Race and the City: The (Re) development of Urban Identity (original) (raw)
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Book Review: Race, Politics, and Community Development in U.S. Cities
Urban Affairs Review, 2006
The final chapter of the book helps urbanists make sense of post-1960s commercial downtowns in the United States, in particular their urban malls, festival marketplaces, and historic preservation. Alison Isenberg is one of several planning historians, including Gail DuBrow, Max Page, and Randall Mason, who finally are writing critical accounts that interpret preservation in the context of planning and urban development. Isenberg reminds us, "There is no authentic downtown past to contrast with a fake urban present, just as there is no lost democratic heyday" (p. 315). Instead, downtown has been a venue through which Americans project, promote, and contest their values and visions for the nation, its economy, and culture writ large. "During the course of the twentieth century, Main Street has been a place to teach, debate, exclude, fantasize, argue, include, make new dreams, and revisit old ones" (p. 316). As the book's epilogue on remaking the World Trade Center site attests, Main Street remains that place today. This book should be read widely by scholars, practitioners, and students of urban policy, planning, preservation, history, and sociology. Downtown America promises to become a classic work of urban and planning history. It is an important critique of race and gender in urban development, a definitive study of the twentieth-century commercial downtown, and a masterful account of people's power to shape metropolitan life.
Race and Cities: New Circumstances Imply New Ideas
Perspectives on Politics, 2012
Political scientists rightly reject the claim that demography is destiny; political institutions, practices, and choices intervene. Nevertheless, as demography changes, a locality's politics are likely to change as well, which opens opportunities for new research programs. Three demographic changes warrant new analyses: the decline of non-Hispanic whites in most large cities, the variety of non-Anglo groups and immigrants across cities, and regional variations in the racially-inflected dependency ratio. Each demographic change generates political and scholarly controversies: are cities becoming less segregated? Is black politics a useful template for studying the politics of other groups? Is the dependency ratio more likely to exacerbate or ameliorate group conflict? In lieu of answering these questions, I point to the odd normative valences of conservative and progressive scholarship, and urge attention to the ways in which cities can surprise us.
The Enduring Significance of Race in Mixed-Income Developments
While public housing reforms seek to address poverty among what is a predominantly African-American population, there has been little explicit attention given to the signance of race in the formation of new mixed-income communities. Indeed, the policy framing of these efforts has focused on economic integration and has been essentially silent about racial integration. In this article, we examine whether and how race remains relevant to the everyday life and experiences of residents in mixed-income developments. Drawing on a multiyear research study of three mixed-income developments in Chicago, we examine the nature of interracial and intraracial social dynamics within these (still) predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Consistent with critical race theory, we find that institutionalized notions of "ghetto culture" continue to inhere in the attitudes of many higher-income, nonblack homeowners and professionals in these contexts, and that the relative privilege and power these groups have to establish and enforce norms, policies, and rules generate and reproduce inequality fundamentally grounded in race. Consistent with secondary marginalization theory, we also find that the increasing economic diversity and widening cleavages among blacks living in these contexts generate complex intraracial social dynamics
Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race-Class
Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2014
San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race-class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race-class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race-class works both “top-down” and “ground-up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race-class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working-class residents. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.
Urban Affairs Review, 49 (3), 435-467
""Urban redevelopment governances are commonly treated as singular, monolithic entities that are interactively homogeneous, deploying uniform ensembles of policies and practices across their respective cities. This study, alternatively, reveals these formations as adroitly proactive and interactively heterogeneous across their respective cities. Through a racial economy lens, we empirically examine the racial contours of this “governance heterogeneity” in one urban setting: Chicago, Illinois. In this frame, a comparative analysis of Chicago’s Bronzeville and Pilsen neighborhoods is presented. Both neighborhoods are constituted by different racial profiles: Bronzeville is home to a predominantly African-American population, whereas Pilsen is mostly Mexican and Mexican-American. The study reveals that redevelopment governances are differentially responsive to established, deeply rooted racialized conceptions of “Blackness” and “Latinoness.” As a result, the form and trajectory of redevelopment in both settings has unfolded in markedly different ways.""
The Urban Racial State: Managing Race Relations in American Cities
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2012
In the two decades since Kretzmann and McKnight developed the asset-based community development (ABCD) framework in Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets (1993), countless community-based organizations have participated in a gradual shift away from purely needs-based approaches to community development. This shift has involved recentering the practice to encourage community development practitioners to leverage existing community assets-such as social capital, local institutions, and community capacities-in efforts to improve the livability of communities. In their recent addition to the ABCD literature, Green and Goetting begin Mobilizing Communities: Asset Building as a Community Development Strategy with an excellent overview of the strategies employed by needs-based and asset-based community development efforts. Their goals in assembling this book were, however, more specifically oriented to the tasks of evaluating the successes and failures of ABCD and offering "insights into how these asset-based development efforts can work more effectively" (p. 4). To accomplish these goals, Green and Goetting draw on community development practitioners and scholars for a geographically and culturally diverse set of ABCD case studies. Seven of the nine chapters offer detailed overviews and analyses of community development efforts that are either explicitly asset-driven or that "recognize the importance of local assets and develop strategies to enhance the quality of life by using these resources" (p. 9). The breadth of focus among the case studies highlights the cultural and economic complexity undergirding ABCD practice. For instance, in "The Politics of Protected Areas: Environmental Capital and Community Conflict in Guatemala" (Chapter Four), Dougherty and Peralta explore the ways that the Guatemalan natural environment ("environmental capital") has been leveraged by local ABCD efforts. They describe the complexity of using natural assets in the community development process by suggesting that "elements of the natural landscape, commonly understood as 'environmental capital'.. .fulfill different roles for different social groups" (p. 69). Unfortunately, because environmental capital was valued differently among local Guatemalan communities, the competing tensions of environmental preservation and economic development resulted in conflict between communities, and ultimately led to the degradation of environmental and other local community assets. Dougherty and Peralta suggest that conflict is likely to continue to occur across the developing world, as the valuation of environmental capital is closely tied to local contexts that have not yet been connected through national development processes. Green's "Natural Amenities and Asset-Based Development in Rural Communities" (Chapter Seven) focuses similarly on the conception of the natural environment as a community asset, but does so from the North American perspective. Drawing on the results of a case study of Petoskey, Michigan, Green explores the ways that the town overcame tensions between preservation and development by making "the