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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

The ‘Community Question’ became a central theme for the Chicago School of Sociology over during the first half of the 20th Century. City living with its manufacturing base was mostly argued to be pluralistic and fragmented, thus becoming what Barry Wellman referred to in his seminal 1979 piece as “Community Lost” (also see Wirth, 1938). Wellman’s response to the hegemony of the Lost argument where the “Community Saved” (also see Gans, 1963), and the “Community Liberated approaches to examining urban communities. In contrast to the “Lost” approach, “Saved” posited that community bonds and supports remained alive and well in urban settings, and “Liberated” refers to social networks transcending place-based ties to ones that are spatially-dispersed and constitute both loose and tight networks of friends, kin and work. This dynamic session will revisit the community question by exploring recent studies looking at urban lifestyles, social threats and conflicts, social altruism in the face of gentrification, urban identifies of various racial and ethnic groups, the changing spatial arrangements of community, as well as the theory of real estate developers as brokers of community social connections. The session asked the fundamental question of where to the ‘community question’ can be situated or resituated in the 21st Century city.

Sub Unit

• Community

Session Organizer

• Deirdre Aine Oakley, Georgia State University

Presider

• Rachael A. Woldoff, West Virginia University

Individual Presentations

• A City in Search of Its Past: Notes on Urban Lifestyles, Culture and Hyper-Growth - Anthony M. Orum

• Conditions of Conflict: Community Ethnic Composition, Prejudice, and the Role of Segregation for Contact/Threat Processes - James Laurence, Manchester University; Katharina Schmid, University of Oxford; Miles Hewstone, Oxford University

• Finding a Lost Letter: Neighborhood Gentrification and Social Altruism in Manhattan’s West Side - Van C. Tran, Columbia University

• Locating the City Limits: Community Characteristics and the Mental Boundaries of Urban Identity - Chase Michael Billingham, Wichita State University; Shelley McDonough Kimelberg, University at Buffalo

• Spatial Arrangements and Practices: A Detroit neighborhood - Jenny Lendrum, Wayne State University; Sarah Christine Swider, Wayne State University

• There’s Money to be Made in Community: Real Estate Developers as Brokers of Social Connections - Philip M.E. Garboden, Johns Hopkins University; Christine J. Jang, Johns Hopkins University