Neighborhood Activists Research Articles

Popular Planners: Newspaper Writers, Neighborhood Activists, and the Struggles against Housing Demolition in Lagos, Nigeria, 1951-1956

As Nigeria prepared for independence in the 1950s, British planners and Nigerian politicians sought to improve Nigeria’s international image by dismantling what they called the “slums” of Central Lagos. This article examines how a loose coalition of residents—including female traders, homeowners, and tenants—challenged the idea that Central Lagos was a slum and pushed for alternative planning proposals that would suit residents’ interests. I propose “popular planners” to describe the residents who drew on their lived experiences and knowledge of colonial planning laws to critique building demolition and demand the Development Board amend its slum clearance plan. Their competing visions, articulated in newspapers, during street demonstrations, and in petitions, demonstrate everyday people’s investment in transforming the city’s future during the end of colonial rule and their opposition to exclusionary planning processes that continue to shape urban policies in Nigeria.

Sharing Homes and Beds: Baptist-Bootlegger Coalitions and the Politics of Authenticity in the Regulation of Los Angeles's Short-Term Rental Markets

Platform economy politics reflect a trend of corporations working with civic actors to achieve shared political goals, reconfiguring once adversarial relationships (e.g., management vs. labor, homeowners vs. tenants). Yet theories on urban politics and policymaking often do not account for such “Baptist-Bootlegger” coalitions (Smith and Yandle 2014; Yandle 1983). This article analyzes how the efforts of two competing Baptist-Bootlegger coalitions shaped the 2018 short-term rental (i.e., Airbnb, HomeAway) ordinance in Los Angeles, CA, USA. I argue that a subtly coordinated partnership of housing groups, neighborhood activists, and hotel market incumbents leveraged their individual authenticity and resources to successfully articulate a shared vision with policymakers. Conversely, an opposing coalition of short-term rental platforms and hosts more explicitly combined their efforts under an organizational framework that conflated economic and moral claims; this hybrid organizational identity was perceived as less authentic by policymaking audiences and precluded potentially more strategic forms of organizing.

Open Streets for Whom?

The COVID-19 pandemic has created opportunities for cities to close streets to automobile traffic in the name of public health. Although these interventions promise numerous benefits, neighborhood activists and scholars of color suggest they can perpetuate structurally racist inequities. In this Viewpoint, we implore planners and other city builders to think critically about the impact of these interventions by employing an environmental justice framework. Applying this framework in the open streets context exposes several potential paradoxes that arise. We conclude with a set of best practices that can help city builders transcend these paradoxes and extend this livability revolution to all.

‘Zodra wij er zijn, komen de roddels op gang.’ Britse krakers en de strijd om beeldvorming in Leiden tijdens de jaren negentig

In the early 1990s, several hundreds of predominantly working-class British and Irish youths moved to Leiden to work as seasonal laborers in the region’s floral industry. Because it was difficult to gain access to regular housing, a large number of them squatted houses in and around the city. Local newspapers paid much attention to the British squatters, who were often described as organizers of rave parties, consumers of illicit drugs and causers of noise complaints. The squatters tried to counter this image, but had only limited access to the media. Based on a systematic analysis of 588 Leidsch Dagblad news reports, debates in the local squatter magazine De Peueraar and six semi-structured interviews with British and Leiden squatter veterans, this paper reconstructs the struggle over the image of ‘the’ British squatter in Leiden during the 1990s. It argues that squatters were only moderately successful in countering the image of noisy ‘party squatters’ and presenting themselves as constructive neighborhood activists, in part because the squatter scene moved between social movement and subculture.

Like Uber, But for Local Governmental Policy: The Future of Local Regulation of the 'Sharing Economy'

