“Place-Framing” as Place-Making: Constituting a Neighborhood for Organizing and Activism

Abstract

This article uses social-movement theory to analyze how neighborhood organizations portray activism as grounded in a particular place and scale. I apply the concept of collective-action frames to a case study of four organizations in a single neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Using organizational documents such as annual reports, comprehensive plans, and flyers, I present a discourse analysis of the ways that organizations describe their goals and agenda. In particular, I assess the extent to which the organizations characterize the neighborhood in their justifications of organizational goals and actions. In order to legitimate their own agendas and empower community activism, neighborhood organizations foster a neighborhood identity that obscures social differences, such as ethnicity and class, among residents. They do so by describing the physical condition of the neighborhood and the daily life experiences of its residents. These “place-frames” constitute a motivating discourse for organizations seeking to unite residents for a neighborhood-oriented agenda, despite very different substantive issues, from crime to land-use planning. This perspective allows for a more effective understanding of how place informs activism at a variety of spatial scales. Further, by inserting place into theories of collective-action framing, this research helps to introduce a new research agenda that addresses the gap between geographical analyses of territorial identities and activism and other scholarly literatures on contentious politics.

Key Words:

• collective action
• discourse
• neighborhood organizing
• place-frames

Notes

Note: The excerpts in this table are quotations from the organizations. They were chosen as representative of the words or themes used repeatedly in organizational documents for each group. Sources cited here are fully listed in the references section under the name of the organization in the column heading unless otherwise specified. The dotted line in each column indicates a break between frames that mostly exhort people to act (above the line) and those that describe the physical/economic conditions or social characteristics, of the neighborhood (below the line).

Note: The excerpts in this table are quotations from the organizations. They were chosen as representative of the words or themes used repeatedly in organizational documents for each group. Sources cited here are fully listed in the references section under the name of the organization in the column heading unless otherwise specified.

Note: The excerpts in this table are quotations from the organizations. They were chosen as representative of the words or themes used repeatedly in organizational documents for each group. Sources cited here are fully listed in the references section under the name of the organization in the column heading unless otherwise specified.

1. Swyngedouw (1992,; 40) credited conversations with Andrew Mair for his coining the term “glocalization,” although Robertson (1995,; 28) indicated that the term was popular in business in the 1980s and suggested that the initial use of the word came from Japan. I do not think that there is necessarily one origin; the many uses of “glocalization” indicate that it articulates an idea that many people find salient.

2. I put the terms “race” and “racial” (“racially”) in quotes to emphasize their social constitution.

3. They were also the basis for Alinsky-style political activism, which seeks to identify and build upon common interests among a group of people, be it based upon race or ethnicity, work status, or, most commonly, residential location (Bailey 1974,; 106; Alinsky 1989; Fisher 1994).

4. I do not wish to argue that all neighborhood organizations are social movements, merely that, as collective organizations outside of formal governments, they act like social movements.

5. I focus here on the frames of the organizations and what they say about place, not on the reception of the place identity and discourse among residents.

6. The boundaries of each district were determined primarily by community groups in existence at the time, in consultation with city planning officials.

7. The city of St. Paul provides funds for a district council in each of the seventeen planning districts of the city, of which Frogtown/Thomas-Dale is one.

8. The McKnight Foundation primarily supports community and family development programs.

9. In fact, organizations were not all audited regularly by the city or the nonprofit foundations that supported them. In 2000, the Alliance declared bankruptcy after financial mismanagement (Balaji 2001).

10. Martin (2000) examined organizational discourses aimed at external audiences: nonresidents and the media in St. Paul.

11. For more about the Frogtown Times as a neighborhood discourse in its own right and in juxtaposition to major media portrayals of the neighborhood, see Martin (2000).

12. I collected and analyzed over one hundred documents for all four organizations. I also attended a total of twenty-nine organizational or neighborhood meetings from June 1996 through January 1997, although most of my observations of meetings were conducted in July, August, and September 1996.