Welcome to Montreal
Ready for the 2017 Annual Meeting?
Montreal as a Gateway-City: Value chains and municipal democracy
Dorval Brunelle
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
CUSS Newsletter, Summer 2017, Vol. 29, No 3.
This contribution should be read as a historical and sociological introduction to the city of Montreal for our American and Canadian guests attending the 112th ASA meeting here in August. But at the same time, the background here provided will be used to contextualize a research project comparing Montreal with three other Canadian cities (Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver) on their respective policies, programs and actions as gateway-cities. Among the questions raised, we want to know what is the role of the municipal government in this regard, the content of its policies and programs, which stakeholders are involved, and how these policies, programs and actions make their way through the filters of municipal democracy. Although a comparative study, only the Montreal segment will be presented.
TRAILS
TRAILS, the ASA Teaching Resources and Innovation Library is an online, modular (by topic and type of teaching tool) and searchable database that reflects a major innovation in the creation and dissemination of peer-reviewed teaching resources. In 2016, TRAILS became a member benefit that all ASA members can access.
In recent years it has gone beyond syllabus sets to include a variety of different exercises, PowerPoints, and other teaching materials. This includes material for urban sociology.
Rural Voters and the Rural Vote in 2016
David L. Brown
Cornell University
Shannon Monnat
Penn State University1
CUSS Newsletter, Summer 2018, Vol 30, No 3.
Much has been written about the impact of rural voters, and the rural vote, on the 2016 presidential election. According to The Pew Research Center, Trump beat Clinton in rural areas by 62% to 34%, and by 50% to 45% in the suburbs. In contrast, Clinton bested Trump by 59% to 35% in urban areas. Moreover, Trump’s share of votes grew in direct relation with the degree of urbanization from about 40% in metropolitan areas with 1 million or more people to 58% in smaller metropolitan areas to fully 70% in totally rural counties (Kurtzleben 2016). Research shows that the share of rural votes cast for Democratic presidential candidates since 2000 was highest in 2008, and declined in both 2012 and especially in 2016. Moreover, this pattern characterizes nonmetropolitan counties with and without small and medium sized cities, and to a lesser degree both core and suburban parts of smaller metropolitan areas (See Figure 12). Only large metropolitan core areas avoided the Democratic drop off (Scala and Johnson 2017f).
Conference Feature: Urban Cascadia
Ryan Centner
London School of Economics
CUSS Newsletter. Summer 2016. Vol 28. No. 3
For those of you attending the Seattle annual meetings: Welcome to the northwestern edge of the Americas – “Cascadia” – a region I am proud to call home, even though I currently live some 5,000 miles away in an increasingly provincial archipelago known as the British Isles. If this is your first encounter with the Pacific Northwest, you may be scratching your head. What is Cascadia? And how can someone so far away still consider it “home”? I aim to answer these questions while briefly conveying some of the distinctive features that define the three largest Northwestern cities of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland (see map in Figure 1), including innovations and inequalities. Cascadia, to begin, is a somewhat contested term (Helm 1993; Smith 2008; Abbott 2009). As a regional moniker, clearly it references the Cascade Range of mountains that run from northern California up to southern British Columbia. Its vernacular origins derive from popular depictions of the Pacific Northwest as a kind of “ecotopia” (Callenbach 1975; Garreau 1981), reflecting both a unique landscape and unusual society-environment rela-tionship. Seattle-based sociologist David McCloskey (1988: n.p.) developed the notion of a cross-border bioregion, noting that:
Conference Feature: Where is the Chicago Ghetto?
Ray Hutchison
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
CUSS Newsletter, Summer 2015, Vol. 27, No. 3
Ernest Burgess’s essay, “The Growth of the City” presents us with one of the iconic images in urban sociology and beyond; the concentric zone model has been reprinted in virtually every textbook in urban geography, urban sociology, and more. Burgess is clear that the purpose of the model (or chart, as he labeled it) is to demonstrate the process of neighborhood succession, a central concept for the Chicago School: “In the expansion of the city a process of distribution takes place which sifts and sorts and relocates individuals and groups by residence and occupation. The resulting differentiation of the cosmopolitan American city into areas is typically all from one pattern, with only interesting minor modifications. Within the central business district or on an adjoining street is the “main stem” of “hobohemia,” the teeming Rialto of the homeless migratory man of the Middle West. In the zone of deterioration encircling the central business section are always to be found the socalled “slums” and “bad lands,” with their submerged regions of poverty, degradation, and disease, and their underworlds of crime and vice. Within a deteriorating area are roominghouse districts, the purgatory of “lost souls.” Near by is the Latin Quarter, where creative and rebellious spirits resort. The slums are also crowded to overflowing with immigrant colonies—the Ghetto, Little Sicily, Greektown, Chinatown—fascinatingly combining Old World heritages and American adaptations. Wedging out from here is the Black Belt, with its free and disorderly life.”
2012 Lynd Award: Urban Theory as Context Specification
Terry Nichols Clark
University of Chicago
2012 Fall, Vol. 25, No. 1
I am honored to receive the Lynd Award. I propose to celebrate a truly community approach. My simple argument is that we in the West exaggerate individualism. We give prizes to individuals, seldom teams and themes. Yet, teams are critical in much of social science. Not just for data but for building complex theories which specify how interpretations shift by location. Team members from different locations add value. Most of my publications are coauthored, indicating these debts. When I have been congratulated, I reply, I could not have done it without you. To date no one has disagreed, including the janitor.
Community does not necessarily imply harmony, but can include stimulating disagreement and debate.
Mile High City: Racial and Ethnic Dynamics
Lucy Dwight
University of Colorado-Denver
CUSS Newsletter, Summer 2012, Vol. 24, No. 3
Denver, the Mile High City, is located where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Though the area was used as a hunting ground for Native Americans for thousands of years and explored by the Spanish as early as the 16th century, it was the discovery of gold in nearby Pikes Peak that lead to permanent settlement by fortune seekers in 1858. Denver quickly became a regional center due to the Colorado Gold Rush and other extractive booms and busts that continued for well over a century. Although experiencing a major economic downturn and loss of population in the 1980s as the regional oil and gas industry collapsed along with the savings and loan debacle, Denver today is the largest city in Colorado and the Mountain West (denver.org 2012). Similar to other urban areas in the South and West, the greater Denver area has grown rapidly in the last few decades, increasing by 50% between 1990 and 2010, with more than 2.75 million residents in the metropolitan area today (Piton 2011). Denver’s core has grown rapidly as well, to over 600,000 residents, an increase of more than 25% since 1990, after experiencing several decades of population decline (census.gov 2012).
2011 Lynd Award: Urban Sociology and the Health of the Nation’s Cities
Greg Squires
George Washington University
2011 Fall, Vol. 24, No. 1
The state of urban sociology is probably healthier than that of the nation’s urban and metropolitan areas. I do not think there is a connection. At least I hope this is not the case. But I am reminded of Robert Lynd’s warning from his 1939 book Knowledge for What that academics do not want to be caught “lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.”
