Discussion 5

Immigration and

Urbanization

Patrick Sharkey, Princeton University

Jody Vallejo, University of Southern California

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Immigration and

Urbanization

P A T R I C K S H A R K E Y , P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y

J O D Y V A L L E J O , U N I V E R S I T Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L I F O R N I A

INTRODUCTION

URBANIZATION

City life and community life

The liberated community

IMMIGRATION

The new immigration

Who migrates and why

Immigration policy

Immigrant integration

CONCENTRATED POVERTY AND RACIAL SEGREGATION

Concentrated poverty

Racial segregation

The new American city

THE FUTURE OF URBAN LIFE

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INTRODUCTION

 How can we understand cities and neighborhoods?

Think back to any moment in your life when you stepped into an entirely new city, or

even a new neighborhood that was very different from your own. You might recall hearing

phrases that you hadn’t heard before, or observing customs that were unfamiliar. You might

not have known whether a particular street was safe or dangerous, whether you were

welcome or observed with suspicion. You might have spent some time asking questions about

that strange place, observing the people around you, or exploring your surroundings to figure

out exactly how the place works, why the people are all from the same ethnic group, why the

houses look so big and fancy, or why the streets feel so dangerous.

This is what urban sociologists do. In this chapter we’ll introduce you to the work of

social scientists who analyze large-scale data on where groups of city dwellers live, why

immigrants decide to come to the United States (or to leave), where crime takes place, where

housing is built, where jobs are prevalent and where they are scarce. We’ll introduce you to

researchers who have spent years living in a community to try to understand how it works from

the inside.

Let’s start with William Helmreich, a longtime professor in New York City, who took a

different approach—he decided to walk through almost every block of his city.1 Helmreich

walked about 6,000 miles over the course of four years, going through nine pairs of sneakers in

the process. He kept notes on scenes from the city as he passed, watched to see who was in

the parks and who was on their front stoops, and talked with as many people as he could.

And he discovered an urban landscape that sometimes transformed from one block to the

next, where kids took tennis lessons in a pristine park just a few streets away from where young

men walked down the street conspicuously wearing the colors of their gang.2 He saw hints of

change up close, and learned that residents had a very different view of the change in their

neighborhoods than outsiders like journalists or politicians did. And he saw tremendous, almost

unfathomable diversity, visible in the distinct clothes of Orthodox Jews and the bustling street

markets of Chinatown.

Walking the city’s streets, he found a population of New Yorkers who “display both

small-town values and a high degree of sophistication.” But what united everyone, according

to Helmreich, was their shared claim to the city—the collective understanding of what makes

their city different, the unflinching acceptance of the wide variety of people who come

together in the subway cars, the feeling of solidarity that comes from living in the city where

the towers came down on September 11th, 2001. Their city was their common identity.

We are very sad to say that William Helmreich passed away from COVID-19 in 2020. But

we hope his work inspires you to join us as we pursue two goals for this chapter. The first goal is

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to introduce you to important ideas and debates about two large-scale processes,

immigration and urbanization, that affect how every part of society works. We will examine

how these processes alter how cities function, what they look like, and the way we live our

lives. We’ll ask questions like, How has the growing movement of humans to cities affected our

lives and interactions? How can we explain the emergence and transformation of cities and

neighborhoods? How have American cities changed in the last century? What are the major

trends and problems in urban areas? Are cities leading us toward economic growth and

environmental sustainability or are they breeding grounds for poverty and inequality?

Chinatown, Manhattan, New York City. (Source)

This is the stuff of urban sociology. But the second goal of the chapter is to get you to

consider different ways to learn about the neighborhoods and cities that surround us, as well

as communities around the world. William Helmreich walked through almost every block of his

city, and he learned a tremendous amount about New York in the process. But is there

anything he might have missed along the way? Do people act the same way outdoors, on

the street, as they do when they’re inside with their friends and families? Do residents talk to a

stranger in their neighborhood the same way that they talk to a neighbor who’s lived next

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door for years? How might an older White man be perceived as he walks, alone, down a New

York city street?

“You need to walk slowly through an area to capture its essence,” Helmreich wrote. As

you read through this chapter, try to keep thinking like a social scientist. Ask yourself: Do I

believe the ideas I’m reading? What kind of evidence would be more convincing? If I wanted

to “capture the essence” of an entirely new city or neighborhood, how would I do it?

URBANIZATION

 How much of the world’s population lives in urban areas?

 What do cities look like and how are they connected?

 Does city life change the way we interact with each other?

 What does community look like in an urban world?

This is a good time to study cities, because they are taking over the world. Cities have

been around for more than 5,000 years, but they used to look very different than they do

today. Ancient cities were often the capitals of empires and centers for trade, surrounded by

walls and protected from the outside. The modern city dates back only a couple hundred

years. When the factory first emerged in Britain in the 1700s, people began to move from rural

areas to the nation’s industrial cities. The process of urbanization, defined by growth in the

proportion of a nation’s population that lives in cities, spread from Britain to the rest of Europe,

then to the United States, then to much of the rest of the world.

Now, for the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population lives in

urban areas.3 From 1950 to 2014, the number of people living in urban areas rose from around

750 million to almost 4 billion. Urbanization is happening in every corner of the globe. Tokyo,

Japan, is the largest city in the world, with over 38 million residents. But cities like Delhi, India;

Shanghai, China; Paris, France; São Paolo, Brazil; Lagos, Nigeria; and New York City are other

examples of megacities, urban areas with over ten million people, that have sprouted up in

North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Although Africa and Asia are the only two

major continents where less than half of the population lives in urban areas, they are

urbanizing at the fastest pace. By 2050, close to two-thirds of Asia’s population will live in urban

areas.

In many parts of the world, cities that are near one another are connected by

transportation lines and economic activity, forming megaregions, or chains of densely

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populated areas that extend over long stretches of space. In satellite images taken in the

evening, these stretches of land appear as wide swaths of space lit up with activity.4 One

megaregion in England stretches across London to Leeds, to Manchester, to Liverpool, to

Birmingham; another stretches from Shanghai to Nanjing to Hangzhou in China. Almost one-

fifth of the entire human population lives in just 40 megaregions throughout the world, and

two-thirds of the world’s economic activity happens in these places.

