Lyn H. Lofland

SOCIAL LIFE IN THE PUBLIC REALM: A Review

The public realm is defined as those nonprivate sectors or areas of urban settlements in which individuals in co-presence tend to be personally unknown or only categorically known to one another. Through a review of the largely ethnographic literature on the public realm, this article details the relationship between it and other types of social space, argues for the thoroughly social character of what occurs there, and describes some of its characteristic rules and relationships. A concluding section speculates on the possible functions or social uses of the public realm.

Loss and Human Connection: An Exploration into the Nature of the Social Bond

In Western culture, the involuntary severance (through death, desertion, or geographical separation, for example) of a relationship defined by actor as “significant” or “meaningful” is generally conceived of as a “loss” experience. In this essay, I want to pursue the question: What is lost? Stated more positively, I want to ask what it is that humans do for one another? What links self to other, personality to society? I want to make, that is, a modest foray into those matters that psychologists typically pursue with such concepts as “attachment,” “affect,” and “separation anxiety,” and that sociologists pursue in their inquiries into the nature of the social bond.

Self-Management in Public Settings: Part //

THE PERIOD OF APPROACH is a very brief one. While it is in process, the individual is primarily concerned with projecting himself only as someone who can successfully execute this maneuver. There is time for little else. It is not until after he has reached a position and is faced with a prolonged stay in the midst of strangers that it becomes important-or even possible-for him to assume his more individualistic and complex management style. His overriding concern continues to be that of projecting a favorable and confirmable image, but with more timc now at his disposal, this projection will involve a grcater range of behavior and will reflect more individual differences than was possible during the approach.

Toward a Sociology of Death and Dying

conferences, in television documentaries and talk shows, and in newly organized or rejuvenated research clearing houses and foundations. Much of the current attention to these topics is, as past attention has been, of an exhortive or ameliorative or speculative character. The more scholarly work has tended to emerge primarily from psychologists and psychiatrists, especially those concered with suicide or grief. And while sociologists have certainly had a part in this tide of attention, a large, comprehensive, and solid body of materials clearly labeled &dquo;sociology of death and dying&dquo; has yet to be amassed. There is, for example, to my knowledge, no published,

THE REAL-ESTATE DEVELOPER AS VILLAIN: NOTES ON A STIGMATIZED OCCUPATION

This paper is the initial published report of an ongoing research project focused on the occupational world and culture of the real-estate developer. 1 Data sources include intensive interviews with (mostly) California developers and associated occupational groups (e.g. architects, planners), participant observation of developer-oriented workshops and conferences, and diverse publications including: (1) the work of social science colleagues who have dealt – sometimes directly, mostly tangentially, with the topic; (2) biographies and autobiographies of contemporary and historic individuals who are “captured” by my classificatory scheme, that is, who I can clearly categorize as being in the development business or who are, at minimum, fellow travellers; (3) newspaper articles, columns, and op-ed pieces dealing with individual developers, with development projects and with support of or opposition to either; (4) social histories which capture the “who did what and when” details of growth and patterning of specific human settlements; (5) information available on the internet (and there is a great deal of it) dealing with both individual developers and with developer-related organizations; (6) publications (newsletters, journals, and so forth) of organizations which either directly represent or are enmeshed with or are in opposition to this occupational group; and (7) fictional works (films, short stories, TV, novels, newspaper and magazine cartoons, etc.) in which one or more of the characters is a developer.1 It is perhaps not surprising that this first report should deal with matters of symbolism, of imagery: As a self-identified symbolic interactionist and, more tellingly perhaps, as a student of Anselm Strauss, 2 Strauss’ Images of the American City (1961) and his edited, The American City: A Sourcebook of Urban Imagery (1968) were among the first works I encountered by him and they continue to be major influences on my thinking about urban matters of all sorts.2 these are the sort of issues that come most readily to mind whenever I am surveying data on almost any phenomenon. And while there are many, many other “stories” to be told about this occupation, I think it is fair to assert that all of them – or at least those dealing with the contemporary situation – will have to be understood against the backdrop of what I have come to think of as the developers’ “image problem.” In what follows, I will first, overview my rationale for undertaking this study; second, provide some data to support the claims made by the title of the piece, i.e. that developers are seen as villains and that theirs is reasonably captioned a “stigmatized occupation” and then offer other data to question the accuracy of that image; third, propose a triplet of (among, undoubtedly, many other) reasons for this apparent mis-match between image and “reality”: and finally, in a concluding section, speculate a bit about consequences of this occupational stigmatization.

WHAT TIME IS THIS PLACE?, Kevin Lynch. Cambridge, Mass. and London England: The MIT Press, 1972,

The title alone is a spellbinder. If the contents seem less so, that may say more about the expectations of the reader than about the accomplishments of the author. To anticipate a continuation of the strong and inventive empirical thrust of Lynch’s Image of the City is to court disappointment. What Time Is this Place? is more prescriptive than descriptive, more speculative than analytic, aimed more at doers than at observers. Nonetheless, if one is willing to give the author his head, as it were, to let him lead, one will find this book rich in insights (as well as photographs), heavily sprinkled with intriguing ideas and enormously useful in sensitizing one to some previously unexplored possibilities in the relations between self and surroundings. Lynch is concerned here with the ways in which time is (or is not) and can be embodied in space; with the ways, that is, in which the elements of

10.00, 277 pp.:

This nine-chapter collection of empirical and theoretical papers and essays continues Suttles’ interest, expressed in his previous work, in such complexly interrelated matters as territoriality, urban residence groups, community structure, the varying bases of social cohesion, trust and mistrust, and identity. While all the pieces partake of the insights of his five years of observation in two Chicago areas, only two are explicitly ethnographic. In &dquo;The Contrived Community,&dquo; Suttles argues that the Douglas Park Community Area, a recently redeveloped section of Chicago’s Near South Side, while not presently typical of big-city neighborhoods (&dquo;natural communities&dquo;), may, as urban redevelopment continues, become so, and he outlines some broad features and general processes that appear integral