Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect

Citation

Sampson, R. J. (2012). Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (with a foreword by William Julius Wilson). University of Chicago Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a large synthesis of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, about 550 pages in five parts and seventeen chapters, combining the project's data with the author's own observations of the city. Its central claim, in the publisher's words, is that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where people live.

Part I, Chapters 1–2: Placed; Neighborhood Effects: The Evolution of an Idea

The opening part sets out the setting and thesis. Chapter 1 argues for the importance of place against views that treat people as individuals choosing freely regardless of their surroundings, or as subject to global forces beyond their control. Chapter 2 traces the history of the idea of neighborhood effects.

Part II, Chapters 3–4: Analytic Approach; The Making of the Chicago Project

These chapters present the principles and method: the analytic approach of the book (Chapter 3) and how the Chicago project was designed and carried out (Chapter 4). They are the place to learn what the data are before meeting the findings.

Part III, Chapters 5–9: Community-Level Processes

Chapter 5, Legacies of Inequality, concerns the persistence of neighborhood inequality. Chapter 6 examines "broken windows" and the meanings of disorder. Chapter 7 gives the theory of collective efficacy. Chapter 8, Civic Society and the Organizational Imperative, turns to organizations and civic life, and Chapter 9, Social Altruism, Cynicism, and the "Good Community", to altruism and cynicism as community-level properties.

Part IV, Chapters 10–14: Interlocking Structures

This part moves from single neighborhoods to the links among them. Chapter 10 argues that neighbors of neighborhoods matter (spatial logic). Chapter 11, Trading Places, discusses experiments and neighborhood effects. Chapter 12 treats individual selection as a social process, and Chapter 13 network mechanisms of interneighborhood migration. Chapter 14 considers leadership and the higher-order structure of elite connections.

Part V, Chapters 15–17: Synthesis and Revisit

Chapter 15, Neighborhood Effects and a Theory of Context, draws the argument together. Chapter 16, Aftermath—Chicago 2010, revisits the city after the Great Recession, and Chapter 17, The Twenty-First-Century Gold Coast and Slum, closes the book.

Key Concepts

Part I–II: Thesis and method

• Neighborhood effects: the influence of the place where people live on their outcomes, traced through the history of the idea in Chapter 2.
• Contextual analysis: the book's method of treating the neighborhood setting, not just individuals, as an object of explanation.

Part III: Community-level processes

• Collective efficacy: the subject of Chapter 7, central to the book's account of how communities work.
• Disorder and "broken windows": Chapter 6's treatment of what disorder means.
• Civic organization and altruism: the focus of Chapters 8 and 9.

Parts IV–V: Structure and context

• Spatial logic: why the neighborhoods adjacent to a given neighborhood matter.
• Selection as a social process: Chapter 12's argument about how individuals come to live where they do.
• Theory of context: Chapter 15's synthesis of neighborhood effects.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• An unusual combination of theory and data. The publisher presents the book as a research project, an argument for a new theory of social life and the story of a city. Quillian, reviewing it in Contemporary Sociology, described it as a model of how theory, data collection and analytic methods can benefit each other.
• Wide range of outcomes. The publisher lists crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks and immigration among the phenomena examined, so one dataset and framework are applied across many topics.
• Attention to the selection problem. Chapters 11 and 12 address experiments and individual selection directly, which is the usual objection to neighborhood-effects claims.
• Readable for its size. The Choice review quoted by the publisher called it very readable, and the Foreword and the personal observations of Chicago give the data a narrative setting.

Limitations

• Length and density. At about 550 pages, with 46 line drawings, 14 maps and extensive notes and references, it is a large commitment and most readers will want to be selective.
• A single city. The evidence is drawn from Chicago, although the author presents Chicago as a basis for a wider theory, and the book's reach beyond it depends on that argument.
• Methods background helps. Part IV in particular (spatial logic, network mechanisms, selection) assumes comfort with quantitative social science.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the urban-sociology course, this is the most research-heavy monograph. Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic argument from observation of streets and districts, and is an accessible way into the question of what makes neighborhoods work before Sampson tests such ideas with data. Sassen's The Global City asks how global economic change concentrates functions in a few cities, a scale above the neighborhood focus here.

Gottdiener, Hohle and King's The New Urban Sociology and Parker's Urban Theory and the Urban Experience are textbooks that set the Chicago School tradition, to which Sampson claims to belong, in a wider field of urban theory, and The Urban Sociology Reader collects shorter readings; these are good preparation. Sampson is the book to read for an extended case of how a modern Chicago School study is done.

How to Use This Book

This is a book for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in sociology, criminology, urban studies and public policy, and for researchers interested in neighborhood effects.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapters 1 and 2 for the thesis, Chapter 3 for the approach, then Chapters 5–7 for inequality, disorder and collective efficacy.
• Method: Chapter 4 explains the Chicago project; read it before the empirical chapters if the data are unfamiliar.
• Extensions: Chapters 8–9 for civic life and altruism, and Part IV for readers interested in spatial and network arguments or the selection debate.
• Synthesis: Chapters 15–17 reward reading after the earlier parts; Chapter 16 follows the city to 2010.

Reading the publisher's excerpt, "Observing Chicago", is a low-cost way to judge the style before committing to the whole book.