The Benefits of Thinking Small: Emplaced Inequality and the Material Politics of Pedestrian Infrastructure

• In Event: 189 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Urban Planning and Governance

Abstract

Sociologists and geographers in the United States tend to “think big” when they think about spatial inequality. But an important dimension of spatial inequality disappears at too broad a scale. Urban space does not simply confer access to more or less proximate resources – it directly affects wellbeing, and does so differently for different people. In this paper, I make a case for an urban sociology that recognizes spatial inequality as not simply a characteristic of regions, cities, neighborhoods, or census tracts, but as an embedded feature of specific, small-scale urban and suburban spaces. Spatial inequality, I argue, is “emplaced” (Gieryn 2000), through planning, architecture, and urban design. Adapting and building upon the theoretical vocabulary of STS, I argue for the value of four analytical steps that reveal the implicit inequalities built into the design and regulation of urban space. The result of this exercise is a conceptual vocabulary that is useful in describing and generalizing forms of spatial inequality that inhere in urban spaces with heterogeneous sets of users. I then apply this vocabulary to an empirical case – reactions to a pedestrian fatality epidemic in suburban New Jersey.

Author

• Michael Owen Benediktsson, Hunter college