Thanks. I'm absolutely delighted to be back in Chicago. I spent many wonderful years as a Chicagoan and also teaching at the University of Chicago just down the road. I also spent about 15 years on a major research project.
studying the city and what I'd like to do is share some of the results with you today. Now 15 minutes, 15 years worth of research. That's not going to work in terms of details but what I think I can do is give you the big picture. Think of it as a tasting menu of facts about the city.
And I'm going to start with the cover of the book because I think it represents the idea of the book and actually the talk today. I argue that the city is characterized by distinct and diverse set of neighborhoods represented abstractly in color that have persistent effects across a wide variety of outcomes. Things that you might not think go together. I study things as diverse as crime. well-being, infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, test scores for example.
In short, I emphasize the power of place on a multiple set of outcomes across our lives and for a long period of time. Hence the idea of the enduring neighborhood effect. Now it's true that this idea goes against a lot of common wisdom. We're told that globalization, technology have rendered place irrelevant.
You've all heard the phrase, the world is flat, perhaps. And it's true that if you walk around the street here, people are walking around chatting on their cell phones, plugged into the iPhones, tweeting, whatever. They're elsewhere rather than here.
But I argue that the city is in fact not flat. It's very uneven. And also community.
Which we've been told is dead is not. There are many thriving communities and I want to tell you a little bit about that. Chicago is not just a great American city as many will attest even die-hard New Yorkers and that's my tribe but it's also a microcosm for other cities.
In other words I think of Chicago in a way as a urban laboratory and I use that laboratory to study the city and I'll walk you through that. And I start off in the book by taking the reader on a walk down the streets of the city. You're familiar with these scenes. I'll start with the gleaming and vibrant city right outside our door, of course.
This is what most tourists know, glorious architecture, people frolicking in Millennium Park. But there's also another part to the city. The city is really multiple cities in one.
Here's the abandoned and forgotten city. As you walk south, you don't have to go far from the loop to come across places like this. Manufacturing left this neighborhood.
No one is on the street. It's abandoned. Furtive looks. People are fearful. Even further south, we see the following.
This is the first picture actually that I took and I present in the book. It was rather eerie and haunting to me because about ten years ago on this very spot I met with a family, as did others, who were living in one of the largest housing projects in Chicago, the Robert Taylor Homes, and they were telling us their struggles to deal with everyday life. Today it's a field.
25,000 people used to live in this neighborhood. It no longer exists. This night and day contrast exists across the United States.
In fact, I have to confess, here's my hometown. On the left, that's actually across the street from where I went to high school. The high school is no longer a high school. On the right, it's across the street from where my family went to church. The church no longer exists.
This night and day difference is in this city, Utica, New York. It's in most cities, and I, as a social scientist, want to understand that. But let's move away from just pictures and move out to take a more sort of distal or bird's-eye-view perspective. What I'm going to do is walk you through very quickly thousands of data points that we've studied over the years. What could be more different than a homicide, typically among two young males, and a woman giving birth to a baby less than 2,500 grams, a low birth weight baby?
a baby that dies. It turns out, and this is a map now of Chicago, the entire city, the community areas in the city, and what I've done is to array the murder rate proportional to the size of the stars, and these are hundreds of incidents over multiple years, and also shaded it by... The health of children, infants, again low birth weight, infant mortality.
What you see is that areas that have high murder rates, where the stars are, are almost in every single case those where there are low child health. Areas on the south side, running down the south side and over to the west side. You might think it's just poverty.
It's not. If we control for poverty, the same relationship exists. It's not just the negative things. We talked about the global elite saying that community is dead. Well, guess what?
They tend to concentrate in particular neighborhoods too. The stars here are proportional to what some economists call the creative class, including artists and writers per 1,000. They tend to concentrate very distinctly in certain cities.
And moreover, the more people are wired into the Internet, the more they use the Internet, the more technology, they too are clustered in space. And actually, as it turns out, the more wired people are externally, the more wired they are into their community. It even matters where you have a heart attack or drop a letter.
