This paper uses unique data on Philadelphia’s nonprofit organizations compiled from IRS listings, city cultural fund grant applications, telephone directories and newspaper listings in 1997 and 2003 to test Wilson’s (1987) hypothesis that inner-city neighborhoods suffer from a dearth of social institutions. The author integrates these data with demographic information from the 2000 census to ex...

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of info...

Debate about the substitutability of manufactured, natural, human and social capital is at the heart of sustainability theory. Sociology can contribute to this debate by examining the processes and mechanisms by which one form of capital is substituted for another. We examine the substitution among different forms of capitals at China’s Wolong Nature Reserve where the consumption of an importan...

Ethnoracial residential segregation is a complex, multiscalar phenomenon with immense moral and economic costs. Modeling the structure and dynamics of segregation is a pressing problem for sociology and urban planning, but existing methods have limitations. In this paper, we develop a suite of methods, grounded in information theory, for studying the spatial structure of segregation. We first a...

Research on mass communications and on the acceptance of new farm practices may be characterized as an interest in campaigns to gain a acceptance of change. Despite their shared problems, these two fields have shown no interest in each other. However, very recently, as the student of mass communications began to revise his image of an atomized mass society, there have been signs of growing conv...

In urban residential environments in Australia and other developed countries, Internet access is on the verge of becoming a ubiquitous utility like gas or electricity. From an urban sociology and community informatics perspective, this article discusses new emerging social formations of urban residents that are based on networked individualism and the potential of Internet-based systems to supp...