SOCIAL-ORDER AND DISORDER OF STREET BLOCKS AND NEIGHBORHOODS - ECOLOGY, MICROECOLOGY, AND THE SYSTEMIC MODEL OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION

Bursik and Grasmick's recently reformulated, ecologically oriented sys temic model of neighborhood disorder explicitly recognizes three level s of informal social control: private (family and close friends), paro chial (bared on nearby acquaintances), and public (between neighborhoo ds and external agents and agencies). Recent research suggests that th e model deserves further articulation at the parochial level The autho r proposes developing the parochial level of informal social control i n the following three ways: by recognizing within-neighborhood variati ons in informal social control and responses to disorder; by acknowled ging the central importance of street blocks as durable features of th e everyday environment connecting residents to broader ecological dyna mics in their neighborhood; and by developing microecological principl es, analogous to human ecological principles, to help us understand co nnections between street block and community-level ecological dynamics . The proposed perspective links ecological and community psychologica l perspectives with social disorganization processes to clarify spatia l and temporal variations in the collective psychogeography of residen t-based control.