Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing the Property Claims and the Reorganization of Urban Space

宗教和种族社区在塑造现代城市环境中的社会生活中扮演什么角色？这个研究项目，它训练学生的经验，科学的数据收集和分析的方法，询问这些身份是如何通过城市本身不断变化的性质重塑。自世纪末以来，许多研究者认为城市环境是传统生活的对立面，是金钱、市场和多样性的密集世界，在那里，个人被原子化，并被重建成群体和基于阶级的政治运动。在这些叙述中，城市宗教基础设施在塑造城市生活中的持续作用被抛在一边。联合国经济和社会事务部预测，到2050年，全球三分之二以上的人口将居住在城市环境中，社会科学家迫切需要重新考虑宗教和种族形式的社区如何融入城市环境，以及它们在塑造人们生活、社交和体验城市的地点和方式方面发挥什么作用。拜伦·格雷，在斯坦福大学的托马斯汉森博士的指导下，将探讨社区身份在构建房地产市场、城市内部移民和城市空间感知方面的作用。这个研究项目的重点是印度孟买500年历史的天主教社区，作为了解这些动态的窗口。早在这座城市从一个葡萄牙殖民地发展成为印度首屈一指的全球城市之前，孟买天主教社区就为研究宗教与城市环境转型之间的关系提供了一个理想的案例研究。事实上，在过去的30年里，这60万人口中的许多人已经放弃了他们在城市南部的传统社区，前往不断扩大的北方区，这一过程重塑了天主教徒与城市以及彼此之间的长期关系。通过访谈、参与者观察、档案工作和人口统计图的结合，该项目将绘制出社区对孟买的财产和社区进行控制的法律的和社会手段，以及使这些社区成为有意义的社区空间的仪式和社会实践。除了测试社区的宗教和种族形式往往是塑造房地产市场和城市居民生活体验的关键力量这一假设外，该项目还旨在了解社区身份在不稳定时如何从现有的空间安排中转变。这项研究的结果不仅将提高对世界上最大的民主国家的社会和政治动态的理解，而且还将更广泛地帮助对社区与不断变化的城市环境之间复杂关系感兴趣的城市规划者和决策者。

What role do religious and ethnic community play in shaping social life in modern urban environments? This research project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, asks in what ways these identities are reshaped by the changing nature of cities themselves. Since the late nineteenth century, many researchers have assumed that urban environments are the antithesis of traditional life, dense worlds of money, markets, and diversity where individuals are atomized and rebuilt into crowds and class-based political movements. Left aside in these accounts is the continued role of urban religious infrastructures in shaping city life. With the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs projecting that urban environments will be home to over two-thirds of the global population by 2050, there is an urgent need for social scientists to reconsider how religious and ethnic forms of community are woven into urban environments, and what role they play in shaping where and how people live, socialize, and experience the city.Byron Gray, under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Hansen of Stanford University, will explore what role community identities have in structuring property markets, intra-urban migration, and perceptions of urban space. This research project focuses on the 500-year-old Catholic community of Mumbai, India as a window into these dynamics. Predating the city's development from a Portuguese settlement into India's premier global city, the Mumbai Catholic community presents an ideal case study for examining the nexus between religion and the transformation of urban environments. Indeed, over the past 30 years, many members of this 600,000-strong population have abandoned their traditional neighborhoods in the south of the city for its expanding northern wards, a process that has reshaped Catholics' longstanding relationship with the city and one another. Using a combination of interviews, participant observation, archival work, and demographic mapping, this project will map out the legal and social means through which communities assert control over properties and neighborhoods in Mumbai, and the ritual and social practices through which such neighborhoods are made into meaningful community spaces. In addition to testing the hypothesis that religious and ethnic forms of community often act as key forces shaping property markets and the lived experience of urban residents, the project also aims to understand how community identities are themselves transformed when unsettled from existing spatial arrangements. The findings of this study will not only improve understandings of the social and political dynamics of the world's largest democracy, but also more broadly to urban planners and policymakers interested in the complicated nexus between community and changing urban environments.