As part of a larger project to understand the relative health and disorder of St. Louis City neighborhoods, this paper presents estimates of the number of vacant parcels in the city. These estimates, which are considerably higher than previously published ones, are heavily concentrated in the city's disinvested and segregated North side. We term this heavy concentration of vacancy as "urban prairie". After accounting for other factors as well as possible sources of statistical error, we identify both long-term population loss since 1970 and the proportion of African American residents as significant covariates associated with the amount of urban prairie land per neighborhood. These high levels of concentrated vacancy lead us to critique the City's existing approaches as being too limited in scope, and to suggest a range of possibilities for revitalizing portions of North St. Louis while allowing prairie land to continue to exist in others.
Cities have long been the object of fascination within sociology. Key portions of sociological literatures on inequality and globalization, for instance, have focused on urban spaces as essential sites for the production and reproduction of social life, and urban sociology itself is one of the oldest fields in the discipline. For all of this prominence, however, locating the city itself in these literatures can be difficult. Much of our understanding of urban life and urban social problems is derived from a relatively small number of American cities. Moreover, cities are often relegated to a supporting role as a research site rather than an institution worthy of interrogation. This article reviews the path that has brought a specific set of cities to the fore of American sociological analyses. In response, broadening literatures to cities in the literal and figurative American South and producing deeper literatures of specific cities can give sociology the opportunity to produce more representative and contextually rich analyses of inequalities, urban social life, and urban form. The literature on St. Louis, Missouri, is presented as an example of what such a broader and deeper literature could encompass.
Unlike most American cities, St. Louis, Missouri has a highly bisected street grid. Where intersections would typically be open to two-way traffic, in hundreds in cases in St. Louis they have been closed using concrete barriers or cul-de-sacs. These street closures are the outgrowth of a 1970s-era “defensible space” strategy to address rising crime rates. Oscar Newman, who is most closely associated with this paradigm, developed it while a faculty member in St. Louis. The city therefore is not only the birthplace but also one of the most significant test cases for its implementation. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive data set of closures available, evaluate their location in the city, and assess their association with contemporary violent crime patterns. We find that barriers are located in neighborhoods that lost significant population between 1970 and 2016, particularly in North City and the northernmost reaches of South City. Critically, though the barriers are imagined as crime reduction tools and justified as such in City legislation, we find that they are associated with elevated violent crime rates at the neighborhood-level. This finding suggests significant limitations with “defensible space” strategies in St. Louis and elsewhere for addressing crime.
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