The conventional wisdom of the twenty-first century insists that we are living on a shrinking planet, where the global forces of modern technology, commerce, and mass culture are displacing the more localized perspectives of our forebears. For better or worse, the story goes, our impressions of the world around us are now shaped less by the view from our front porches or stoops than by images traveling across vast distances to flash on the screens of our televisions, computers, and smartphones. The colorful parochialism that once characterized much of political life is likewise seemingly giving way to an era in which popular attention is overwhelmingly directed across provincial boundaries toward national and even international issues, leaders, and media sources.
In his fine book The Space Between Us, however, Ryan D. Enos makes a strong case for the continued—and, indeed, critical—influence of local context on the formation and maintenance of political predispositions. Humans are wired by nature to make sense of our world in terms of concrete geographic space, Enos argues, and this instinct shapes our perceptions of, and relationships with, the fellow inhabitants of our immediate physical surroundings. Because we also habitually classify ourselves and others by social group membership, we maintain an active mental map of our environs that includes expectations about which types of people live in which places and which attributes distinguish one group from another. When confronted with evidence that these assumptions are out of date, some of us will respond by changing our own beliefs and behavior in politically consequential ways.
The book thus examines the nexus where cognitive phenomena, such as heuristics and perceptual biases, meet the experience of modern life in a diverse metropolitan community. It draws upon, and responds to, previous research in social psychology, public opinion, urban politics, and ethnic studies and will interest scholars in these and related fields. The findings of the book also carry significant public policy implications, especially for strategies intended to reduce intergroup prejudice and conflict in contemporary societies.
For prejudice is indeed the primary subject of Enos’s attention. Rather than simply serving as a visible manifestation of previous or existing discrimination, he argues, residential segregation itself works to further promote racial, ethnic, and religious biases by increasing the salience of group identity and encouraging the belief that other groups are fundamentally different from one’s own. These problems are maximized when an outgroup is populous enough and lives close enough to attract regular attention, but is not sufficiently integrated into the social networks of the ingroup to yield positive personal interactions that might reduce the prevalence of negative group stereotypes. Geographic units like municipalities, neighborhoods, and even city blocks are therefore not merely aggregations of individuals; in Enos’s view, they independently exert a significant contextual effect on the attitudes of the citizens within their borders. “[T]he geographic space between groups leads to a psychological space between groups,” he writes, “which, in turn, leads to a political space between them” (p. 3).
The middle chapters present a series of empirical studies designed to demonstrate these claims, carried out in several locations within the United States and Israel. In one experiment, the repeated presence of two Spanish-speaking men on the platform of a commuter rail station in suburban Boston reduced the openness of non-Latino fellow riders to liberal immigration policies after just a few days. (Because the men were catching inbound trains on weekday mornings, they appeared to the experimental subjects as newly arrived inhabitants of their own hometowns, rather than merely workers or visitors.) Enos finds that residential proximity to African Americans reduced support for Barack Obama among whites in Chicago and among Latinos in Los Angeles. Across a range of locations in Israel, Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) Jews and non-Haredi Jews given the chance to share money with members of the opposite group became less generous as both the degree of residential segregation and the size of the outgroup in their community increased.
Readers who are familiar with the long trail of research illustrating the limited political sophistication and dedication of the mass public will be struck by the knowledge, attentiveness, and personal investment on display when citizens engage the topic of social geography. Enos’s subjects can accurately identify the location of different groups in their communities and are especially sensitive to changes in this spatial distribution over time, such as the nearby arrival of a new immigrant population. We really care about who lives where.
Demonstrations of citizen perceptiveness and engagement are normally considered to be positive developments for the health of civic democracy. But the mobilization of group bias under conditions of residential segregation described in The Space Between Us has more sobering implications. Enos suggests that rising ethnic heterogeneity in the absence of concurrent geographic integration is a formula for the perpetuation of negative attitudes toward outgroups whose political salience could well increase in parallel with the numerical growth of nonwhite populations now occurring in the United States. In order to ameliorate such dangers, he recommends that laws, institutions, and public spaces be designed to promote peer interactions between groups, encouraging urban density over sprawl and reducing the proliferation of local municipalities with separate identities (and tax bases).
Such an ambitious and synthetic work inevitably raises more questions than it can answer. The impact of Obama’s race and Donald Trump’s nationalist platform on the electoral behavior of Americans suggest further fruitful avenues for exploring how local demographic and attitudinal trends interact with larger shifts in the national political climate. A few findings—such as the claim that the demolition of several Chicago public housing projects with heavily African American populations in the early 2000s led to a decline of more than 10 percentage points in the voter turnout rate among the adjacent white electorate (Enos argues that the removal of a proximate outgroup produced this sudden demobilization)—are striking but would benefit from confirmation in other contexts.
More generally, the book does not fully resolve the matter of exactly how close is close. For example, the estimated depression in white turnout associated with the removal of the Chicago housing projects was concentrated within a 500-meter radius and faded entirely outside 1 kilometer (p. 152). In contrast, the resistance of Los Angeles–area Latinos to Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries was strongest within 1 kilometer of majority-black precincts and was still apparent at a distance of 20 kilometers (p. 219). Elsewhere, the book suggests that the impact of residential segregation on certain attitudes and behavior can extend across the width of an entire multicounty metropolitan area (e.g., pp. 36–41).
One final virtue is worthy of mention. The author employs an engaging style that is accessible to students and the interested public as well as academic specialists. Enos uses plain language to explain the reasoning behind his methodological choices and the relationship of his results to the findings of previous research; he also illustrates many key points with personal anecdotes. In this way, The Space Between Us resembles Katherine J. Cramer’s (2016) The Politics of Resentment, another intellectually rigorous but highly readable recent work that similarly illustrates how citizens remain politically rooted in geographic place even in our supposedly globalized age. Like Cramer, Enos suggests convincingly that making sense of the popular anxiety and disorientation that characterizes modern political life requires an examination of the sometimes explosive energy released when the psychological predispositions of individuals meet larger social and institutional change.
