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Urban disorder today
Author(s) -
Sennett Richard
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
the british journal of sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.826
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1468-4446
pISSN - 0007-1315
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.01215.x
Subject(s) - immigration , perception , race (biology) , psychoanalytic theory , social psychology , sociology , criminology , psychology , political science , gender studies , law , psychoanalysis , neuroscience
Rob Sampson’s research has important implications for how we understand cities, in the way urbanites themselves understand each other. Sampson demonstrates that perceptions of urban disorder are fundamentally tied to the hard facts of racial and economic inequality, which is to say that the visual evidence of disorder is projective rather than deductive (in psychoanalytic terms). This means we are processing something other than what we see directly. In one way this finding is not surprising, but in another it is quite original. Not surprisingly, urbanites, like all human beings, possess a code for analysing sense data. Surprisingly, Sampson shows us that most urbanites use the same code. A purely interest-based or identity-view would suggest that poor blacks see less disorder in their own environments than do rich white outsiders. Sampson’s research demonstrates that a common yardstick of malaise defines urban perceptions. Originally, he shows the variability over time in these perceptions, as patterns of race, wealth, and migration re-configure the city. His work has implications that go beyond measures of perception. The immigrants and migratory processes which diversify cities in time also promise to diminish the fear of disorder; that is, the more dynamic a city can become, the less fearfully chaotic it will seem. In British and American terms, this means looking at immigrants as a positive source of urbanity. This is not how police officers think, but Sampson’s conclusions ask us as planners to stop thinking like police officers. Because Sampson quotes my early book, The Uses of Disorder (Sennett 1970), I’d like to add a note on where I see the issue of urban disorder today, 45 years after writing the book.When I wrote it, I wanted to affirm the positive vitality of certain forms of perceived disorder: these perceptions can stimulate awareness of others as much as arouse fear and desire for withdrawal.All truly adult experience negotiates tension and dissonance, rather than seeks, as younger human beings necessarily must do, for a more fixed sort of security. In the America of the 1970s, the built environment – rigidly segregated into zones,