Transforming Neighborhoods: How Arts, Walking, Mixed Use, Buzz, and Social Movements Generate Local Area Effects

• In Event: 417 - Regular Session. Urban Sociology: Perspectives on Urban Change

Abstract

These themes have joined several of us that we propose to summarize with cross-national neighborhood analyses. We add active policies by citizens and leaders to assess how they relate to broader socio-economic characteristics of neighborhoods. Walking, the arts, and civic/organizational activities are reconceptualized and measured by neighborhood in the US, Canada, and France. How do socio-economic characteristics like race/ethnicity and income inequality shift these effects? This work builds on the dramatic effects of walking that Knudsen/Clark reported in UAR (2013), but substantially extends it cross-nationally and digs deeper with specific processes.
Walking is an intimate, direct, embodied means of experiencing the city and its diverse social and built forms. Through these direct engagements with one’s social and environmental surroundings, walking heightens awareness and raises consciousness, elicits impressions and sentiments, conjures feelings, encourages imagination, and increases desires for expression. Walking thus enhances people’s creative engagement with their cities. The artistic implications of walking are evident, from Baudelaire to Benjamin and beyond. We argue, however, that walking has significance beyond the life of the artist and the aesthete, in particular, for politics: modern political activism has an expressive and imaginative character that makes experiences traditionally conducive to the arts also conducive to political mobilization.
We use multiple regression and other analyses to test these propositions in the U.S., Canada, and France. Findings show strong and significant effects of walking in all three countries: artistic and social movement activities are higher in locales with more walking.

Authors

• Terry Nichols Clark, University of Chicago

• Brian Knudsen

• Christopher Michael Graziul, University of Chicago

• Aaron Isaksen, New York University

• Maxime Jaffre, University of Avignon