Kevin Loughran
Biographic Data
| ID | 158299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Loughran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin |
| FAMILY NAME | Loughran |
| SIGNATURE | LOUGHRAN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-1549-8942 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 171 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Colorblind retreat: How residents make sense of race and relocation from flood-prone areas
Over recent decades, the United States federal government has funded the purchase and demolition of flood-prone housing across the country through a policy known as managed retreat. As this policy has touched down in areas where residents and government actors look to adapt to growing climate threats, managed retreat has entered housing markets long shaped by racial segregation and become entangled with the ideological frameworks that support and…
The Revolving Door of Risk: Climate Hazards, Risk Containment, and the Hidden Social Dynamics of Managed Retreat
Nationwide, flood risks are encouraging local authorities to implement a federal policy known as managed retreat. The program offers homeowners a fair market price to voluntarily relinquish their properties for demolition and move elsewhere, thereby subsidizing residential relocation as a means of climate adaptation. Despite widespread implementation, we know little about how people move or how many move from places where the program intervenes. …
The Chicago School: Conjectures and refutations
What good is an urban theory? Is it to provide a framework for empirical investigation? A scholarly ideology and worldview? Should it explain and predict things? Can an urban theory be proven correct (or incorrect)? And, if shown to be incorrect, when should one be discarded
Quantitative Inquiry in the Early Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois
A New Du Boisian Sociology has recently clarified, elevated, and synthesized Du Bois’s sociological contributions. We argue that more systematic and detailed study of Du Bois’s research methodologies, with an eye towards their contemporary applicability, can further strengthen this body of scholarship. Here we begin this effort with sustained attention to Du Bois’s use of quantitative data and methods during a productive and illustrative period a…
Environmental Authenticity: Constructing Nature in Postindustrial Parks
If nature is socially constructed, how do cultural producers construct it? Few social spaces materialize social constructions of nature as powerfully and as directly as parks, which represent cultural beliefs about nature's form and function. This paper considers how landscape architects and other social actors involved in creating contemporary urban park landscapes think about nature and decide how to represent it through cultural objects. Drawi…
Postscript: Environmentalize Urban Sociology
Divergent Residential Pathways from Flood-Prone Areas: How Neighborhood Inequalities Are Shaping Urban Climate Adaptation
Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement o…
Unequal Retreats: How Racial Segregation Shapes Climate Adaptation
Recent research on climate adaptation points to the need to take flood control seriously as a state-led process that organizes and responds to the racial and environmental spaces of cities. The present study advances that agenda by focusing on the federally funded retreat of homes and residents from flood-prone urban neighborhoods. While officially organized by rational engineering and technocratic calculations, its implementation cannot escape t…
Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City
Accessibility and Recovery Assessment of Houston’s Roadway Network due to Fluvial Flooding during Hurricane Harvey
The record-breaking rainfall produced by Hurricane Harvey resulted in catastrophic and prolonged impacts on Houston’s transportation infrastructure, inundating entire neighborhoods and rendering them inaccessible to emergency response services. Harvey highlighted the vulnerability of the roadway network to severe inundation during extreme fluvial flood events and emphasized the need for a detailed roadway network accessibility characterization in…
Urban parks and urban problems: An historical perspective on green space development as a cultural fix
Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Contemporary planning interventions promise salvation via spatial fixes that might reduce carbon emissions, boost metropolitan economies, and allow urban society to thrive in spite of rising seas and climate disasters. New wetlands, floodgates, and other adaptive infrastructures allow water to coexist with urban space; new parks, such as New York’s High Line and Chicago’s 606, celebrate the inte…
Racial Inequities in the Federal Buyout of Flood-Prone Homes: A Nationwide Assessment of Environmental Adaptation
One way the U.S. government is responding to the challenges of climate change is by funding the purchase of tens of thousands of flood-prone homes in more than 500 cities and towns across the country. This study provides a nationwide analysis of that program, extending beyond cost-benefit calculations to investigate racial inequities at different scales of local implementation, from county-level adoption, through neighborhood-level participation,…
D uBois, W. E. B.
This entry presents an overview of W. E. B. DuBois's contributions to urban studies scholarship. Core arguments from important texts like The Philadelphia Negro are introduced. Also discussed are the contributions of DuBois's research program at Atlanta University and the legacy of the body of his work within urban studies.
