Homelessness & Community Mental Health
In the mid-1970s, after completing my doctoral degree, I began a systematic research program aimed at understanding the geography and planning of ‘service-dependent’ populations, including mentally disabled and homeless people. This work had three elements: client demand, service delivery, and community opposition (the NIMBY syndrome, for Not-In-My-Back-Yard). In terms of clients, I was the first to demonstrate that ‘patients’ discharged from psychiatric hospitals tended to ‘ghettoize’ in inner city areas close to services designed to assist them. There they were joined by other service-dependent people (including the developmentally disabled, ex-prisoners, the dependent elderly, and so on), drawn by the availability of relatively affordable housing, but also excluded from other neighborhoods through NIMBYism, which explained the absence of services in most other city neighborhoods. In Toronto, I undertook the first large-sample survey of community attitudes toward the mentally disabled, introducing the CAMI scaling instrument (for ‘community attitudes toward mental illness’) which is remains benchmark metric for psychological studies of community attitudes. The results of this project were published as Not on our Street: community attitudes toward mental health care (1982). Read more.
Asylum to Community
Books & Articles
Dear, J.R. Wolch Landscapes of Despair: From Deinstitutionalization to Homelessness Princeton University Press/Polity Press, 1987 (Re-issued, 2014).
Dear, J. Wolch, R. Wilton The Service Hub Concept in Human Services Planning Pergamon Press, 1994.
Los Angeles and the Chicago School: invitation to a debate
M. Dear, City & Community 1(1) 2002, 5-32.
Postmodern Urbanism
M. Dear & S. Flusty, Annals, Association of American Geographers 1998, 88 (1), 50-72.
Critical Responses to the LA School of Urbanism
M. Dear et al. Urban Geography, 2008, 29 (2), 101-112.
Sprawl Hits The Wall
M. Dear, Volume 4 of the Atlas of Southern California, University of Southern California, 2001.
The Urban Question: toward a framework for analysis
M. Dear and A.J. Scott (eds.), Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society, 1981, 3-16.
For a complete list of books and articles, refer to the full CV
Community Attitudes to Mental Illness | CAMI
Scaling Community Attitudes Toward the Mentally Ill
The ‘Community Attitudes to Mental Illness’ (or CAMI) scale was developed in the late 1970s by Martin Taylor and Michael Dear, professors of geography at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
The survey goal was to measure and explain the bases for neighborhood opposition to community-based mental health facilities in Toronto, Canada. Although techniques for measuring attitudes already existed, CAMI was the first instrument that specifically designed to address attitudes in residential neighborhoods where such facilities existed or were being proposed.
Since that time, the CAMI scale has been in continuous use and applied in many settings world-wide. The original survey acts as a bench-mark for these subsequent studies.
For more information and to download the CAMI Scale, click below.
Books & Articles
Dear, S.M. Taylor, Not on Our Street: Community Attitudes Toward Mental Health Care. Pion Ltd., 1982.
The Postmodern Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography
M. Dear. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 1988, NS 13(3), 262 274.
Postmodernism and Planning
M. Dear. Society and Space, 4, 1986, 367 384
Privatization and the Rhetoric of Planning Practice
M. Dear. Society & Space, 7(4), 1989, 449-462.
For a complete list of books and articles, refer to the full CV
Homelessness
Books & Articles
R. Wolch, M. Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City. Jossey-Bass, 1993.
Infrastructures of Occupation: US-Mexican Border 1848 to Present
2017 | Infrastructure Space: Berlin: Ruby Press, Ika and Andreas Ruby (eds.)
Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall
March 11, 2013 | New York Times op-ed
Bajalta California: The border that divides brings us together
2014 | BOOM: A Journal of California, Spring 2014, Vol. 4, No. 1
Americans and Mexicans living at the border are more connected than divided
March 5, 2017 | The Conversation
5 Problems ‘the Wall’ Won’t Solve
February 28, 2107 | Politico Magazine
The World Is Full of Walls That Don’t Work
August 16, 2016 | Politico Magazine
The World Is Full of Walls That Don’t Work
August 16, 2016 | Politico Magazine
An Eight-Point Plan to Repair the U.S.-Mexico Border
November 4, 2015 | The Berkeley Blog
Beware of the Growing U.S.-Mexico Border Industrial Complex
October 6, 2015 | Huffington Post
Dousing the Flames of Immigration Rhetoric with Facts
September 22, 2015 | Huffington Post
At the U.S.-Mexican Border, Prosperity and Pollution
May 19, 2013 | New York Times: Letters
When L.A. became the Capital of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
April 29, 2013 | KCET Departures
For a complete list of books and articles, refer to the full CV