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Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? This book offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston's poorest areas. The book uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public–private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality. The book's author spent four years following key players in Boston's community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, the author found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. The author argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. The author shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods. The book demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.

Urbanization is rapidly overtaking China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. One-sixth of humanity now lives in either a Chinese or Indian city. This transformation has unleashed enormous pressures on land use, housing, and the environment. Despite the stakes, the workings of urban governance in China and India remain obscure and poorly understood. This book explores how China and India govern their cities and how their different styles of governance produce inequality and exclusion. Drawing upon historical comparative analyses and extensive fieldwork (in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wukan, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata), the book investigates the ways that Chinese and Indian cities manage land acquisition, slum clearance, and air pollution. It discovers that the two countries address these issues through radically different approaches. In China, urban governance centers on territorial institutions, such as hukou and the cadre evaluation system. In India, urban governance centers on associational politics, encompassing contingent alliances formed among state actors, the private sector, and civil society groups. The book traces the origins of territorial and associational forms of governance to late imperial China and precolonial India. It then shows how these forms have evolved to shape urban growth and residents' struggles today. As the number of urban residents in China and India reaches beyond a billion, this book makes clear that the development of cities in these two nations will have profound consequences well beyond their borders.

A distinctive feature of the conflict in Northern Ireland over the past forty years has been the way Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries have policed their own communities. This has mainly involved the violent punishment of petty criminals involved in joyriding and other types of antisocial behavior. Between 1973 and 2007, more than 5,000 nonmilitary shootings and assaults were attributed to paramilitaries punishing their own people. But despite the risk of severe punishment, young petty offenders—known locally as “hoods”—continue to offend, creating a puzzle for the rational theory of criminal deterrence. Why do hoods behave in ways that invite violent punishment? This book explains why this informal system of policing and punishment developed and endured and why such harsh punishments as beatings, “kneecappings,” and exile have not stopped hoods from offending. Drawing on a variety of sources, including interviews with perpetrators and victims of this violence, the book argues that the hoods' risky offending may amount to a game in which hoods gain prestige by displaying hard-to-fake signals of toughness to each other. Violent physical punishment feeds into this signaling game, increasing the hoods' status by proving that they have committed serious offenses and can “manfully” take punishment yet remained undeterred. A rare combination of frontline research and pioneering ideas, this book has important implications for our fundamental understanding of crime and punishment.

This book renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem-solving. The book follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. The book shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need to move beyond well-established thinking about what is strategic. The book presents a pragmatist-inspired sociological framework that illuminates core tasks of social problem-solving by grassroots and professional advocates alike. It reveals that advocates' distinct styles of collective action produce different understandings of what is strategic, and generate different dilemmas for advocates because each style accommodates varying social and institutional pressures. We see, too, how patterns of interaction create a cultural filter that welcomes some claims about housing problems while subordinating or delegitimating others. These cultural patterns help solve conceptual and practical puzzles, such as why coalitions fragment when members agree on many things, and what makes advocacy campaigns separate housing from homelessness or affordability from environmental sustainability. The book concludes by turning this action-centered framework toward improving dialogue between social advocates and researchers.

Arquitecto Tucci, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires, is a place where crushing poverty and violent crime are everyday realities. Homicides—often involving young people—continue to skyrocket, and in the emergency room there, victims of shootings or knifings are an all-too-common sight. This book takes a harrowing look at daily life in Arquitecto Tucci, examining the sources, uses, and forms of interpersonal violence among the urban poor at the very margins of Argentine society. It provides a powerful and intimate account of what it is like to live under the constant threat of violence. It argues that being physically aggressive becomes a habitual way of acting in poor and marginalized communities, and that violence is routine and carries across various domains of public and private life. The book traces how different types of violence—criminal, drug related, sexual, or domestic—overlap, intersect, and blur together. It shows how the state is complicit in the production of harm, and describes the routines and relationships that residents, particularly children, establish to cope with and respond to the constant risk that besieges them and their loved ones.

For many Americans, the Middle West is a vast unknown. This book sets out to rectify this. It shows how the region has undergone extraordinary social transformations over the past half-century and proven itself surprisingly resilient in the face of such hardships as the Great Depression and the movement of residents to other parts of the country. It examines the heartland's reinvention throughout the decades and traces the social and economic factors that have helped it to survive and prosper. The book points to the critical strength of the region's social institutions established between 1870 and 1950—the market towns, farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, townships, rural cooperatives, and manufacturing centers that have adapted with the changing times. It focuses on farmers' struggles to recover from the Great Depression well into the 1950s, the cultural redefinition and modernization of the region's image that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of secondary and higher education, the decline of small towns, the redeployment of agribusiness, and the rapid expansion of edge cities. Drawing arguments from extensive interviews and evidence from the towns and counties of the Midwest, the book provides a unique perspective as both an objective observer and someone who grew up there. It offers an accessible look at the humble yet strong foundations that have allowed the region to endure undiminished.

More than thirty million Americans live in small, out-of-the-way places. Many of them could have joined the vast majority of Americans who live in cities and suburbs. They could live closer to more lucrative careers and convenient shopping, a wider range of educational opportunities, and more robust health care. But they have opted to live differently. In this book, we meet factory workers, shop owners, retirees, teachers, clergy, and mayors—residents who show neighborliness in small ways, but who also worry about everything from school closings and their children's futures to the ups and downs of the local economy. Drawing on more than 700 in-depth interviews in hundreds of towns across America and three decades of census data, the book shows the fragility of community in small towns. It covers a host of topics, including the symbols and rituals of small-town life, the roles of formal and informal leaders, the social role of religious congregations, the perception of moral and economic decline, and the myriad ways by which residents in small towns make sense of their own lives. It also tackles difficult issues such as class and race, abortion, homosexuality, and substance abuse. The book paints a rich panorama of individuals who reside in small communities, finding that, for many people, living in a small town is an important part of self-identity.

Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. This book examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and the Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, it argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of the postindustrial city are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. The book explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. It considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, the book illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, it sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.