In the past five years, “sharing economy” firms like Uber, ZipCar, AirBnB and TaskRabbit have generated both huge market valuations and fierce regulatory contests in America’s cities. Incumbent firms in the taxi, hotel and other industries, as well consumer protection, labor and neighborhood activists, have pushed for regulations stifling or banning new sharing economy entrants. Sharing firms have fought back, using their popularity with consumers and novel political strategies, lobbying for freedom to operate as broadly as possible without government interference. But to date, both participants and observers of these “sharing wars” have relied on an unstated assumption: if the sharing firms win these fights, their future will be largely free from government regulation. Local governments will either shut sharing down, or they will leave it alone.But this assumption is almost surely wrong. If sharing firms prevail in the current fights over the right to operate (and indications suggest they will), it is unlikely that cities and states ignore them. Instead, as sharing economy firms move from being upstarts to important and permanent players in key urban industries like transportation, hospitality and dining, local and state governments are likely to adopt the type of mixed regulatory strategies they apply to types of firms with whom sharing firms share important traits, from property developers to incumbent taxi operators. Using tools of agglomeration economics and public choice, this Article sketches the future of such policy regimes.Specifically, local and state governments will adopt some combination of the following policies in addition to insisting on consumer/incumbent protections: (1) subsidizing sharing firms to encourage expansion of services that produce public goods, generate substantial consumer surplus and/or minimize the need for excessive regulation of the property market; (2) harnessing sharing firms as a tool for redistribution; and/or (3) contracting with sharing firms to provide traditional government services. The future of sharing economy regulation will be very different from its present, and the changes will pose profound legal, political and ethical questions for our cities.

Poor Influences and Criminal Locations: Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Multicultural Identities, and Normal Homosexuality

In 1984 the City of Los Angeles implemented a new policing ordinance called the “containment and mitigation policy,” which did not target subjects for prison arrest but sought to achieve their open-air capture in a redesigned “homeless district” called skid row. The policy was devised by Mayor Tom Bradley and his black and gay allies as a solution that balanced the pressures of deinstitutionalization and deindustrialization with the objectives of the community mental health movement and black, gay, and downtown community redevelopment programs. Looking to archival material related to architectural landscapes oriented to normalizing race and homosexuality built by Bradley, community mental health professionals, and neighborhood activists in inner-city districts, this essay demonstrates that new discourses of racial and sexual liberalism, coded as “multiculturalism” and expressed as black and gay community pride campaigns, substantiated new forms of surveillance and policing that renewed violence on queer, homeless, trans, and disabled people of color that resulted in their spatial segregation in skid row. Rather than forward social justice, I argue that the city’s cultivation of multiculturalism obscured the processes of racial capitalism that underwrite the enlargement of carceral spaces and normalize surveillance and policing as a common good.

Neighborhoods as Arenas of Conflict in the Neoliberal City: Practices of Boundary Making between “Us” and “Them”

This paper is concerned with processes of place making among middle class residents in Santiago de Chile, and focuses on the ways in which neighborhood groups seek to receive heritage status for their areas of residence, as a way to contest the demolition of houses in order to build high–rise buildings. I focus on the tensions inherent in reconciling a critical view of neoliberal residential politics with a securing of their individual or family class position. I bring together debates and evidence about social and spatial boundary making with analysis of strategies of reproduction of class position. The paper focuses on intraclass symbolic boundaries in place making and the local politics and practices involved, by addressing the relationship of the middle classes to territory and their place in the contemporary city (Andreotti et al. 2014; Bacqué et al. 2015; Bridge et al. 2012; Brown–Saracino 2009; Zukin 2010). I discuss data obtained from research in five inner–city urban Santiago neighborhoods involving a mix of sources: in depth interviews, nonparticipant observation, content analysis of CMN legal texts, and copies of the files prepared by neighborhood activists.

Jordan Sand. Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects.

In Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects, Jordan Sand considers how, in the late twentieth century, neighborhood activists, architects, artists, and others promoted urban preservation projects and claimed rights to common spaces, thus fostering new modes of political engagement in Japan's postindustrial society. The micropublics they created, however, existed in ambivalent relation to both the capitalist forces that captured ever growing shares of urban life and the metropolitan authorities who sought to remake Tokyo in conjunction with the demands of the market. Noting Tokyo's lack of monumental structures and history of repeated destruction through natural and man-made disasters, Sand reflects on the meanings of urban preservation in a city with ostensibly little to preserve (p. 1). He presents these movements as reactions to the failure of a set of ideas of postwar nationhood in which the monumental public plaza (hiroba) served as the locus of unified action by sovereign citizens. This form of mobilization reached its apex in the 1960 demonstrations against renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty; but by the end of the decade, state agencies actively denied citizens the right to the plaza, seeking instead to ensure that urban space was amenable to capitalist development. The forcible expulsion in 1969 of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators from Shinjuku Station's West Exit Underground Plaza (which was renamed a pedestrian concourse) constitutes the symbolic starting point for Sand's study. Not only rapid economic growth but also Japan's increasing participation in the global tourism industry stimulated transformations in the urban landscape and the property regime shaping it. The “dematerialization of wealth” (p. 12) that followed the 1971 “Nixon shock” and accelerated in the 1980s gave even greater impetus to the waves of destruction and speculative construction that turned Tokyo into the global city of the present, a city with little in the way of a “secure foundation in any notion of tradition” (p. 5).

