Anne Power. CITY SURVIVORS: BRINGING UP CHILDREN IN DISADVANTAGED NEIGHBOURHOODS

Abstract

Anne Power. CITY SURVIVORS: BRINGING UP CHILDREN IN DISADVANTAGED NEIGHBOURHOODS. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2007. Ppbk: £17.59; Hdbk: £59.Neighbourhoods shape people's lives, providing essential services that families and children depend on. This involves the physical space that shapes the early life experience of the young, where children can socialize outside of the family and acquire the coping skills necessary for adulthood. Anne Power's book, City Survivors, provides a unique perspective on how neighbourhoods condition the life experience of families and children in four highly disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England: two in east London and two in urban areas in Northern England. Drawing from rich ethnographic data collected over a period of 5 years, a large part of this book is told through the words of 24 interviewees, mostly mothers, who are raising their children alone and in poverty. The end product is a highly readable book, following a narrative style, of relevance to academics, students and potentially many other interested readers.Told through the stories of parents, this book allows the reader to empathize with mothers who raise children in neighbourhoods that all too frequently create fear and unease among residents and their children. As impUed in the title of this book, many of these families are barely surviving in neighbourhoods noted for their chronic unemployment, crime, poor housing, pollution, traffic congestion, lack of amenities for children and adolescents, and inadequate health and education services. As part of a larger longitudinal study that involves visits to over 200 families, from 1998 to 2004, Power continues with her ongoing interest in urban regeneration, and how such disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods can be improved without displacing the low-income families that Uve in them. A principle contribution of this text, as implied in the stories of residents, is that a particularly undervalued asset of these neighbourhoods is the social capital that in large measure is created by families with children.While disadvantaged neighbourhoods have many problems associated with poverty, the residents and families of these areas are not to be demonized. As the city survivors indicate through their own personal testimonies (over half of the book directly draws from Power's field notes), famines need each other, rely upon social spaces, supervise each other's children and attempt to provide a reasonable quality of Ufe for all concerned. In so doing, parents create social contact within urban neighbourhoods and with other parents, family members and neighbours. This in turn fosters the necessary goodwill towards neighbours that serves to build community, even under difficult urban conditions. …