Table 1: The World’s 31 Megacities in 2016

Urban Area Country 1990 Population 2016 Population 2016 Population

Rank

Tokyo Japan 32,530,000 38,140,000 1

Delhi India 9,726,000 26,454,000 2

Shanghai China 7,823,000 24,484,000 3

Mumbai India 12,436,000 21,357,000 4

Sao Paulo Brazil 14,776,000 21,297,000 5

Beijing China 6,788,000 21,240,000 6

Mexico City Mexico 15,642,000 21,157,000 7

Osaka Japan 18,383,000 20,337,000 8

Cairo Egypt 9,892,000 19,128,000 9

New York

(metro area)

U.S. 16,086,000 18,604,000 10

Dhaka Bangladesh 6,621,000 18,237,000 11

Karachi Pakistan 7,147,000 17,121,000 12

Buenos Aires Argentina 10,513,000 15,334,000 13

Calcutta India 10,890,000 14,980,000 14

Istanbul Turkey 6,552,000 14,365,000 15

Chongqing China 4,011,000 13,774,000 16

Lagos Nigeria 4,764,000 13,661,000 17

Manila Philippines 7,973,000 13,131,000 18

Guangzhou,

Guangdong

China 3,072,000 13,070,000 19

Rio de Janeiro Brazil 9,697,000 12,981,000 20

Los Angeles

(metro area)

U.S. 10,833,000 12,317,000 21

Moscow Russian

Federation

8,987,000 12,260,000 22

Kinshasa Democratic

Republic of

Congo

3,683,000 12,071,000 23

Tianjin China 4,558,000 11,558,000 24

Paris France 9,330,000 10,925,000 25

Shenzhen China 875,000 10,828,000 26

Jakarta Indonesia 8,175,000 10,483,000 27

Bangalore India 4,000,000 10,456,000 28

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Urban Area Country 1990 Population 2016 Population 2016 Population

Rank

London United Kingdom 8,054,000 10,434,000 29

Madras India 3,800,000 10,163,000 30

Lima Peru 5,800,000 10,072,000 31

Source: United Nations (2016)

Cities that are nowhere near each other are also increasingly connected through

technology and commerce that allow products, services, and information to move quickly

across national and continental boundaries, otherwise known as globalization. Much of this

activity occurs in global cities, major urban areas that serve as the nodes for the worldwide

network of economic activity.5 As city governments try to attract global firms and become

centers of international commerce, many urban scholars have documented a growing divide

between the global elite and the city residents who carry out the service jobs that make the

global economy run.6 As I show later in the chapter, the rise of globalization goes hand in

hand with the rise of a new form of urban inequality.

The rise of global cities means that we are not only living in an increasingly urban world,

we are living in a world where cities connect the world together. But the figures we’ve

presented to you are not sufficient to understand the importance of cities. A sociological

perspective on cities goes beyond pure description of their size and growth across the world

and asks how cities change us, change the way we live, and change the way we interact

with each other.

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The megaregion in the northeast U.S., running from Boston to Washington, D.C., is visible in the top right of this

satellite photo. (Source)

City life and community life

To write his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam analyzed data from a range of

different surveys asking Americans how they spend their time.7 The title of the book came from

a finding that the number of Americans who enjoyed bowling had grown over time, but the

number who took part in organized bowling leagues had dwindled. People across America

were bowling, but they were bowling alone. And it wasn’t just bowling leagues that were

disappearing. Putnam showed that from the 1960s to the 1990s, Americans became less likely

to attend religious services, donate blood, vote in national elections, and volunteer on

parent/teacher associations. He worried that social capital, the tight connections that people

form with each other through organizations, civic life, and strong social ties, had withered

away.

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Putnam’s concerns about

what he called “the collapse of

American community” raised

alarms around the country. But his

worries weren’t new. Since the

early days of the discipline,

sociologists have grappled with

the question of whether

community life has eroded in

modern society. In the late 1880s,

German sociologist Ferdinand

Tönnies (pronounced “Tone-ees”)

argued that pre-modern societies

were characterized by close ties

between members of the same

families and the same communities.8 As Europe industrialized and capitalism proliferated,

interactions between people started to change, becoming more impersonal and

instrumental.

Writing during the same period, Georg Simmel (pronounced “Zimmel”) observed the

crowded streets of Berlin, Germany, and noted how life in the bustling city changed the

mindset of those within it.9 To protect themselves from the chaos and anonymity of urban life,

city dwellers developed a “blasé” outlook, according to Simmel, which allowed them to

adapt to the barrage of stimuli—sights, sounds, lights, and people—in the urban environment.

Personal relationships became less important, emotional life was pushed aside, and the

mental life of the individual became more rational, more intellectual.

Both of these sociologists shed light on a recurring theme of urban sociology. The type

of community life that existed in tight-knit villages in rural areas had become less common in

the modern, industrializing world. And many sociologists, writing from the end of the 19th

Century to the end of the 20th Century, had one primary explanation: City life had changed us

all.

But what was it about cities that altered the way humans interact with each other?

Louis Wirth was a sociologist at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, and it was there that he

wrote one of the classic statements about urbanism, the unique ways of life in cities.10 Wirth

defined a city as “a large, dense, and permanent settlement of heterogeneous individuals.”

He focused on these defining characteristics of cities because large, densely-populated

places with diverse groups of people changed the way that urban residents interacted with

each other. Because it’s impossible to know everyone in a city, Wirth wrote, “urbanites interact

with others not as individuals but with others in certain roles.” The character of our interactions

Rooftops in a German village. (Source)

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changes, becoming less intimate and more formulaic. The diversity of the urban population

leads residents to sort into groups, creating a segmented city where different groups of

residents interact with a mix of tolerance, indifference, and occasional conflict.

Wirth, Simmel, and Tönnies offer a somewhat bleak picture of our urban world, but other

scholars have put forth a more complex, and in some cases more positive, theory of urbanism.

Claude Fischer built on some of Wirth’s ideas about city life, but argued that the scale and

density of cities tends to generate a more diverse, extreme set of lifestyles or subcultures—

groups that hold values and engage in activities that separate them from wider society—that

are reinforced by establishments and institutions found only in cities.11 Because so many

people are crowded together in one place, small groups of people can find others who share

the same unique tastes, lifestyles, interests, or passions. And new clubs, businesses, or sections

of a city are more likely to emerge to cater to these subcultures within the city.

