The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and School of Social Policy and Practice hosted a Thursday discussion about the influence of geography on community well-being.
The Feb. 19 panel, titled “Place and Well-Being,” featured a conversation between SP2 professors Millan AbiNader and Alice Xu and concluded with an audience question and answer session. The event marked the fifth installment in The Politics of Well-Being, a collaborative year-long speaker series across the Penn organizations that highlights the effect of social policy on political life.
During the event, Xu discussed her research about the impact of a city’s geographic layout on preferences for public goods and argued that spatial externalities of inequality is the “core mechanism” through which segregation impacts the provision of public goods.
“There’s always pockets of segregation, whether it’s based [on] race or ethnicity or income — people self sort to like-minded voters and people self sort to where they’re most comfortable,” Xu told The Daily Pennsylvanian. “What we’re only now beginning to understand is that these geographies affect how people perceive and have preferences and do collective demand-making from the state.”
Xu specifically focuses on segregation of “urban slums,” which are historically the “areas that are neglected by the state.”
“They become quite sources of sewage runoff that is not collected by the state and activity on the part of organized criminal groups,” Xu added. “Patterns of segregation determines the extent to which the effects of uncollected storage and organized crime spill over from these informal slum settlements to the middle class and externality.”
AbiNader discussed her own research and explained that there are stark disparities in critical service accessibility between urban and rural environments.
“There are more domestic violence shelter beds in the city of Philadelphia than the entire state of Maine,” AbiNader said. “Even for organizations to evaluate their own programs requires grant funding — but how can an organization in Maine compete with an organization in the city?”
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She added that the “cultural perception” of “what is rural” differs and has shifted over time, creating more barriers for “rural” communities.
“The U.S. population is getting less rural, not only because of very real patterns of people migrating to urban areas for work, but also because of how we’re measuring rural in the first place,” AbiNader explained.
The United States government does not consider many areas — including “rural spots” in Western Massachusetts — as rural because of “commuting rates to urban centers,” according to AbiNader. Therefore, many communities that “we would all consider extremely rural” are not eligible for the funding “specific to rural communities that our government gives out.”
“I found that a 1% increase in the rural population was associated with a 1.38% increase in the intimate partner homicide rate at the town level,” she explained. “That’s a small increase, but it’s not negligible, and it aligns with other research suggesting that rural intimate partner violence is more frequent severe and lethal than urban activity.”
Given the federal government’s definition of rural, “none of these communities would be … able to take training that are specific to rural communities or access programming that our federal government offers.”
During the audience Q&A session, AbiNader and Xu emphasized the importance of understanding people from different communities.
“For those of us who’ve predominantly domiciled in one type of place … that’s problematic because we’re being dismissive,” Xu said. “Especially living in such a polarized context in our society today, I think it’s very important to understand exactly what ‘place’ means, and what those communities are really going through.”
2018 College graduate and 2023 SP2 graduate Ibrahim Bakri — associate director of the Andrea Mitchell Center — was involved in coordinating the Center’s collaboration with SP2.
Bakri expressed hope that the speaker series helps Penn students understand that “many communities are directly impacted” by politics.
“In the Penn bubble, you can be a little bit disconnected from the consequences of a lot of our policies that are passed in this country,” Bakri added.
AbiNader, who also serves as chair of the series planning committee, told the DP that the total series includes six events that highlight “the real range of expertise at SP2” through discussions about “six aspects of life that impact people’s ability to not only survive, but thrive.”
Jeffrey Green, the director of the Andrea Mitchell Center, told the DP that the event series aims to highlight the “micro-politics of everyday life perspective.”
He emphasized that “democratic politics is not just running for office,” but involves “a whole parallel set of pursuits and challenges at the local level, the neighborhood level” — which the series explores.
AbiNader told the DP that the “unifying theme of well-being” was selected because the SP2 community is focused on improving “people’s lives and communities’ lives.”
The monthly moderated panels each feature SP2 professors who their research on topics including civil society, technology, and identity. The final event in the series, “Health and Well-Being,” is set to take place on March 19.
