Evolutionary Theory and Neighborhood Quality: A Multilevel Selection-inspired Approach to Studying Urban Property Conditions

Actions that increase individual quality of life (QoL) can often undermine QoL at some higher level of aggregation. In cities, this “fundamental problem of social life” is regularly played out in the form of physical disorder. When an urban actor allows his or her property to fall into disrepair, perhaps to allocate resources to more essential uses, this decision reduces the relative quality of that actor’s neighborhood by contributing to local disorder. Researchers and policymakers therefore devote significant attention to understanding and controlling patterns of such behaviors. The central thesis of this paper is that evolutionary theory has much to offer this discourse. First, through synthesizing existing arguments from the urban disorder/decline literature, I develop a framework for studying intra-city disorder that is inspired by evolutionary multilevel selection (MLS) theory. Next, to empirically demonstrate the utility of this framework, I draw on longitudinal data and space-time analysis to find that population-level patterns of substandard property conditions in a given study area—i.e., measurable manifestations of physical disorder—are generated by a combination of individual and group “selective” pressures on property maintenance behavior. The results suggest that adopting an MLS perspective might aid policymakers in managing the processes that produce patterns of urban disorder, which can ultimately help to improve urban QoL.