Working-class Neighborhoods Research Articles

Moving medicine inside the neighborhood

This article focuses on the spatial significance of health care access, analyzing how state health programs effected sociospatial transformations in poor urban neighborhoods in Caracas, Venezuela. Starting in 2003, the leftist state constructed a parallel public health system to shift biomedical care from hospital emergency rooms to small clinics in neighborhood settings, arguing that it would improve the quality and accessibility of medical care for the poor. The new national health program, Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood), explicitly reorganized public medicine according to the pragmatic and symbolic significance of place. This article, based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in central Caracas, focuses on the meanings of these new health spaces for patients. Patients viewed the placement of clinics – and doctors – in barrios and working-class neighborhoods not only as logistically necessary but also as a moral and political commitment on the part of doctors and on the part of the state that employed them. In a context of marked spatial segregation along class lines, the placement of doctors ‘inside the neighborhood’ was symbolically significant because it marked such communities as deserving of services and challenged longstanding divisions between marginalized and privileged social groups in Caracas.

Regeneración urbana en la Ciudad de México: polisemia de concepciones y de acciones públicas

This article analyzes the usage of the term urban regeneration in the theory and the practice in Mexico City, which since the 1970s different theoretical, political, and ideological currents have used to address the multidimensional economic, social, physical, and environmental problems of urban decay and deterioration in the existing urban fabric. The article provides evidence that under this conception a polysemy of public actions (non-neutral or depoliticized) and some social initiatives are promoted and applied in dealing with very partially diverse urban problems. The article analyzes experiences of public interventions carried out between 1970 and 2020 in consolidated urban fabrics in Mexico’s capital city, promoted with more or less intensity by social collectives in working-class neighborhoods downtown, the historic center, and self-built quarters in the urban periphery. Beyond the neutral discourse of urban regeneration and alleged comprehensive interventions, in the practice sectoral policies or real estate ventures that, although sometimes converge in a single territory, and are not comprehensive nor coordinated or do not necessarily benefit the majority of society. The article collects the results of various investigations carried out in the last two decades on urban and housing policies in different urban areas.

Regeneración urbana: un panorama latinoamericano

Tradicionalmente, en el campo del urbanismo, el término regeneración urbana refiere al proceso de producción urbana que se ha vuelto predominante en las ciudades de Europa y América del norte desde hace ya varias décadas: la implementación de grandes proyectos urbanos de recuperación, tanto física como socio-económica, de áreas intra-urbanas, generalmente en desuso. Esto se está dando todavía poco en las ciudades latinoamericanas, a pesar de la existencia de un alto potencial de suelo posible de reciclar. Los proyectos realizados, escasos, son cuestionados. A su vez, los programas para revitalizar los centros históricos y redensificar las áreas peri-centrales no pueden ser considerados como iniciativas de regeneración urbana, en el sentido en que consistieron principalmente en impulsar dinámicas de puesta en valor turístico-cultural y de desarrollo inmobiliario intensivo, respectivamente. Sin embargo, sería un error concluir que no existen experiencias valiosas de regeneración urbana en la región. Éstas se encuentran, aunque bajo otras modalidades, en los barrios populares de las periferias urbanas, donde se están llevando a cabo programas de mejoramiento urbano integral. Descentrar la mirada hacia estas iniciativas podría contribuir a replantear la visión que se tiene de la regeneración urbana en la región.

“D.C. is mambo sauce”: Black cultural production in a gentrifying city

Centering mambo sauce as both a cultural staple and a metaphor for struggles over ownership in Washington, D.C., this article explores mambo sauce’s role in constructing a D.C. identity. Drawing on data from ethnographic interviews and newspaper headlines, I argue that, against the background of intense and consistent gentrification that has left the city’s population younger, whiter, and wealthier, mambo sauce becomes a lens through which to examine larger tensions related to race, class, and power. Specifically, I examine mambo sauce as a form of Black cultural production to explore the dialectical relationship between how mambo travels well beyond the carryout restaurants in Black working-class neighborhoods and the displacement of Black residents in the gentrifying city.

