neighbourhood has changed more than its character. Julie Fawcett, who lives in one of the blocks, characterises her neighbours as ‘the mad, the bad and the sad’. Unemployment is double the city average and ‘heroin alley’ hides around a corner. Perhaps Booth's crude distinctions are not so antediluvian after all. In the current era of globalization, the alleged ‘placelessness of place’ (Relph 1976), and place even as ‘phantasmagorical’ (Giddens 1990), the apparent durability of place exposes a puzzle. As the quote by Ms. Fawcett reveals, it is not just economic or racial status but identities and moral evaluations that in many cases remain sticky. What mechanisms sustain the hierarchy of places, or what the late Charles Tilly (1998) termed ‘durable inequality’? Anecdotes notwithstanding, how stable are disorder and its related neighbourhood dimensions such as concentrated poverty? What predicts perceptions of disorder – that is, what are its sources? What are its consequences? My general thesis is that perceptions of disorder constitute a fundamental dimension of social inequality at the neighbourhood level and perhaps beyond. At first this might seem an odd thesis considering that dominant stratification theorists take a structuralist stance in analysing the materialistic constituents of inequality. Demographers do likewise in thinking about urban change. Whether expressed by Charles Booth or our Stockwell contemporary, perceptions about disorder are likely to be dismissed in favour of presumed weightier causes. By contrast, I argue that the grounds on which perceptions of disorder are formed are contextually shaped by social conditions that go well beyond the usual suspects of observed disorder and poverty, a process that in turn molds reputations, reinforces stigma and influences the future trajectory of an area. ‘Seeing’ disorder, like seeing Ralph Ellison's narrator, is intimately bound up with social meaning at the collective level and ultimately inequality. This conceptualization turns around the usual strategy in the study of crime of reifying disorder as part of the environment. To assess my general position I present a set of empirical evidence based mainly on the social laboratory of Chicago. Along with colleagues I have spent over a decade intensively studying this quintessentially American of cities and the site of much seminal work. My hope is that the current analysis will spur new insights into stability and change in urban inequality in a way that has relevance for cities around the world. The implications of my analysis are in the end optimistic, owing to increases in immigration and diversity that are eliding racial (and other) group categories and upending dominant conceptions of disorder. Indeed, in many places ‘grit’ is becoming the new glamour (Lloyd 2006). Before getting to the empirical patterns, however, I first lay out the historical and theoretical groundwork that motivates the logic of my investigation. Theorizing disorder can be seen as an outgrowth of the writings of the influential Chicago School sociologists of the mid-twentieth century. Louis Wirth, one of the most famous theorists of the American city who hailed from the Chicago School, emphasized the general ‘disorganizing’ effects of the disorder and diversity that he argued flowed from increasing urbanization (Wirth 1938). Although not in the Wirthian camp, Richard Sennett argues in The Uses of Disorder that concern with disorder is fundamentally a concern about the loss of control in an increasingly urbanized world. More than that, he argues it is about an attempt to restore the myth of the ‘purified community,’ to keep unknown and disorderly events at bay (Sennett 1970). For Sennett, anxiety over disorder is rooted in psychological needs for control and at a general theoretical level, to efforts aimed at restoring the imagined community of solidarity.2 That the community of solidarity never existed, much less the ‘urban village’ of close personal ties, makes the obsession with controlling disorderly people in urban spaces all the more interesting.3 Tangible manifestations of disorder, or what Hunter (1985) called ‘incivilities,’ were argued by another Chicago School theorist as central to a neighbourhood's public presentation of self. Erving Goffman (1963a: 9) cites the obligation in medieval times to keep one's pigs out of the streets to demonstrate how the norms regulating public order covered not just face-to-face interaction among strangers or acquaintances, but the visual ordering of the physical landscape. He also studied how shared expectations formed about the maintenance of sidewalks and keeping the streets free of refuse. Jane Jacobs' observation of urban life in the 1950s evoked a broader concern with the impact of disorder on neighbourhood civility (1961: 29–54), especially the negotiation of public encounters in the ‘world of strangers’ (Lofland 1973). These thinkers did not consider disorder in literal or essentialist terms, nor did they propose disorder as somehow random or chaotic. Disorder can be socially and spatially patterned – highly organized even. What was important to Goffman and Sennett, I believe, were the expectations and perceptions surrounding signs or cues, the rules and functions of urban social order, as it were. These symbolic expectations are as powerful as the signs themselves, motivating theoretical and empirical interrogation. The fundamental importance of public observation in the process of social order was put well by the American urban theorist Lynn Lofland: The answer to the question of how city life was to be possible, then, 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 by simply looking. (Lofland 1973: 22, emphasis in original) The key to Lofland's argument is that social ordering is a visual process that involves classification. People divide the urban world into manageable bits, with one