Residential buyouts as environmental mobility: Examining where homeowners move to illuminate social inequities in climate adaptation
Development and Its Disruptions on Manhattan’s Far West Side, 1971-2014
Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change: Houston, Flooding, and the Case of Federal Buyouts
This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over rec…
Memory Politics: Growth Coalitions, Urban Pasts, and the Creation of “Historic” Philadelphia
Facing economic changes and disinvestment, powerful actors in post–World War II American cities attempted to define the city as a space of public culture to confront demographic shifts, suburban growth, and the breakdown of community. Some civic actors, especially in older Eastern cities, looked to a nostalgic and heroic past where a theme of American identity became salient as a result of the Cold War and rapid cultural and economic changes in t…
Architectures of Memory: When Growth Machines Embrace Preservationists
Studies of urban redevelopment demonstrate how growth coalitions and city residents use ideas about local history and culture to facilitate or oppose interventions in the built environment. Building on this literature, we introduce the concept of architectures of memory to describe methods of remaking urban space, relying on historical representations. We argue that preservation, demolition, and reproduction are practices that are often conflated…
Who Cleans the Park? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City
Race and the construction of city and nature
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city-nature boundaries h…
Imbricated Spaces: The High Line, Urban Parks, and the Cultural Meaning of City and Nature
This article explores how the socio-spatial relationship between cities and nature is changing under the cultural conditions of the twenty-first century. I argue that contemporary urban parks such as New York's High Line, along with less cultivated sites of city-nature intersections such as vacant lots, represent variations of an emergent type of social space, which I term imbricated spaces. Imbricated spaces present 'city' and 'nature' as active…
The Philadelphia Negroand the Canon of Classical Urban Theory
This paper outlines the urban theory of W. E. B. Du Bois as presented in the classic sociological textThe Philadelphia Negro. I argue that Du Bois's urban theory, which focused on how the socially-constructed racial hierarchy of the United States was shaping the material conditions of industrial cities, prefigured important later work and offered a sociologically richer understanding of urban processes than the canonized classical urban theorists…
Parks for Profit: The High Line, Growth Machines, and the Uneven Development of Urban Public Spaces
This paper investigates the growing inequality of public spaces in contemporary cities. In the era of neoliberal urbanism, stratified economic and cultural resources produce a spectrum of unevenly developed public parks, ranging from elite, privatized public spaces in wealthy districts to neglected parks in poor neighborhoods. Contemporary economic and cultural practices in public space are equally segmented, as privileged public spaces such as N…
Parks for Profit: The High Line, Growth Machines, and the Uneven Development of Urban Public Spaces
This paper investigates the growing inequality of public spaces in contemporary cities. In the era of neoliberal urbanism, stratified economic and cultural resources produce a spectrum of unevenly developed public parks, ranging from elite, privatized public spaces in wealthy districts to neglected parks in poor neighborhoods. Contemporary economic and cultural practices in public space are equally segmented, as privileged public spaces such as N…
Racial Inequities in the Federal Buyout of Flood-Prone Homes: A Nationwide Assessment of Environmental Adaptation
One way the U.S. government is responding to the challenges of climate change is by funding the purchase of tens of thousands of flood-prone homes in more than 500 cities and towns across the country. This study provides a nationwide analysis of that program, extending beyond cost-benefit calculations to investigate racial inequities at different scales of local implementation, from county-level adoption, through neighborhood-level participation,…
The Philadelphia Negroand the Canon of Classical Urban Theory
This paper outlines the urban theory of W. E. B. Du Bois as presented in the classic sociological textThe Philadelphia Negro. I argue that Du Bois's urban theory, which focused on how the socially-constructed racial hierarchy of the United States was shaping the material conditions of industrial cities, prefigured important later work and offered a sociologically richer understanding of urban processes than the canonized classical urban theorists…
Imbricated Spaces: The High Line, Urban Parks, and the Cultural Meaning of City and Nature
This article explores how the socio-spatial relationship between cities and nature is changing under the cultural conditions of the twenty-first century. I argue that contemporary urban parks such as New York's High Line, along with less cultivated sites of city-nature intersections such as vacant lots, represent variations of an emergent type of social space, which I term imbricated spaces. Imbricated spaces present 'city' and 'nature' as active…
