urban planning

EIN Presswire featured Angela Simms’ (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University) new book Fighting for a Foothold. The book examines why Black middle-class residents in the United States–who are well positioned to thrive–struggle to sustain strong public goods and services. Simms investigates why they face challenges when following the same fiscal rules as Whiter, wealthier neighbors. She argues that ongoing government policies and business practices such as federal mortgage insurance policies, reliance on property taxes, and private investment patterns shaped these disparities in wealth.

Angela Simms

A story by The Rice Thresher features Leah Binkovits (Sociology Ph.D. Student at Rice University and a Senior Editorial Writer for the Houston Chronicle) who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2025 for a series she wrote on train safety. In the series, Binkovits used her sociological training to frame the everyday “inconvenience” Houston residents face from dangerous railroads and how it connects to a “bigger system of power and economics, history and all these courses together.” The work began receiving attention from officials after the death of a teenage boy crossing train tracks in 2024. She felt honored to be recognized by her peers with this award and wants to use her work to draw attention to Houston’s financial needs, especially since that money can help create overpasses, underpasses, and necessary infrastructure.

Leah Binkovits

Rena Zito (Associate Professor of Sociology at Elon University) wrote an article in The Conversation challenging misconceptions about Tourette syndrome that have to do with shouting curses or slurs. As a person with Tourette syndrome, Zito felt it was important to clarify the misconception that tics reveal what people really think: “In reality, tics often compel people to say or do precisely what they most wish to avoid.” She also explains that “fewer than 1 in 5 people with Tourette’s experience taboo tics, such as coprolalia — involuntary obscene or offensive speech.”

Rena Zito

Daniel Perez G. recently wrote about Zygmunt Bauman’s (Philosopher and Sociologist) work on social structures. An idea he developed “liquid modernity,” which is the belief that “nothing is meant to last” recently received attention for the way it captured his beliefs on the fragility of romantic bonds. He believes this type of modernity has exchanged stability for constant change and describes the impact this is having on romance using his theory “liquid love”. This theory explains how consumer culture and the crave for individual freedom and flexibility perpetuates the idea of having options and weakens romantic bonds. Relationships are moving away from long-term commitment to temporary arrangements. Bauman warns and cautions that the ideal of the “liquid” individual blocks personal growth by avoiding emotional pain.

Zygmunt Bauman

The New York Times ran a story on the removal or design changes of public benches as a part of a “decades-long shift of reinventing the public bench into something that doesn’t welcome the public at all.” Michael Benediktsson (Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College) commented that this trend connects to pre-1970s anit-vagrancy laws that allowed police officers to arrest people of color and people experiencing homelessness who were utilizing public spaces. Benediktsson commented that once these laws were deemed unconstitutional, “that’s when you see more of a turn to hostile urban design and planning as a means of achieving the same objective.”

Michael Benediktsson

Ash Watson (Scientia Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney) described the consequences of the digital divide in Australia in an NewsCop article. Nearly “6 million Australians have difficulty accessing the internet; this spans physical access, affording the internet and being confident and capable with their own abilities,” Watson described. As more services–including banking, news, housing applications, and government services–move online, many Australians are getting left behind. “The big consequence is that people can struggle to fully participate and feel that they don’t belong in Australian society as a result,” Watson said.

Ash Watson

The Atlantic ran a story addressing a “surprisingly contentious” question: does money make parenting easier? In 2023 a Pew Research Center survey found that lower-income parents were more likely to state that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding most of the time. Many media commentators focused on this singular data point, claiming that parenting was most difficult for wealthier parents (despite another finding in the Pew data that lower-income parents are more likely to say that parenting is stressful). Jennifer Glass (Sociology Professor at the University of Texas at Austin) commented that “there’s simply no data on mental health, subjective well-being, or happiness that I have ever seen showing [that wealthy parents struggle with parenthood more].” Rather, Glass’s research shows that higher income and education improve happiness for parents.