Fischer’s theory helps explain why the most distinctive, eclectic types of people and

places are often (though of course not always) found within cities. For example, decades ago,

when heterosexual norms and culture dominated American society, sections of Manhattan’s

Chelsea neighborhood, San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, and Chicago’s Boystown

neighborhood emerged as areas where each city’s gay and lesbian population

congregated. It’s not an accident, according to Fischer’s theory, that the first set of

“gayborhoods” arose in cities, not in the suburbs of Chicago, the sparsely populated area

north of San Francisco Bay, or the suburban and rural areas of upstate New York.

Other scholars have countered the idea that community life has eroded, pointing to

the unique ways that people can connect with each other and create community even

within large, densely-populated cities. One of the most influential urbanists in modern history is

Jane Jacobs, who observed city life by looking out at the streets below her apartment in

Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.12 Jacobs argued that city streets densely populated with

residents and businesses allow a wide range of people to look out over the street together,

keeping tabs on activity and making sure that vulnerable residents are safe, while also

absorbing streams of strangers and visitors. While generations of sociologists have argued that

cities erode community life, Jacobs saw something different; the city, from her perspective,

facilitated the kind of interaction and communication that breeds a sense of community—an

urban village.

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The Castro District, San Francisco. (Source)

The liberated community

In July 2011, a magazine asked readers to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents,

kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.” Two months later, on September 17th,

hundreds of people heeded the call and gathered in the heart of the financial district of

Lower Manhattan to protest the rise of inequality in the United States and the growing

influence of the wealthiest Americans, “the 1%.” That was just the beginning. What came to

be known as the Occupy movement spread across the country, bringing thousands of people

together at hundreds of sites and starting a social movement around the issue of economic

inequality.

How did it all happen so quickly? Facebook is one reason. Almost 1,500 Occupy

Facebook pages emerged, attracting more than 400,000 members. Researchers Sarah Gaby

and Neal Caren analyzed data from all of these pages and identified the types of Facebook

posts that attracted the most members to the movement.13 The same features of Facebook

that made it such an expansive, popular social media platform—photographs of the Occupy

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sites, testimonials from people with a unique story, inspirational quotes from historical figures

like Malcolm X—were also most effective in bringing new people to Occupy. In other words, a

technology that allowed people to develop an entirely new way to connect with their friends

and family was used in the exact same way to start a social movement.

When generations of sociologists and urbanists, from Louis Wirth to Jane Jacobs, wrote

about community life, they typically focused on the people who are generally nearest to us—

family members, friends, and neighbors. But the “communities” of protesters who came

together via Facebook complicate this idea of community life. With the advent of new

communication and transportation technologies, our “communities” have spread well

beyond where we live.14 Barry Wellman was one of the first sociologists to notice this; he

argued that the study of community life should focus on social networks, defined as the

various types of connections that individuals form with other people, no matter where they’re

located.

Wellman pointed out that sociologists

who saw a decline in community life may

not have noticed the larger social networks

in which individuals are embedded through

home, work, school, religious institutions,

and now online. Community is neither “lost”

nor “saved,” according to Wellman, but

rather has been “liberated.” Residents of

cities now form networks that extend across

space, and they create different kinds of

networks of friends, colleagues, family, and

acquaintances who share the same

interests.

As of 2018, Facebook had over 2 billion users. It’s easier than ever before to reach

thousands of people across the world, and we still don’t quite know how our expanding

network of potential “friends” has changed the way humans interact with each other. But

there is good reason to believe that community life is not going away, even if it is evolving.

Some research has even found that online interactions may provide new information and

contacts in ways that strengthen our offline social ties.15 Online networks can connect

neighbors to each other, allowing people who may pass each other on the street without so

much as a nod to communicate and share information about their building or

neighborhood.16

Decades of research make clear that this type of communication is crucial for

mobilizing groups to take political action, organizing for neighborhood change, and

facilitating the basic types of supports that are essential when people face a crisis—whether

Connecting with friends from the beach. (Source)

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it’s a heat wave, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or the threat of a local fire station being

shut down. Our networks may be evolving, but the ability to find a way to connect with those

around us remains as strong as ever.17

REVIEW SHEET: URBANIZATION

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

IMMIGRATION

 What factors affect patterns of migration?

 How did The Great Migration change America’s cities?

 Where do today’s immigrants come from and why do they migrate?

 What is immigrant integration?

In the previous section we described how large-scale migration to industrializing cities of

Europe dominated the attention of European sociologists at the end of the 1800s; they

wondered how urbanization had changed the nature of community life. In the United States,

industrialization and urbanization had an added twist: the movement to America’s cities

resulted in a major reshuffling of the entire population and permanent changes in the form

and layout of our urban neighborhoods.

As cities expanded throughout the country, African Americans began to move out of

the rural South and into the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West—a demographic shift

known as The Great Migration. From 1900 to 1970, over six million African Americans left the

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Deep South and traveled northward to cities that previously had only small Black populations.

New York City had just over 140,000 African Americans in 1910, but three decades later more

than 660,000 African Americans lived there.18 The population of African Americans in Detroit

went from just 9,000 in 1910 to almost 169,000 in 1940 and over 750,000 in 1970.

To understand this mass migration that permanently transformed the country, historian

Isabel Wilkerson took a novel approach. She tracked down people who were part of this

stream of migrants and sat down and talked to them about their lives—she carried out an oral

history.19

In her book The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson recounts the life of George Swanson

Starling, who was forced to leave Florida when his life was threatened after he tried to

organize for better wages for citrus workers. His migration story took him up the East Coast to

New York. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney’s story took her from Mississippi to Chicago, and Robert

Joseph Pershing Foster’s amazing story took him from Louisiana to California, where he was

finally able to practice freely as a surgeon.

A segregated drinking fountain. (Source)

These stories, brought to life through personal narratives, reveal the incredible injustices

that were common in segregated towns and cities in the South, and the humiliations and

blocked opportunities that led African Americans to leave the only places their families had

known. In the study of migration, the forces that lead people to leave a neighborhood, a city,

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or even their home country are called push factors. The forces that draw people to a new

destination are pull factors. The lure of jobs in northern factories was the primary pull factor for

many African Americans. But they were also drawn by the idea of living in cities where Black

culture was flourishing, where newspapers like the Chicago Defender were produced by and

for African Americans, and where they hoped to live freely and with dignity.20

Wilkerson’s oral history reveals that the “promised land” of the North didn’t live up to

these ideals. Her research on the experience of Black communities in the North aligns with the

groundbreaking research carried out by African American sociologists St. Clair Drake and

Horace Cayton before World War II. Just as the eminent sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois had

rigorously studied the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia decades earlier, Drake and Cayton

analyzed every dimension of social, political, and economic life in Chicago’s predominantly

Black South Side in their multi-volume book Black Metropolis.21 Their work documented the

vibrant community life in a section of the city known as Bronzeville, but also the challenge of

unrelenting racism faced by Black migrants in their new homes, and the new forms of urban

poverty and racial conflict that emerged in northern, midwestern, and western cities

absorbing large numbers of African Americans for the first time.