Contentious memories: History and urban redevelopment in Bogotá, Colombia

ABSTRACT In 2004, the city of Bogotá designated the historic working-class neighborhood of Las Aguas an “Urban Renovation Zone.” Subsequently, in 2012 the Universidad de los Andes proposed a massive redevelopment plan called Progresa Fenicia, with city approval. Redevelopment is imminent and residents’ responses have been diverse. In an effort to contribute to the literature that seeks to enrich and nuance our understanding of urban renewal processes and gentrification, this article explores the subjective experiences of long-term residents and the role of history and memory in such processes. Our analysis is based on participant observation and 31 oral histories from long-term residents of the small urban area designated for intervention. Through them, we seek to illuminate how residents understand their personal experience of the transformation of the neighborhood, and their part in urban renewal processes that extend into the past but also the future. We emphasize the agency of long-term residents, arguing that the past and memory play a significant role in how people define place, position themselves vis-à-vis urban interventions, and shape their experiences of urban redevelopment beyond monetary issues, class displacement, physical landscape, and housing policy.

Does demand lead supply? Gentrifiers and developers in the sequence of gentrification, New York City 2009–2016

Consumption-side theorists of gentrification examine the flow of middle-class White people into previously working-class neighbourhoods and argue that their demand for housing stimulates gentrification. In contrast, production-side theorists emphasise the movement of capital into previously disinvested neighbourhoods and contend that profit-seeking development increases property values and sparks gentrification. Hybrid theorists argue that consumption and production occur simultaneously. This article operationalises arguments made by each approach, and asks: Do gentrifiers precede rising home values or do rising home values precede gentrifiers? To answer this question of sequence, we build a dataset of census and property tax assessment data for 2192 New York City census tracts between 2009 and 2016. Using cross-lagged regression models with tract and year fixed effects, we find neighbourhoods that experienced an increase in White, middle-class residents had related housing price spikes in each of the subsequent two years. A 1% increase in gentrifiers was associated with a subsequent 2.7% increase in property values. However, housing market growth did not predict future increases in gentrifiers. This suggests that consumption leads production during neighbourhood gentrification, and that developers are reactive, not proactive, in their investment decisions. Focusing on the sequence of gentrification’s subsidiary elements enables city officials, non-profits and social movements to better anticipate gentrification and develop more targeted policies.

Violence and territorial order in Caracas, Venezuela

In 2015, Caracas, Venezuela, had a homicide rate of 75 per 100,000 inhabitants, which made it one of the most violent cities in the world that year. Despite these high rates of violence, the international community knows relatively little about the dynamics underlying conflict in the city. Through a systematic comparison of three poor and working-class neighborhoods in the Caracas metropolitan area, this article analyzes the factors that have driven these remarkably high rates of violence, as well as those factors that have configured the heterogeneous violent conditions that operate across the city. Building on extensive interviews in these neighborhoods, we argue that the levels of violence in particular locales derive from the ways in which the Bolivarian political regime failed in its efforts to incorporate the poor and working-class inhabitants of different parts of the metropolitan area into the political, social, and economic systems that dominate the country today. We also argue that variation in violence results from the way in which certain neighborhoods are geographically inserted into local illicit economies and the political and social dynamics of an increasingly violent and unstable political system.

A Place to Breathe in the Dense City: Community Gardening and Participatory Urbanism in Paris

Community gardens have emerged in Paris as a way to create green spacesin the city’s densely populated working-class neighbourhoods. One such garden is the Goutte Verte,a temporary, nomadic community garden that, with the agreement of the city and its developers, occupiesvacant lots awaiting the construction of new-build social housing. The continued existence of the GoutteVerte is placed in opposition to much-needed housing in the city, with poor, unemployed, and middle-classgardeners alike caught between a desire for green space and a demand for comfortable housing. Drawingon participant observation and interviews conducted in 2013–14 and 2019, I demonstrate how communitygardens act as a material alternative to urban planning and governance that often fail to account for a rightto a “place to breathe” in the city – a situation that is increasingly fraught as city planners treat newconstruction as the primary solution for affordable housing in Paris.