Jennifer Glass

Equal Times interviewed Alex Wood (Assistant Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Cambridge) on the rise in self-employment and freelance work since 2000. Wood explains that freelancing is often more common where there are weaker labor protections, service-based economies, and digital labor platforms available. Wood also describes a shift in the corporate mindset toward prioritizing short-term profit: “If you leave it to employers, to firms, they will choose the low road, the easy option, because they are focused on short-term profitability and short-term share price, even though that’s detrimental to them in the long term.”

Alex Wood

The Washington Post ran an article about shifting trends in cosmetic surgery–particularly a rise in breast implant removals and breast implants of smaller sizes, mirroring a broader cultural trend toward thinness. Alka Menon (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University) explained that “cosmetic surgery moves on a trend model. Minimalism is the name of the game now.” Menon also commented on how social media accelerates cycles of beauty trends: “What took decades to shift from Marilyn Monroe to Kate Moss now happens in a few years. The algorithm determines what version of beauty you’re exposed to.”

Alka Menon

Evidence shows that trees and green spaces in urban areas offer a number of benefits, such as reducing stress and improving air quality. Despite these benefits, many residents of Detroit refused to allow the city to plant trees in front of their houses during a recent city “greening” initiative. An article appearing in CityLab draws from sociological research to demonstrate how a history of government abuses and lack of inclusivity of communities of color in key decisions explains why many Detroiters had this reaction.

Sociologist Dorceta Taylor published a report in 2014, arguing that white environmentalists make environmental justice projects less effective when they assume they know what is good for a neighborhood. By leaving communities of color out of the planning process, they are not able to anticipate or overcome challenges along the way. This proved true in Detroit. A recent article by Christine Carmichael and Maureen McDonough examined the reasons why Black residents resisted the city’s trees. CityLab reports: “It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.”

Carmichael and McDonough found that Black residents were aware of the many benefits of living near trees. However, to some, the trees were a symbol of the city’s unwanted intervention in their lives. Amidst racial tension in the 1960s, the city began clearing trees from Black neighborhoods — ostensibly to combat Dutch elm disease, but some interviewees. Yet, some people believed the city cut down trees to increase police surveillance. This memory triggered their reaction to the modern tree-planting. Carmichael says:

“In this case, the women felt that [after the race rebellion] the city just came in and cut down their trees, and now they want to just come in planting trees. … But they felt they should have a choice in this since they’ll be the ones caring for the trees and raking up the leaves when the planters leave. They felt that the decisions regarding whether to cut down trees or plant new ones were being made by someone else, and they were going to have to deal with the consequences.”

This failed initiative in Detroit highlights the social forces that environmental organizations must consider when working in marginalized neighborhoods. Recruiting volunteers and administrators who come from the communities they are serving (something Detroit did not do) could help improve the process. As CityLab reports:

“[E]nvironmental justice is not just about the distribution of bad stuff, like pollution, or good stuff, like forestry projects across disadvantaged communities. It’s also about the distribution of power among communities that have historically only been the subjects and experiments of power structures.”

Gentrification is rapidly transforming once-industrial cities into trendy urban neighborhoods.  However, the dangers that lie below the surface – “hundreds of millions of pounds” of hazardous wastes released by small and large businesses each year – fail to be addressed at the same rate. In a recent interview in The Guardian, sociologists Scott Frickel and James R. Elliot discuss findings from their book about the limitations of current data on environmental hazards and how gentrification has diversified the types of people at risk of exposure to toxic waste.

Frickel and Elliot explain that government databases on hazardous sites only appeared in mid 1980s, and databases often exclude manufacturers that have few employees or release under a specified threshold of pollutants. Reporting is also completely voluntary, meaning the databases only contain the information facilities choose to report. In their research, Frickel and Elliot use old manufacturing directories to address these limitations by creating their own database. They found manufacturing to be heavily concentrated in certain “legacy sites,” or areas where you would expect to find heavy industry with large concentrations of factories or other facilities. However, these site boundaries also spread out slowly over time, and so too did the hazardous wastes. While disadvantaged social groups are more typically exposed to these pollutants, gentrification has disrupted this to some extent.  Elliot explains,

“We do also find things that we’ve come to unfortunately expect from the vast research on environmental injustices… These larger facilities are opening up and disproportionately concentrating in areas of ethnic minority and low-income settlement. But when we begin to consider the spread and the accumulation across cities as land uses change, that picture also changes. We begin to see, as one of our colleagues put it, that we’re all in this together. Many different types of neighborhoods are exposed.”

