Race, Space, and Exclusion by Robert Adelman Christopher Mele

Author:Robert Adelman, Christopher Mele [Robert Adelman, Christopher Mele]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317675228
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Contemporary Exclusion: Layered and Compounded

It is widely known and reported that urban destination developments, such as casinos and sports stadiums, “fail to deliver” often-promised economic and social changes for adjacent neighborhoods in older, former industrial cities. While redeveloped enclaves thrive (with ample assistance from tax credits, abatements, and related favorable urban policies), inner-city communities remain neglected or simply left behind. Policy makers and urban scholars often view this exclusion as an unfortunate social and economic outcome of neoliberal urbanism. But in this chapter I take a different approach by demonstrating how exclusionary practices are embedded in various elements of an overall process of contemporary urban redevelopment. Because these elements, from site selection to place-marketing, are interrelated, their embedded forms of exclusion are layered, and the isolation of adjacent poor minority communities is compounded.

The various elements of neoliberal urban development described in this chapter feed into each other and further racial and class exclusion. At the most obvious level, enclave developments deploy a number of architectural, design, and security measures to create self-contained and bounded spaces distinct from adjacent communities. But location itself does not ensure social exclusion; local governments consciously create policies to differentiate enclaves from the rest of the city. Enclaves benefit from special locational incentive programs that increase economic opportunities in designated areas but not the city as a whole. Enclaves are entitled to tax abatements, loans, and other financial enticements provided to developers, while other areas in need are excluded. Administratively, governments increasingly outsource the planning, implementation, and management of redevelopment to the corporations and firms in the private sector. The reliance on EDAs and P3s redefines the purpose of urban development and shifts project accountability from the state to the market; the overarching mandate of publicly subsidized redevelopment is economic, not community, development. The overall participation of local communities in planning and oversight is negligible, as are the resulting tangible benefits to residents.

This entrepreneurial shift in urban governance entails a contraction in the state’s responsibility to address and attempt to solve long-standing urban social problems. More importantly, the reliance on the market and the private sector as drivers of urban policy directly implicates the state in furthering racial and class exclusion, given the redefined mandate of enclave redevelopment to deliver economic growth. The state not only shrinks from its social welfare obligations to its marginalized citizens, it abandons them to the private market by facilitating consumption-focused urban development (Beckett and Herbert 2008, 19). Enclave developments like those in Chester and Camden create idealized perceptions of urban revitalization (limited to their respective waterfronts) while continuing to ignore surrounding economic despair and social isolation. The focus of redevelopment, consumption, becomes the main basis for regulating behavior in destination enclaves and in turn for defining who should be included and excluded from their use. But it also labels non-consumption as external and potentially threatening to urban development and, as a consequence of marketing efforts, the rebirth of the city. Nonthreatening activities and behaviors of local residents are recast as

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