Relying on the Census in Urban Social Science

Census data have long been a key tool for urban research, and the approaching 2020 Census offers a natural moment to reflect on how we use it. The highly partisan plan to include a citizenship question has recently captured our attention. I suggest that its short-term effects may be modest since immigrant communities already are suspicious of government surveillance and many will prefer to stay hidden regardless of the census questionnaire. I raise several other kinds of questions about the reliance of urban researchers on census data. These include concerns about how we treat census tracts as neighborhoods, how we accept census statistics at face value, and how readily available and increasingly useful quantitative data sources may be crowding out ethnographic research. I also comment on new approaches such as spatial analysis and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and opportunities for linking individual and place-level data with one another and following both over time.