“I would say it’s alive”: Understanding the social construction of place, identity, and neighborhood effects through the lived experience of urban young adults

A burgeoning literature provides evidence that neighborhood matters, especially in relation to urban adolescent development. Exposure to crime and poverty has been shown to negatively impact key aspects of development, such as physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Traditional theoretical frameworks identifying the social mechanisms of place fail to critically examine how neighborhood effects are socially constructed at the individual level, and rather assume aggregate community narratives. Such blanket measures of neighborhood effects do not account for individual interpretations of space or the impacts of larger structural forces on decision making and developmental processes. A unique combination of qualitative GIS methodologies was utilized to explore how urban adolescents define, navigate, and engage their surrounding environment to better understand the mechanisms of neighborhood effects, and how these interactions shape development. Sedentary and walking interview data were paired with GPS data to develop a real-time understanding of the spaces across which youth were navigating. The findings from this work suggest that how youth perceive space is a complex process, stemming from the interaction of structural and social systems, and highlight the value of understanding varying resident experiences when considering definitions of neighborhood. This study begins to fill a gap in the neighborhood effects’ literature by developing an argument for the social construction of place as an alternative to traditional methodological and theoretical frameworks.