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Overview
Mimicking the methodology of disorganization theorists from the Chicago School, Tom Hare conducted four neighborhood studies in the San Salvador metropolitan area. Mixed methods, including two hundred original survey-interviews, were used to create a rich description of each case. The cases were selected in order to compare and contrast the social order in neighborhoods with varying levels of security and physical and demographic makeup.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823280919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2018 |
| Series: | Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies |
| Pages: | 100 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Citizen Security
After hearing about the problems of neighborhood crime and violence in San Salvador for many years, experiencing a sense of insecurity firsthand, grieving with friends victimized by violence, and then witnessing prevention efforts like El Paseo, I became more interested in the community life of Salvadoran neighborhoods. I started to ask myself: How do residents use public spaces? How do they come together in places without secure spaces? How do they participate in decisionmaking processes? Are there differences in community and social life between communities with different physical appearances? And, what does this all have to do with whether or not a neighborhood is a "zona segura" or "zona peligrosa"? I wanted to know if community and social life is really any different in neighborhoods with and without attempted "fixes" to the social or physical order.
I also wanted to know more about the theories and hypotheses about life in these neighborhoods that undergird the popular concept of "citizen security." Citizen security is a prevalent policy approach to crime and violence prevention in Central America that emphasizes physical order, strong social cohesion, participation, and expectations for action on the part of neighbors and civil society. I quickly learned that the idea behind the El Paseo citizen security approach is nothing new. Fixing up rundown areas to make people feel and act better was an approach attempted by urban social reformers in nineteenth-century Europe. It became established by the mid–twentieth century in the United States. Many of the prescriptions offered in the literature on citizen security in Central America draw on "social disorganization theory" or the "disorganization hypothesis" from the United States. Basically, theorists who ascribe to this hypothesis see two sides to the disorganization of a neighborhood. One is social, where there is little engagement by neighbors, a lack of community life, and problems maintaining order that is evinced by crime and violence. The other is physical, where one can observe deteriorated buildings, disrepair in streets and sidewalks, and a lot of people crowded into small areas. Both the social and physical sides are assumed to be related in the hypothesis. Where there is physical disorder, we should expect to find social disorder. When the physical disorder is fixed, one should expect to see improvements on the social side, including a reduction in crime.
From the outside, this seemed to be the case in Santa Tecla. Physical order was created, improving the social order such that a crowd could gather to enjoy a night out in the middle of one of the most violent cities in the world. Similar to what I witnessed, proponents of the disorganization hypothesis suggested that physical things such as deterioration and population density correspond to social things such as a lack of strong social ties and high levels of crime (Greenberg, Rohe, & Williams, 1982; Jacobs, 1961; Kelling & Wilson, 1982; Newman, 1972; Park, 1915; Park & Burgess, 1925; Shaw & McKay, 1942). European social reformers leaned on this hypothesis as a way to fix early urban problems of poverty and crime. They assumed that the rise in crime in late-nineteenth-century cities was attributable to rapid, disorderly urbanization.
This hypothesis was criticized at the time by European social ecologists André-Michel Guerry (1833) and R. W. Rawson (1839). Guerry and Rawson were among the first to determine that there was significant variation in crime even within urban areas. They found that, contrary to anti-urban narratives, it was not the trend in industrialization and the unpleasant aesthetics of early urbanization that increased crime, but spatially differentiated social order within those urban areas. Tight, shared spaces and the way streets were organized mattered less than what people did in those spaces. For instance, Guerry found that crime was concentrated in industrial areas in France, while Rawson found that non-industrial areas in England had the most crime. It was not the ugly and dirty urban industrial area itself that invited crime, as people had thought previously. There was something different going on.
In the United States, however, the idea that living closer together in an urban area increased crime and violence was accepted well into the twentieth century. The concentration of unemployment, family disintegration, poverty, and crime was believed to make these problems worse than in rural areas (Hall, 2002). After the turn of the century, it was the Chicago School sociologists who looked at these issues most closely. They advanced what would become "social disorganization theory" in urban areas. While European predecessors and Chicago contemporaries set the stage, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) are credited with the theory that crime is perpetuated depending on the amount of disorganization of a particular neighborhood. The definition of social disorganization used by Shaw and McKay is summarized well by Sampson (2012) as "The inability of a community to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls" (p. 37). This inability to realize common values in disorganized communities was a result of some of the same "urban problems" identified by earlier theorists. In particular, Shaw and McKay pointed to heterogeneous populations, migration, and weak interpersonal relationships as the source of disorganization. Greater varieties of people and more of them meant that they would not share the same idea of what was important. Without a basic, if implicit, agreement among these peoples about the maintenance of private property and public spaces, how to interact or work together, there could be no effective way to maintain order.
