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This paper explores drinking by girl gang members. Sociologists and criminologists have tended to concentrate on both male gang members and their involvement in drug dealing. This pre-occupation has tended to overshadow not only the role of female gang members but also the importance of drinking within youth gangs. In spite of a growing interest in female drinking, ethnographic and qualitative research on female drinking is still much less developed than that devoted to male drinking. In analyzing the culture of drinking in the lives of girl gang members, we uncover the extent to which alcohol plays a central part in their everyday lives. Data for this paper are drawn from the results of an on-going study of street gangs in the San Francisco Bay area, in which 97 female gang members were interviewed using both a quantitative and qualitative interview schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban aspects of local food systems, such as farmers' markets, provide an opportunity for city residents to “do” environmentalism within their own home places. What environmentalism is and how to do it, however, vary greatly with the social location of the population involved. This paper investigates the social construction of the environment through participant-observation research at two urban farmers' markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. In one farmers' market, located in a largely affluent and white neighbourhood, locally grown organic food becomes a symbol through which urban eaters can connect to wild nature. This framing provides an urban corollary to the wilderness narrative that dominates the US environmental movement. In another case, located in a low-income area, the farmers' market's largely African-American managers and vendors liken the farmers' market to environmental justice efforts. By constructing the environment as the places where the customers it targets “live, work and play”, this farmers' market emphasises race and inequality, rather than traditional environmental concerns. Both farmers' markets, however, do to some degree engage both ecology and equity in their discourses and actions. Given the importance of meaning-centred tensions to conflicts between the environmental justice and reform environmental movements, my analysis has important implications for the development of a paradigm that attends to both ecological sustainability and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes findings from a pilot study of drug use and environment for Southeast Asian youths in the San Francisco Bay Area. From interviews with 31 drug-involved youths living in two low-income predominantly ethnic minority neighborhoods, smoking marijuana emerged as pervasive and highly normative. Smoking marijuana provided a means for coping with the stresses of home and community life, and located youths, moreover, within an alternative ghetto lifestyle of rap music, marijuana smoking, and youth crime, as modeled by co-resident ethnic minority peers, with which many Southeast Asian youths identified. The findings indicate the importance of the social environment as well as social status in the substance use of this group of second-generation youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influences of urban form and transport infrastructure on economic performance show up in several contemporary policy debates, notably 'sprawl versus compact city' and in the developing world, the future of mega-cities. This paper probes these relationships using two scales of analysis. At the macro scale, an econometric analysis using data across 47 US metropolitan areas reveals that employment densities and urban primacy are positively associated with worker productivity, suggesting the presence of agglomeration economies. Congested freeways are shown to be a consequence of strong economic performance. An intrametropolitan analysis using data on sub-districts of the San Francisco Bay Area generally reinforces the findings of the macro-scale analysis. In the Bay Area, labour productivity appears to increase with size of labour-marketshed and high accessibility between residences and firms. Higher employment density and well-functioning infrastructure also contribute positively to economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many large US metropolitan areas, the San Francisco Bay Area has experienced rapid suburban employment growth since 1980, much of it concentrated in sub-centres. This paper shows that, contrary to the co-location hypothesis, employment decentralisation has not been associated with shorter average commute distances or durations in the Bay Area. Combining statistics on shifts in modal splits and average vehicle occupancy levels reveals that parallelling the region's sub-centring trend has been a substantial increase in average commute vehicle miles travelled (VMT) per employee between 1980 and 1990. The largest increases occurred in the fastest-growing and most remote suburban centres. Using decomposition analysis, we found that increasing commute distances contributed the most to rising commute VMT per employee, and the distance factor had proportionately the greatest effect on rising commute VMT rates in the most peripheral work centres. Since shifts in commute VMT per employee are thought to be strongly associated with transport externalities, we conclude that the social and environmental implications of the Bay Area's regional growth trends deserve more public policy attention than given to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]