of the most important differentiating characteristics being signs of disorder. But there is more to this process than meets the eye. The human tendency to categorize racial and other groups despite their lack of scientific separateness, our ability to easily observe and code skin colour and our sensitivity to the opinions of others in the form of reputations or identities that stigmatize areas of ‘the mad, the bad and the sad,’ makes for a potent combination. Debates about disorder and diversity in the urban context continue to inspire passion but with new twists. Diversity and the 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 (Putnam 2007). Disorder in cities has produced similar anxiety and institutionalized action. According to the world famous ‘broken windows’ theory of urban decline, Wilson and Kelling (1982) argued that public incivilities – even if relatively minor as in the case of broken windows, drinking in the street and graffiti – attract predatory crime because potential offenders assume from them that residents are indifferent to what goes on in their neighbourhood. At its core, broken windows theory sees visual cues as objective and natural in their meaning – signs of disorder are negative and serve as a signal of the unwillingness of residents to confront strangers, intervene in a crime, or call the police (Skogan 1990: 75). Proponents thus assume that physical disorder and social disorder provide important environmental cues that entice potential predators and eventually, crime. Few ideas are more influential than broken windows in the urban policy world, with police crackdowns in numerous cities on elements of social and physical disorder. New York City is the most well known example of aggressive police tactics to control public incivilities (Kelling and Coles 1996: 108–156). The tactics of broken windows policing and a neoliberal approach to public order have been exported around the world, even to liberal Paris and visibly so, to England. The government's attempt to ‘soothe the savage breast’ and tamp down antisocial behaviour has led to a declared ‘war on incivility’ (Economist 2006a). In the Stockwell neighbourhood, the London police keep an ‘aggressive’ watch, which has apparently proven ‘a comfort to many Londoners’ yet provoked anger within the neighbourhood (Jordan 2005). The concept of disorder has penetrated social psychology and the study of health as well, following the train of thought of broken windows theory. Here again the notion is that cues of disorder are a negative, but with harmful consequences for individual health and overall well-being. A growing number of recent studies have linked perceived disorder to physical decline, depression, psychological distress and perceived powerlessness (Geis and Ross 1998; Ross, Reynolds and Geis 2000). Residents are thought to read signs of disorder as evidence of a deeper neighbourhood malaise, undermining personal health and trust (see Sampson and Raudenbush 2004). Even if we wish it were not so, then, disorder triggers attributions and predictions in the minds of insiders and outsiders alike. It changes the calculus of prospective homebuyers, real estate agents, insurance agents, investors, the police and politicians, and shapes the perceptions of residents who might be considering moving out or moving in. Evidence of disorder also gives a running account of the effectiveness of residents seeking neighbourhood improvement, and that record may encourage or discourage future activism. Physical and social disorder in public spaces is thus fundamental to a general understanding of how urban neighbourhoods work. Figure X presents a simple heuristic of both received wisdom and the operative stance of many theoretical accounts: the fact of urban disorder and its correspondence to perception is taken for granted, and the consequences are many, none of them good. Received Wisdom: disorder as a multi-purpose cause At one level disorder theory is on the right track by emphasizing the salience of visual cues. Isn't it obvious that graffiti or drunken revellers are a problem? But imagine a situation where these same cues are not evaluated negatively. Perhaps the revellers are bankers on a bender, or the graffiti is on a street in Soho. Or perhaps signs of disorder creep into Chelsea as shown above. Does this still cause crime or urban decline? Or might it be perceived instead as ‘edgy’? Walking along the south side of the Seine in Paris one observes a long stretch of graffiti against the backdrop of couples strolling. Why is this ‘disorder’ not seen as problematic and why is Paris thriving? Despite the largely taken-for-granted notion of disorder, there remains a first-order question about what triggers our shared perceptions of it in the first place. The prevailing view seems to be that seeing disorder is a straightforward matter of cues in the environment visible to our eyes, albeit with correspondence errors in perception. Ross and Mirowsky (1999: 414), for example, conceptualize perceived disorder as ‘a characteristic of the neighbourhood’, an objective place that generates consensus. But it is one thing to perceive, more or less accurately, what is in the objective environment, and another to assign it value, meaning and to rate its seriousness. Here language and cognition become central, for the dominant method of asking (thinking?) about disorder is to have respondents assess ‘how much of a problem it is’. It follows that we can separate what is in the environment from how (or whether) it is perceived and how much it matters to the observer. Sociologically, we can further ask fundamental questions about context and social order: is the perception of disorder as a problem filtered or altered by the presence of stigmatized groups and disreputable areas? And even further, does seeing disorder as a problem depend on the collective judgments of others? In