Center for Neighborhood Knowledge Director Paul Ong and Assistant Director Silvia R. González have co-authored a book on urban ethnoracial inequalities. “Uneven Urbanscape: Spatial Structures and Ethnoracial Inequality,” newly published by Cambridge University Press, draws from a vast trove of research and data to evaluate the causes and consequences of urban inequality, specifically looking at housing, employment and education. Focusing on Los Angeles, Ong and González studied small geographic units that approximate neighborhoods to determine how location relates to access and isolation. Los Angeles, they found, is “a powerful case study for understanding spatialized racial and ethnic stratification.” The authors describe the different elements that make up the urban spatial structure — place, relative location and networks — as a means to evaluate how spatial structure produces and reproduces ethnoracial inequalities in cities. “The material world reflects and projects socioeconomic realties and is instrumental in creating the lived experience,” they wrote. “By touching a broad range of human activities, the urban landscape, or urbanscape, becomes complicit in the production of socioeconomic injustices along racial and ethnic lines.” Ong and González said Los Angeles as a case study provides critical insights into the nation’s racial and ethnic hierarchies. They call for engaged scholarship with research such as theirs and conclude, “The academy is a privileged institution that should embrace societal responsibilities to directly combat socioeconomic disparities.”