Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods

Abstract

This article assesses the sources and consequences of public disorder. Based on the videotaping and systematic rating of more than 23,000 street segments in Chicago, highly reliable scales of social and physi- cal disorder for 196 neighborhoods are constructed. Census data, police records, and an independent survey of more than 3,500 resi- dents are then integrated to test a theory of collective efficacy and structural constraints. Defined as cohesion among residents com- bined with shared expectations for the social control of public space, collective efficacy explains lower rates of crime and observed disor- der after controlling neighborhood structural characteristics. Collec- tive efficacy is also linked to lower rates of violent crime after ac- counting for disorder and the reciprocal effects of violence. Contrary to the "broken windows" theory, however, the relationship between public disorder and crime is spurious except perhaps for robbery. The answer to the question of how city life was to be possible, then, is this. City life was made possible by an "ordering" of the urban populace in terms of appearance and spatial location such that those within the city could know a great deal about one another by simply looking. (Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space, 1973, p. 22; emphasis in original) Visual signs of social and physical disorder in public spaces reflect power- fully on our inferences about urban communities. By social disorder, we refer to behavior usually involving strangers and considered threatening,