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My current project actually is a continuation of a research interest that I have had for a long time which is to try and understand neighborhoods and crime.

Also more generally the social order of cities and understanding how cities are changing with our time.

Way back in graduate school I was interested in how neighborhoods affect crime in the great tradition of the "Chicago School," focusing on how social structures beyond individual characteristics influence people's lives. So it's looking at things like the concentration of poverty, residential stability and other characteristics of neighborhoods.

It's not just the negative end which you might think of in terms of violence and ill health.  I've also studied the "top end" with regard to things like civic participation, protest, collective civic action events, and leadership networks. Even the amount of time people spend on the internet is extremely variable by neighborhood, and where the educated or so-called "creative class" lives is highly concentrated by time and space.

Part of my research and the book I'm working on stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, initiated in the mid-90s. The reason Chicago was picked was not only because it's a large and one of the most important cities in the USA, but because it's a city of great diversity and immigration. We were able to look at whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians as key groups and at heterogeneous neighborhoods. From 1995 we studied families with children and followed them for up to eight years. Over 6,000 kids ranging from birth through to 18 year olds were enroled. They were followed through time no matter where they moved in the United States, Mexico - you name it.

We tracked the characteristics of their neighborhoods and the characteristics of their lives.  One of the major pieces of research was to try and understand why violence is concentrated in particular neighborhoods and the role of social relationships in explaining the violence in Chicago.

One of the questions was while we have a high occurrence of homicide and crime in particular communities, could we get beyond poverty and race to see what else is occurring there?  For example there are some things you can observe, and this bears on one of the key debates on US crime policy known as "Broken Windows" theory; the idea that one broken window leads to another broken window, creating a cycle of decline which then leads to more crime. We studied this theory by video taping neighborhood streets and conducting literally thousands of interviews with residents of all backgrounds and ages looking for links.

For the last two decades there has been a dramatic increase in immigration. It's a huge issue in Europe and the stereotype is that immigration is a social problem. Because immigrants are poor, they typically move into poor neighborhoods, so therefore they are often at risk of violence. We found that people's perceptions of disorder are linked to what they see on the street. So where there's a concentration of minority groups, Americans perceive there to be more disorder. For example if you have the equivalent amount of graffiti, broken windows, and  trash on the streets, if people see two or three white kids hanging out on the street versus two or three black or 'immigrant' kids, it is interpreted much differently even though the physical setting is the same.

One paper we published showed that first-generation immigrants actually had lower rates of violence than the second generation, who in turn had lower rates of violence than the third generation of native-born Americans. That's an interesting finding that kind of goes against common beliefs.

Furthermore we found that the concentration of immigrants in the neighbourhood was linked to lower rates of violence whether or not you were first or second generation. This dual finding suggested that perhaps the great increase in immigration we saw in the 1990s was in part responsible for the big drop in crime we saw during the same period. This wasn't a hugely popular idea as it again went against the common stereotype.

I'm a social scientist first and foremost: my job is to provide knowledge. Crime policy and housing policy-making are very specialist areas and I think more social science is definitely having a positive impact so I'm quite optimistic on a number of fronts.