Although African Americans had escaped the most brutal forms of segregation and

racial violence in the South, they met with fierce resistance in the North as formal and informal

steps were taken to maintain rigid boundaries that defined where Blacks could live. Violence

and intimidation were commonly used to keep Blacks from moving into White neighborhoods,

along with legal tactics such as restrictive covenants, contracts that prohibited homeowners in

White neighborhoods from selling or renting their home to a Black family.22 The racial

segregation that persists today had its roots in the large-scale, rapid movement of African

Americans to northern cities.

The new immigration

The Great Migration provides a striking example of urbanization in the United States. But

it also provides insight into the dynamic nature of cities, which are constantly experiencing

flows of in- and out-migration—both of immigrants and of people moving from place to place

internally—that can alter the urban landscape completely. The process by which new

populations are sorted into urban environments was a central focus of a group of sociologists

at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 20th Century who came to be known as the

Chicago School of Urban Sociology. One of their central questions was, Why does the city look

the way it does? Why were some neighborhoods landing spots for new immigrants, while

others were sought out by Americans who have been in the country for longer periods of

time? Why were shopping centers located in the heart of the city, while factories were just

outside the city center?

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Sociologists affiliated with the Chicago School used the city as their laboratory,

scrutinizing the inner workings of urban life in a rapidly changing city. Ernest Burgess, one of the

most influential scholars in the Chicago School, analyzed the slow movement of different

groups across the city’s neighborhoods. He argued that new immigrants resided in the slums

just outside the downtown business district because it placed them near other immigrants

going through a similar phase of transition and allowed them to be near the factories that

dominated the economies of cities in the industrial North. As these new immigrants established

a foothold in the labor market, he argued that they would “assimilate” into American culture

and gradually drift away from the culture of their ethnic group. This led them to move outward

to working-class sections of the city, and then further outward into surrounding areas of the

city that were less densely settled and provided some separation from the grit, the crowds,

and the slums found in the heart of Chicago.

Burgess’s theory, which suggested that the city filters groups of people into the

environment that provides the best “fit,” was known as human ecology. Burgess’s observations

led him to develop an intricate map showing where different groups clustered within Chicago

and how they moved across areas of the city over time.23

Mulberry Street in the heart of Little Italy, Manhattan, New York City. (Source)

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Burgess’s model of neighborhood change and migration didn’t work as well in other

cities as it did in Chicago and quickly became outdated with the emergence of new

transportation and communication technologies. The model overlooked how historical

legacies of discrimination in federal housing policy and in the financial system prevented some

immigrants, and Black Americans, from moving into neighborhoods outside the central city as

Burgess expected. However, some of his insights remain very valuable for understanding the

layout of cities today. Burgess focused on the way that migration shapes the form of

neighborhoods and how they change over time. And part of the explanation for the form of

urban neighborhoods even today is that groups of people come to the housing market with

different levels of resources, different ideas of what they want in their neighborhood, and

different roles that they play within the urban environment.

As an example, new immigrants entering a city often move to communities with a large

number of other immigrants from the same country. Being part of an ethnic enclave, a section

of a city where the local culture and labor market are dominated by a single ethnic group,

can provide immigrants a more gradual, smoother transition to a new country. Immigrants

often rely on social capital—such as information about jobs and housing—to help establish

themselves in the new city.24 Living within ethnic enclaves can allow people to share in a

common cultural life, take advantage of tight social networks, participate in institutions that

facilitate integration, and enjoy greater political influence because of the concentration of

people with the same racial or ethnic background.

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When Burgess was writing, the new immigrants moving to

Chicago were mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe.

There was no immigration from Asia because immigrant-entry

policies, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibited

immigration from Asia. However, Mexican immigrants, whose

migration was spurred by the Mexican Revolution on the one

hand and the hope of jobs in Chicago’s railroads and steel

mills on the other, migrated to, and formed ethnic enclaves

in, Chicago. The Mexican-origin population in Chicago grew

after the 1924 Immigration Act, which created numerical

limits based on national origin that suspended immigration

from Southern and Eastern Europe and favored those from

countries considered to be “White,” such as Great Britain and

Germany. The 1924 Immigration Act didn’t restrict Mexican

immigration to the U.S., partly because the powerful

agricultural lobby worried that their labor supply would be cut

off since Asian immigrants, and now Southern and Eastern

Europeans, were no longer allowed to enter the country. The

principle threading these racist immigration laws together

was the desire to maintain White racial homogeneity.25

The racist national-origin quotas instituted by the 1924

Immigration Act remained in place until Congress passed the

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Signed by President

Lyndon B. Johnson on Ellis Island at the base of the Statue of Liberty, the 1965 legislation

created two primary pathways for entry: employment and family reunification. The Act

opened up immigration from Asia and the Caribbean, but included restrictive provisions for

Latin America, leading to undocumented migration from the region.26

Who migrates and why

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ushered in major demographic changes

that continue to shape the racial and ethnic composition of our country. In 1970, just 5% of the

U.S. population was foreign-born, but now those born outside the United States account for

almost 14% of the population (Figure 1).27 As of 2017, almost 44.4 million residents of the United

States were born outside of the country. The regions new immigrants come from have also

shifted since1965. In 1960, 84% of immigrants were from Europe or Canada. Today, 87% of

immigrants hail from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East.28 The

largest numbers of new immigrants come from India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and El

Salvador. In 2008, Asian immigrants began to outnumber immigrant arrivals from Latin America

Chinese Exclusion Act handbill for

a public rally (source)

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and they now make up the largest share of recent immigrants to the U.S. Among Latinos, we

have witnessed a “Latino nativity shift,” as over two-thirds of Latinos in the U.S. are native-

born.29 Since 1980, the Black immigrant population has increased fivefold.30

Figure 1: Percent of U.S Population that Is Foreign-Born, 1850 – 2017

Copyright: “Immigrant Share of U.S. Population Nears Historic High.” Pew Research Center

While the majority of immigrants in the U.S. have entered under the work or family

pathways created by the 1965 Act, about 10.5 million undocumented people who generally

do not have access to these pathways lived in the U.S. in 2017. The U.S. undocumented

population (those who entered the country without legal documentation) is long-settled. More

than two-thirds of undocumented people have lived in the U.S. a decade or longer;

undocumented people are embedded in our communities and live, work, and go to school

alongside documented people. Unauthorized people are also strongly connected to families

and U.S. citizens: more than 8 million U.S. citizens live with at least one family member who is

unauthorized.31

Many observers assume that people migrate simply “for a better life.” However, in order

to really understand why people forge new lives in new places, we must consider the push

and pull factors that propel people to move and the social networks that link individuals and

communities across borders.

