Understanding Community Building in Urban America

Abstract

Neighborhood-based community building has been positioned as an effective strategy for combating urban poverty in America. This paper considers three predominant models of community building in America, and focuses particularly on a contemporary derivative of these–community-building initiatives that claim to address the circumstances of urban poverty through people- and place-based neighborhood revitalization. The empirical evidence shows that the impacts of community building on poverty often are left undocumented. Community-building initiatives can increase neighborhood organization, connect neighborhood actors with existing political-economic structures at the city level, enhance neighborhood-level infrastructural development, increase community surveillance of crime and provide new homeownership opportunities. Yet tensions appear to exist around economic, political and land-use issues, in part due to “consensus-based” planning that actually limits residential involvement in a variety of ways. Further, when taken as a whole, community-building initiatives in some respects serve the already advantaged, instead of being a new agenda for political-economic changes that aid the urban poor.