Book review: great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighbourhood effect

For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. In Great American City, Robert J. Sampson argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live. To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade’s research in Chicago combined with his own personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower, and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. Laura Vaughan feels that Sampson’s work contributes to important debates around the place of the Big Society and neighbourhood inequality.