Neoclassical economic theorists (who focus on supply and demand dynamics) argue

that people are pushed out of their home country by low wages and pulled into another

country by high wages. People will make the decision to migrate if the benefits outweigh the

costs. This perspective, often referred to as rational choice theory, assumes that the decision to

migrate is made by individuals acting in their own self-interest. But think about your own life. Do

parents, siblings, grandparents, or others influence the decisions you make?

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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Scholars developed new economic theories of migration to explain how economic and

social inequality in a city or country can stimulate migration elsewhere, and they maintain that

the decision to migrate is usually made by collective groups, like families, not by individuals.

But families are embedded in larger social structures, which is why scholars also use world

systems theory to explain how the global economy structures relationships between capitalist

and non-capitalist countries and influences migration. The idea is that the expansion of

capitalist nations into other countries in search of land, raw materials, and labor disrupts social,

political, and economic systems. Capitalist exploitation creates conditions that push people to

move, usually to the country that disrupts social and economic life in their home country.

Patterns of migration tend to continue over time because social networks link families and

cities across borders.32

Immigration policy

Many of today’s immigration policies revolve around trying to control who can enter

the United States. While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened up authorized

immigration from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, the legislation restricted immigration from

Latin America, leading to an increase in unauthorized migration from the region.33 Policies

created to reduce unauthorized migration are generally framed within the rational choice

model because policymakers often mistakenly assume that people make a cost-benefit

calculation about migration and that if the benefits outweigh the costs, they will move. The

reality is that current immigration is more complex than a simple cost-benefit calculation.

Sociologist Douglass Massey and his colleagues have written extensively about how U.S.

immigration policies seek to raise the costs associated with unauthorized migration and why

they continually fail.34 These policies include militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border by building

border walls and increasing enforcement; record levels of deportations; separating refugee

children from their parents; caging children and families in detention centers; stigmatizing

unauthorized status in the U.S.; and stripping asylum protections from refugees fleeing violent

conflicts or persecution. These policies have not deterred unauthorized migration, but they

have resulted in deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border and an increase in the number of

undocumented youth in the U.S. More recently, these policies have created a humanitarian

crisis of refugees from Central America fleeing violent conditions resulting from decades of U.S.

social, economic, and political intervention in the region, as world systems theory would

predict.35

These policies, especially intensified federal immigration enforcement, have negative

consequences for individuals, families, and immigrant communities. By conducting

observations and interviews with unauthorized immigrants and their family members,

sociologists Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego demonstrated that immigration enforcement

and criminalizing unauthorized immigrants stirs up fear among individuals and families, which

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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affects how they interact in institutions—like school and the workplace—and in city life. They

argue that fear created by harsh immigration enforcement is a form of legal violence that

can hinder the integration of immigrants and their children into the country.36

May Day Immigration Protest in Downtown Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Jody Agius Vallejo

Immigrant integration

Immigration since 1965 has transformed cities across the country, particularly those

near the coasts. Instead of urban neighborhoods that are mostly African American or

White, global neighborhoods that contain at least three different racial or ethnic groups

have sprouted up in many of the more diverse U.S. cities.37 And immigrants and their

descendants are increasingly moving into new destinations in the South and Midwest.

America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity makes the question of immigrant

integration—the process by which immigrants and their descendants integrate into

American life—of great importance.

Burgess and colleagues used the term “assimilation” to discuss the process by which

immigrants incorporate into society. However, there is an underlying ethnocentric bias to the

idea of assimilation which, in America, upholds whiteness as the cultural model by which

immigrants and their children should be judged. Today, scholars write about the

multidimensional process by which immigrants become integrated into American culture and

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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institutions. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine,

led by sociology professor Mary Waters, asserts that “Integration is a twofold process that

depends on the participation of immigrants and their descendants in major social institutions

such as schools and the labor market, as well as their social acceptance by other

Americans.”38

Immigration researchers have demonstrated a range of possible integration paths that

immigrants and their descendants may take after they arrive in the United States.39 The

traditional idea of assimilation into the cultural and economic institutions of the dominant

racial group is one path, but other immigrants have experienced downward mobility due to

discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and economic barriers, and have integrated into

the neighborhoods of the urban poor. Others have charted a new path, partially experiencing

structural integration while remaining in ethnic enclaves and maintaining strong cultural ties to

their communities of origin. Other immigrants and their descendants integrate into the racial

and ethnic minority middle class.40

Overall, more than a quarter of people living in the U.S. today are immigrants—what

scholars refer to as the first generation—or are the U.S.-born children of immigrants—the

second generation. Given current trends, immigrants and their children will account for more

than 88% of U.S. population growth by 2065.41 This means that today’s new immigrants and

their descendants are especially important for the social, economic, cultural, and political

vibrancy of American cities.

REVIEW SHEET: IMMIGRATION

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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CONCENTRATED POVERTY AND RACIAL SEGREGATION

 How do politics and power affect neighborhood inequality?

 How has concentrated poverty changed over time?

 What problems arise in high-poverty neighborhoods?

 How segregated are America’s urban neighborhoods?

 Why does segregation persist?

Earlier in the chapter we discussed some of the core ideas of the Chicago School of

urban sociology. One idea was that the landscape of cities like Chicago resulted from a

process in which groups of people moved through the city and found the environments that

provided the best fit. The theories of scholars like Edward Burgess can give the impression that

the layout, form, and composition of city neighborhoods is like an ecosystem or a forest, that it

is in some sense “natural.” But is this true?

Writing in the mid-1980s, John Logan, Harvey Molotch, and a group of sociologists,

planners, and geographers transformed the way social scientists thought about the city. In

their book Urban Fortunes, Logan and Molotch observed that the layout of cities was anything

but natural—in fact, it was the result of highly-contested conflicts where different groups took

part in political battles to determine how city resources would be used, which neighborhoods

would receive investments, and where development was allowed.42 To understand the form of

cities, they argued, we need to focus on power, politics, and profit.

