Hilary Silver

Philadelphia : neighborhoods, division, and conflict in a postindustrial city

List of Tables and Figures Preface Series Preface 1. The Legacy of the Industrial City Population and Settlement Patterns Machine Politics in the Industrial Era The Transition to Postindustrialism Declining Economic Opportunity and Racial Conflict The Central Argument of the Book 2. Economic Erosion and the Growth of Inequality The National Context Philadelphias Special Vulnerability to National Trends The Changing Distribution of Jobs in the Postindustrial Economy The Changing Earnings Profile Who Gains? Who Loses? Workforce Participation Family Wage Earners Conclusion 3. Housing and Neighborhoods Housing in Philadelphia: An Overview Housing Conditions at the End of World War II Postwar Reorganization The Decline of the City: Despair and Exodus, 1955-1975 The Paradox of Revitalization and Decay, 1975-1985 Race and the Regional Housing Market Housing the City Conclusion and Prospects 4. Philadelphias Redevelopment Process Continuous Redevelopment Why Redevelop? Trends in Redevelopment Two Case Studies The Political Economy of Redevelopment The Outcomes: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Conclusions 5. Race, Class, and Philadelphia Politics The Dissolution of the Ruling Postwar Coalition Why the Fragmentation? The Business Community and Philadelphia Politics Populism and Minority Politics Conclusion 6. The Prospects for City-Suburban Accommodation Barriers to Political Cooperation Opportunities for Regional Cooperation Transportation Port Facilities Solid Waste How Realistic Are the Prospects for Regionalism? 7. Alternative Scenarios for Philadelphias Future Appendix A: The Index of Dissimilarity Appendix B: Economic Transition: Further Data Appendix C: Income Differentials by Race Notes Index

Homework and domestic work

This study assesses two competing theories about the extent to which homework—paid work in the home—helps integrate work and domestic roles for men and women. Contrasting male and female homeworkers with their counterparts working outside the home, it supports some aspects of both the resource and role overload theories, but predominantly the role overload perspective. Homeworkers, especially in the working class, experience less interference between job and family life, but perform more housework and child care. They have no more leisure time nor greater marital satisfaction than those working outside the home, but receive more family assistance with their paid jobs, suggesting that they combine tasks from their “first” and “second shifts.” Working at home does not break down gender roles in domestic life. Despite time saved from commuting, male homeworkers perform no more housework than comparable men working outside the home. Thus, the gender division of unpaid household labor is not simply a matter of resources or spatial logistics.

Race and Job Dismissals in a Federal Bureaucracy

We examine the racial differential in job dismissals in an unexpected setting the federal government. Blacks were more than twice as likely to be fired, after controlling for human capital variables, job tenure, detailed job title, union protection, absenteeism, and incidence of accidents, injuries, and disciplinary actions. That black postal workers in a large northeastern city were more likely to be fired than their white counterparts suggests that racial differentials in job dismissals are at least as great in the private sector. A theory of job dismissals should consider employer practices as well as worker characteristics.

Social Exclusion: Comparative Analysis of Europe and Middle East Youth

Most typically, analyses of youth have employed either the neo-classical economic framework of human capital or the socio-demographic framework of life-course research in the Middle East. While both have produced important findings and insights, their focus on supply-side processes of individuals is limited. The role of institutions on the supply side is especially important in understanding youth disadvantage in the Middle East. As research turns to the sources of youth disadvantage, comparative studies may fruitfully adopt a perspective oriented to the idea of social exclusion. Whatever the content and criteria of social membership, socially excluded groups and individuals lack capacity or access to social opportunity. Exclusion breaks the larger social bond holding groups together. Thus, exclusion is at once a macro and a micro phenomenon. The theoretical orientation of social exclusion can be distinguished from the previous two approaches in that it considers trajectories of group relations as well as relations between individuals, and examines not only those excluded, but also the excluding institutions and individuals that benefit from the process.

