Collaborative Digital Techniques and Urban Neighborhood Revitalization

Abstract

For social workers and community development practitioners, there are a host of new technologies that, when combined with participatory research techniques, can shed new light on the nuances of everyday life in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. In this commentary, I suggest that this integration of technology and technique is particularly useful to community programs in urban areas that are increasingly marked by social, cultural, and economic complexity. Contemporary community revitalization programs emerge from a spectrum of social and economic discourses and are deployed across a heterogeneous range of urban neighborhoods (Ferguson & Dickens, 1999; Rubin, 2000; Vidal & Keating, 2004). As a professional practice, the field of community development has grown exponentially since the War on Poverty was declared in 1964--from early informal grassroots urban coalitions to today's formalized nonprofit organizations and community and economic development corporations (O'Connor, 1999;Vidal & Keating, 2004). The evolving structure and focus of the field has been based as much on social experimentation (for example, urban gardening, food cooperatives) as on federal and state policy pressure (for example, faith-based initiatives, empowerment zones, enterprise communities) (Ferguson & Stoutland, 1999; Rubin, 2000). However, although structural and programmatic evolution is ongoing, one constant has been the exceedingly complex nature of postindustrial urban space. COMMUNITY REVITALIZATION AND THE COMPLEXITY OF URBAN SPACE Dear and Dahmann (2008) recently referred to multiple shifts in the practices of urban place production: demographic, economic, political, social, cultural, and virtual (p. 268). They argued that a conventional, singular urban lens returns an incomplete portrait of the urban landscape, stating specifically that population diversity is becoming the norm in contemporary cities and the conventional divide between Black and White in many American cities is being submerged by a minoritizing polity; that waves of immigration are altering practices of community and citizenship; that the principal tropes of contemporary urbanism include edge cities, privatopias, and other mutant urban forms; that the rise of post-Fordism and the network society are transforming urban economic geographies everywhere. (Dear & Dahmann, 2008, p. 268) In essence, Dear and Dahmann have walked us through a transformation of urban space (from the modern to the postmodern) that is simultaneously present in the sociocultural landscape, the urban economy, and the built environment. One consequence of this transformation is that the discourses and methods that we use to understand urban communities must be better equipped to distill meaning from complexity. This transformation is challenging for community development practitioners, social workers, neighborhood advocates, and academic researchers as the production of effective revitalization policies and programs is inextricably linked to the task of understanding the myriad social, economic, cultural, and ecological landscapes of a particular place. Drawing on existing secondary data sources to construct spatial narratives (particularly those that are used to frame revitalization policy) is unlikely to produce desired results. And, as Sherraden, Slosar, and Sherraden (2002) suggested, in the writing of social policy, success hinges on creativity and requires a broad perspective and a determined search for alternative approaches (Sherraden et al., 2002, p. 210). Since Kretzmann and McKnight's work in the early 1990s on asset-based community development (ABCD), there has been considerable momentum both in theory and in practice to build and revitalize places using a foundation of existing place-bound assets and capacities (Ferguson & Dickens, 1999; Kretzman & McKnight, 1993). Similarly, the notions of participation and empowerment occupy a prominent position in the community worker's toolkit as they have become ubiquitous elements in both large and small comnmnity programs (Chaskin, Joseph, & Chipenda-Dansokho, 1997; Dennis, Gaulocher, Carpiano, & Brown, 2009). …