Hunker down, now (part 1)

Sorry in advance for all the academic-y name dropping.

Robert Putnam’s research and publications are now synonymous with the concepts of social capital and civic disengagement. We are now Bowling Alone, according to Putnam, and are disengaged from the same level of community participation forged by previous generations.

My friend Jessie and I are presenting case studies contradicting these claims at a conference at the end of June

Anyway, Putnam’s “hunkering thesis” is a product of his subsequent research:

New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies.

I’ve red-marked my copy to high heaven. I have a couple problems with what Putnam infers from his data. But the issue I want to focus on today is his place-agnostic research method.

Putnam marshals a national sample size of nearly 30,000, with the ability to drill down within 41 subsamples of 350 to 1500 for areas ranging in size from neighborhood to county. You might think that would be plenty place-specific.

Putnam recognizes that the community-level data lacks “contextual effect,” yet the only context he then provides comes from the US Census (tract-level). The only factors he includes are socioeconomic, despite the housing data available for the same census geography.Does the giant, disembodied head of Ferdinand Tönnies make you hunker down?

Ideally, I’d want to know more about the place than census reveals. I am an urban planner (though I shy away from complete environmental determinism). The data about the physical form of the place is much, much harder to come by. Get out your tape measure.

And this is the roundabout way we end up back at what Jane Jacobs has to say about contact with each other and sidewalks:

When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, the people of the place must enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors. They must settle for some form of ‘togetherness,’ in which more is shared with one another than in the life of sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results. “The uses of sidewalks: contact,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p62-63)

How wide are the sidewalks where these folks “hunker down?” Do they go anywhere? Is there physical diversity? In other words: Are there sidewalks and do people use them?

When we were rural, other social ties, norms, and institutions governed our level of contact - Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft (a la Tönnies or Wirth) relies on secondary contacts, or “weak ties.” More tomorrow.