Sublime

Evidence also suggests that when average incomes tend to rise in a neighborhood relative to its surrounding areas, the racial demographics of the areas are slower to change. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey, for example, finds that the lessening of poverty in US neighborhoods between 1970 and 2000 is not associated with white residents displacing

These searches for social matches, for new information, and for new value take many people—especially younger people, specialized workers, and foreigners—to larger cities,

Today, we fashion our walls out of something much more durable and dispiriting: money and laws. Zoning laws govern what kinds of properties can be built in a community, and because different kinds of properties generally house different kinds of people, those laws also govern who gets in and who does not. Like all walls, they determine so much; and

permanent settlements can become cultural self-constructed niches, where interdependence between humans and a set of technologies and rules of conduct become common to all and

reduce the scope for people to meaningfully participate in shaping their lives and communities. We will call these threats “centralizing”.

The dispossessed, barred from many areas of the city by their color and their poverty, had no place to go but into the already overcrowded slums—or into “soft” borderline areas that then became slums, so that his “slum clearance programs” created new slums as fast as they were clearing the old.

In this situation, the information content of a network can scale up with the size of the society, N, as individual differentiation becomes the norm: