The social geography of near and far: built environment and residential distance in mid-nineteenth-century New York City

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-534
Author(s):  
Gergely Baics

AbstractThis article brings together two Geographical Information Systems (GIS) datasets – building-level land-use data from the 1852–54 Perris Fire Insurance Atlas, and geocoded home addresses from the 1854 city directory – to explore how desirable and undesirable conditions of the built environment accounted for new dynamics of residential separation in mid-nineteenth-century New York. Using spatial analysis, it shows how early forms of residential separation were driven by the desire of elites to create secluded residential neighbourhoods. Further, although stark contrasts delineated the extremes of wealth and poverty, the city's dominant landscape was defined by in-between conditions and subtle variations in built environment and residential distance.

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 612-621
Author(s):  
Joanna Sara Valson ◽  
V. Raman Kutty ◽  
Biju Soman ◽  
V. T. Jissa

This study aims to find spatial clusters of diabetes and physical inactivity among a sample population in Kerala, India, and evaluate built environment characteristics within the high and low spatial clusters. Spatial clusters with a higher and lower likelihood of diabetes and physical inactivity were identified using spatial scan statistic at various radii. Built environment characteristics were captured at panchayat level and 1600 m buffer around participant location using Geographical Information Systems. Comparison of sociodemographic and built environment factors was carried out for participants within high and low spatial clusters using t tests. Ten high and 8 low spatial clusters of diabetes and 17 high and 23 low spatial clusters of physical inactivity were identified in urban and rural areas of Kerala. Significant differences in built environment characteristics were consistent for low spatial clusters of diabetes and physical inactivity in the urban scenario. Built environment characteristics were found to be relevant in both urban and rural areas of Kerala. There is an urgent call to explore spatial clustering of non-communicable diseases in Kerala and undo the one-size-fits-all approach for prevention and control of non-communicable diseases.


Ethnohistory ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-268
Author(s):  
Morgan Ritchie ◽  
Bruce Granville Miller

Abstract During the socially transformative mid-nineteenth century in the Salish Sea region of the Northwest Coast, a number of influential leaders emerged within Indigenous tribal groups. They played a significant role in reshaping the social geography of the region, blending emergent religious, commercial, and military bases for authority with more conventional Coast Salish strategies of patronage and generosity. The authors examine the lives and social connections of three Coast Salish leaders to illustrate how they were able to establish and maintain social networks across the region for their advantage and for the advantage of followers who had gravitated to them from surrounding shattered communities.


2001 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Beadie

Academies and academy students increased substantially in number during the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Why? Who were these students and what did academy attendance mean to them? Theodore R. Sizer asked these questions in 1964, but his ability to answer them was limited by the absence of studies that focused on academy students. In this essay I reexamine Sizer's understanding of academies in light of evidence provided by subsequent studies of student populations. These studies include my own comparative analysis of data from nearly 500 Regents academies that operated in New York State between 1835 and 1890, as well as in-depth case studies of individual institutions by myself and others.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camillo Berti ◽  
Massimiliano Grava

The use of toponymy as an indicator of settlements and fortified structures: the Tuscan caseThe purpose of this contribution is to analyze the spatial distribution of the place names referred to the Tuscan territory, to fortified structures and settlements, through the study of the place names recorded geodatabase RE.TO.RE. (Regional Toponymic Repertory) created by the Tuscany Region with the scientific contribution of the Universities of Pisa, Florence and Siena. The Tuscan toponyms has been the object of both a synchronic study within each of the cartographic sources that make up the geographical database, and a diachronic analysis between the temporal thresholds in which the archive is articulated. The database, extrapolated from cartographic supports, in fact covers a time span between the first decades of the nineteenth century (nineteenth century land registries) and the most recent information series produced in the regional context (Carta Tecnica Regionale). In the contribution, the place names related in various ways to different types of structures and fortified settlements, such as castle, fort, tower, fortress, has been analyzed both in relation to the distribution and spatial aspects, and in reference to their evolutionary dynamics (persistence, disappearance, transformation), with the aim of identifying possible relationships between the territory and the distribution in time and space of the different types of fortifications. From a methodological point of view, the study has been carried out, in addition to the traditional tools of the topomastic survey, especially taking advantage of the potential of spatial analysis functions typical of geographical information systems.


Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 488-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Griffiths ◽  
Laura Vaughan

AbstractThe theory and methods of space syntax can help to rebalance the prevailing cultural perspective, which views maps as ideological representations, with an analytical approach that emphasizes maps as sources for understanding space and spatial relationships embedded in built forms. The quantitative descriptions of urban street networks produced by space syntax analyses can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about patterns of urban movement, encounter and socio-economic activity in the past that can help in the interpretation of other historical source materials to give an overall account of urban spatial culture. In this article, the authors explain how space syntax, a theory and method originally developed in the field of architectural research, is making a distinctive contribution to research in social and urban history. The key principles of the method are explained by clarifying the relationship of space syntax to HGIS (Historical Geographical Information Systems) and through a worked example of research undertaken into political meeting places. A survey of research into the urban history of the nineteenth-century city using space syntax is used to highlight a number of important methodological themes and also demonstrates the range of innovative contributions that this interdisciplinary approach is able to advance. A final, theoretical, section reflects on maps and the practice of ‘mapping’ from a space syntax perspective.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Beck

Public housing has been an important site for empirical research on concentrated poverty, social isolation, and social organization. Scholars have demonstrated that public housing was disproportionately built in high poverty neighborhoods, thereby exacerbating the physical and social isolation of residents. They have also hypothesized that physical features of public housing may contribute to a breakdown of social organization. These hypotheses motivated the demolition of large and physically deteriorated public housing structures throughout the United States. I use the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey to test the hypotheses that large building size and visible building disorder are associated with mistrust among neighbors, as would be expected by theories linking the built environment to social organization. Although I find some evidence that trust is less common in large buildings with higher levels of disorder, I argue that critics of public housing overstate the social effects of the built environment.


Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole

A particularly grotesque form of the comic sensibility emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century in the works of George Luks. Luks was called on to take over Richard Outcault’s phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1896; he soon made the Yellow Kid his own. As Outcault’s duplicate or twin, Luks capitalized on the grotesque potential of twinning, doubling, and replication to question the social order from below, laying bare—and then savagely mocking—fears of the rapidly growing immigrant and ethnic populations in the United States. In subsequent strips, including The Little Nippers and Mose’s Incubator, his representations of polyglot America become positively fantastical, even monstrous, reflecting the interchangeability and reproducibility of ethnic identity that formed the logical basis of the “melting pot.”


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