ABSTRACT
The task of providing appropriate interventions for vulnerable children and youth in urban communities is a major challenge in national and international contexts (Yeakey, 2012). Fortunately, a growing scientifi c literature focused on the sociological and epidemiological study of child and adolescent mental disorder and learning trajectories has developed where community and neighborhood environments are examined for their predictive infl uence (Spencer, Tinsley, Dupree, & Fegley, 2012). An emerging set of studies within this larger effort has attempted to understand better the role of multilevel pathways to child and adolescent education outcomes, criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and prosocial behavior among urban youth. However, this literature is disjointed, with few conceptual or linguistic bridges afforded to scholars in the fi eld of education interested in better understanding the complex ecology of youth development in the urban context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a synthetic review of three distinct literatures-youth mental health, juvenile justice, and special education-with a specifi c aim to help clarify classifi cations across these fi elds as part of an effort to understand better how youth service providers and educators might strategically support the development and learning outcomes of urban youth experiencing mental disorder. 1 The review is in part an examination of the infl uence of neighborhood and other social conditions in urban communities on a narrowly focused area of youth development. We recognize that historically the fi elds being examined have treated geographic context as a distal factor or have ignored geographic infl uences altogether.
