Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
7
“code of honor” or “street code” that shapes residents’ values and behavior, for instance, by
encouraging a disputatious attitude and aggressive sanctions against individuals who show
disrespect.’
What Kubrin and Weitzer (2003) and several others suggest is that people in such
neighbourhoods lack collective efficacy. Coined by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls (1997),
the term collective efficacy refers to a dynamic mutual trust and support among neighbours
built on the bonds they have with one another. People in neighbourhoods that have collective
efficacy can work together to solve what they perceive as problems. In disorganized
neighbourhoods, however, residents do not work together. It is possible that people in such
neighbourhoods have become ‘numb’ about the conditions around them, therefore allowing
further deterioration to happen. It is possible they do not care to stop the open-air drug
markets, or the graffiti, or the crime, nor can they fix the abandoned housing or move the
abandoned vehicles. It is also possible that people in such neighbourhoods think there is
nothing that can be done about these issues. Thus, crime is allowed to run rampant in those
areas where a community concerned about keeping it in check is absent. The present study, by
contrast, finds that people in such neighbourhoods
do
care about certain things related to
neighbourhood safety and quality of life issues.
Differing Constructions of Reality
To understand how life in such a neighbourhood relates to the NIMBY battle, one theory that
is useful is social constructionism. Thomas & Thomas (1928: 572) first articulated the idea
that ‘…situations are real in their meaning, only if men define them as such.’ This idea is
meant to express the myriad ways that individuals define and adapt to the world around them.
The idea was later called social constructionism and is a micro-level theory that suggests that
people behave in ways that are appropriately consistent with their definition of their
environment.
Sociologists have long worked with the idea that multiple definitions combine into a
holistic reality. Researchers such as Berger and Luckmann (1966) and Schütz (1967) sought
to explain the ways that aggregates act based on shared discourse about individual
perceptions. Later iterations of social constructionism would include symbolic interaction,
ethnomethodology and phenomenology that placed the onus on perception above macro-level
conditions in explaining human behaviour. While the epistemological tenets of social
constructionism have rarely been used to explain aggregate patterns of behaviour such as
crime rates, one can see how they would drive people who share geographic space to operate
toward a commonly beneficial resolution to a problem. In an uncertain environment, people
will work together to define normative boundaries.
Some social constructionists (Blumer 1936, Becker 1963) have pointed out the
importance of shared discourse in predicting collective action. NIMBY battles represent the
ability to turn shared dissatisfaction with the neighbourhood into efficacious political
activism. Deseran (1978) suggested that community satisfaction could be understood as tri-
dimensional. It consists of factual knowledge to provide the descriptive content, individual
appraisal of a situation and salience to indicate the relevance of a circumstance to the actor.
