BARI has worked closely with the Mayor’s Office of New urban Mechanics and the 311 system to examine how Bostonians contribute to the maintenance of the public spaces and infrastructure of neighborhoods—that is, custodianship in the urban commons. The project uses the requests for non-government service received by the 311 system to examine when and where people report such issues, and their motivations for doing so. This project has demonstrated that custodianship is largely hyperlocal, anchored by an individual’s home, and driven by territoriality, or our innate tendency to claim and identify with spaces and objects.
The project led to a number of improvements to Boston’s 311 system, especially how the City conducts outreach with communities and ensures equity in public works. These lessons are relevant to 311 systems worldwide. It also culminated in BARI Director Dan O’Brien’s first book, The Urban Commons (Harvard University Press; 2018), which won the American Political Science Association’s Urban & Local Politics Section’s Best Book Award. BARI continues to curate 311 data, including original measures of neighborhood conditions and custodianship, available through our Boston Data Portal to be downloaded and visualized through interactive maps.
Investigators:
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi (Fordham University), Eric Gordon (Emerson College), Dan O’Brien (Northeastern University)*, Dietmar Offenhuber (Northeastern University), Melissa Sands (Harvard University) *-Contact: d.obrien@neu.edu
Data Products:
Annual neighborhood-level measures of custodianship are available through Boston Area Research Map. BARI releases a modified version of Boston’s 311 data annually.
Publications:
- The Urban Commons. 2018. Harvard University Press.
- Winner of the Dennis Judd Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Urban & Local Politics Section.
- O’Brien, D.T., Offenhuber, D., Baldwin-Philippi, J., Sands, M., & Gordon, E. 2017. Uncharted territoriality in coproduction: The motivations for 311 reporting. Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, 27, 320-335.
- Honorable Mention for the annual Beryl Radin Award for best article published in JPART.
- O’Brien, D.T. 2016. Lamp lighters and sidewalk smoothers: How individual residents contribute to the maintenance of the urban commons. American Journal of Community Psychology, 58, 391-409.
- O’Brien, D.T. 2016. Using Small Data to Interpret Big Data: 311 Reports as Individual Contributions to Informal Social Control in Urban Neighborhoods. Social Science Research, 59: 83-96.
- O’Brien, D.T. 2016. 311 hotlines, territoriality, and the collaborative maintenance of the urban commons: Examining the intersection of a coproduction policy and evolved human behavior. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 10: 123-141.
- O’Brien, D.T. 2015. Custodians and custodianship in urban neighborhoods: A methodology using reports of public issues received by a city’s 311 hotline. Environment & Behavior, 47: 304-327.
- O’Brien, D.T., Gordon, E., Philippi-Baldwin, J. 2014. Caring about the community, counteracting disorder: 311 reports of public issues as expressions of territoriality. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 40: 320-330.