Before the Creative Class

During the summer of 1964, the Haight Theater in San Francisco operated briefly as “gay movie house” that screened B-movies, held drag shows, and hosted male physique contests. For Haight-Ashbury neighborhood activists, already engaged in a fight to block a planned freeway and reverse the attrition of white families from the community, the reopened theater presented an existential threat to the family-oriented character of the neighborhood. They saw the growing visibility of gay men in the area as a harbinger of social disintegration that could, if allowed to continue, result in the classification of the area as blighted, making it a candidate for demolition and renewal. The moral anxieties of Haight residents are best understood not simply as the manifestation of an inherent, latent homophobia but as part of the broader struggle of neighborhood activists to stave off the destructive impacts of urban renewal and freeway expansion. The episode reveals the degree to which taken-for-granted assumptions about the social and economic impacts of gay men on urban space have changed as postwar planning discourses about blight and social disorganization have been eclipsed by more contemporary narratives of gay-led urban revitalization and the productivity of creative capital.

The Place of the City

The articles in this special section illuminate the benefits and challenges of university–community partnerships. For decades, there has been a movement to facilitate collaboration among urban historians, public historians, preservationists, city planners and neighborhood activists. Those who championed such work recognized that aligning academics’ agenda of research, teaching, and service with public servants’ advocacy and community organizing could transform the relationship between institutions of higher learning and the neighborhoods that surround them. In recent years, several intellectual and pedagogical trends have lent legitimacy to this effort, including the rise of service learning and the promotion of civic engagement. It is crucial for institutions of higher learning to recognize the ways in which place-based research challenges traditional measures of achievement, breaking down not only barriers that have separated universities from communities but also those that have long separated research, teaching, and service.

The Political and Civic Implications of Chicago’s Unsuccessful Bid to Host the 2016 Olympic Games

Between 2006 and 2009, Chicago’s political and civic leadership developed a bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) ultimately selected Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Games, with Chicago finishing fourth among the finalist cities in the October, 2009, IOC voting. This article is based on 20 key informant interviews with members and staff of the Chicago 2016 Committee, neighborhood activists and organizational staff in projected Olympic “venue” neighborhoods, and three “unaffiliated” civic leaders. The aim of the interviews was to determine—in light of the failed 2016 Olympic bid—if Chicago’s leadership had effected a process of what urban regime theorists term “social learning,” collective retrospection that can lead to the pursuit of more successful future civic ventures. The evidence provided by these interviews suggests that not only has there been little civic retrospection by Chicago’s leadership, but also that processes put in place to promote the Chicago bid to international and local constituencies actually inhibited the ability of local elites to learn from past action.

The transatlantic collapse of urban renewal: postwar urbanism from New York to Berlin

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal examines how postwar thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic considered urban landscapes radically changed by the political and physical realities of sprawl, urban decay, and urban renewal. With a sweep that encompasses New York, London, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Toronto, among others, Christopher Klemek traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected the lives of the world's cities. In the postwar decades, the principles of modernist planning came to be challenged - in the grassroots revolts against the building of freeways through urban neighborhoods, for instance, or by academic critiques of slum clearance policy agendas - and then began to collapse entirely. Over the 1960s, several alternative views of city life emerged among neighborhood activists, New Left social scientists, and neoconservative critics. Ultimately, while a pessimistic view of urban crisis may have won out in the United States and Great Britain, Klemek demonstrates that other countries more successfully harmonized urban renewal and its alternatives. This much anticipated book provides one of the first truly international perspectives on issues central to historians and planners alike, making it essential reading for anyone engaged with either field.

The Politics of Inequality in Globalizing Cities: How the Middle Classes Matter in the Governing of Buenos Aires

This paper contributes to the literature on the new politics of social inclusion and spatial justice in globalizing cities. My main argument is that accounts of such politics should focus on the multiple intervening social actors without neglecting or assuming the roles played by the urban middle classes. Focusing on the case of the City of Buenos Aires (CBA) after Argentina's neoliberal crisis of 2001, I show the importance of mobilized middle-class social actors in shaping institutional and territorial outcomes in a globalizing city that is highly polarized and fragmented. This study is based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival research focused on (a) subscribers of state-sponsored citizen participation processes and (b) neighborhood activists with middle-class profiles—middle incomes, relative housing stability, and residency in neighborhoods with middle levels of development. Findings show that, although middle-class politics in the city evidenced a primary concern with place, neighborhood, and local territories, mobilized actors were also responding to deeper transformations brought about by processes of neoliberal globalization. Their repertoires of collective action also moved beyond the local scale and had significance for the wider governing of the city. Finally, it is shown that middle-class politics in the postcrisis CBA departed from the exclusionary attitudes evidenced in studies of other cities, which leads to the question of how such politics may be reconciled into broader coalitions seeking more egalitarian forms of urban globalization. Further inquiries for comparative analysis beyond the CBA are suggested in the paper's conclusion.

