Locating the City Limits: Community Characteristics and the Mental Boundaries of Urban Identity

• In Event: 099 - Regular Session. Bringing Sociology's 'Community Question' Back to the 21st Century City

Abstract

The growth of American suburbs in the 20th century was, in part, a result of white middle-class Americans’ attempts to find alternatives to inner-city congestion, crime, and educational failure. In recent decades, though, central-city gentrification and increasing poverty within inner-ring suburbs have contributed to a blurring of the boundaries between the “urban” and the “suburban” in American metropolitan areas. In this paper, we examine one aspect of this blurring process by investigating how metropolitan residents describe the communities they inhabit. Using data from respondents in eight metropolitan areas in the Soul of the Community Survey, we note a disjuncture between many respondents’ geographic residence and their characterizations of their communities – many central-city residents claim to live in a “suburban” area, while many inhabitants of suburbs describe their homes as “urban.” We explore some potential factors related to this disjuncture, finding that people’s perceptions of two local community characteristics – public safety and school quality – affect the labels that they attach to the places they call home. Controlling for where respondents actually live, logistic regression results indicate that those who perceive their communities to be unsafe and to have low-performing schools are significantly more likely to claim to live in an “urban” environment. We discuss some of the implications that these findings have for theories about space and place.

Authors

• Chase Michael Billingham, Wichita State University

• Shelley McDonough Kimelberg, University at Buffalo