Divided Cities in the Middle East

continuestopromoteresearchonurbansociallifebeyondthe United States, featuring three articles on Jerusalem and Beirut, divided cities in theMiddle East.This introduction places the articles in the broader context of two prominent urbanthemes. One is the distinctiveness of the ancient and ever-changing cities of the MiddleEast. Cities in the region certainly differ among themselves, but share some commonali-ties in history, spatial structure, political organization, and culture. However, that distinc-tiveness is eroding under the external influences of globalization, international politics,and neoliberal policies. The second theme in these articles is that of divided or contestedcities. The authors apply more general theories of social and symbolic boundaries tourban sociology as well as theories of the social construction of urban space, its represen-tational force and cultural significance. In Beirut and Jerusalem, contests over space arenot merely conflicts between exchange value and use value, productive capital and col-lective consumption. Although class struggles are occurring and gated communities arespringing up in the region, more deadly are conflicts about ethnonational identity andspiritual values, sovereignty and the sacred. Divided cities are polarized over religion,ethnicity, even nationality, so that conflicts over space, territory, and “turf” go beyondthe rough and tumble of interest group pluralism, the class, ethnic, and racial clashes sofamiliar in U.S. urban politics. Although American cities do periodically erupt in com-munal violence, race riots and gang wars do not compare to the protracted fighting tocontrol sacred sites between organized sectarian militias in the Middle East. Those com-batants split cities right down the middle, with social boundaries marked by barricades,checkpoints, and walls. Europe has not escaped these deadly conflicts over urban space:Belfast, Mostar, Nicosia, and Sarajevo come to mind. Thus, Beirut and Jerusalem addressgeneral theoretical issues for urban sociologists and cities beyond the Middle East. Theyalso offer lessons about boundary-making processes generally.

Only So Many Hours in a Day: Time Constraints, Labour Pools and Demand for Consumer Services

Some sociological sources of increasing demand for consumer services are discussed in this article. Contrary to J. Gershunys theory of ‘self-service: jobs in these industries are still growing, despite productivity improvements, due to increasing house-hold demand generated by constraints placed on time by both paid and unpaid production and insufficient pools of household labour upon which to draw. Social trends with these effects include increasing female labour force participation and longevity, declining household size, later age at marriage, political struggles over state provision, and factors internal to the state itself.

Obama's Urban Policy: A Symposium

Barack Obama is the first President of the United States to have a background in community organizing. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama recounts his experience working on the Developing Communities Project with a coalition of South Chicago black churches to address neighborhood joblessness.1 From the de-industrialized far South Side, he moved on to Harvard Law School and a life in politics. In the 2008 presidential election, he won the votes of city residents by a 28-point margin. In his first month in office, President Obama created a White House Office of Urban Affairs. For these reasons, one might reasonably expect the newly elected Chief Executive to adopt a comprehensive national urban policy, moving the federal government back into an active role of improving life in American cities. This Symposium explores whether one can properly speak of a return to national urban policy under the Obama Administration and if so, of what it consists.

Dual Cities? Sectoral Shifts and Metropolitan Income Inequality, 1980–90

The sectoral shift from manufacturing to services is one of several potential explanations for increasing income inequality in the United States. This article reframes national-level explanations of rising inequality at the level of urban labour markets and assesses their relative contributions to levels and trends in metropolitan income inequality. We find that sectoral shifts, especially the rates of deindustrialisation and employment growth in personal services, significantly affect changes in Gini indices for the largest constant-boundary MSAs between 1980 and 1990. In addition, rising metropolitan inequality is associated with the trend towards self-employment and such supply-side factors as local education levels, changing family structure and immigration. The study provides mixed support for the mismatch and global cities hypotheses.

