Great American City demonstrates the powerfully enduring impact of place.
 
Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City presents the fruits of over a decade’s research to support an argument that we all feel and experience every day: life is decisively shaped by your neighborhood.

Engaging with the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago, Sampson, in this new edition, reflects on local and national changes that have transpired since his book’s initial publication, including a surge in gun violence and novel forms of segregation despite an increase in diversity. New research, much of it a continuation of the influential discoveries in Great American City, has followed, and here, Sampson reflects on its meaning and future directions. Sampson invites readers to see the status of the research initiative that serves as the foundation of the first edition—the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)—and outlines the various ways other scholars have continued his work. Both accessible and incisively thorough, Great American City is a must-read for anyone interested in cutting-edge urban sociology and the study of crime.
 

Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University.
 

Foreword
Acknowledgments

Part I: Setting and Thesis
1. Placed
2. Neighborhood Effects: The Evolution of an Idea

Part II: Principles and Method
3. Analytic Approach
4. The Making of the Chicago Project

Part III: Community-Level Processes
5. Legacies of Inequality
6. “Broken Windows” and the Meaning of Disorder
7. The Theory of Collective Efficacy
8. Civic Society and the Organizational Imperative
9. Social Altruism, Cynicism, and the “Good Community”

Part IV: Interlocking Structures
10. Spatial Logic; or, Why Neighbors of Neighborhoods Matter
11. Trading Places: Experiments and Neighborhood Effects in a Social World
12. Individual Selection as a Social Process
13. Network Mechanisms of Interneighborhood Migration
14. Leadership and the Higher-Order Structure of Elite Connections

Part V: Synthesis and Revisit
15. Neighborhood Effects and a Theory of Context
16. Aftermath—Chicago 2010
17. The Twenty-First-Century Gold Coast and Slum

Afterword: The Idea of Neighborhood and Its Enduring Realizations

Notes
References
Index