This proposal joins two estranged social science literatures.  While criminology
got its start in theecological studies of the Chicago School, it has drifted away
from the organic analysis of city life characteristic of Robert Park (Sennett 1969). The ecological tradition continues in both routine activities (Cohen and Felson 1980) and social disorganization theory (Bursik 1988).  However static concepts have
gradually replaced the earlier dynamic tradition (Massey 2001).  For example, even distinguishedcriminologists like Jim Short (1997) typically categorize cities as "big" or "small" rather than taking into account variables related to decline and revitalization.  

Urban political economy, on the other hand, while originating in a critique of the Chicago School (e.g. Castells 1979; Harvey 1973), has, with few exceptions (e.g. Davis 1990; Hall 1996; Judd1999; Caldiera 2000), paid relatively little attention to the role of crime and violence in the remaking of the postmodern city.  While political economists have made extensive analyses of the workings of theglobal city, they too have neglected variations in trends of crime and violence between and within cities.

What is needed is a closer relationship of criminology with urban political economy, and more attention to the sources of variation. 

A.   Criminology and the History of Urban Violence

Understanding violence requires a grasp of historical context. Hawkins (1985, 93-4) has complained that criminology has "tended to underemphasize a variety of structural, situ­ational, and institutional variables that affect interpersonal violence" as well as neglects "historical patterns developed during slavery to the immediate racialist social context of an individual homicidal offense to the operation of the criminal justice system, past and present."

  Criminology as a discipline typically reduces violence to one type, i.e. those acts which are measured in crime rates. Lane (1997, 258) however, in seeking to understand patterns of homicide, examines factors unrelated to standard criminological variables.  He claims declines in homicide rates in Philadelphia in the 1920s, for example, can be explained "simply" by the decline in the Italian population. Racist Italian gangs that terrorized blacks, causing an arms race, moved to the suburbs with their ethnic group.  As tensions declined, so did the number of firearms and homicides.  Similarly, Lane points out that the extent and implications of southern violence against blacks were not officially measured as "crime."

 Lane looks at homicide among African Americans from a global perspective.  The world-wide declines of violence in the 1950s, he suggests,  might be related to raised aspirations of people, including African Americans, of the coming  benefits of modernization (see also Messner and Rosenfeld 1994). The subsequent failure of modernity to live up to its promises, Lane (1997, 298) believes, was similarly a likely cause of the worldwide rise in rates of violence in the 1960s and 1970s.  High rates of black violence in the US, according to
Lane, Hawkins, and others, need to be grounded in the specific, violent experience of persisting segregation by African Americans.

 One strength of the "underclass" literature is that it corrects ahistorical tendencies in criminology. Taylor and Covington (1988) in their study of neighbor­hoods and violence, discussed theemergence of an underclass in Baltimore and speculated on the meaning of gentrification for rates of violence. Consistent with Wilson's analysis of the impact of deindustrialization on the Black community, Taylor and Covington found that violence is related to both gentrifying and underclass neighborhoods, but for different reasons (for Chicago, see Morenoff and Sampson 1997).

Wilson, writing with Robert Sampson (1995), explained violence by reference to the structural
constraints giving rise to a ghetto-specific culture. Gangs, crime, and other anti-social behavior are seen as disorganized responses to the lack of conventional controls.  The Project on Human Development in Chicago's Neighborhoods (PHDCN)furthers this perspective by exploring how "individual personalities, family relationships, school environment, and type of community interact to contribute to delinquency and criminal behavior"  (Earls 1996). The PHDCN's key concept in explaining variation in crime and violence is "collective efficacy," a term which means the process by which neighborhoods "inhibit the occurrence of personal violence" (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997) and exercise informal social control over delinquent youth (see Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush forthcoming).

However, in the PHDCN studies, the context of Chicago sometimes seems lost in the search for universal correlates of violence.  A reader of many of the articles written by scholars affiliated with the PHDCN would not know from those texts that there are massive spatial changes taking place in Chicago today , the dislocation of poor populations, the redevelopment of traditional areas of gangs and immigrants, and the physical transformation of the city.

"Collective efficacy" in Chicago also has a specific historical context, which is alien to the PHDCN's
notion of thick neighborhood networks in a healthy, inclusive community.   In many white
neighborhoods over the past century "collective efficacy" was positively related to violence, as whites
organized resistance to the feared black "invasion.""Athletic Clubs," which were officially sponsored
white gangs, were organized by politicians during World War I to act as para-military units to combat
the movement of blacks into white areas.  Gangs acted as the principal force in the 1919 race riots
(Chicago Commission on Race Relations 1922), and played active roles in the bombings and mob violence of the next decades (Philpott 1978). Little of this violence showed up in official crime rates, consistent with Lane's argument about racist violence in the south.  Much black violence, in turn, was defensive, but more often criminalized (Perkins 1987). 

This picture, from the report of the Chicago Commissionon Race Relations, shows white gang members stoning to death a black youth.

Thus, if a fundamental process leading to the ghettoization of African Americans was the "collective efficacy" of white neighborhood violence, then scholars ought to also analyze the content of "collective efficacy" today.   Some crime prevention strategies, which seek safety for the incoming white middle class, result in the expulsion of minority residents to other areas (see Davis 1990; 1998).  Indeed, a decade ago Skogan (1990, 156-7) wrote that some kinds of neighborhood action "may also work to the positive disadvantage of the poor. Group formation succeeds more easily in better-off and white neigborhoods.  They focus on housing, and want to freeze the current race and class distribution of desirable real estate" (emphasis in original).  This proposal hypothesizes that these exclusive processes may have the effect of reinforcing segregation and thus indirectly increasing rates of violence (see Young 1999). 

While some communities have a strategy of inclusion and community empowerment, others advocate community development through building walls, and, in Sir Peter Hall's (1988) apt phrase "pulling up the drawbridge."  Both strategies may reduce crime rates, but measures of "collective efficacy"  won't be able to differentiate between inclusive and racist tactics. The crime prevention literature generally (e.g. Davis and Luigio 1996) focuses on stabilizing neighbor­hoods and the isolation of "undesirable" elements, but has not considered the unintended (and perhaps not always unintended) effects of such policies.

In Chicago, the processes of segregation differ sharply, however, for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Unlike devastated African American neighborhoods such as Lawndale, Mexican communities, like Pilsen, have dense neighborhood networks along with institutionalized gangs that have become a stable part of the landscape (see also Moore 1978, 1991). Other areas, which have been off limits to African Americans, like Bridgeport and South Chicago, have welcomed large Mexican populations.

Puerto Rican neighborhoods have been pushed about Chicago over the past half century, not
concentrated over time like the Black ghetto, Puerto Ricans have been dislocated from the near West Side in the 1950s by the building of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and from Lincoln Park just north of the Loop in the 1960s. Today Puerto Rican Humboldt Park is a prime target for gentrification(see Padilla 1987 for a history).

 To better understand the spatial dynamics of ethnicity, segregation, and crime in Chicago, we need to turn to concepts developed by urban political economy.