a recent contribution to criminological theory, Wikström (2008) argues that the social context of individual-level perception is a missing link in attempts to explain acts of crime. He specifically argues that perceptions are the key to understanding alternative courses of social action. Although I am not attempting to explain crime, I take seriously the idea that the link between social context – in this case the neighbourhood – and perception is variable and necessary to explain. To recognize subjective variations in perception and meaning is not to give up on systematic scientific inquiry. Quite to the contrary, I argue that perceptions, especially when collective (or inter-subjective) in nature, form a causal ingredient that can constrain or enable social behaviour. As Bottoms and Wiles (1992:16) argue, perceptions of order and safety may be seen as rooted in shared understandings of the nature of particular areas and public spaces. Lamont (2000) makes a similar 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 ‘the mad, the bad, and the sad’ if not a cultural repertoire and potentially even more consequential, a categorization system? It turns out, however, that most research on disorder turns on the hegemonic broken-windows theory of whether disorder causes crime or any number of other outcomes (Figure X), and in particular, whether the aggressive policing of said disorder reduces crime. I too have weighed in on this debate (Sampson and Raudenbush 1999) but the results did not bear on the questions posed here regarding the sources and consequences of social perceptions. In a paper in 2004, Stephen Raudenbush and I thus set aside the standard form of inquiry and examined instead what explains a person's perception that disorder, defined in the manner of broken windows theory, was a problem. Drawing on independent sets of linked data to be described, we examined how the racial, ethnic and socio-economic structure of neighbourhoods predicted perceptions above and beyond the observable conditions of disorder. We argued that there are multiple mechanisms at work in translating cues in the environment to a rating of disorder. We first evaluated broken windows theory on its own terms by tracing the logical consequences of the idea that disorder's visual cues are unambiguous in meaning and that residents' perceptions map neatly onto objectively observable aspects such as the amount of garbage, broken bottles, litter, graffiti, abandoned cars and drug paraphernalia. After all, these cues are highly visible. If we imbue human beings with bounded rationality in the classic sense, then it makes sense to hypothesize that, according to the theory, the major factor leading to perceived disorder is externally assessed or observed disorder. Put simply, broken windows theory is a correspondence account of disorder that posits a direct disorder-perception link. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. (Ellison 1947: 3) In the first instance, ‘race’ is a mode of perceptual categorization people use to navigate their way through a murky, uncertain world. (Loury 2002: 17) More challenging theoretically is what else happens on the pathway to the formation of social perceptions and their sequelae. Cultural attributions about disorder are prevalent in American society and increasingly in other cities as a result of exported American policies, feeding the hunger that humans carry for social information. Stereotypes become especially tempting when, as is almost always the case, residents are not trained as systematic or neutral observers. Relatedly, if cultural stereotypes are pervasive and residents have uncertain information or ambiguous reactions to disorder, then they may, in a Bayesian like way (Rosenkrantz 1977), augment that information with contextual cues about people who can be seen on the streets. It follows that individuals may draw on their prior beliefs in judging whether disorder is a problem – that is, combining uncertain evidence with prior beliefs underwritten by cultural stereotypes. Evidence from cognitive psychology suggests that categorical distinctions are important for the organization of information in everyday life (Fiske 1998). Categories of relevance are hardly random. Research suggests that Americans hold persistent beliefs linking blacks, disadvantaged minorities and recent immigrant groups to many social images, including crime, violence, disorder, welfare and undesirability as neighbours (e.g., Bobo 2001; Quillian and Pager 2001; Rumbaut and Ewing 2007). Beliefs about disorder are reinforced by the historical association of non-voluntary racial segregation with concentrated poverty, which in turn is linked to institutional disinvestments and neighbourhood decline (Massey and Denton 1993; Skogan 1990; Wilson 1987). As Glenn Loury (2002) argues, while race may be denied as a legitimate biological classification, dark skin is an easily observable trait that has become a statistical marker in American society, one imbued with meanings about crime, disorder and violence that stigmatize not only people but also the places in which they are concentrated. The use of racial and ethnic context to encode disorder does not mean that people are necessarily prejudiced in the sense of group hostility. The power of cultural stereotypes is that they can operate beneath the radar screen of our conscious reasoning, forming what has been termed implicit bias (Banaji 2002; Bobo 2001; Fiske 1998). Suppose that someone without racial animus has none the less been exposed to the historically and structurally induced inequality that is urban America: on average, for example, rates of violence such as homicide are higher among blacks than whites. Implicit bias arises when this person automatically concludes from such a statistical generalization that a specific black person, without corroborating evidence, is prone to