I thought you might find this of interest. Real quickly, my research team and I dropped about 3,000 letters systematically in the city of Chicago to see if they were returned and what was the rate of return. Turns out that it varied tremendously across cities. Those communities that you see that have a larger envelope had a higher rate of return of letters.
I think of this as other regarding behavior, right? I mean, you don't have to pick up a letter and return it, but damn, if you drop a letter, a bill, you want it to be returned. That varies tremendously, but also it varies according to a character of the community that was measured 14 years prior where we looked at the rate of giving assistance, CPR, to heart attack victims on the street. If you're feeling your chest tighten when you walk out of the theater, it's not a bad place to be because it turns out actually that the Loop is a pretty decent place.
The point is very distinct differences across communities in what I think of as the social character. of communities. It's also true that things like poverty and segregation have a long history and they're very sticky and persistent. The areas that were segregated in 1960, this shows over a 50 year period, the segregation in Chicago and the increases in poverty designated by the positive marks. And what you see is that poverty is very consistently and unevenly spread.
It shifts down south in the city and across the west side. That's over about a 40-year period, and if we look at the most recent data available, the foreclosure, Great Recession, boom, being layered on the most disadvantaged communities that go as far back as 1960. So in this sense, we really have to take into account the history and the persistent inequality that exists in cities. Now, my obsession as a social scientist, perhaps because I grew up in the place that I showed you, It's to try to understand these differences within cities and across cities and the neighborhood effect. And there's a large-scale project.
It was called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It went on for many years. It was a collaborative project. It was a study of 6,000 children in many neighborhoods.
I'm not going to tell you about the children part. There's no time. I want to talk a little bit about the neighborhood part.
And really, if you think about it, we have report cards for kids. We have GNP for society. We have thermometers for our individual health.
Why not for neighborhoods? We developed a scheme. We called it EcoMetrics.
If you think about it, it actually makes sense. It's a metric for the study of social ecology. And what we did is to interview thousands of Chicagoans clustered in their neighborhoods, not just a random survey, but a neighborhood-level survey. We also drove down the streets very slowly with video cameras and taped and videotaped 22,000 street segments in the city of Chicago. This was way before Google Street View.
Later on, I was like, I should have patented that. But you can get a lot out of this. You can actually see.
You can count up. Is there a disorder? Are there broken windows, vacant homes, et cetera?
We did that for all the streets. We also interviewed leaders, the movers and the shakers, the aldermen, ministers, school principals, community organizations, thousands, multiple points in time. And also, we collected data on what we... call collective action events marches rallies blood drives and so forth let me give you an example we asked 10 000 chicagoans questions like this would your neighbors take action if for example children were skipping school there was a fight in the neighborhood city was going to close down the local fire station turns out there's huge variability across neighborhoods in the sense in which people expect their neighbors to take action and in terms of their interaction whether they trust their neighbors and willing to help them now i'm not talking about Close-knit ties, having dinner with your neighbors, or going to their son's wedding.
I mean, that might not be a bad thing. I'm talking about a sense of working trust and cohesion. And it turns out that this characteristic, which we call collective efficacy, for the efficacy ...in a united way, predicts a number of outcomes with regard to health and homicide.
Here you see every homicide that occurred over a three-year period in Chicago, arrayed by the rate of collective efficacy in a neighborhood. The purple areas, dark purple, are high collective efficacy, very few homicide incidents. The white areas, low, high rate of homicide. This has been adjusted.
This is the simple chart. Lots of details in the book, like, well, what about... This and what about poverty and what about that.
Turns out that collective efficacy seems to have a very direct effect on homicide. Even, by the way, in other cities. We even replicated this study in Stockholm.
What could be different? Welfare state? I mean Stockholm is very different from Chicago and indeed these show all the neighborhoods in Chicago in the blue line and all the neighborhoods in Stockholm on the red line. Chicago is more violent, it sits above, but The relationship shows as collective efficacy gets higher, moving to the right, violence goes down in both cities in the same way. Okay, let's talk about another phenomenon, disorder.
