Governing the “New Hometowns”: Race, Power, and Neighborhood Participation in the New Inner City

Inner city residents, once shunned and ignored by city planners, are now seen as a vital resource in United States urban redevelopment plans. This shift in perspective has come at a time when municipal elites routinely champion the neoliberal strategies of privatization, marketization, and consumerism across the urban policy spectrum. In this article, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a gentrifying neighborhood in Philadelphia to illuminate the ways in which race, power, and neighborhood participation shape urban governance. Against the governmentalist approach, which tends to present a totalizing vision of neoliberal rule, this article emphasizes the failures and instabilities of urban governance under contemporary conditions. In particular, I direct attention to the overlooked dynamics of racial politics as they play out at the neighborhood level, where attempts to encourage self-governance on the part of inner city residents are predicated upon post-civil rights era notions of diversity and multiculturalism. The imposition of this politics produces new forms of racial inequality and class division that, paradoxically, undermine neoliberal rule itself.

Early versions of this article were presented at the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 13 May 2003 and the Department of Social Policy, Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, 10 April 2003. I wish to thank the participants at those seminars, especially Micaela di Leonardo and John Clarke, for their thoughtful comments. A note of thanks too to Dana-Ain Davis, Rudolph Gaudio, Galey Modan, Matt Ruben, Catherine Kingfisher, Roger Lancaster, and Roopali Mukherjee for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article. I also thank Identities editors Jonathan Hill and Thomas Wilson and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. This article was written based on research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Key Words:

• racial inequality
• class
• neighborhood redevelopment
• neoliberal governance

Notes

Early versions of this article were presented at the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 13 May 2003 and the Department of Social Policy, Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, 10 April 2003. I wish to thank the participants at those seminars, especially Micaela di Leonardo and John Clarke, for their thoughtful comments. A note of thanks too to Dana-Ain Davis, Rudolph Gaudio, Galey Modan, Matt Ruben, Catherine Kingfisher, Roger Lancaster, and Roopali Mukherjee for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article. I also thank Identities editors Jonathan Hill and Thomas Wilson and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. This article was written based on research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

1. To protect informant identities, all names, with the exception of those of politicians and public figures, are fictitious.

2. I conducted five years of ethnographic research focusing on the civic activities of residents in Southwest Center City (1997–2002). Funded by the National Science Foundation, it was part of a large, comparative ethnographic research project. In addition to myself, the research team included Judith Goode, Professor of Anthropology, Temple University, Philadelphia; Susan Hyatt, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis; and several graduate student assistants from the Department of Anthropology, Temple University. The research relied principally on three ethnographic methods: participant observation, open-ended interviews, and an in-depth life-history collection. I studied a wide array of activities involving neighborhood residents as they volunteered in non-profit and church-based soup kitchens, recovery programs, and job-training programs and as they organized around “quality of life” issues such as trash removal, the maintenance and upkeep of abandoned lots, and the construction of affordable housing. I collected data on the strategies and tactics residents used to distribute resources, access services, and attract investment and paid close attention to how residents negotiate with each other, with city officials, and with representatives from the corporate sector. My interview data provided insights into the contested terrain of community life, as residents revealed varied, often contradictory, visions of community development, resource mobilization, and neighborhood belonging. I also interviewed public officials, developers, policy makers, consultants, professional staff from non-profit organizations, and civic leaders from outside of the neighborhood. My life histories provided insights into activist trajectories, showing how personal histories of political involvement became a resource for contemporary civic practice. In my field research, I paid close attention to the ways in which race, class, and gender shaped civic action and was careful to collect data across these axes of difference.

3. The ethnographic research on urban poverty in anthropology that has rejected both sides of the “underclass” formulation is extensive (see, for example, di Leonardo 1998; Susser 1996; Goode 2001a; Goode and Maskovsky 2001; Kingfisher 1996, 2002; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Gregory 1994, 1998; and Williams 1992). Work focusing on kinship and gendered networks of reciprocity direct attention to the informal mechanisms of rule in the inner city (Aschenbrenner 1975; di Leonardo 1984; Stack 1974).