Demolition Means Progress

In 1960, city officials in Flint, Michigan, announced plans to demolish the St. John Street neighborhood. In support of the clearance project—which promised to replace a segregated black neighborhood with an industrial park and a freeway—executives from General Motors, municipal officials, and downtown boosters argued that redevelopment would provide more jobs and a growth-oriented future. Yet urban renewal in Flint was much more than a top-down campaign for growth. Many civil rights and neighborhood activists also supported St. John redevelopment, viewing urban renewal as an opportunity to secure new housing, desegregation, and clean air. Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s, corporate and city officials had triumphed over local civil rights activists, ultimately presiding over a renewal program that valued short-term industrial growth and ghetto containment over housing equity. Emphasizing state-sanctioned segregation, this article challenges the usefulness of de facto segregation as a descriptor of the North's color lines.

From Crackertown to Model City?

This article uses Atlanta as a case study to examine how proponents of two visions of urban renewal came into conflict in the mid-1960s. Atlanta's mayor, aldermen, and city planners, in conjunction with a few white downtown business associations and some of the city's African American middle class, believed that the purpose of federal renewal funding was to ensure economic growth for the city, either by protecting central business district property values from nearby slums or by constructing new revenue-generating structures. Many of the city's poorer residents rallied alongside housing advocates, civil rights organizations, and neighborhood activists, believing that federal renewal funding should be used to replace deteriorating housing stock, whether with new public housing or low-cost housing built by private developers. This article demonstrates how and where leaders expressing these two visions of urban renewal competed for limited funds, site selection, and planning control.

Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design

Problem: Historically, neighborhood participation has lapsed into NIMBYism or has not been especially effective at long-term, inclusive, and integrative planning. Purpose: I aim to describe and analyze an example of how local governments can function as civic enablers and capacity builders for collaborative and accountable planning among neighborhood stakeholders and city government. Methods: This is a case study of Seattle's neighborhood planning approach in the 1990s based on semistructured interviews with 33 current and former planners, other officials, and neighborhood activists, and review of a broad selection of neighborhood plans and other planning documents and newspaper coverage of the planning process. Results and conclusions: The city of Seattle developed a set of tools and resources to empower local citizens in the planning process while also holding them accountable for actions consistent with specified broad values and planning targets. This, together with the city's substantial investment in neighborhood planning staff, who served as relational organizers and intermediaries of trust, was critical to the success of neighborhood planning and to the emergence of a collaborative governance culture among highly diverse and often contentious community associations, business interests, city departments, and the city council. Takeaway for practice: Diverse neighborhoods can find common ground and make positive progress on planning to address shared citywide concerns. However, they need staff assistance to do this. Neighborhood planners can play this role, but only if cities fund them to do this time-consuming work and provide institutional support and guidance.

Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940‐2000

Portland, Oregon, is celebrated in the planning literature as one of the nation's most livable cities, yet there is very little scholarship on its small Black community. Using census data, oral histories, archival documents, and newspaper accounts, this study analyzes residential segregation and neighborhood disinvestment over a 60‐year period. Without access to capital, housing conditions worsened to the point that abandonment became a major problem. By 1980, many of the conditions typically associated with large cities were present: high unemployment, poor schooling, and an underground economy that evolved into crack cocaine, gangs, and crime. Yet some neighborhood activists argued that the redlining, predatory lending, and housing speculation were worse threats to community viability. In the early 1990s, the combination of low property values, renewed access to capital, and neighborhood reinvestment resulted in gentrification, displacement, and racial transition. Portland is an exemplar of an urban real estate phenomenon impacting Black communities across the nation.

Geographies of Opportunity for Whom?