To remedy this exposure to hazardous materials, Frickel suggests that urban planners seriously consider the history of pollutants that exist below our cities when addressing sustainability. It remains to be seen how gentrification will impact citizens’ ability to hold businesses and government officials accountable for these environmental hazards, but recent events such as the water crisis in Flint should serve as a key example of how far we have left to go to address toxic hazards. 

Spain has always gone to great lengths to meet its high demand for water, but when faced with a shortage, the town of Zaragoza took a different approach. When severe droughts in the early 1990s caused reservoirs to dry up, forest fires to rage, and crops to wither, it became clear that the inland city would not be able to meet their high demand. Víctor Viñuales, the director and co-founder of the Spanish NGO Fundación Ecología y Desarrollo (Ecology and Development Foundation), used his understanding of sociology to devise an innovative solution. He tells The Guardian:

“Trained as a sociologist, Viñuales wondered what would happen if municipalities focused less on making sure residents had access to all the water they wanted and more on reducing demand. From that thought began a 15-year experiment in Zaragoza that has revolutionised how many in Spain – from locals to public officials – think about water management.”

Viñuales lead an ambitious project that began with a challenge to the city’s citizens to save 1 billion liters of water in a year. He used a widespread media and social outreach campaign, offered free audits to help find water saving opportunities, gave discounts on water saving products, and even changed the city’s water bills so citizens could track their changes in usage. Zaragoza stepped up to the challenge.

“Today Viñuales rattles off statistic after statistic to show how this city of 700,000 has transformed itself. Between 1997 and 2012, per capita use of water in Zaragoza dropped from 150 litres/day to 99 litres/day. The drop even sustained an increase in population; between 1997 and 2008, the city’s population grew by 12% but daily water use dropped by 27%.”

Viñuales was able to use both social and economic factors to effect the lives of the people of Zaragoza and make a huge stride forward in sustainability. While he acknowledges the success he has seen, he reminds us that “To achieve profound change – whether it be environmental, social or cultural – you have to be prepared to take it on for the long haul. Here in Zaragoza we’ve had that profound change. The population grew, but we use fewer resources than before. It’s really what needs to be achieved on a global level.”

While yesterday’s article from The Atlantic, “The Rise of the Temporary City,” never addresses utopianism, we still think Erik Olin Wright, American Sociological Association president and champion of the study of “real utopias” would be pleased with the rise of “temporary urbanism.” In the piece, which jumps off of the new book The Temporary City, author David Lepeska points out that pop-up cities are nothing new (the World’s Fair’s various incarnations spring to mind), but the recent spate of pop-up stores, restaurants, and the like seems to be breathing new life into these short-lived utopias.

The truly quick cities—week-long urban malls, for instance—are intriguing on their own, but urban planner Peter Bishop tells The Atlantic that it’s the “grander, longer-lasting temporary projects that have begun to alter thinking in the field.” Various projects cited include London’s “Boxpark,” in which “60 shipping containers have been turned into shops with three or five-year leases… in large part due to the open-mindedness of the landowners”; the now-permanent Camden Lock Market, which has “helped rejuvenate an overlooked neighborhood”; and even city-wide projects like Washington, D.C.’s Temporary Urban Initiative, meant to help developers overcome the slow pace of owner approval, permitting, and zoning for such projects.

The author points out that whether the pop-ups are just a passing revival of a past fad remains to be seen and will likely be measured by scholars like Bishop on “the extent to which major colleges and universities incorporate temporary concepts into their curriculum, and uptake among municipal officials.” Still, “temporary urbanism offers an innovative way to use vacant space, generate revenue, and boost property values in a downturn.”

Further, such projects offer an excellent experimental space in which to create, from the ground up, a new community and see how it plays itself out: real utopias in action. If, as Wright instructs, we should study operational utopias (like Copenhagen’s Christiania, which has been in operation as a squatter settlement since the early 70s) in order to be ready to take action when opportunities arise to improve our larger communities, we could do worse than to study the temporary urbanism of the 21st century.