Abstract
City & Community devotes its pages not only to urban sociology, but also to the sociology of community. Although often treated as synonyms, neighborhoods do not necessarily constitute communities, nor are communities always contained within neighborhoods. To recall this is not intended to rehash the old debate over “community lost” and the persistence of strong and weak ties in the city. The field is well saturated with studies of “community without propinquity” demonstrating the existence of durable networks of Gemeinschaftlich social relations maintained over great distances. Rather, the observation calls attention to the ways community attachments to specific neighborhoods are nonetheless preserved by institutions, identities, and rituals, reinvigorated by pilgrimages of nonresident group members, and reproduced in collective memory. Furthermore, the processes by which socially diverse neighborhoods begin to cohere into local communities are also important subjects for study. Just as people erroneously assume nation–states are societies, too often they expect neighborhoods to be integrated, self–conscious, efficacious communities. This misapprehension is an opportunity for research.
Three articles in this issue address the complex relationships of communities and neighborhoods. Theo Greene's article points to the “vicarious citizenship” of community members who cannot afford to live in their group's increasingly expensive “home base,” but who nonetheless make claims about normative conduct in the neighborhood's public places and engage in community political activity there. Although identifiable gay spaces are dispersing and are increasingly attracting straight households, iconic neighborhoods like Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, continue to attract LGBT nonresidents who hang out in public spaces, frequent bars, patronize businesses, and advocate for group interests.
Jeremy Hein offers an account of community formation after secondary migration of refugees to the American “capital of the Hmong” in the Twin Cities. This group's unique geographical concentration in a smaller re–emerging gateway city has amplified its influence. Hmong events in St. Paul and Minneapolis are mainly dedicated to civic causes, like socio–economic improvement and group solidarity, more than electoral politics or protest. But when Hmong Americans do launch collective actions, the spatial distribution of those events reflects the location of established ethnic and public institutions more than ethnic residential concentration. Again, community does not perfectly coincide with neighborhood.
Petra Kuppinger's study of the diverse ethnic businesses on a Stuttgart shopping street moves the discussion of ethnic enclaves forward by examining a neighborhood that is home to multiple ethnic communities. By sharing the same third spaces, cosmopolitan canopies, and public places, members of different groups come to develop local interethnic ties, innovative cultural practices, and cross–cultural lifeworlds. Kuppinger's study thus lends support to the “contact” hypothesis, a more hopeful, pro–urban perspective on ethnic diversity than the one Robert Putnam recently painted. Local entrepreneurs may cultivate a multi–ethnic clientele for economic reasons, but are also dedicated to creating, maintaining, and intensifying positive everyday encounters in the neighborhood across group boundaries. So loyal are their customers that, even when ethnic Germans move out of the neighborhood, they return to frequent Turkish–German shops. Read this study to learn what a “Blumenberg pizza” is!
These are just a few of the insightful papers submitted to the journal that examine the relationship of city and community.