Local governments claim that neighborhood improvement programs develop grassroots leadership capacity, raise the importance of neighborhood issues on the citywide political agenda, and empower residents to solve neighborhood-level problems. This article argues that neighborhood improvement programs also jeopardize the geography of opportunity, particularly women's neighborhood activism. Drawing from interviews with neighborhood activists and local government officials from one municipality in Southern California, this study illuminates the ways in which local government efforts regulate and contain neighborhood activism.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (review)

Reviewed by: Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid Teresa Barnes Bozzoli, Belinda . 2004. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 326 pp. $28.95 (paper). Theatres of Struggle recounts the events and significance of the six-month-long urban rebellion in Alexandra, one of the most famous townships of Johannesburg, South Africa. Alex, as it is popularly known, is a tiny place of much significance in South African history for many reasons, not least because it was home to one of the deepest and most overtly revolutionary of the urban conflicts of the 1980s, conflicts that contributed greatly to transforming apartheid's discomfort into its death throes. Bozzoli is much taken by the metaphor of performance in explaining the rebellion, which was started by a violent "rupture" of the social fabric known as the Six-Day War, in February 1986. Battlefields and their surrounds are often, of course, known as theaters; but Bozzoli takes the meaning literally and uses the extended metaphor of theater, actors, scripts, audiences to give structure to a complex moment. Theatres of Struggle introduces the reader to Alexandra's history; the political trials and economic tribulations of the late apartheid state; the substance and structures of the rebellion, its participants, and leaders (most of all, the neighborhood activists known as comrades); its generational and ideological conflicts; its physical course and impact; and finally, how it was remembered in the Truth Commission hearings in the 1990s. This is a long reach of intricately detailed historical sociology. As South Africans move far enough away from the agonies of the 1980s to be able to begin to reexamine the era, there is no doubt that Bozzoli's portrait of urban spaces, social groups, and dynamics will prove a fruitful stimulus to further research and debate. One forgets how deft Bozzoli's writing can be, masterfully blending sure phrase with complex conceptual constructions. The book's inner structure allows the explication of different forces and personae of the rebellion to walk onto a stage, like a play within a play. Bozzoli has a freer rein to "play" with her scenes, language, and so forth. The hourly saga of the violence and drama of the Six-Day War is wonderful historical stuff. This book often reads like a brilliant soliloquy: swaths of pages dramatically roll by, again, like a novel or a play. The presentation amounts to a tour de force, in which Bozzoli relies heavily on her insight and powers of historical synthesis. This is an important book—because of its strengths, as noted above, but also because of what its weaknesses reveal about the difficulties of South African social science. A new problem is that Bozzoli's use of the concept of performance to explain the rebellion suggests that there was an artifice to what was (as of course she portrays) six months of grim, incredibly taxing (although sometimes exhilarating) struggles over life, death, and morality. We see how Alex residents fought each other along a host of social cleavages, and how they redefined the local meanings of power and [End Page 116] authority through fighting the police, the army, and other apartheid governance structures. The idea of performance holds within it a duality, a prior identity that is preserved, watching and perhaps judging itself. Elements of agency and spontaneity seem to be removed from Bozzoli's characters and scenes by the use of this concept. Bozzoli's treatment of white liberalism in Alexandra is an older problematic angle. Before the period that she terms "racial modernism" was enforced by the apartheid state, she argues that "welfare paternalism" and white liberals made aspects of township life more bearable and orderly. A discussion of the role of white liberalism in black South Africa must take on board the Black Consciousness argument that liberalism, because it propagated the idea of white efficacy, was in fact an obstacle in the path of black advancement. Bozzoli does not have to agree with this idea, but she should acknowledge it. The political-historical crosscurrents of Soweto were only on the other side of Johannesburg in 1986, for example, not on the other side of the world...

Constructing the ‘Neighborhood Sphere’: Gender and Community organizing [1

This article examines organizing styles and issues in neighborhood activism to illustrate how activists seek to constitute a neighborhood community. It identifies the ways in which community organizing is gendered in both style and content, often separating 'women's' and 'men's' issues along an artificial public-private divide. This research illustrates, however, how neighborhood activists can use and challenge gendered forms of activism to integrate both public and private into an ideal of a neighborhood community. Using a case study of the Thomas-Dale Block Clubs in St Paul, Minnesota, the article examines how residents use gender-essentializing discourses of safety and parenting to insert household and family issues into a broader community arena. Further, it identifies how these discourses overlay cultural tensions in a diverse neighborhood. The activism in the block club organization studied here reflects a wide variety of community organizing strategies and concerns, focusing on defining and creating a neighborhood public sphere, to which, as the organization argued, every resident ought to be responsible and accountable.