I took this picture, it appears in the book. Is this disorder? How many of you have heard of broken windows theory, the idea of, you know, one, yeah, broken windows leads to another, unravels, you got it.
Well, you know, there's defacement of the property, but maybe there's a little art on the wall. We took pictures like this and videos all over the city. And the claim is that it leads to lower crime. I mean, it reduces well-being, so there's more crime, and people move out of the city, and there's lower health.
But the answer is that, in fact, perceptions depend a lot on the context in which we are viewing it. In other words, we can count up the disorder in a neighborhood, but the perceptions people have, it's not like they're divorced from that. They see things, but there's a lot more going on in terms of their...
cultural understanding of disorder. And it turns out that what you can actually measure and see and film isn't what predicts things, it's really those perceptions, and those perceptions can be deceiving. One example, people perceive there to be more disorder with a higher concentration of immigrants in the community, but one of the findings is actually that immigration is related to lower crime and disorder, as these workers in a march in Chicago in 2006 are indicating. So the perceptions are deceiving.
Things are not always what they seem. Another thing, networks. You're familiar with networks probably these days. So this is a network of all the leaders in Chicago.
Again, politicians, business leaders, law enforcement, education, religion. They're shaded by their type, and I'm not going to tell you because that's not really important now. The size is those people that are more connected.
In the middle is probably, we could call them Mr. Big. But I'm not going to tell you who that is. You might be able to guess. And around the edge are all these isolates, people that have no ties. And yet other people are in cliques and are very tied together.
Hmm, that's an important difference. What I'd like you to take away from this, however, is that while this is important, when we look at it across neighborhoods, this is what we see. Differences. Again, on the left, it's a real community that is basically made up of A bunch of isolates, that is leaders that have no ties to the other leaders in their community.
And then you have three cliques. Whereas on the right, think of this as a spider web, a dense web of relationships among leaders in the community. What we find, in a nutshell, is that that's the kind of community that tends to do better on a number of things, again, even when we adjust for some of the usual suspects. The other...
Thing I mentioned earlier, collective civic action. Took this picture after a vicious incident of violence in the south side in Roseland, as it turns out. There was a beating outside of a high school. Some of you may remember it, Fenger.
These men were out protesting that and trying to get the community to work against violence. We measured these kinds of collective actions across multiple years, actually across about 30 years. and examined what collective action is related to. And it turns out that collective action, in this sense, is highly related to the organizational density in a community.
That is to say, the number of nonprofit organizations that exist. And it turns out that when you have these kinds of organizations, even if you have a mundane event like a blood drive, people then start to talk and get involved in other things. So... Networks matter, collective action, organizations, social connections, trust, and the things that we always have known about cities in terms of the pervasive segregation and inequality. The book tries to put this all together.
So I'm not going to show you any more maps, but I just want to leave you with a couple takeaways. I think that policy is often based on anecdotes and that the tools of ecometrics and the kinds of procedures that we use and kinds of ideas I think that have been derived from our study can be put forth in a policy way. And even technology, which is said to undermine community, actually can be used to improve it.
There's now iPhone apps to report things, not just potholes, but in terms of pollution and housing and a number of other things. So you can go out and get involved that way. So on a personal level, oh, by the way, there's also technological applications now even for enhancing interactions with neighbors. But on your level, I hope that this perhaps leads you to see the city in a new light, right? Because again, things aren't always what they seem.
So when you're out there, put away the cell phone after you've made that call for the pothole, perhaps, and observe things differently. And imagine a new city or a better city because everything I've shown you, nothing is inevitable. These are patterns that are socially constructed, take action to improve our neighborhoods. And I'll leave you with another picture that I took this time next to a very down-and-out neighborhood at least over the years, former Cabrini Green housing area.
It was very poor. It's now in transition and I came across this and I found it interesting looking toward the loop, perhaps graffiti, perhaps not. Thank you.