The Social Fabric of Cities

Vinicus Netto (Twitter) has published a new book called 'The Social Fabric of Cities' (contents and introduction available here. There is also a website of the book). This one is going straight to my reading pile and I'm sure it will be of interest for all the 100 million readers of this blog. Here are the foreword by Mike Batty and a description of the book.

Foreword:

"Linking the physical to the social city is the challenge of our times. This is one of the first attempts to systematically do so, and Netto brilliantly succeeds in showing how encounters, segregation, movement and interaction are reflected in our understanding of the form and function of the city." (Michael Batty, CASA, UCL)

Book description:

Bringing together ideas from the fields of sociology, economics, human geography, ethics, political and communications theory, this book deals with some key subjects in urban design: the multidimensional effects of the spatial form of cities, ways of appropriating urban space, and the different material factors involved in the emergence of social life. It puts forward an innovative conceptual framework to reconsider some fundamental features of city-making as a social process: the place of cities in encounters and communications, in the randomness of events and in the repetition of activities that characterise societies. In doing so, it provides fresh analytical tools and theoretical insights to help advance our understanding of the networks of causalities, contingencies and contexts involved in practices of city-making. 

In a systematic attempt to bring urban analysis and research from the social sciences together, the book is organised around three vital yet relatively neglected dimensions in the social and material shaping of cities: (i) Cities as systems of encounter: an approach to urban segregation as segregated networks; (ii) Cities as systems of communication: a view of shared spaces as a means to association and social experience; (iii) Cities as systems of material interaction: explorations on urban form as an effect of interactivity, and interactivity as an effect of form.

Inequalities, cities, big data, transport and health

These are the core issues covered in five special issues of top journals this year, what I think reflects how these topics and particularly cities and social inequality have gained strong momentum in recent years.

• Nature: Science and Inequality
• Nature: a  not so  new urban agenda and the UN’s Habitat III meeting
• Science: Urban Planet
• Built Environment: Big data and the city
• The Lancet: Urban design, transport, and health

Geographic Effects on Intergenerational Income Mobility

Another paper to my never ending reading list (ht Flavia Feitosa)

Rothwell, J. T., & Massey, D. S. (2015). Geographic Effects on Intergenerational Income Mobility. Economic Geography, 91(1), 83-106. Ungated version here.

Abstract:

Research on intergenerational economic mobility often ignores the geographic context of childhood, including neighborhood quality and local purchasing power. We hypothesize that individual variation in intergenerational mobility is partly attributable to regional and neighborhood conditions—most notably access to high-quality schools. Using restricted Panel Study of Income Dynamics and census data, we find that neighborhood income has roughly half the effect on future earnings as parental income. We estimate that lifetime household income would be $635,000 dollars higher if people born into a bottom-quartile neighborhood would have been raised in a top-quartile neighborhood. When incomes are adjusted to regional purchasing power, these effects become even larger. The neighborhood effect is two-thirds as large as the parental income effect, and the lifetime earnings difference increases to $910,000. We test the robustness of these findings to various assumptions and alternative models, and replicate the basic results using aggregated metropolitan-level statistics of intergenerational income elasticities based on millions of Internal Revenue Service records.