Editorial: The Urban Sociology of Detroit

This is my last issue as Editor of City & Community, an appropriate place to thank those who wrote and reviewed for the journal during my two terms. It was a privilege to serve with the longstanding senior Associate Editors, Nancy Denton and Sharon Zukin, who provided wise counsel, intellectual guidance, and good sense. I am also grateful to the many Editorial Board members who contributed to making City & Community such an engaging, scholarly, high-quality publication. Managing Editors Sukriti Issar, Orly Clerge, Omar Pereyra, and Aaron Niznik ably organized the review process and made the lonely job of editing the journal more enjoyable. It has also been a pleasure to work with the staff at Wiley-Blackwell. Finally, thank you to the members of the ASA Section on Community and Urban Sociology for the honor of allowing me to read your work and learn so much from you over the past six years. To mark the transition, our newest Associate Editor, Karyn Lacy of the University of Michigan, kindly consented to solicit and edit a symposium of peer-reviewed essays on Detroit. The idea for this issue originated with William Tabb, who, with others in Michigan, has been exploring the idea of a Detroit School of urbanism. He recalled that the inaugural 2002 issue of our journal contained a debate over the existence of a Los Angeles School of urbanism, to complement or challenge the hegemonic Chicago School. In 2003, David Halle proposed the existence of a New York School of urbanism as well. Tabb pointed out that, in contrast to the Los Angeles and Chicago Schools’ shared emphasis on growth, Detroit—once America’s fourth largest city—exemplifies a class of declining cities. Presented with this astute observation, the Editorial Board members gave the green light to a special issue on Detroit. Although there is considerable urban scholarship on this city, much of it is written by historians, economists, political scientists, and planners, not sociologists. The historians look back at Detroit’s industrial heyday, the UAW and African-Americans’ struggle for equal rights. The planners look forward in search of a new industry or new governance arrangement that can restore Detroit’s grandeur. But perhaps surprisingly, urban sociologists have been reticent. Indeed, the University of Michigan’s Detroit Area Study, established in 1951, was never really about Detroit per se. On the 37th anniversary of the annual survey, conducted to teach graduate students how to do research, Converse and Mayer (1988, p. 9) wrote that if the

Editorial: The Centrality of Public Space

This issue of City & Community assembles four articles on the theme of public space. Few topics in urban sociology are as timely. Around the world, citizens have been assembling in central squares to protest injustices and demand democratic rights. In contrast, cities are privatizing the construction, maintenance, and policing of parks, streets, waterfronts, and plazas, creating zones of exclusion. Municipal governments and planners are redesigning public spaces largely to attract private investment and affluent taxpayers, while displacing, banishing, and even criminalizing “undesirables.” Not surprisingly, conflicts over the city’s public space—its extent, openness, regulation, and control—are multiplying. Sociologists have traditionally adopted a liberal democratic orientation toward public space. In this perspective, the city holds back the State, enabling the flourishing of a broad civil society. Stadtluft macht frei (“urban air makes you free”). The city materializes the abstract communicative freedom of the public realm described by Habermas. In the autonomous “world of strangers,” a moral code of civility governs human relations among essentially equal citizens. Spaces are open to all classes, the “universal otherhood,” and an ethic of tolerance or even a “cosmopolitan canopy” prevails. Civility, Richard Sennett maintained, is behaving with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remaining aloof from them. Face-to-face contact among strangers, who are neither brothers nor enemies, is noncommittal but “ritually ratified.” In this ritual exchange of gifts, strangers reciprocally perform social rites of public behavior, concealing private sentiments and enacting manners, politeness, niceness. In Cuddihy’s phrase, “civility is not merely regulative of social behavior; it is an order of ‘appearance’ constitutive of that behavior.” Yet both capitalism and private family life threaten “public man.” From Olmsted to William Whyte, designers of public spaces aimed to moderate class conflict and ethnic stresses of the industrial workplace through common recreations, civic pride, and civil exchanges. In the conventional view, “the public” is also politically constituted and deliberates in public space. The agora was more than a marketplace; it embodied democracy. In cafes, lodges, and other “third places,” discursive interaction produces “civic virtue” and “public opinion.” Citizens learn to compromise their differences and practice leadership. As Margaret Kohn argues, public space promotes democracy not least because it forces the middle and upper classes to confront the common humanity of fellow citizens usually avoided and stigmatized as “the other.” Today, growing disillusionment with electoral democracy and communication mediated by commercial mass media are contributing to a revival of direct participation in community affairs. While Robert Putnam bemoans the decline of social capital, new forms of public engagement are emerging. Publicity calls for performance. As the revival of interest in Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau suggests, simply strolling the streets and taking in the passing pedestrian parade are quintessential popular amusements in the city. In the best public spaces