Social and physical reform programs in the United States picked up on these ideas in an effort to combat rising crime and violence in cities. For example, the Chicago Area Projects, started by Shaw in the 1930s, instituted community committees and promoted youth participation in decision making. The Mobilization for Youth program in New York, begun in the 1960s, promoted physical and social order through neighborhood councils, the beautification of public spaces, and greater public participation in policy discussions.
While evaluation methodology was poor during the early days of the Chicago Area Projects, by the time of Mobilization for Youth evaluations were calling into question programs that relied primarily on social cohesion and participation (Klein, 1995, p. 141). After decades of proliferation, regard for the disorganization hypothesis began to recede toward the end of the twentieth century in the United States. It drew fire from both researchers and practitioners as the epidemic of crime and violence continued to spread across the country after a half-century of prevention efforts tried to fix physically and socially disordered neighborhoods (Klein, 1995; Lees, 1991; Monti, 1994; Spergel, 1995).
Alternative approaches based on a retooled version of the disorganization hypothesis, such as "collective efficacy," emerged to refine disorganization theory (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997; Sampson, 2004). Explanations based on the idea of collective efficacy placed greater emphasis on the perception of social control than the observed amount of physical order in a neighborhood. Collective efficacy has been shown to better predict amounts of crime and violence than indicators of disorganization theory in some neighborhoods in the United States (Sampson, 2012).
At the same time the disorganization hypothesis was being criticized, citizen security prescriptions were being developed to combat increasing crime and violence in Latin America (Bergman, 2006). Along with reforms to police, prosecutors, and the courts, fixing the physical appearance of a neighborhood and strengthening the participation and cohesion of the community within it became prevalent citizen security interventions in Latin America (Tulchin & Golding, 2003). These were fixes that included infrastructure investment and social programs, all with a participatory bent (Chinchilla, 2003; UNDP, 2009a; UNDP, 2009b; UNDP, 2009c; UNDP, 2013; UNODC, 2007; USAID, 2010; World Bank, 2011). This mirrors what social reformers had tried for more than a century in Europe and the United States, and what I witnessed along El Paseo.
Despite a large amount of prescriptive literature describing what neighborhoods and communities should do, and descriptive literature telling what neighborhoods and communities actually do, empirical evaluations showing the impact of the citizen security approach are nascent and show mixed results (Abt & Wiship, 2016; Bergman, 2006; Frühling, 2012). For example, evaluations using representative samples in the greater Santiago, Chile, metropolitan area demonstrated that social disadvantage (e.g., poverty) and physical disorder and deterioration are associated with greater incidence of crime, while trust is associated with lesser incidence of crime (Frühling & Gallardo, 2012; OlavarríaGambi & Allende-González, 2014). Findings from Brazil show that while poverty and physical disorder are associated with each other, neither is associated with crime (Villareal & Silva, 2006). However, social disadvantage and homicide are associated in the same areas (Silva, 2014). In Colombia, social disadvantage and homicide are associated, but environmental or physical factors are much less associated (Escobar, 2012). Finally, in Mexico, collective efficacy and social cohesion correlate well with a sense of security (Valenzuela Aguilera, 2012). These mixed and nuanced findings, along with success stories such as El Paseo, are promising (Washington Office on Latin America & Inter-American Development Bank , 2011). However, they must be considered along with the challenge of generalizability across cultural and crime contexts within the region and between the region and more-developed countries (Timerman, 2013; Tulchin & Golding, 2003). In particular, the fact that social disadvantage often increases cohesion in the region confounds the original disorganization hypothesis. Poor Latin Americans, it has been found, are more likely to band together to provide for basic needs than others, challenging the core assumption of the disorganization theory that poor areas also suffer from a lack of social cohesion (Silva, 2014; Villareal & Silva, 2006).
In El Salvador, I had observed where a transformed physical space created a safe, civil environment. I had also seen that a strong show of force contributed to that safe environment. Once I had placed these observations in the context of citizen security's origins in social disorganization, I realized that what was lacking was an examination of how policies and programs that intervene to improve the physical or social order of a neighborhood actually make a difference or fail to make a difference in the social life and security of those who live there.
