(cc) Cornell University

Bullet points, sans synthesis:

• Some venture to say that the phrase, “the wrong side of the tracks,” has its origins in the pollution generated by early locomotive technology. The prevailing winds blew the pollution on to the “wrong side,” resulting in lower real estate values. This affected what was built where, and, consequently, who lived on either side. That is, lower real estate values, attracts lower class residents, which means the presence of the “wrong” or criminal element. This chain of causation seems much too simple. Fallacious logic, though it could be part of the story.
• Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart, contends that we tend to self-sort—pinpointing a tipping point in such activity as Americans moved away from traditional social institutions around 1965. I’m sure this is the same kind of finger pointing that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone accomplishes by pointing the decline in civic engagement. That is, engagement in these traditional social institutions. Other theses I’ve seen on this take up the rural to urban transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries—that the rise in these institutions provided social structures once found in the relatively homogeneity of small town life.
• I’ve blogged about Putnam’s hunkering thesis:

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.

• Researchers Ann Bowman and Michael Pagano take up Kevin Lynch’s concept of the edge in discussing geographic barriers and vacant land

[T]he boundaries and barriers created by vacant land can serve the same kinds of ends that are considered problematic to both the fragmentationists and the consolidationists with respect to political boundaries. That is to say, individuals choose residential locations to maximize their own personal or familial needs, in many cases, the schooling needs of their children. In the process, however, segregation by income and race results. Terra Incognita: Vacant Land and Urban Strategies (p93)

They discuss the formation of microcommunities and neighborhoods by these barriers. Some delineations are productive in non-offensive ways by grouping certain types of land uses; others seem unpalatably racist.

The list continues tomorrow.