Abstract
The articles in this issue of City & Community look northward and southward, comparing the urban United States to other cities of the Americas. It brings together three articles on Canadian cities and three essays on Latin American cities. Like the compilation of articles on “Cities of the Middle East” in the fourth issue of volume 9, City & Community has assembled contributions on Canadian cities into this fourth issue of volume 10. The intention is to encourage through comparison more reflection on how a neighboring, broadly similar, but nonetheless different nation–state shapes urban social life. This issue of C&C also includes three essays that analyze North American cities and/or U.S. urban sociology from the perspective of Latin American urbanism. In an increasingly global era, urban theorists need to stretch the imagination and look farther afield to appreciate contemporary urban trends.
For nearly a century, theories of urban development, spatial form, and social dynamics have been modeled on prototypes in the United States. Even with some notable works on “The European City,” what passes for urban theory is still dominated by a few prototypes: Chicago or its bi–coastal competitors, Los Angeles and New York (See the 2002 inaugural issue of City & Community). Although these American megacities emerged in different periods around different topographies, economies, and modes of transportation, they do not exhaust the range of ideal types.
In order to push urban sociological theory forward, City & Community has been seeking articles that place American cities in comparative context. Recently, Jennifer Robinson, Colin McFarlane, and other scholars have appealed for more international, post–colonial, cosmopolitan research comparing cities across the conventional global North–South, rich–poor divide. In addition to universalizing comparisons, there is value in particularizing comparisons that identify systematic differences between cities. Creative contrasts force scholars to confront the unfamiliar or unexpected. In the process, comparison becomes a mode of thought and a theoretical strategy, not simply a methodology.
There are surprisingly few systematic comparisons of cities across the northern border. Seymour Martin Lipset was among the first who fruitfully studied Canada to shed light on American politics and values. Since then, comparing these two “liberal” welfare states has offered a natural experiment to assess the impact of social policies, labor organizations, and national institutions on socioeconomic outcomes. Ann Shola Orloff and David Card & Richard Freeman demonstrated that “Small Differences Matter” to national levels of income inequality, unemployment, and poverty. At the urban level, Daniyal Zuberi's 2006 book, Differences that Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada contrasted the impact of Canadian and US labor and social policies on the lives of working poor Vancouver and Seattle hotel workers. Our northern neighbor consistently produces more favorable outcomes for disadvantaged citizens than does the US.
Both Canada and the US consider themselves countries of immigration. Canada's points–based system attracted more skilled immigrants than the American family–unification rules. In addition, as Monica Boyd, Jeffrey Reitz, and others have shown, Canadian immigrants are less racialized in Canada than in the US, inhibiting the segmented assimilation found in American cities. Moreover, Irene Bloemraad points out, the two countries have divergent processes of immigrant political incorporation, with Canada more actively supporting citizenship, settlement, and integration. Not only are there large national differences in the rates of becoming a citizen, but the official multicultural policies of Canada give rise to greater recognition and organization of ethnic and immigrant communities in that country. Together with First Nations and linguistic communities, Canadian ethnic groups contribute to a very different configuration of social diversity than the racial divide so dominant in the United States.
As the articles in this issue show, cities in these countries differ in other respects too. Although Canadian immigrants – both “visible minorities” and whites – are more readily accepted by the host society than American immigrants, this is not to say that immigrants to Canada do not encounter racial discrimination. The article here by Berry and Hogan discusses discriminatory mechanisms in the housing market of Toronto, a multicultural city with less segregation and more diverse visible minorities than most large U.S. cities. In an innovative audit study of housing ads on Craiglist, the authors contrast the treatment of Caucasian, Black, Asian, Muslim/Arab, and Jewish men and women in the on–line housing market. They find that “Opportunity denying” (exclusion through non–response) was much more common than “Opportunity diminishing” behavior, such as multiplying obstacles to a rental agreement. Discrimination was greatest against Muslim/Arab men compared to other groups, and was evenly spread throughout the city.
Residential segregation by race, nationality, and religion in turn shapes the potential for intergroup contact and social integration. Despite globalization and increasing mobility, community and place attachments persist. In this vein, the article here by Zheng Wu, Feng Hou, and Christoph Schimmele demonstrates that residential exposure to racial diversity has an independent effect on Canadians’ sense of national and in–group belonging, taken as barometers of social cohesion. The study supports intergroup contact theory. The multilevel analysis reveals that, although effects vary by personal racial background, the sense of belonging to Canada is strongest, and in–group belonging is weakest, in racially heterogeneous rather than homogeneous neighborhoods.