Urban parks and urban problems: An historical perspective on green space development as a cultural fix
Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Contemporary planning interventions promise salvation via spatial fixes that might reduce carbon emissions, boost metropolitan economies, and allow urban society to thrive in spite of rising seas and climate disasters. New wetlands, floodgates, and other adaptive infrastructures allow water to coexist with urban space; new parks, such as New York’s High Line and Chicago’s 606, celebrate the inte…
Race and the construction of city and nature
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city-nature boundaries h…
Memory Politics: Growth Coalitions, Urban Pasts, and the Creation of “Historic” Philadelphia
Facing economic changes and disinvestment, powerful actors in post–World War II American cities attempted to define the city as a space of public culture to confront demographic shifts, suburban growth, and the breakdown of community. Some civic actors, especially in older Eastern cities, looked to a nostalgic and heroic past where a theme of American identity became salient as a result of the Cold War and rapid cultural and economic changes in t…
Residential buyouts as environmental mobility: Examining where homeowners move to illuminate social inequities in climate adaptation
Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change: Houston, Flooding, and the Case of Federal Buyouts
This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over rec…
Who Cleans the Park? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City
Postscript: Environmentalize Urban Sociology
Architectures of Memory: When Growth Machines Embrace Preservationists
Studies of urban redevelopment demonstrate how growth coalitions and city residents use ideas about local history and culture to facilitate or oppose interventions in the built environment. Building on this literature, we introduce the concept of architectures of memory to describe methods of remaking urban space, relying on historical representations. We argue that preservation, demolition, and reproduction are practices that are often conflated…
Divergent Residential Pathways from Flood-Prone Areas: How Neighborhood Inequalities Are Shaping Urban Climate Adaptation
Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement o…
Parks for Profit: The High Line, Growth Machines, and the Uneven Development of Urban Public Spaces
This paper investigates the growing inequality of public spaces in contemporary cities. In the era of neoliberal urbanism, stratified economic and cultural resources produce a spectrum of unevenly developed public parks, ranging from elite, privatized public spaces in wealthy districts to neglected parks in poor neighborhoods. Contemporary economic and cultural practices in public space are equally segmented, as privileged public spaces such as N…
The Philadelphia Negroand the Canon of Classical Urban Theory
This paper outlines the urban theory of W. E. B. Du Bois as presented in the classic sociological textThe Philadelphia Negro. I argue that Du Bois's urban theory, which focused on how the socially-constructed racial hierarchy of the United States was shaping the material conditions of industrial cities, prefigured important later work and offered a sociologically richer understanding of urban processes than the canonized classical urban theorists…
Imbricated Spaces: The High Line, Urban Parks, and the Cultural Meaning of City and Nature
This article explores how the socio-spatial relationship between cities and nature is changing under the cultural conditions of the twenty-first century. I argue that contemporary urban parks such as New York's High Line, along with less cultivated sites of city-nature intersections such as vacant lots, represent variations of an emergent type of social space, which I term imbricated spaces. Imbricated spaces present 'city' and 'nature' as active…
Race and the construction of city and nature
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city-nature boundaries h…
Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change: Houston, Flooding, and the Case of Federal Buyouts
This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over rec…
Memory Politics: Growth Coalitions, Urban Pasts, and the Creation of “Historic” Philadelphia
Facing economic changes and disinvestment, powerful actors in post–World War II American cities attempted to define the city as a space of public culture to confront demographic shifts, suburban growth, and the breakdown of community. Some civic actors, especially in older Eastern cities, looked to a nostalgic and heroic past where a theme of American identity became salient as a result of the Cold War and rapid cultural and economic changes in t…
Architectures of Memory: When Growth Machines Embrace Preservationists
Studies of urban redevelopment demonstrate how growth coalitions and city residents use ideas about local history and culture to facilitate or oppose interventions in the built environment. Building on this literature, we introduce the concept of architectures of memory to describe methods of remaking urban space, relying on historical representations. We argue that preservation, demolition, and reproduction are practices that are often conflated…
Who Cleans the Park? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City
D uBois, W. E. B.
