Urban Poverty

1. Urban Poverty Researching Society & Culture Week 8 Dr Alice Mah

2. Lecture Outline • Researching urban poverty • Chicago School and urban ethnography • Community studies tradition • Researching urban poverty since the 1960s • Research examples • Conclusion

3. Researching urban poverty • Long traditions in sociological research • 19th century UK social investigators: Henry Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor 1861); Charles Booth (Life and Labour of the People in London, 1891) • Late 19th-mid 20th century: Chicago School of Sociology (Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, W. F. Whyte) • Focus today: US example, from Chicago School to present day

4. 1. Chicago School of Sociology (tradition of urban ethnography) • Late nineteenth century- mid-twentieth century: Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth • Focus on everyday interactions in specific locations • Urban ethnographic approach to sociology • Seeking out “natural areas” of the city (e.g. Jewish ghetto, dance halls etc.)

5. The Chicago School: aims and methods • Sociologists learning to take the role of others • Aim: ‘objective’ science of society • Triangulation of methods (qualitative and quantitative) • Lived in the setting • Worked for local employers / agencies • Walked the streets • Methodologically problematic • Usually white, male, middle class perspective • Affects focus of studies – primarily on men • Presumes a neutral observer; lacks reflexive engagement

6. The Chicago School: urban ecology approach Urban ecology: concentric circles of growth around the urban (poor) core, modelled on organic systems, increasingly white, stable, and affluent towards outer rings

7. Urban ecology: analysis • explanation of the emergence of ghettos as segregated urban social spaces (particularly the Jewish ghetto but other examples as well) • certain sites of the city were seen to incubate ‘social diseases’ of ‘poverty, disease and delinquency • highly influential early sociological analysis of the city and still used as an ideal type of patterns of urban growth and spatial segregation(especially US), but criticized for assumptions of rationality and naturalism, and for reductive spatial/organic argument, implicit racism, and moralizing discourse about social disorder

8. Research example: W. F. Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943) • Pioneering urban ethnography (influenced later works by Anderson and Venkatesh) • Whyte was educated in Chicago but departed from Chicago School traditions through his in-depth ethnographic focus • Italian-American slum district of Boston ‘Cornerville’ • Participant observation over three and a half years of street gangs and ‘corner boys’ • Focused on local gangs and their organization, showed that a poor community need not be socially disorganized

9. 2. Community Studies (tradition of urban/community ethnography) • Developed between the 1930s and 1960s • Communities are ‘collections of people sharing certain interests, sentiments, behaviour and objects by virtue of their membership of a social group’ (Brunt, 2001: 80) • Initially focused on place as the common element; later included interests • Not exclusively focused on urban poverty, but this theme emerged in studies of particular communities (e.g. Wilmott and Young 1957’s Bethnal Green Study of an urban working-class community) • Early community studies – seeking out ‘pure’ communities (e.g. US study Middletown, Lynd and Lynd 1937) • Later – focus on migration, urbanisation, and other factors • Participant observation was central (living / working in the community; often drawing on key informants)

10. 3. Researching urban poverty since the 1960s (different methods, US/UK) 1960s: British and American liberal policy interventions in response to growing ‘urban problem’, focused on crime, education, labour markets, and renewal in urban areas : • 1960s US War on Poverty • 1968 UK Urban Programme 1960s US and UK: urban policies as an instrument for speaking about ‘race’ in a de-politicized, ‘neutral’ way (about space rather than race) • managed to direct resources on the basis of social and economic need and avoid thorny debates, but • avoided addressing racial injustice explicitly, and • neglected the role of politics and economics in producing and sustaining urban social inequalities

11. Urban poverty debates: pathologies of neighbourhood • Increasing interest in understanding urban poverty as a social and spatial problem in cities, linked to race and class • Pathologies of neighbourhood, human ecology, functionalist perspective (Chicago School and urban ethnographers): certain urban areas are prone to crime, social fragmentation and disorder • Reductive links between social factors and spatial ‘containers’ (or ‘vessels’, or ‘pumps’…): ‘ecological fallacy’ which typifies urban areas in terms of their worst features • Strength and weakness of urban ecological approaches: focus on complex of elements in organizing urban spaces and shaping urban processes, yet difficult to pinpoint ‘causal’ factors

12. Urban poverty: research examples

13. William Julius Wilson (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged • One of the most important and influential studies of urban poverty in the United States: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-publications/vbt/index/wilson-truly-disadvantaged • Offers structural account of urban poverty, against the ‘culture of poverty’ theory (Lewis 1968) that associates poverty with poor subcultures that perpetuate poverty • based on quantitative methods (statistics on unemployment, birth and marriage rates, etc.) • Crisis of US inner cities, based in Chicago, role of class vs. race in inner city problems, related to economic restructuring and job losses, controversial idea of the ‘black urban underclass’

14. Structural vs. cultural explanations • Some scholars have argued that structural accounts are inadequate for explaining the complexity of lived experiences of urban poverty and that cultural explanations offer more compelling analyses (e.g. Anderson, Venkatesh) • Structural explanations are generally associated with quantitative and mixed methods, whereas cultural explanations are associated more with qualitative methods, especially ethnography • Wilson was Venkatesh’s supervisor (who Venkatesh criticized for using rigid quantitative methods to study ‘black and poor’ neighbourhoods) • In his more recent work, Wilson aims to reconcile structural social factors (race and class; ‘objectivist’) with cultural and social psychological factors (using ‘interpretivism’).

15. Elijah Anderson • Elijah Anderson’s (1990, 1999) urban ethnographic research in Philadelphia about the effects of social mobility within black urban population in the context of ‘white flight’ (corresponding black middle class movement out of poor neighbourhoods): loss of local capital and social leadership • Streetwise (1992): based on 14 years of research in Philadelphia, about class and racial relations between blacks and whites in adjacent neighbourhoods • Code of the Street (1999): argues that both ‘street’ and ‘decent’ families live in the same inner-city neighourhoods in Philadelphia • Anderson (and W.F. Whyte before him) inspired in-depth urban ethnographies such as Venkatesh

16. Critiques of US urban poverty research • Focuses largely on African-Americans and largely ignores ethnic diversity of Latinos, Asians, and West Indians living in inner cities • Inner-city cultural explanations risk stereotyping cultures (e.g. dichotomies of inner-city/mainstream and underclass/middle-class) • Rigid divide between structural and cultural explanations (BUT beginning to change; many authors including Wilson recognize the limitations of this divide, and the benefits of combining approaches and methods)

17. Conclusion • Urban poverty has been researched by a range of sociological theoretical and methodological approaches since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including urban ethnography, mixed methods (triangulation), and quantitative methods • Structural vs. cultural explanations for urban poverty relate to different methodological approaches (e.g. Wilson’s quantitative and mixed methods approaches vs. Anderson’s and Venkatesh’s urban ethnographic approaches) • There remain gaps and limitations in methods for researching urban poverty as a complex phenomena across different national, regional, urban, community, class, and ethnic contexts * *see for example, Small and Newman’s 2001 article ‘Urban poverty after the truly disadvantaged…’ in Annual Review of Sociology