Logan and Molotch documented how local government officials, real estate

developers, private business interests, and leaders of cultural institutions (such as museums)

worked together to increase the size of city populations and expand the level of economic

activity taking place within the city. They referred to this group of actors as a growth machine.

City growth brings more customers for retailers, more housing demand for real estate

developers, more workers for business owners, more fans for local sports teams, and more

taxes and clout for government representatives.

The layout of cities isn’t driven purely by migration into and out of a city, according to

this perspective, but by the set of policies and investments made in the pursuit of growth.

Coalitions of economic, political, and cultural elites work together to regulate land use and

local tax rates, to selectively distribute public services like policing and road maintenance,

and to invest in some communities and not others, with the overarching goal of attracting

new populations and expanding economic activity.

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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These efforts can transform entire sections of cities. The riverfront in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, provides an example. In Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela

Rivers meet to form the Ohio River, the riverfront had long been little more than industrial

wasteland cut off from any form of public use. A task force made up of CEOs, foundation

presidents, a newspaper editor, and the owners of the Pirates and the Steelers—the

prototypical members of the growth machine—began to plan a transformation of the

riverfront.43

Years later, the area has two shiny new stadiums that are part of a larger entertainment

district, and acres of parkland linking the neighborhoods of the city to the riverfront. And with

new urban amenities come new populations. One of the most controversial dimensions of

neighborhood change is gentrification, defined as a shift in the population of a community

bringing in new residents who are more affluent or more educated—and sometimes from a

different racial or ethnic group—than the original residents.44 Gentrification is so controversial

mainly because it is so visible. As new faces appear in a community, concerns about rising

rents and displacement of original residents—generally people of color—who can’t pay more

may surface, and the character and culture of a neighborhood can transform as well.

The role of public policy

makers is often overlooked in

discussions of gentrification. In

Pittsburgh, for instance, enormous

public investments in the riverfront

paved the way for a new group of

residents to gentrify the area.45 The

resulting redevelopment of

Pittsburgh’s riverfront is seen by some

as an urban success story, a tale of

an industrial wasteland come back to

life. After all, a walk along the river on

a sunny day wasn’t possible just

decades ago. But skeptics would

argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by taxpayers to redevelop the waterfront

and build those new stadiums might have been spent more wisely in the city’s poor,

segregated neighborhoods that have never received similar investments. Perhaps the owners

of two of the city’s premier sports teams didn’t need to be subsidized by the citizens of

Pennsylvania.

No matter which view you hold, the lesson is that the look of our cities isn’t natural at all,

but rather is the product of long-term battles where politics and profits are as important as

ideas and urban design. And in many cases, the neighborhoods that draw the most visitors

PNC Park in Pittsburgh. (Source)

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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and bring the greatest profits receive the greatest investments. The neighborhoods often left

behind are those occupied by the urban poor.

Concentrated poverty

In the Culture chapter, you learned about Elijah Anderson’s book Code of the Street, a

classic ethnographic study of life in Philadelphia’s ghetto in the 1990s—when violent crime in the

United States reached unprecedented levels.46 Anderson described a social world where the

threat of violence loomed in the background at all times and structured everyday interactions.

Children were forced to adapt to an informal set of rules about how to act in public spaces to

avoid being victimized while still maintaining status on the street. Some embraced the idea that

they could gain respect only by accepting the possibility of death at any moment. Others lived

in fear, trying to find ways to survive while minimizing the chance of being jumped or shot. The

brutal reality of life in the poor, segregated neighborhoods of Philadelphia was portrayed vividly

due to Anderson’s years of work on the streets of the city, spent trying to understand how

residents made sense of their neighborhoods and their own lives.

Sociologist William Julius Wilson helped explain how Philadelphia’s neighborhoods had

reached that point. In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson became the first scholar to observe,

and document, how urban poverty had transformed since the 1950s.47 Manufacturing jobs

that used to be abundant in America’s major central cities disappeared as factories closed

down or moved to the suburbs. As stable employment became less common, joblessness rose.

African American men, in particular, experienced soaring rates of unemployment. Without the

ability to support a family, use of welfare grew, along with the number of families headed by

single women.

At the same time, central city neighborhoods began to fall apart. Taking advantage of

new civil rights that made discrimination in the housing market illegal, middle-class Black

families began to leave the traditional Black ghettos found in most northeastern and

midwestern cities. They left behind central city neighborhoods where residents were poor and

jobless, where institutions like the schools and the church slowly deteriorated, and where

violent crime increased. They left behind neighborhoods like those that Elijah Anderson

documented in Code of the Street.

Wilson’s concerns about concentrated poverty, the growth in the number of urban

neighborhoods with extremely high rates of poverty, changed the way we understand poverty

in America. Although the poverty rate has remained fairly steady over the past several

decades, the way poverty is spread across communities has changed dramatically. The

number of Americans living in extremely poor neighborhoods rose from about 4 million in 1970

to almost 14 million by 2013.48

But it’s not just poverty that has become more concentrated. Economic segregation,

defined as the degree to which the poor live apart from the rich, has risen steadily. Since 1970,

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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the number of American families living in either extremely poor or extremely affluent

neighborhoods has risen from 12% to 34%.49 Since 2000, the number of people living in gated

communities has risen by 50%. At both the top and the bottom of the housing market, then,

we find a growing number of neighborhoods where the rich or the poor are isolated from the

rest of the population.

A fading mural in Chicago. Photograph courtesy of Michael R. Bump.

Racial segregation

While William Julius Wilson drew the nation’s attention to the concentration of urban

poverty, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton argued that the changes he documented

wouldn’t have been possible without the persistence of racial segregation in urban

neighborhoods. In their book American Apartheid, the two researchers showed that despite

major advances in civil rights in the 1960s, African Americans continued to live in

neighborhoods that were separate from Whites and isolated from communities that contained

higher-quality schools, well-maintained parks, and greater economic opportunities.50 Racial

segregation in urban neighborhoods was the “lynchpin” for racial inequality, they claimed.

