Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives

Abstract

The roles, relationships, and strategies of state and civil society institutions in urban planning, problem solving, and service delivery are in flux. In trying to understand how these changes affect community organizations, grassroots groups, and local-level institutions of civil society, existing research has tended to conceptualize these roles through a series of oppositional dialectics, such as cooptation or resistance. This article shows instead that community organizations shift their technological, institutional, and spatial approaches to urban planning and problem solving in creative and multifaceted ways. They produce a variety of spatial narratives to advance their agendas by strategically enacting multiple roles vis-à-vis a diverse set of actors and institutions. Information technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) can play a central role in this approach. Community organizations apply their own interpretive frameworks to GIS-based maps and images to produce spatial narratives of local needs, conditions, and assets that may be adapted to the diverse roles and relationships they negotiate in urban spatial politics. These arguments are developed from ethnographic research carried out with two inner-city Chicago community organizations pursuing a range of neighborhood improvement activities.

Key Words:

• community organizations
• neighborhood revitalization
• neoliberalism
• participatory GIS
• urban politics

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by NSF Grant #BCS-0443152. I thank the participating community staff and residents in Humboldt Park and West Humboldt Park for their contributions and collaboration. I am particularly grateful for detailed and thoughtful input from Helga Leitner, Eric Sheppard, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Throughout, I use the term “community organizations” to refer to nongovernmental agencies whose activities are geographically specific within a locality—directed at fostering change within a defined area in a city—with no implication that the social community represented is singular, unchanging, or uncontested. In the diverse literature on community development, neighborhood organizing, and social movements, geographers suggest that designations like “neighborhood” or “community” have vastly divergent meanings to different social groups; multiple definitions as spatial areas, administrative units, and spaces of lived experience; and varying meanings for the voluntary organizations and civil society institutions that identify as neighborhood or community institutions ( 29 b57 b42 b80 Harvey 1999; North 2000; Martin 2003a; Whitehead 2003 ). Here, I use “community organizations” in part because not all voluntary and civil organizations that work within a small part of an urban area identify with a neighborhood. Community organization is also a useful designation because of the practical difficulty of differentiating between community-based organizations and community development corporations. Some scholars characterize community-based organizations as having lower levels of funding, fewer paid staff, and a programmatic focus on fostering social cohesion; and community development corporations as having higher funding, paid staff, and a programmatic focus on capital development, often realized through investment in the built urban landscape ( 73 Stoecker 1997 ). However, increasingly, most local level nongovernment organizations engage in a variety of practices, making it difficult to situate them as one or the other ( 3 b74 b71 Bright 2003; Stoecker 2003; Smock 2004 ).

2. This is not to suggest that financial, time, and expertise barriers to GIS use by these organizations are no longer relevant. Many of the constraints on GIS use by community organizations and other nontraditional GIS users documented in 39 Leitner et al. (2000) and 69 Sieber (2000) continue. Access to hardware, software, data, and training resources needed for GIS are characterized by a high degree of uneven development from local to global scales.

3. The close relationship between the two entities is signified by the tendency of residents, staff, and local government officials to refer to them together as “NNNN/HPEP.” I will use the identifier NNNN throughout this paper because I focus on organizational roles and activities, and these are carried out by NNNN in pursuit of the broad goals framed by HPEP.

4. 83 Wilson, Wouters, and Grammenos (2004) provide supporting evidence that such threatened and enacted disruption by community actors is a significant disincentive to developers.

5. For legibility of print size, the legend in Figure 3 has been enlarged from the original version.

6. As 33 Kwan (2002) and 34 Kwan and Aitken (2004) note, it is important to consider the ways in which GIS can represent and communicate affect, emotion, and perceptions produced and experienced in particular spaces. I cannot fully address such a discussion here, but I am grateful for the suggestion from one of the reviewers that although research on social and political constructions of GIS has largely focused on its representative power and practices, GIS as an emotive/affective practice might be productively conceptualized through nonrepresentational theory.