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Urban relaxation: Two girls play in Chicago's Humboldt Park. BOB BLACK

Introducing a new phrase is a tricky business," says Felton Earls, professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It may or may not take hold." Earls wants his phrase, "collective efficacy," to become a buzzword in urban social reform--seven syllables on the lips of urban planners and lawmakers worldwide. He knows the phrase is a little tough to negotiate, but he has confidence in it.

Earls, a child psychiatrist, has coauthored a paper suggesting that collective efficacy--loosely, the degree to which residents perceive their neighborhood to be "cohesive" or "tight-knit"--is a major factor in explaining the rate of violent crime in urban areas.

"When you walk through an area where collective efficacy is high, you don't see unaccompanied children--I mean kids from about 7 to 13. Walking to and from school, in playgrounds, children will be with adults or older youths," says Earls. "But in neighborhoods with low collective efficacy, you'll see kids of that age left on their own, with no older people around."

Earls has directed the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a citywide study of 343 neighborhoods that run the gamut of socioeconomic status and ethnic composition, since 1990. The study seeks to determine why, everything else being equal (or adjusted for, using rigorous statistical methods), one neighborhood consistently has lower crime rates than another. Why does one neighborhood work, where another seems to fail?

"Trust, reciprocity, and a willingness among people to look out for one another" are the factors Earls cites. The study questioned urban residents on the full spectrum of their beliefs about their neighbors: Are they the kind of people you could depend on to help you in an emergency, to call an ambulance if you needed one? Would they be likely to supervise an impromptu playgroup of neighborhood kids? Would they mobilize to prevent a fire station from being moved out of the area?

The researchers coded and tracked the responses and then distilled them into a single measure--"collective efficacy." Earls and his team found that it was the single most important determinant of a neighborhood's violent crime rate. The factors popularly associated with crime--primarily race and socioeconomic status--were still meaningful, but not to the same degree as collective efficacy. The findings not only explain why some poor, black Chicago neighborhoods have low crime rates, but also offer a measure of real hope. And even though the research took place in Chicago, the researchers are convinced that the results can be generalized to any large city, anywhere in the world.

"We get two kinds of responses to the study," Earls says. "One is: 'This is fantastic. Finally we have some evidence that all urban neighborhoods are not blighted, run-down places. It's good news. They've shown us that there's something to work with.'" The other response is that the results of the study are "common sense." Maybe so, but "a lot of what science does is confirm hunches that we have," says Earls. Now that the study has shown collective efficacy to be a definable, measurable quantity, decision makers can use it as a tool to track the progress of current social programs, and perhaps to influence the development of new ones.

"There are a lot of major social policy initiatives going on in Chicago," Earls says. "Most are initiated without much science to monitor whether the desired ends are being achieved or not." He believes that collective efficacy could provide some of the missing science. For instance, in the Cabrini-Green public-housing neighborhood, gigantic high-rises are being razed to make way for a series of elegant townhouses. Although this will improve the quality of housing, it will also decrease the amount, displacing a significant portion of the area's residents. Measuring collective efficacy should, for the first time, provide a substantive answer to the question, "What effect is this going to have on the neighborhood?" Earls hopes the process will develop to the point that, "Wherever the collective efficacy is not strong, you can make it strong. Where it is strong, you can keep it strong."

The work on how to promote and produce collective efficacy has yet to be done. Earls's study notes that poverty tends to undermine collective efficacy, and residential stability generally supports it. A major reason for the latter fact, the study states, is that "the formation of social ties takes time."

"Our national ideology gets spun off in the direction of individualism," says Earls. "But maybe the survival of our country demands that we balance that strong ethic with the admission that we're in it together."

~ Matt O'Keefe

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