Residential segregation is the degree to which different segments of the population,

typically classified by race, ethnicity, or social class, live apart from each other in separate

communities. How can we measure how much residential segregation there is and how it has

changed over time? Perhaps the best way to understand segregation is to see it. Figure 2

shows the area surrounding Washington, D.C.51 Each dot on the map represents one person,

with different colors representing different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The map shows the

nation’s capital as a diverse mosaic of many different people living together, with African

American (green dots) and Latino/a (yellow dots) residents concentrated on the east side of

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

Page 27

the city, Whites (blue dots) on the west side of the city and the northwest suburbs, and a large

Asian population (red dots) in the Virginia suburbs to the west. Although the area around D.C.

is remarkably diverse, the wide swaths of red, blue, green, and yellow reveal how members of

the same groups cluster together in communities within the city. By some measures,

Washington, D.C., is one of the most segregated urban areas in the country.

Figure 2: Map of Racial and Ethnic Composition of Neighborhoods in Washington, D.C.

Source: Copyright 2013, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

(Dustin A. Cable, creator)

Researchers studying residential segregation have developed several ways to measure

how different groups are sorted among the neighborhoods of a city. The most common

measure describes how evenly different groups are spread across neighborhoods. Imagine a

hypothetical city in which 75% of the population is White and 25% is Black. If the

neighborhoods of this city were perfectly integrated, we’d expect 75% of the residents of

every neighborhood would be White and 25% would be Black. In this scenario, Black and

White residents are perfectly spread across the city’s neighborhoods. If, on the other hand,

every neighborhood in the city was either 100% White or 100% Black, then the city would be

completely segregated.

Among cities with at least 100,000 residents, Chicago, New York, and Miami have the

highest levels of segregation between Black and White Americans, according to this

measure.52 In Chicago, 83% of the White or Black residents of the city would have to move to a

different neighborhood for the city to be perfectly integrated. Oakland, New York, and Los

Angeles have the highest levels of segregation between Latinos and Whites.

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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Table 2: Large Cities with the Greatest Segregation of Blacks from Whites in 2010

Segregation

Rank as of

2010

City Black/White

Segregation

in 1980

Black/White

Segregation

in 1990

Black/White

Segregation

in 2000

Black/White

Segregation

in 2010

1 Chicago, IL 90.6 87.4 85.2 82.5

2 New York, NY 82.8 83.5 83.2 81.4

3 Miami, FL 77.4 74.7 75.1 75.5

4 Fort Lauderdale,

FL

79.3 75.7 77.7 74.2

5 Atlanta, GA 79.6 81.3 81.6 74.1

6 Dayton, OH 81.4 79.0 76.2 74.0

7 Philadelphia, PA 83.9 82.9 76.7 73.4

8 Washington, DC 76.8 78.2 80.0 72.2

9 Newark, NJ 79.7 79.2 77.8 71.2

10 Milwaukee, WI 76.8 73.9 69.0 70.1

11 Boston, MA 78.6 75.3 70.4 69.2

12 Cleveland, OH 88.1 87.6 78.0 69.0

13 Baltimore, MD 79.0 75.9 71.2 68.9

14 Houston, TX 78.7 69.5 71.4 68.6

15 Memphis, TN 75.7 71.2 65.1 67.9

16 New Orleans, LA 64.7 62.5 65.9 67.6

17 Baton Rouge, LA 74.2 72.5 72.3 66.9

18 Los Angeles, CA 85.0 78.4 71.5 66.9

19 Dallas, TX 79.8 67.4 66.1 66.1

20 Buffalo, NY 77.2 72.8 69.5 65.9

Source: US2010 Project

Another common measure identifies the degree to which a particular group is isolated

from all other groups by capturing the average percentage of neighbors who are of the same

racial background. In Detroit, which has the highest level of segregation according to this

measure, the average Black resident of the city lives in a neighborhood that is 92% Black.

We have already covered the ways that Whites maintained racially segregated

neighborhoods during the first half of the 20th Century, when hundreds of thousands of African

Americans moved north. But when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, racial

discrimination in housing and lending markets became illegal for the first time in U.S. history.

Why did racial segregation continue, and even worsen, through the 1980s?

One major part of the answer is that White Americans began to leave central city

neighborhoods and move to new suburban communities, a process known as white flight.

Many left because advances in civil rights meant that neighborhoods and schools could no

longer be legally segregated by race; White families would soon have to share their

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

Page 29

communities with African American families and send their kids to the same schools. As Massey

and Denton document in American Apartheid, Whites were able to buy homes in the suburbs

because of a federal policy that provided mortgages to millions of Americans, supporting

homeownership and paving the way for the development of new suburban communities.53

One reason most suburbs became almost entirely White is that the mortgages provided

by the federal government were almost never given to African Americans. When the

government entered the mortgage industry, official policies determined how risky a loan was

based in part on the racial and ethnic composition of the community. Neighborhoods that

had more non-White residents were much more likely to be classified as risky. Redlining was

the practice of taking a map of a city and outlining in red the sections that were considered

high risk, and then rejecting loan applications from people living in those areas. This meant

that people living in largely Black or mixed-race neighborhoods were usually ineligible for

federal loans. This practice spread throughout the mortgage industry, and effectively meant

that the large-scale exodus to America’s suburbs was only possible for Whites.

The impacts of these policies still shape the development of cities and suburbs,

although there are some signs of change. Suburbs continue to grow more quickly than any

other type of community in the United States, and their boundaries have extended farther out

in a process called suburban sprawl. Although urbanists have long critiqued the “boring”

suburban environment, noted the misery of long commutes, and highlighted the

environmental damage caused by sprawl, Americans are still moving outward. The desire for

space, and for a home of our own, drives the expanding landscape of America’s cities and

suburbs.

Though many cities remain highly segregated by race, the overall level of racial

segregation has fallen steadily since the 1980s. Just over 50 years ago, one out of every five

White Americans lived exclusively with other White Americans. By 2010, neighborhoods that

are entirely White were almost extinct. Economists Jacob Vigdor and Edward Glaeser

analyzed racial segregation over the entire 21st Century and came to a surprising, optimistic

conclusion: racial segregation has declined to the lowest levels in 50 years.54 Many different

racial and ethnic groups have moved to the suburbs and made them more diverse than they

used to be.

Although this is welcome news, problems remain. While the segregation of Black

Americans from Whites has declined over time, the level of segregation for Latinos has

remained stable or risen slightly.55 And despite the decline in racial segregation, Black

Americans continue to live in neighborhoods that are quite different from those where Whites

live. For instance, high-income Black families live in neighborhoods that are more

disadvantaged, and just as poor, as the areas where White families with very low incomes

live.56 Despite the positive change that has taken place, urban inequality has not gone away.