Intervención comunitaria en barrios populares: tensiones entre actores sociales

El artículo presenta los resultados de un estudio llevado a cabo en el distrito zaragozano de Delicias, sobre la evolución reciente del discurso que acompaña a la transformación de los tradicionales barrios obreros en barrios “pobres”, “degradados” o “vulnerables” y, con ella, la creciente consideración de sus habitantes como “objetos de intervención”. La investigación se llevó a cabo combinando elementos del enfoque cualitativo, analizando informes, memorias y planes referentes a los procesos comunitarios de las últimas décadas, realizando entrevistas semiestructuradas a técnicos de entidades y observación participante en las actuaciones del actual proceso comunitario. La historia reciente del barrio, sus procesos de intervención comunitaria y la relación entre actores públicos y privados implicados conforman el campo de estudio. En cuanto al objeto, la discusión entre tales actores sobre la situación social en el barrio nos permite poner en relación las acciones emprendidas en materia de planes económicos y políticas sociales con los discursos generados y los planteamientos ideológicos de cada actor. Para acabar se proponen conclusiones extrapolables a otros barrios multiculturales en el actual contexto del urbanismo neoliberal.

How Energy Retrofit Maintenance Affects Residential Buildings Market Value?

By now, it is clear the built environment could play an important role in fighting climate change, since it accounts for around 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Generally speaking, Italian residential stock is over 50 years old and around 16% of that needs large interventions due to its poor maintenance condition. So, the maintenance in this context can play a pivotal role in acheiving both energy efficiency and asset valorization. Introduced by a reference framework for the question in the title, this paper presents the case study: a portion of a working-class neighborhoods near the metropolitan city of Turin, marked by very recurrent typologies for the period (early seventies). The local real estate market is discussed to investigate the extraordinary maintenance impact on the property values: the paper considers the market value increase due to the energy class upgrade and the external look improvement. Individual owners putting money on this group of works get a very cost-effective investment and take advantage of Italian legislation supporting these kinds of interventions: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and in turn greater than the cost assumed for the renovation work.

Understanding the spatiality of short-term rentals in Spain: Airbnb and the intensification of the commodification of housing

ABSTRACT This article analyses the spatiality of the proliferation of short-term rentals in Spain. It was based on geolocalised data for all the Airbnb listings in the country. A multiscale analysis enabled us to identify the socio-economic, tourism market and housing stock variables that have had the greatest influence on the proliferation of short-term rental offers. The results obtained confirmed a pattern of concentration that validates our central hypothesis: the uneven distribution of Airbnb listings has a strong spatial correlation with the potential for generating new profits in the housing market. At national level, the urban areas with the highest concentration of Airbnb listings are those with the highest tourist demand. These are the largest cities, coastal tourist regions and archipelagos. At the city level, clusters of Airbnb concentrations are located in central areas where short-term rentals tend to be more expensive. They are also located in working-class neighbourhoods with lower housing prices with great potential for investors due to their proximity to tourist sites. These findings provide new evidence of how the so-called sharing economy is playing a central role in the intensification of the commodification of housing and how this is correlated with the intensive touristification of urban areas.

Into the Cold: Neighborliness, Class, and the Emotional Landscape of Urban Modernism in France and West Germany

In France and West Germany, public opinion on modernist mass housing switched from positive to negative over a short period of time. The following article explores and compares this disenchantment with urban modernism in both countries. Analyzing TV documentaries, press reports, and sociological studies, as well as inhabitants’ reactions to them, it traces the discursive production of modern high-rise estates as arenas of social and emotional malfunction. It investigates how contemporaries came to contrast the apparent desolation of modernist high-rises on the periphery of French and West German cities with the warmth and solidarity of traditional working-class neighborhoods. Tracing the genesis of this socio-emotional framing, the article foregrounds the influence of psychological discourses and a new left-wing activism on contemporary urbanism and highlights the local repercussions of modern housing’s public denigration in France and West Germany.

Música popular y resistencia política en Venezuela (2002–2018)

This article analyzes the creative contributions to counterrevolutionary criticism in Venezuelan popular music (2002–2018). I examine how these musical productions reclaim discourses previously controlled by political power. From the working-class neighborhoods of cities such as Caracas and Maracay—Chavista territories par excellence—the emergence of a radical street consciousness bluntly attacks the symbolic apparatus of the Revolution. In this context, these cultural products question the government’s fight for social justice and equality. In the study of the musical representation of political dissent, I focus on denunciations of a failed state, portrayals of socioeconomic tribulations, and possible solutions to the national crisis.