4. Rose draws on Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism as they are interpreted and discussed by Gordon (1991) to address the question of what it means to be governed in what he calls “an advanced liberal way” (Rose 1996a: 295). Rose uses “neoliberalism” as a term to gloss the political rhetoric of the Reagan–Thatcher era. In contrast, he uses the term “advanced liberalism” to gloss the broad programmatic aspects of the new governmental rationality (Rose 1996b: 61). In my discussion, I use the term “neoliberal governance” in much the same way that Rose uses the term “advanced liberalism.”

5. Important examples of this include Davis (2004), Hyatt (1997), Kingfisher (2002), Lyon-Callo (2004), and Maskovsky (2001).

6. For similar critiques of the governmental approach to the study of advanced liberalism, see Maskovsky and Kingfisher (2001) and Raco (2003).

7. See, for example, Sassen (1991), Castells and Hall (1994), Portes and Stepik (1993), Soja (1996), and Mollenkopf and Castells (1991).

8. Philadelphia has a long history of cronyism and corruption. At the onset of the twentieth century, investigative reporter Lincoln Steffens called the city “the worst governed city in the country” (quoted in Abernethy 1982: 539). This reputation persisted well beyond the early decades of the twentieth century. The wave of progressive municipal reform that spread across the United States at the turn of the century arrived late to Philadelphia and did not break the hold of private monopoly control of the city's economy or government. Although Philadelphia experienced a significant industrial boom in the early decades of the twentieth century, political cronyism persisted to such a degree that the city government allowed Philadelphia's docks to decay and its downtown area to be abandoned even as manufacturing flourished and the economy grew. Sam Bass Warner (1968) calls Philadelphia a “privatist” city. He traces historical pattern of economic growth for Philadelphia that is based on the triumph of private interests over nearly all forms of public accommodation (see also [Adams et al. 1991], Abernethy [1982], Goode and Schneider [1994], and Hodos [2002]).

9. Newspaper reporting from the era attributes the notable decline in commercial investment in the neighborhood to the “phantom” of the Crosstown Expressway. The possibility of its construction loomed over the neighborhood for decades, discouraging small business investment on South Street, the neighborhood's main commercial corridor. One article refers to the expressway project as “a new scourge [that] has eroded [South Street] and almost extinguished its flickering hopes” Binzen 1969: 26). Data collected by historian H. Viscount Nelson (Nelson 1979) suggests that the exodus of black middle-class residents began in the mid-1940s; Nelson attributes this exodus to the expansion of housing opportunities for blacks in other areas of the city.

10. The University of Pennsylvania Neighborhood Information System provides the following demographic overview of the neighborhood, based on official 2000 U.S. census data: in 2000, Southwest Center City was sixty-nine percent black and twenty-three percent white; sixty-one percent of housing was renter occupied and thirty-eight percent owner occupied (in contrast with forty percent and fifty-eight percent, respectively, for the city as a whole). With respect to poverty indicators, twenty-six percent of residents reported incomes below the official poverty line; seventeen percent of home owners were paying greater than thirty percent of their monthly income for their mortgages; and nearly forty percent of renters were paying more than thirty percent of their monthly incomes in rent. These statistics include a small white working class area called Devil's point that is adjacent to Southwest Center City. This is a small historically working-class Irish neighborhood comprised of several dozen houses. Most people consider Devil's Point to be geographically co-extensive with a neighborhoodlocated to the immediate north of Southwest Center City (Philadelphia NIS Neighborhood Base 2005).

11. A brief history of urban renewal, the redevelopment process, and the neighborhoods movement in Philadelphia can be found in (Adams et al. 1991: 100–125); for historical perspective on questions of race and class in the city, see the articles collected in Katz and Segrue (1998); see also Ruben (2000). See Ley (1996) for an interesting discussion of the neighborhoods movements as an aspect of the New Urbanism in Canada.