Use value of place and closing schools

The January 15th issue of the New Yorker has an article by Katherine Boo (ex-Washington CIty Paper) called "Expectations" about school reform efforts in Denver, and the closure of Manual High School due to persistent failure, the impact on the children, and the reform agenda of the school superintendent, Michael Bennet.

I realized when reading this article that I have been too quick to support closing schools, without thinking of the negative impact on families and the children--even though I have considered and written about the impact on neighborhoods more broadly. Declining enrollments mean schools must be closed. However, I realize that the discussion of "use value of place" by Logan and Molotch in Urban Fortunes: Toward a Political Economy of Place, is completely relevant when thinking about and planning to ameliorate the negative effects.

While not citing this work, in Root Shock Fullilove makes the same kinds of arguments on the destruction of community and social networks as a result of urban renewal.

Types of Use Values*

Daily Round: The place of residence is a focal point for the wider routine in which one's concrete daily needs are satisfied.

Informal Support Networks: Place of residence is the potential support of an information network of people who provide life-sustaining products and services.

Security and Trust: A neighborhood also provides a sense of physical and psychic security that comes with a familiar and dependable environment.

Identity: A neighborhood provides its residents with an important source of identity, both for themselves and for others. Neighborhoods offer a resident not only spatial demarcations but social demarcations as well.

Agglomeration Benefits: A shared interest in overlapping use values (identity, security, and so on) in a single area is a useful way to define neighborhood.

Ethnicity: Not infrequently, these benefits are encapsulated in a shared enthnicity... When this occurs, ethnicity serves as a summary characterization of all the overlapping benefits of neighborhood life.

(* From chapter four of Urban Fortunes: Toward a Political Economy of Place.)