Disadvantage, disorder and diversity

Professor Sampson is our foremost contemporary researcher of urban disorder and crime and this recent lecture (Sampson 2009) provides an elegant summary of his current thinking. It also represents a new attempt to empirically explain how the interplay between structure and perception drive action and hence future structure. In this country, similar thinking has been attempted – most notably at Cambridge by Tony Bottoms and Per-Olof Wikström. However, for Sampson, as ever, he locates his thinking firmly within the Chicago tradition and clearly wants to be seen to be carrying that mantle forward – an ambition that few would aspire to but which he of all people fulfils. Sampson’s thesis, briefly stated, is that disadvantage at the neighbourhood level is long lasting; that this longevity can not be explained by the structural variables of disadvantage since their persistence is to be explained; that it is perception of disorder that is fundamental to disadvantage and its persistence; such perceptions are contextually shaped into collective social meaning that drive a neighbourhood’s future and that race and diversity is the key to such perceptions of disorder. This thesis actually involves two different but connected lines of argument: one about disadvantage and the other about disorder. Since the stages in each of these arguments are to some extent implicit it is worth spelling them out. The first argument starts with the assumption that disadvantages of various kinds exist and a claim that they are hierarchically structured. The argument then claims that many disadvantages are inter-correlated and so clustered. Furthermore, this clustering exists in space – i.e. that neighbourhoods have different rates of disadvantage. The next step in the argument is that neighbourhood rates of disadvantage are persistent over time. Whilst this claim is not always true (some areas do significantly change their relative disadvantage rate) it is often correct. Sampson is right that persistence is often more striking than change. Indeed, he starts his lecture by pointing out the similarity of some