Contextualizing Impressions of Neighborhood Change: Linking Business Directories to Ethnography

Abstract

This article suggests a research tool, the temporal map, for ethnographers to employ in supplementing the accounts of urban change provided by local informants. Such a map, created using city business directories, can provide an external validity check to ethnographic research. The authors' tool allows urban ethnographers to extend contemporary ethnographic accounts backward to a period prior to the beginning of fieldwork. It provides a geo-temporal contextualization by fitting fragmented, geographically and historically specific ethnographic accounts into a broader area and across a broader period of time. The authors show how two ethnographic case studies were enhanced by such temporal maps. Their cases involve a redeveloped central business district in North Carolina and a gentrified neighborhood in New York City. TRACKING TEMPORAL CHANGE IN URBAN SPACEWhen geologists examine deep incisions in the Earth's surface, they often observe moraines, the glacial deposits of soil and rocks left at the margin of an ice sheet. The glacier has long since retreated or disappeared altogether, but evidence of its earlier presence remains. As ethnographers, we too find ourselves in a contemporary research setting trying to contextualize the remains of earlier, broader processes. We often arrive at the tail end of a longer set of events or during a particularly interesting phase without immediately witnessing the social glacier that left a particular deposit of activity.As urban ethnographers, we are haunted by the Marxist dictum that "all that is solid melts into air." Harvey (1989, p. 250) informs us that "transformations are wrought through the 'creative destruction' of the landscapes that went before." But what landscapes went before and what are the best ways to learn more about them? Without the time or resources to "revisit" a site (Burawoy, 2003), ethnographers--like geologistsdescribe historical moments that may crystallize decades of change. We are left with moraines of the built environment that serve as tantalizing hints of the past from which to construct a narrative leading to the present.

More Coffee, Less Crime? The Relationship between Gentrification and Neighborhood Crime Rates in Chicago, 1991 to 2005

“…Mounting evidence further supports the fact that racial disparities in crime tend to be confounded with significant differences in community contexts (Sampson and Bean 2006; Sampson and Wilson 1995). Often referred to as “ecological dissimilarity,” this research posits that it is impossible for statistical models to reproduce the same neighborhood conditions for Whites and Blacks, since they occupy markedly different positions in the social and spatial order of the city (Sampson and Bean 2006).…”

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Big City Problems: Private Equity Investment, Transnational Users, and Local Mobilization in the Small City

“…To access residents' sentiment concerning the downtown, I employed methods such as go-along interviews and photo elicitation interviews (Harper 1998;Kusenbach 2003;Lynch 1960). To interrogate the nature of the downtown's transformation, I recorded the land uses from 1963 to 2003 utilizing a data set developed from Polk city directories (Schlichtman and Patch 2008). To access the public dialogue surrounding the downtown transformation, I conducted archival research and executed a 40-year content analysis of the city's daily newspaper, the High Point Enterprise.…”

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“…Figure 2 utilizes what I call a ‘temporal map’ to overview the change in downtown High Point (Schlichtman and Patch, 2008). This map spans nine streets laterally and four streets vertically and represents the core of the downtown.…”