Identifying the Socio-Spatial Logics of Foreclosed Housing Accumulated by Large Private Landlords in Post-Crisis Catalan Cities

The article analyses the socio-spatial logic behind the accumulation of foreclosed housing in the hands of large private landlords in the neighbourhoods of all the Catalan cities with over 100,000 inhabitants. Spatial regression and clustering techniques are applied to identify the determinants of the concentration patterns of 10,725 housing units in these cities. The socioeconomic variables, such as income level, percentage of foreign population, level of studies or percentage of unemployed residents, are identified as key explanatory factors of clustering of foreclosures in working-class neighbourhoods. A high presence of previously mortgaged homes is a variable especially relevant in the case of working-class neighbourhoods, but it has no incidence in the case of the medium-high class neighbourhoods. Our findings provide a detailed urban geography of the housing accumulated by banks which, at the same time, correspond to areas in which the vulture funds are focusing their business in the present and in the forthcoming years. New evidences of the spatial logic of the housing crisis and detailed information for the understanding of the new scenarios that have emerged during the post-crisis phase are revealed.

Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space

This article examines the effects of Morocco’s new, “humane” migration policy that claimed to center human rights and integration over securitized border enforcement. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper demonstrates how the new migration policy expanded rather than dismantled the border regime, respatializing it from the edges of Moroccan territory into cities in the interior. Border respatialization was accomplished through abandonment, theorized not as an absence of government but a technique of governance that targets the racialized poor. Focusing on the experiences of migrants living in two urban spaces—an informal migrant settlement and a working-class neighborhood—this paper illustrates how abandonment limits black migrants’ ability to move and transgress the border, and how these effects have site-specific, as well as racial and gendered dimensions. This analysis underscores how humanitarian migration policy may have changed the modality of border violence, but not its substance.

Vivienda y estrategias familiares de vida en barrios populares consolidados en Bogotá

This paper questions the way in which household owners, residents in consolidated working-class neighborhoods, mobilize their houses in their strategies for family life. This study was conducted in five informal neighborhoods in Bogota, applying 355 surveys and 29 in-depth interviews using a biographical approach. The results show the economic centrality of housing for these vulnerable households. They confirm that their houses are increasingly important to contain crises and in good times the house is the first to be invested in. In terms of social mobility, in some cases, the house has allowed for children to study, but in others its construction has provoked disinvestment in human capital. In short, for these households, owning a house has a role in containing the insecurities –typical of current capitalism and the neoliberal state– of the social system.

Circuiting parents’ voice: Parenting discussion groups and institutional healing in northeast Paris

The discussion group is a common form of parenting support offered by associations in the pluri-ethnic, working-class neighborhoods of northeast Paris. Situated in a larger formation of voice that hails marginalized parents to speak, professionals engage with these discussion groups as potential social ‘transistors’: simultaneously circuiting parents’ voice inwards to restore parents’ agentive capacities and amplifying it outwards into an audible collective voice aimed at impacting state–citizen relations. In order to reach this double effect, professionals deploy ‘paralinguistic techniques’, which produce and combine intimate and civic, normative and alternative (semi-)public speech contexts. As a result, discussion groups emerge as pedagogical instances of a ‘Republican’ public sphere and its reworkings. Against the backdrop of anxieties of a disintegrating Republic and failing institutions, discussion groups highlight a desire for new conduits of citizenship, as well as the ways in which marginalized residents are called upon to invest these with their voice.

Looking Back at White Working-Class Racial Attitudes and Behaviors in the Late 1940s: An Updated Analysis

ABSTRACT We re-analyze quantitative and qualitative data from a study of a white, working-class neighborhood in mid-twentieth century Chicago to pursue two research goals. First, we test how attitudes toward blacks as coworkers and neighbors are correlated, and determine whether those attitudes are associated with commitment to the union and neighborhood attachment. Second, we address three timely issues in urban sociology and race relations: (1) how community efficacy is related to attitudes toward racial exclusion, (2) whether white homeowners are likely to oppose racial minorities as neighbors due to fears over property value decline, and (3) the “whitening” process by which people of southern and eastern European ancestry came to embrace a white racial identity.

Neighbourhood redevelopment and the making of a housing middle class: Can gentrification explain China’s spatial and social changes?

