APS 341 Urban Sociology

Crime in most urban areas has been falling since 1991. While the decline has been well-documented, few scholars have analyzed which groups have most benefited from the crime decline and which are still on the frontlines of violence--and why that might be. In Unequal Crime Decline, Karen F. Parker presents a structural and theoretical analysis of the various factors that affect the crime decline, looking particularly at the past three decades and the shifts that have taken place, and offers original insight into which trends have declined and why.

Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South seeks to identify the drivers of urban violence in the cities of the Global South and how they relate to and interact with poverty and inequalities. The book explores what works, and what doesn't, to prevent and reduce violence in urban centres. concludes by considering the broader implications for policy and practice, offering recommendations for improving interventions to make cities safer and more inclusive.

This book broadens the scope of single-city, black/white studies by comparing local crime patterns in five racially distinct types of neighborhoods. Peterson and Krivo meticulously demonstrate how residential segregation creates and maintains inequality in neighborhood crime rates. It provides a more complete picture of the social conditions underlying neighborhood crime patterns than has ever before been drawn. The study includes economic, social, and local investment data for nearly nine thousand neighborhoods in eighty-seven cities, and the findings reveal a pattern across neighborhoods of racialized separation among unequal groups.

For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in cities, the result of a rapid process of urbanization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. 'Megacities' around the world are rapidly becoming the scene for deprivation, especially in the global South, and the urban excluded face the brunt of what in many cases seems like low-intensity warfare. Megacities examines recent worldwide trends in poverty and social exclusion, urban violence and politics, and links these to the challenges faced by policy-makers and practitioners.

Randall Amster explores homelessness as both a social and spatial problem. Homeless people are on the front lines of a struggle to preserve places that are theoretically open to anyone regardless of status. Urban spaces in particular manifest a complex ecology comprised of people, culture, architecture, technology, and the natural environment, expressed through gentrification, redevelopment, and privatization. In this ecology, homeless people are criminalized for performing basic activities such as sitting or sleeping. These trends are evident across the U.S. and internationally, linking local issues with wider forces of globalization