Canadian urban sociologists also enjoy an advantage over their American counterparts in having access to data on some kinds of social diversity unavailable south of the border. Eric Fong and Elic Chan analyze the 2001 Canadian census data on religion to explore the residential segregation of eight religious groups in 16 Canadian metropolitan areas. Their article here asserts that religions have their own set of institutions that influence members’ residential decisions and relationships with other religious groups. A religion's community services, subcultural identity, religious identity, and discrimination are related to its degree of residential segregation in Canadian cities. With increasing religious diversity and the visible presence of non–Christians in many North American cities, segregation by faith will become an important sociological topic.
This issue's peer–reviewed essays on Latin American cities were invited to promote cross–fertilization of ideas across the conventional area studies divide. Urban scholars in both regions take certain assumptions for granted. Urban sociologists in the US too often think of the “inner–city” as synonymous with segregated enclaves of poor African–Americans, neglecting the gentrification of those areas as well as the rising poverty in suburbia. Conversely, urban sociologists in Latin America assume poverty is concentrated in sprawling informal settlements of the periphery, neglecting the occupation of central interstitial land by the poor and the construction of rich gated communities in the suburbs. Neither the Chicago nor the Los Angeles Schools can fully account for these developing urban forms, but placed in dialogue, North and South American urbanists might mutually find an explanation.
The first two essays engage in historically grounded comparisons embedded in the context of common global forces affecting cities in North and South. Bryan Roberts examines two periods of urban development in Latin American cities. Unlike in the US, he maintains, Latin American urbanization initially produced social disorganization that in turn gave rise to social organization and local cohesion. Population growth, density, and heterogeneity produced urbanism on both continents, but the mix of formal and informal economies in those cities differed considerably, with implications for neighborhood solidarity. In Latin American cities, informality in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to local cohesion, as rural migrants worked with their families or in workshops near their neighbors. They built their homes and environment together. In the current period of neoliberal globalization, however, the older boundary between formal and informal sectors has eroded, and new urban and suburban development has displaced some informal activities. Population turnover and economic transformations undermined the older neighborhood solidarity. The subsequent unemployment, especially of young men, has promoted the drug economy and its attendant violence. Latin American cities now have organized crime more than the social disorganization. Instead of neighbors who help one another, outsiders – whether NGOs, public service providers, or relatives abroad – address residents’ needs. Disorder produces a different kind of order today, integrating the Latin American urban poor into global markets, communication networks, and politics.
Nora Libertun de Duren argues that, regardless of the shared effects of globalization, comparing cities in North and South America must also take account of national context. Nation–states remain an important level of analysis in urban research. She illustrates this point by comparing the largest parks in New York and Buenos Aires. Recalling that Haussmann's public works in Paris were globally influential at the turn of the 20th century, she contends that the concern to incorporate the industrial working class in the US led to a democratic and open Central Park, while parks in Buenos Aires accommodated the landed upper classes to the exclusion of others. She attributes this difference in public space partly to intercity competition for dominance in the national urban hierarchy, itself a consequence of differentially centralized national transportation systems. The global spread of land uses and styles today, such as gated communities, should not lead scholars to neglect distinctively national investments in housing, infrastructure, and public safety that produce urban forms that are highly specific to each locality.
The third essay by Javier Auyero observes that urban poverty scholars in North and South America rarely talk to each other, despite the influences of common neoliberal forces. Although the terminology – marginality, informality, exclusion – differs, Auyero shows that a fruitful exchange between Global North and Global South on the nature of urban inequality is possible. Beyond Wacquant's familiar comparison of ghettos around the world, Auyero highlights some other common themes. For example, while the literature on both continents debates cultural and structural conceptions of urban poverty, the labor markets that produce joblessness differ considerably. Second, debates over urban violence and incarceration, especially as they relate to the global drug market, are central in both North and South American cities. Third, as Auyero's own book, Flammable showed, environmental suffering is part of the plight of poor families in disadvantaged neighborhoods of the two Americas, but has not been an important focus of urban sociological attention until recently.
Comparing cities of the Americas, cities of the Middle East, and cities of other regions has the potential to reorient urban sociology. As mentioned in the editorial introduction to Volume 9, City & Community welcomes more empirically–grounded submissions that offer theoretical insights derived from comparative analysis between cities in the United States and elsewhere in the world.