In this assignment, you will operationalize and evaluate both sides of the Jacobs-Gans debate on the theoretical relationship between the built environment and urban vitality. You will gather and manipulate US census data for three communities -- New York's Greenwich Village, Boston's West End, and the city of Poughkeepsie -- to operationalize these authors' theories and make conclusions from. You will analyze data and discuss your findings in groups of 2-3 students but each turn in an individual 5 page report. The assignment is worth 15% of your grade.
First, find one or two other students to conduct research with and begin by discussing the specific theoretical claims that Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans make. How do they define the following concepts? What different arguments do they make about the relationships between these concepts?
Dependent variables: urban vitality, political capacity...Independent variables: ethnicity, class, residential stability, demographic diversity/uniformity, the four generators of diversity in the built environment, trust among residents...
Construct at least 10 hypotheses (at least 5 for each author) that Jacobs and Gans use to explain Greenwich Village and Boston's West End, respectively. Are their hypotheses antithetical; that is, does one author's set of hypotheses imply the falsification of the other's?
At the (rescheduled) mandatory October 12th session in the electronic classroom, you will be trained in the basics of Census data gathering and analysis. You will examine Census data for New York's Greenwich Village and Boston's West End. In order to track trends across time, you will examine decennial data from at least 1940 to 1990.
For the Census data needed for this assignment, click here.
Identify and analyze Census variables that best operationalize the 10 concepts you theorized above. Variables you may want to look at include:
Percentage white, median income, median housing cost...
These variables can be further manipulated into useful variables like:
Racial homogeneity = percentage white ÷ total population.Housing affordability = median housing cost for, e.g., Greenwich Village ÷ greater New York City.
Gentrification = a trend across time in decreasing housing affordability for, e.g., the West End ÷ greater Boston...
Do not limit yourself to these examples! Some of Gans and Jacobs' concepts may be difficult to operationalize exactly using the Census variables. In this case, you may want to theorize about additional variables that in some combination best approximate the effect of Gans and Jacobs' concepts (be sure to incorporate your rationales into your final paper).
Prepare some descriptive tables that report the data corresponding to your variables. In your individual reports, you and your group members will copy these tables and present them in an appendix that will be (the only text) common to all your reports.
Write a 3-5 page report (NOT including the appendix of tables) in the following format:
1. Introduction. Very briefly introduce the case studies of Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans and the theoretical debate them.2. Hypotheses. Present the hypotheses that you constructed based on their research, being sure to attribute each to either Jacobs or Gans. Your hypotheses can be reported in a numbered list (H1, H2, H3...) and need not be written in complete sentences. For each hypothesis, identify the empirical indicators (and their formulae, if necessary) you derived from the Census database to operationalize your theories.
3. Empirical support for authors' case studies. Are Jacobs' theories supported by the Greenwich Village evidence? Are Gans' theories supported by the West End evidence? Explain. If they are not, discuss whether you believe the inconsistencies are due to (a) inaccuracies and errors in how you operationalized their theories or (b) invalid theories by Jacobs and/or Gans (elaborate on this in 6, below).
4. Data extrapolation. Do you discover anything new about Jacobs and Gans' hypotheses as you track data for Greenwich Village and the West End, respectively, past their 1960 observations towards the present? What does the Poughkeepsie data indicate?
5. Theoretical explication. What do you know about the histories of Greenwich Village, Boston's West End, or Poughkeepsie that explain the empirical trends you observed in the Census data?
6. Debate evaluation. Based on your analysis, which author's theories about the relationship between the built environment and urban vitality are best supported by the data? Does this mean that the other author's theories are therefore invalid, or is there another way to re-think their apparently incompatible theories?
Throughout your report, you are encouraged to adopt a clear yet speculative voice. After all, there are other and possibly better ways to gather data that tests Jacobs and Gans' theories than analyzing Census data. Elaborate on those instances where the data do not allow you to conclude one way or the other. Briefly address other hypotheses and concepts that your data highlight. Explain how this exercise suggests superior ways to operationalize and test Jacobs and Gans' theories. Discuss what else this exercise has taught you.