This paper addresses the relationship between spatial change and social process in China. Studies in Anglo-American and European cities usually suggest middle classes move into a working class neighbourhood and causes gentrification. Such a relationship is not found in China, where the state intervenes highly into the social and economic processes. Using neighbourhood redevelopment in Guangzhou as a case study, this paper argues that China’s state-led redevelopment is a redistribution process which produces a housing class in cities. During the process, native residents received the blessing of the local government and granted access to housing resources after redevelopment. Through house allocation and land rent sharing, neighbourhood redevelopment makes a specific housing middle class in the city. This process demonstrates not only the Chinese state’s consistent engagement in socioeconomic development, but also a very different relationship between spatial changes and social class transition in the country.

The Intersection of Muralist Movements and Two L2 Classes

The Intersection of Muralist Movements and Two L2 Classes Mariadelaluz Matus-Mendoza The Philadelphia Mural Movement is internationally known; admittedly, it is one of its most sought attractions when visiting the city. Using this form of art as the backdrop, a telecollaborative task-based project between two universities located in two different countries, in two different continents, was designed in fall 2015. Universidad Católica (UC) in Santiago, Chile, and Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, share a similar art form on their city’s walls: murals. Both movements relate to cultural, social, and political trends in their respective city and country. Selecting this as the overarching theme, this telecollaboration, part of two traditional intermediate world language classes’ curricula, was created with two goals: 1) to develop the intercultural communicative competence of students of a second language (L2), and 2) to prepare Chilean students who will study abroad in Philadelphia the following academic term. This current essay includes three sections. The first sets up for the project represented here, briefly describing the mural movements, on the one hand, and placing this project within telecollaborative projects, on the other. The second concisely presents its design, and its evolution. Finally, the essay turns to outcomes drawing on a qualitative analysis of an individual written survey and group debriefing sessions. The muralist movements in these two cities started twenty-five years apart with similar beginnings in working class neighborhoods, the participation of graffiti artists, and their desire to portray their citizens’ socio-political concerns. In Philadelphia, the artist Jane Golden invited graffiti artists to create public art on working class neighborhoods in 1984 which was the birth of Mural Arts Philadelphia. In the Southern Cone, in San Miguel, a neighborhood in Santiago, Chile, two local residents David Villarroel and Roberto Hernández convened not only graffiti artists, as Golden did, but muralists to paint on their neighborhood walls in 2009 which gave origin to Museo a Cielo Abierto. Both movements collaborate with their communities to create art that empowers them portraying issues dealing with social justice, racism, poverty, workers’ rights, migration, etc. Community members participate on the projects giving suggestions on mural themes, being models for them, or painting under the artist’s guidance. These artistic manifestations have also economically revitalized these neighborhoods and become tourist attractions for locals and non-locals. For this telecollaboration, a well-known muralist in Philadelphia, Cesar Viveros, recorded a lecture on the mural movement in the city and his art as an introduction to the project’s theme. It was uploaded to Drexel’s learning management system (LMS) to be watched by participant students. This telecollaborative project was created under the umbrella of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) that consists of “online and hybrid courses . . . where faculty from two or more cultures work together to develop a shared syllabus for the purpose of implementing an internationalized classroom emphasizing experiential and collaborative student learning.” (Rubin 2016: 263) At Drexel University, this collaboration is denominated as a “global classroom.” As noted previously, the global classroom consists of two traditional intermediate world language classes, one at Drexel and one at UC, where students of Spanish in Philadelphia and students of English in Santiago work using Asynchronous (ACMC) and Synchronous Computer Mediated [End Page 15] Communication (SCMC) technologies to facilitate developing their intercultural communicative competence and to prepare Chileans for their study abroad experience in the United States. Before describing the global classroom, it is necessary to define intercultural communicative competence as the speaker’s ability to operate in cultural contexts that allows one to appreciate and adapt to the cultural differences of the other. The aim is that students of a world language see the other’s culture as a variation of their own, not as a divider. It is also worth noting that the intercultural communicative competence involves the acquisition of linguistic as well as cultural competences. The duration of the global classroom was modified to accommodate UC’s need to evaluate their students and determine who would study abroad in Philadelphia the following term; it lasted six weeks in 2015, five weeks in 2016, and finally was set to run for four weeks in 2017. Weekly topics are...