Resilience and Persistence of the Synergism of Plagues: Stochastic Resonance and the Ecology of Disease, Disorder and Disinvestment in US Urban Neighborhoods

Abstract

We adapt recent perspectives on the resilience of ecosystems in a stochastic environment to analysis of the effects of public policies of ‘planned shrinkage’ on stressed US urban minority neighborhoods. The ‘synergism of plagues’—a self-reinforcing, interactive mix of contagious urban decay and deterioration in both public health and public order—emerges in the course of a sudden ‘phase transition’ from community-spanning geographically focused social networks within ghetto neighborhoods to a condition of fragmented and isolated subnets. This transition occurs because instabilities inherent in the marginalization of ethnic ghetto neighborhoods synergistically amplify externally imposed stressors, most notably public policies of disinvestment. The amplification, a short-time version of stochastic resonance, may be quite large. Our work implies that continued subjection of marginalized US urban minority neighborhoods to public policies of ‘planned shrinkage’ can trigger similar but larger scale—regional and national—transitions in patterns of public health and public order, ultimately placing much of the three quarters of the country's population living in or near central cities at significantly increased risk.