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When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations (CBOs) that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid. Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, the author of this book discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but this book widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city's status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. This book is a tour of the city's postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography. This book's point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By blending ethnographic and visual approaches, this book offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.

This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship dominated by well-known cities at notorious moments of urbanism—paradigmatically, New York City’s 19th century Central Park—has understood such efforts as reactions to urban pathologies such as slums and density. Instead, the book examines Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, to explain the common sense of these associations and their persistence across time and place. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by an imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature, that is an outcome of urbanization processes rather than a reaction against cities. It traces urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century and shows how it has motivated greening, carried out with the goal of creating ideal cities and citizens, across three moments: industrialization in the late 19th century, the postwar crisis of democracy in the 1960s, and postindustrial economic renewal in the 1990s. Across these moments, it also identifies similarities in how this imaginary causes greening to play out, finding that greening is a practice of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, and that shared beliefs in nature’s universal benefit condition greening projects to be understood as investments in the public good, even as they reinscribe existing inequalities in public space and distribute their goods unevenly.

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city's plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. This book is a study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform. To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, it goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, the book widens the lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

This book examines the intent, implementation, and emerging outcomes of Chicago’s Plan for Transformation, the largest and most extensive effort in the country to deconcentrate poverty by redeveloping public housing. We explore one particular component of the broader Transformation—the development of new, mixed-income communities on the footprint of former public housing complexes. We focus on public housing reform as a mechanism of community revitalization and integration—an intentional effort, driven by public policy but relying to a large extent on market processes and operating through public-private partnerships, to reclaim and rebuild neighborhoods. Drawing on seven years of research focused on three of the new mixed-income developments, we examine the motivating assumptions, arguments, and interests that drive these efforts, the nature of the new communities being built, the strategies, mechanisms, and social processes that shape community dynamics in them, and the apparent benefits and costs to public housing residents and to the city. We find that while some of the concrete goals of the Transformation are being met—including significant improvements to the housing units and neighborhood environments in which public housing residents and their new neighbors live—the broader integrationist goals of the policy have failed to take hold. Rather than effectively integrating public housing residents into these new mixed-income contexts, the community dynamics emerging and mechanisms of control put in place are leading to what we describe as incorporated exclusion, in which physical integration reproduces marginalization and leads more to withdrawal and alienation than engagement and inclusion.

This book is about the late night basketball leagues organized in dozens of American cities in the late 1980s and early 1990s for purposes of social intervention, risk prevention, and crime reduction among African American youth and young men. The first chapters trace the historical origins and evolution of these programs set in the context of the social policy transformations of the era. As the chapters unfold, the book also analyzes the racial ideologies, cultures of sport, and policy debates that midnight basketball reveals and that endowed it with larger symbolic significance and political import. Ethnographic fieldwork is used in the final chapters to bring the actual, on-the-ground practices of midnight basketball programs and the young men they were intended to serve to life. Throughout, Midnight Basketball offers a nuanced understanding of the complicated and consequential ways in which sports, race, and risk intersect in contemporary American culture.

Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as this book demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities—the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden—the book portrays how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification. The new breed of gentrifiers, it finds, exhibits an acute self-consciousness about their role in the process and works to minimize gentrification's risks for certain longtime residents. In an era of rapid change, they cherish the unique and fragile, whether a dilapidated house, a two-hundred-year-old landscape, or the presence of people deeply rooted in the place they live. Contesting many long-standing assumptions about gentrification, the book reveals the unexpected ways beliefs about authenticity, place, and change play out in the social, political, and economic lives of very different neighborhoods.

Although the death of the small town has been predicted for decades, during the 1990s the population of rural America actually increased by more than three million people. This book explores these rural newcomers and the impact they have on the social relationships, public spaces, and community resources of small town America. The author draws on richly detailed ethnographic studies of six small towns in central Illinois, including a town with upscale subdivisions that lured wealthy professionals as well as towns whose agribusinesses drew working-class Mexicano migrants and immigrants. She finds that regardless of the class or ethnicity of the newcomers, if their social status differs relative to that of oldtimers, their effect on a town has been the same: suburbanization that erodes the close-knit small town community, with especially severe consequences for small town youth. To successfully combat the homogenization of the heartland, the author argues, newcomers must work with oldtimers so that together they sustain the vital aspects of community life and identity what first drew them to small towns. An illustration of the recent revitalization of interest in the small town, this work provides a significant addition to the growing literature on the subject.

Cities and neighborhoods are production sites, residential habitats, and political arenas; they are also scenes of expression and meaning. Profound global and historical transformations set the stage for new processes. Scenescapes examines patterns and consequences of the various styles of life embedded in the amenities that define the character of our streets and strips. The book articulates core dimensions of meaning supported by local scenes, such as theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy, and uses inter-national data on hundreds of local amenities – cafes, churches, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more—to measure specific aspects of these dimensions, such as glamorous theatricality, traditional legitimacy, and local authenticity. Scenes not only reimagines cities in cultural terms; it demonstrates the impacts scenes have on economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions. Scenes feed into production, add meaning and drama to neighborhoods, and are focal points for political action and organization. They can also be targets for policy. Scenescapes suggests how to add scenic ideas to social science theories and the policy-makers toolkit.

We think of the city as a place where anything goes. Take the sensational fantasies and lurid antics of single women on Sex and the City or young men on Queer as Folk, and you might imagine the city as some kind of sexual playground—a place where you can have any kind of sex you want, with whomever you like, anytime or anywhere you choose. But this book argues that this idea is a myth. Drawing on extensive surveys and interviews with Chicago adults, it shows that the city is—to the contrary—a place where sexual choices and options are constrained. From Wicker Park and Boys Town to the South Side and Pilsen, they observe that sexual behavior and partnering are significantly limited by such factors as which neighborhood you live in, your ethnicity, what your sexual preference might be, or the circle of friends to which you belong. In other words, the social and institutional networks that city dwellers occupy potentially limit their sexual options by making different types of sexual activities, relationships, or meeting places less accessible. To explain this idea of sex in the city, the book develops a theory of sexual marketplaces—the places where people look for sexual partners. It then uses this theory to consider a variety of questions about sexuality. Shedding new light on the city of Chicago, this work recasts our ideas about human sexual behavior.