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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REVIEW SHEET: CONCENTRATED POVERTY AND RACIAL

SEGREGATION

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

THE FUTURE OF URBAN LIFE

 Are cities sites of innovation and prosperity or sites of inequality, poverty, and protest?

 What will the future of cities look like? What should it look like?

We live in an urban world, but the future of that urban world is uncertain. When COVID-

19 first began to spread in the United States in March of 2020, many of our major cities shut

down. Wealthy residents of Manhattan fled to second homes outside the city, office spaces

closed, and public life in New York City slowed to a halt.57 Millions of workers who were able to

do most of their job online began working remotely; commuter rail lines and subway cars were

empty. For a long period in 2020, cities no longer seemed like vibrant areas where ideas

sprouted and culture proliferated. Cities seemed like desolate areas where the poor were

vulnerable to the ravages of the virus, and the rich were nowhere to be found. New York City

began to come back to life in 2021, but the question remains: What will our urban future look

like?

Richard Florida is an intellectual disciple of Jane Jacobs, an urbanist who has sung the

praises of city life for his entire career. In 2002, he published The Rise of the Creative Class,

which argued that creativity is now the crucial ingredient for economic growth, and that the

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

Page 31

most diverse, tolerant, eclectic cities will attract the most creative people.58 His vision led cities

all over the country to try to develop the amenities, walkable streets, cafes, and welcoming

feel that would bring artists, professors, and engineers.

There was one big problem with Florida’s argument: as he himself documented in

studies over the past several years, the most creative cities in the country are also some of the

most unequal.59 And it’s not a coincidence. Florida and his colleagues showed that the most

innovative, creative cities work extremely well for workers who have the skills for the new

knowledge economy, but they don’t work particularly well for less-skilled workers struggling to

survive as housing prices and rents skyrocket.

His findings present urbanists with a dilemma. Economists like Enrico Moretti and Edward

Glaeser show that cities are breeding grounds for innovation and job creation, places where

talent and ideas cluster together.60 But they’re also settings for the most extreme, sometimes

brutal, inequality. As cities continue to grow, and as migration increases around the globe,

cities become linked together in networks that extend across the planet, making more visible

the tensions of our new unequal urban world.

Beginning in 2011, the Occupy movement brought attention to the rise of American

inequality in hundreds of cities. In the summer of 2014, protests in New York; Ferguson, Missouri;

Baltimore; and dozens of other cities brought attention to urban police departments that have

focused the most aggressive, sometimes lethal, forms of policing on African American

communities. When George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in May of 2020,

anger directed toward police violence and racial injustice bubbled over, leading to protests

and unrest in hundreds of cities.

Some observers suggest that these

different types of protests are related. As

urban inequality has grown, critics like Mike

Davis argue that cities have become places

where coalitions of politicians, real estate

developers, and property holders have

adopted policies of aggressive policing and

rigid land use regulations designed to

create urban communities of extreme

wealth that are shielded from the rest of the

city. Davis points to Los Angeles as a

“fortress of exclusion,” where the glitzy,

affluent sections of the city are protected

and fortified and the run-down, poor sections of the city are excluded, abandoned, and

punished.61 This vision of city life bears little resemblance to the optimistic view of urban

prosperity put forth by Glaeser and Moretti.

Black Lives Matter protest. (Source)

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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Maybe they’re all right. In his most recent book, The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida

argues that cities continue to be the ideal sites for innovation and sustainable growth, but

urban policy must change in order to deal with the rising problem of inequality. The next city

must continue to inspire innovation, but it also must be inclusive.

His assessment is relevant

beyond the United States. As

globalization accelerates and more

firms conduct business that crosses

national borders, multinational

institutions play larger roles in

influencing urban policy, often

exacerbating inequality. At the

same time, as more of the world’s

population migrates to cities,

hundreds of millions of people have

moved into slums and shantytowns

at the periphery of the world’s cities.

“The same divides and disparities

that we see in America’s cities and urban areas,” Florida observes, “are magnified many times

over at the global scale.”

Cities are seen by some as the solution to long-term challenges of climate change and

economic growth, and by others as the sites of a new form of extreme, global inequality. Our

hope is that when you come across conflicting perspectives on the nature of city life, you

won’t automatically adopt any particular perspective – instead, you will think like a social

scientist and ask the series of questions that we presented at the start of the chapter: Do I

believe the ideas I’m reading? What kind of evidence would be more convincing? If I wanted

to answer this question, how would I do so?

A slum in Xiamen, China. (Source)

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

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REVIEW SHEET: THE FUTURE OF URBAN LIFE

CLICK THE LINK FOR:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES KEY QUESTIONS

AUDIO KEY POINTS

PRACTICE QUIZ KEY PEOPLE

VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLES KEY TERMS

Immigration and Urbanization (Fall 2021)

Page 34

REFERENCES

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University Press. 2 Rothman, Joshua. 2013. “A Walker in the City.” The New Yorker. Retrieved at:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-walker-in-the-city 3 All of the figures on urbanization come from this report produced by the United Nations: United Nations. 2014.

“World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights.” Department of Economic and Social Affairs,

Population Division. Retrieved at: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf 4 Florida, Richard. 2008. “Megaregions: The Importance of Place.” Harvard Business Review. Retrieved at:

https://hbr.org/2008/03/megaregions-the-importance-of-place

5 Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

6 Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. London: Verso. 7 Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and

Schuster. 8 Tonnies, Ferdinand. 2005. “Community and Society.” Pp. 16-22 in The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin

and Christopher Mele. New York: Routledge. 9 Simmel, Georg.1972 [1902]. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 10 Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1-24. 11 Fischer, Claude. 1975. “Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism.” American Journal of Sociology 80:1319-41. 12 Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. 13 Gaby, Sarah, and Neal Caren. 2012. "Occupy Online: How Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US

Users to OWS on Facebook.” Social Movement Studies 11(3-4): 367-374. 14 Wellman, Barry. 1979. “The Community Question: The Intimate Networks of East Yorkers.” American Journal of

Sociology 84(5):1201-1231. 15 Ellison, Nicole B., Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe. 2007. “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends’: Exploring the

Relationship between College Students’ Use of Online Social Networks and Social Capital.” Journal of Computer-

Mediated Communication 12(3):1143-1168. 16 Hampton, Keith, and Barry Wellman. 2003. "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and

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