Claiming Neighborhood: New Ways of Understanding Urban Change by John Betancur & Janet Smith

Author:John Betancur & Janet Smith [Betancur, John & Smith, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Social Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Urban, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780252098949
Google: 7lYdDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32955704
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-09-08T07:23:02+00:00

Re-presenting Neighborhoods

Looking across the details of change in the three community areas examined so far, we find structuring forces and conditions affecting all and shaping each in different ways. We do not intend to produce an absolute or totalizing explanation of neighborhood change. While there are spatial concentrations of low-income populations, we know that neighborhoods are highly differentiated internally and that social relations within, between, and outside each span a wide range of experiences and points of view. Still, the nature of residential development and segmentation does bring together households of similar incomes around their habitus, resulting in spatialized social reproduction by different class segments. In Bronzeville and Pilsen, the presence of a wide variety of incomes translates into differentiated purchasing power, differences in lifestyles, and struggles between the structures in place and those being introduced by investors and public agencies.

Both Pilsen and Bronzeville are still majority low-income communities. In Pilsen, some longtime residents are holding on to their social fabrics and histories and are resisting gentrification. In Bronzeville, there really is no visible antigentrification front other than a small group advocating for affordable and public housing. Yet despite the support of the city and fairly aggressive gentrifying forces in action, not a lot has happened in this neighborhood. Investors have had a hard time redeveloping empty lots, finding a profitable reuse for many disinvested structures, or establishing an upscale retail and cultural destination. Some link this to the fact that it is a majority black community (Hwang and Sampson 2014), while others point out that until the people and their behaviors that intimidate gentrifiers are gone or at least significantly reduced, the neighborhood will not change (Anderson and Sternberg 2012).

Rather than a homogenous community shaped by the forces under discussion, Englewood is also more diverse than most believe, with homeowners, renters, squatters, homeless people, households making livable wages, public employees, businesses of different kinds, formal, informal, and illegal economies, various institutions with a range of volunteers, community-based organizations, and churches of multiple denominations. There is a wide range of incomes, educational levels, social capital, roots, and so forth. There is a level of community ownership among some groups and individuals working separately and collectively. Rather than a single community, there are actually many subcommunities brought together in space by the forces shaping and reshaping neighborhoods and the practices of everyday life.

We contend that these are hybrid spaces in which different forces produce and fight different struggles, sometimes parallel, sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging and sometimes converging. Similarly, although pushed by the power of capital often working in tandem with government, gentrification and ghettoization are not a fait accompli even when plans are made and apparatuses put in place intended to produce that outcome. Many contradictions shape and reshape the social relations that produce the space of a neighborhood. Most of the displaced and downtrodden, for instance, are not passive actors sitting idle and helpless as chaos ensues, but instead use what resilience and power they have to appropriate space, create openings, and make their own markets where the marketplace has failed.

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