CPRC

Past Research: Professor Neckerman’s past research has examined urban inequality in a broad range of institutional contexts. Early work considered inner-city labor markets and their implications for family structure. A project of historical research on inner-city education culminated in the book, Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-city Education, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. Neckerman has also examined the social and institutional implications of the recent rise in economic inequality, editing a book on this topic (Social Inequality) for the Russell Sage Foundation in 2004 and co-authoring a review article this year for the Annual Review of Sociology.

Present Research: Neckerman’s current research agenda, in collaboration with other Columbia-based researchers, concerns the implications of the built environment for behavioral and health outcomes such as physical activity, diet, and obesity. Core members of the Built Environment & Health (BEH) research group include Andrew Rundle (Epidemiology), Gina Lovasi (an epidemiologist and Health & Society Scholars fellow), Lance Freeman (Urban Planning), Christopher Weiss (Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences), and two full-time GIS specialists. The group is currently funded by an R01 from NIEHS and by several smaller grants and contracts, including funding from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. With a focus on New York City, BEH is assembling a large array of built environment measures to be linked to several large and diverse human health datasets. Initial work indicates that built environment characteristics (population density, mixed land use, and access to public transit) are associated with BMI in a sample of New York City adults. Important strengths of this work include its unusually rich collection of spatial measures, including park quality, food environment, and aesthetic urban design features rarely measured in projects of this type, as well as extensive data on under-studied low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations.

Future Research: Future directions within this research program include a focus on unequal access and on elderly populations. Neckerman is PI of a proposal on spatial equity in New York City that has been recommended for funding by the National Science Foundation; this research will examine trends between 1900 and 2000 in access to basic retail and services by race/ethnicity and poverty status, considering the role of urban policy, gentrification, and immigration in shaping differential access across neighborhoods to essential goods and services. In addition, a new collaboration between BEH and the New York Academy of Medicine will develop a shared data archive of spatial measures relevant to physical and mental health for elderly populations, in preparation for joint funding proposals that would focus on older New Yorkers.

Professor Neckerman's Departmental Biography Page