CHAPTER 2Methods and Hypothesis
With that in mind, I set out to describe both the physical and social order of two sets of neighborhoods in order to explore possible differences in social life and security. I describe the physical and social order of these neighborhoods as I observed over the course of numerous visits to gather archival sources, observe, and conduct interviews.
Archival data came from local newspapers, online resources, and municipal and other government records. For example, each municipality provided a copy of its citizen security plans and policies. I also obtained homicide data from law-enforcement agencies and the medical examiners' offices. Observations were conducted in all neighborhoods at various times of day and over the course of several visits. These archival and observational data provide greater context to the interview data, comprising both in-depth and survey interviews. The in-depth interviews were conducted with public officials, nongovernmental groups, and businesses in the case study neighborhoods. Similar to the archival and observation data, they provide greater context for the survey interviews.
The use of comparative neighborhood studies aligns the research with the work of the Chicago School theorists who first proposed disorganization theory. It also aligns the research with Robert Sampson's more recent work on collective efficacy. The research design mimics Sampson's purposeful use of a neighborhood as the unit of analysis and avoids the use of randomization given that randomization creates a "nonsocial" world (2012, p. x). Interviewing neighbors versus randomly selecting a sample of persons drawn from different neighborhoods provides a more complete picture of social life than if interviews were spread over a larger area. This approach pays more attention to "neighborhood effects" than to an aggregate of individual action or perceptions. As in the Chicago School tradition, neighborhoods are viewed in my research as both the consequence and cause, and the outcome and producer of social order.
With the complexity of neighborhood case studies in mind, my first priority in case selection was geography. All four case study neighborhoods are contiguous to the capital city of San Salvador in order to reduce major intervening variables such as rural– urban differences and drug routes or illegal commerce in outlying regions. The selection of the four cases was made in consultation with local experts and international agencies and based in part on access to communities (i.e., restrictions based on security). The process of community selection began with meetings in San Salvador and Washington, D.C., with community and municipal leaders, a local university, the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and various nongovernmental organizations. Follow-up conversations and visits were made with these resources to refine the list of communities.
Two of the case study neighborhoods are adjacent to El Paseo in the municipality of Santa Tecla. They have apparent physical order overall with better-kept public spaces, homes and buildings in decent repair, and less density. The other two neighborhoods are across the city in another suburb of San Salvador, Mejicanos. These two neighborhoods have fewer and less-well-maintained public spaces, more disrepair of homes and buildings, and greater density than the neighborhoods in Santa Tecla.
I selected these cases for various reasons. First, as we will see in the following chapters, the two municipalities offered interesting differences in crime and violence, land use, repair, housing stock, and demographics that have been used as indicators of social and physical order. Second, the pairs of adjacent neighborhoods also offered differences in physical order within the municipalities, creating a natural experiment to see if less-obvious indicators of social disorganization also existed. Finally, I had enough access to the neighborhoods to ensure security during my visits and the visits of survey enumerators. Access to communities without the introduction of a trusted source or where rival gangs operate would have been too risky. Given the exploratory nature of this research, the convenience sampling using the basic parameters above was enough to give me a sense of whether the disorganization hypothesis helps understand crime and violence in these neighborhoods.
The disorganization hypothesis would have us believe that the neighborhoods with more physical order will have less crime and violence than those with more physical disorder. However, it is possible that something else was going on in the neighborhoods that affected where crime and violence were occurring, something that could not be perceived through observation alone.
To determine if there was indeed something different in the social order between the neighborhoods, I collected survey-interview data on indicators of social order from disorganization theory, collective efficacy, and citizen security to try to tease out differences among the four neighborhoods. I looked at the various ways in which the communities come together for events and in organizations, how much neighbors trust and turn to one another for help, and the roles residents, businesses, and the municipality play in crime-prevention policy and programs.
If the world actually worked the way social scientists think it works, nicer-looking places would have many more community events, activities, and social occasions. People living in nicer-looking places would also face less crime and violence. Places that look deteriorated or rundown would have correspondingly fewer community events, a less active social life, and more crime and violence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Zonas Peligrosas"
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Table of Contents
Preface,
1. Citizen Security,
2. Methods and Hypothesis,
3. Neighborhood Physical Order,
4. Neighborhood Crime and Violence,
5. Neighborhood Social Disorder,
6. Analyzing the Disorganization Hypothesis,
7. Creating Safe Neighborhoods,
Bibliography,
Critics' Corner,