This entry presents an overview of W. E. B. DuBois's contributions to urban studies scholarship. Core arguments from important texts like The Philadelphia Negro are introduced. Also discussed are the contributions of DuBois's research program at Atlanta University and the legacy of the body of his work within urban studies.
Residential buyouts as environmental mobility: Examining where homeowners move to illuminate social inequities in climate adaptation
Development and Its Disruptions on Manhattan’s Far West Side, 1971-2014
Accessibility and Recovery Assessment of Houston’s Roadway Network due to Fluvial Flooding during Hurricane Harvey
The record-breaking rainfall produced by Hurricane Harvey resulted in catastrophic and prolonged impacts on Houston’s transportation infrastructure, inundating entire neighborhoods and rendering them inaccessible to emergency response services. Harvey highlighted the vulnerability of the roadway network to severe inundation during extreme fluvial flood events and emphasized the need for a detailed roadway network accessibility characterization in…
Urban parks and urban problems: An historical perspective on green space development as a cultural fix
Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Contemporary planning interventions promise salvation via spatial fixes that might reduce carbon emissions, boost metropolitan economies, and allow urban society to thrive in spite of rising seas and climate disasters. New wetlands, floodgates, and other adaptive infrastructures allow water to coexist with urban space; new parks, such as New York’s High Line and Chicago’s 606, celebrate the inte…
Racial Inequities in the Federal Buyout of Flood-Prone Homes: A Nationwide Assessment of Environmental Adaptation
One way the U.S. government is responding to the challenges of climate change is by funding the purchase of tens of thousands of flood-prone homes in more than 500 cities and towns across the country. This study provides a nationwide analysis of that program, extending beyond cost-benefit calculations to investigate racial inequities at different scales of local implementation, from county-level adoption, through neighborhood-level participation,…
Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City
Unequal Retreats: How Racial Segregation Shapes Climate Adaptation
Recent research on climate adaptation points to the need to take flood control seriously as a state-led process that organizes and responds to the racial and environmental spaces of cities. The present study advances that agenda by focusing on the federally funded retreat of homes and residents from flood-prone urban neighborhoods. While officially organized by rational engineering and technocratic calculations, its implementation cannot escape t…
Postscript: Environmentalize Urban Sociology
Divergent Residential Pathways from Flood-Prone Areas: How Neighborhood Inequalities Are Shaping Urban Climate Adaptation
Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement o…
Quantitative Inquiry in the Early Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois
A New Du Boisian Sociology has recently clarified, elevated, and synthesized Du Bois’s sociological contributions. We argue that more systematic and detailed study of Du Bois’s research methodologies, with an eye towards their contemporary applicability, can further strengthen this body of scholarship. Here we begin this effort with sustained attention to Du Bois’s use of quantitative data and methods during a productive and illustrative period a…
Environmental Authenticity: Constructing Nature in Postindustrial Parks
If nature is socially constructed, how do cultural producers construct it? Few social spaces materialize social constructions of nature as powerfully and as directly as parks, which represent cultural beliefs about nature's form and function. This paper considers how landscape architects and other social actors involved in creating contemporary urban park landscapes think about nature and decide how to represent it through cultural objects. Drawi…
Colorblind retreat: How residents make sense of race and relocation from flood-prone areas
Over recent decades, the United States federal government has funded the purchase and demolition of flood-prone housing across the country through a policy known as managed retreat. As this policy has touched down in areas where residents and government actors look to adapt to growing climate threats, managed retreat has entered housing markets long shaped by racial segregation and become entangled with the ideological frameworks that support and…
The Revolving Door of Risk: Climate Hazards, Risk Containment, and the Hidden Social Dynamics of Managed Retreat
Nationwide, flood risks are encouraging local authorities to implement a federal policy known as managed retreat. The program offers homeowners a fair market price to voluntarily relinquish their properties for demolition and move elsewhere, thereby subsidizing residential relocation as a means of climate adaptation. Despite widespread implementation, we know little about how people move or how many move from places where the program intervenes. …
The Chicago School: Conjectures and refutations
What good is an urban theory? Is it to provide a framework for empirical investigation? A scholarly ideology and worldview? Should it explain and predict things? Can an urban theory be proven correct (or incorrect)? And, if shown to be incorrect, when should one be discarded
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Geography (13 works) · Economics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Environmental planning (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (6 works)