The Reconstruction of Social Ecology and Neighborhood Change in Brooklyn

Abstract

Social ecology, despite the grave errors made by the Chicago School, still offers insights into the mechanics underlying the formation of urban residential geographies. A reconstituted social ecology, properly grafted to a conception of the division of labor and informed by structuration theory, reveals much about neighborhood formation and dissolution, urban sociospatial mobility, and the neglected issue of ethnicity. In this paper such a project is outlined, and then utilized empirically with a case study of the historical and current evolution of Brooklyn, New York, illustrating that the formation and dissolution of neighborhoods is a function of the changing types of jobs at successive historical moments, the structure of the housing market, the geography of preexisting residential formations, and the cultural and ideological characteristics of immigrant communities.