How Communities and Relationships Produce the Urban Process

Much of the focus on cities and their development is on the built environment: the buildings, the roads, the infrastructure, etc. When human concerns come into play, they are often structured as subsidiary to the broad economic project of the city: cultural amenities boost tourism, job growth begets broader economic growth, and other, similar trains of thought. Even gentrification, be it adored or hated, is conceptualized in the public discourse as a relationship between individual consumers of neighborhoods (as real estate purchasers) and the economic revitalization of a city.

As a geographer, I stress the social construction of places within the city, their interaction with the built environment, and the scalar processes that lead to the ongoing construction of the urban. I am particularly interested in neighborhood identity and formation. While "neighborhood" is an elusively ambiguous term, I think that it captures an important scale for urban analysis precisely because of that ambiguity: it is the "scale" (however large or small) at which personal social identification with the urban fabric plays out. Understanding that interaction (and the place-based communities that energe at the same scale) is critical to understanding possible future paths for the evolotion of cities.

While there remain important empirical questions about the applicability of "neighborhood" in a research context -- for example, how much do people really agree on the edges and substance of the definition of their neighborhood? -- I am focused on finding ways to explore the micro social processes that produce the urban fabric, and the mezzo-scale processes throguh which these small communities contribute to the city and the region.