violence. Research in social psychology has shown that automatic racial stereotypes can persist regardless of conscious or personal rejection of prejudice toward blacks (Devine 1989), leading to what Bobo (2001: 292) calls ‘laissez-faire racism’ and others institutionalized racism. Consider the effect of race in a vignette study where experimental subjects were told to shoot armed targets and not to shoot unarmed targets. Participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was white (Correll, et al. 2002: 1325). The magnitude of this racial bias in shooting decisions varied with perception of cultural stereotypes but not with personal racial prejudice. In fact, the study revealed equivalent levels of shooting bias in African American and in white participants. This finding underscores the potentially far-reaching consequences of statistical discrimination and cultural stereotypes that reside below the level of conscious racial prejudice. As the authors argue, ethnicity can influence the decision to shoot because cultural traits associated with African Americans, namely ‘violent’ or ‘dangerous’, act as a schema to influence perceptions of an ambiguously threatening target. African Americans are unlikely to be racially prejudiced against their own ethnic group, but they are exposed, as is everybody, to dominant cultural stereotypes. Implicit bias and statistical discrimination theory are limited, however, in their tendency to adopt either a psychologically reductionist or a rational choice model of decision making, both of which neglect the social meaning of perceptions – context matters. Indeed, although Goffman's (1963b) concept of stigma was originally advanced at the individual level, its contextual or group forms are equally compelling. A contextual stance was taken some time ago by Werthman and Piliavin (1967), who argued that the police divide up the territories they patrol into readily understandable and racially tinged categories. The result is a process of what they called ecological contamination, whereby all persons encountered in ‘bad’ neighbourhoods are viewed as possessing the moral liability of the neighbourhood itself. This process has general implications in so far as citizens themselves impute the character of disreputability to neighbourhoods containing stigmatized minorities, immigrants and the ‘rabble class’ (Irwin 1985). Such stigmatization appears to be an enduring mechanism going back at least to Charles Booth's lower-class London with its ‘loafers and semi-criminals’. The social structure of everyday life in public places is tied to race and class, reinforcing the production of disrepute (Hagan 1994:150). As Stinchcombe (1963) argued, access to private space is structured such that disorder by the disadvantaged consists of doing many things in public that would be (and are) legitimate in private (e.g., drinking, hanging out). That is, privileged status enhances private access, reducing everyday exposure to public disorder. The resulting social structure of public spaces reinforces the stereotype that disorder is a problem mainly in poor, African-American communities. This stereotype feeds racial stigma and the creation of a durable spoiled identity for the modern American ghetto (Wacquant 1993). Recent ethnographic work underscores the symbolic importance attached to the intersection of race and disorder. In a study of a white working-class Chicago neighbourhood, Kefalas (2003) sought to understand the fastidiousness with which residents kept up their property and why they seemed to be obsessed with physical signs of order. She found that homeowners fretted about ‘the last Garden’ and the threats that disorder were thought to bring on the neighbourhood (Kefalas 2003: 11, 14, 62, 74). No act of vandalism was too minor; no unkempt yard was too trivial to escape notice. Kefalas argued that residents did not care so much about disorder per se, but were threatened by the idea of the urban underclass, blacks' encroachment in particular. In Chicago, many residents of the South-west Side perceive a long westward march of decline preceded by visual cues of disorder. Thus in many ways the residents of Kefalas's Beltway had a ‘broken windows’ theory in mind, but one with a decidedly black face (2003: 43). None of this is to assert that average city dwellers are somehow irrational or merely ignorant. Visual cues of disorder can be disturbing even to those who study it for a living.4 But predictions can become self-confirming when stigma and spoiled identity intercede, leading to actions that increase the statistical association between race and the observable behaviour. For example, if affluent residents use a neighbourhood's racial composition as a gauge for the level or seriousness of disorder, unconsciously or not, they may disinvest in predominately minority areas or move out; such actions would tend to increase physical disorder in those neighbourhoods. In this way implicit bias leads to reinforcing mechanisms that perpetuate the connection of race to disorder, therefore helping to explain the dynamics reinforcing racial segregation (Loury 2002). The general framework of this argument is portrayed heuristically in Figure XI. The social structure of perceiving disorder As with Booth's depiction of drunken Irish women noted earlier, racial and ethnic categories subject to hierarchical classification are historically variable. In many US cities circa World War I, for example, it was not blacks but Irish and Italian immigrants that constituted the dangerous and disorderly class (Laub and Sampson 1995). National context matters too. In present day London it may well be that social distinctions within the white working class are just as pernicious as black-white distinctions in the USA. Watt (2006) reports that social distinctions in the borough of Camden hav
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