James C. Fraser

Beyond Gentrification: Mobilizing Communities and Claiming Space

During the 20th century, neighborhood change and the displacement of low-income residents from their homes has occurred in a variety of ways from the demolition of entire areas to more recent revitalization efforts emphasizing the building of community and new governance structures. In this paper, I argue two interrelated points. First, whereas economic displacement of low-income people from their homes and neighborhoods is one effect of neighborhood revitalization initiatives, there is a wider set of factors that constitutes the marginalization, displacement, and exclusion of certain population groups from effectively making claims on neighborhood space. Second, in an era of neoliberalization, whereby civil society is expected to play a larger role in neighborhood governance and the provision of social welfare, the formation and activities of neighborhood-based communities, and their relation to state and market forces, have become increasingly important factors to examine. In this article, I address these areas of inquiry through a case study of a neighborhood revitalization initiative in Chattanooga, Tennessee that has been under way since 1998.

The Construction Of The Local And The Limits Of Contemporary Community Building In The United States

With new relationships between state and civil society, community building has arisen as a preferred mechanism to ameliorate urban poverty. Community building is a much-supported but undercriticized paradigm, especially with respect to questions about the benefits that impoverished neighborhood residents actually acquire from these initiatives. The authors examine community building as a process that is related to larger agendas meant to enact certain productions of urban space and challenge many taken-for-granted notions about the realized benefits of this form of antipoverty work. Moreover, they argue that community-building initiatives occur in an increasingly globalized context, providing opportunities for stakeholders other than residents to promote certain productions of space and place. A case study is presented of an initiative occurring in a southern city in the United States to highlight the theoretical framework presented.

The Role of Public, Private, Non-profit and Community Sectors in Shaping Mixed-income Housing Outcomes in the US

Since the 1990s, public policy-makers in the US have renewed support for mixed-income housing development as a means towards inner-city neighbourhood revitalisation and poverty amelioration. Yet, research to date finds that, while these mixed-income developments have promoted neighbourhood revitalisation, they have accomplished less for people in these areas who live in poverty. This paper theorises about the conditions that may in principle lead to these alternative outcomes. The approach emphasises the continuity in goal sets and capacities among four sets of urban actors—investors, local government, non-profits and community residents. To examine extant theory and an alternative model, case study evidence is offered from two comparable cities with different mixed-income initiatives and different configurations of goals and capacities among the four stakeholder groups. It is found that place-based outcomes (i.e. neighbourhood revitalisation) from mixed-income efforts hinge on the continuity of goals and effective capacities of investors, government and non-profits, but not community residents. It is also found that, with or without goal consonance and capacity, existing residents are relatively underserved by mixed-income initiatives while other stakeholders realise a variety of benefits.

The Interpretive Repertoires of Whites on Race-Targeted Policies: Claims Making of Reverse Discrimination

Drawing on the accounts of white men and women, we examine the role that discourse plays in the formation and reinforcement of ideals that perpetuate social disadvantaging. In addition, using discourse analysis we examine the redefinition of race-targeting policies from being a social remedy into being a current social problem. We collected interview and questionnaire data from a sample of 310 students and faculty at a predominantly white university, regarding their attitude toward race- and income-targeted social policies in the United States. We find that the majority of respondents who oppose race-targeting policies (1) frame racial discrimination as a problem of the past; (2) define race-targeting as a subversion of meritocracy; and therefore, (3) devalue programs that seek to provide differential opportunity to those groups that have been structurally disadvantaged in American society. We conclude that the “American stratification ethos” can be employed for disadvantaging purposes.

HOPE VI, Colonization, and the Production of Difference

Between 1993 and 2010, the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) Program sought to transform public housing by demolishing large spatially concentrated developments and replacing them with mixed-income housing. Drawing on postcolonial geographical thought, this article interrogates HOPE VI as a colonial project. Through the displacement of public housing residents, the razing of the development in which they lived, and the rebuilding of mixed-income housing, including new public housing units, HOPE VI projects seek to revitalize neighborhoods by attracting higher-income homeowners to relocate in these areas. Proponents of HOPE VI and other mixed-income housing strategies contend that socioeconomic mixing will provide a range of benefits for low-income residents in these environments. Yet, there is a growing body of research suggesting that income mixing itself can be a problem for public housing residents because the neighborhood social relations operate to marginalize them. Using a case study conducted in a midsized southern city, we build on this prior work by examining the sociospatial narratives that neighbors surrounding the HOPE VI site use to identify themselves. The article focuses on how new homeowners, residing in a self-contained development right across the street from a HOPE VI site, construct themselves as a community by situating public housing residents as their other. We conclude that these sociospatial distinctions are integral to the broader, state-led effort to colonize and transform this low-income neighborhood situated next to the downtown business district.

Methadone Clinic Culture: The Everyday Realities of Female Methadone Clients

The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which clinic practices create obstacles for women who seek drug treatment. On the basis of interviews and participant observation at a methadone clinic, this article uncovers issues that women negotiate with their status as methadone clients. Being a woman and being a methadone client, from a feminist perspective, interact in our society to provide various meanings for women. Accounts from female clients make visible the neglect that persists in treatment settings. Their experiences illustrate the dilemmas women face when entering a male-dominated organization. These stories comprise the everyday workings of the methadone clinic and are part of the production of subsequent clinic culture, which is embedded in the larger social world that is gendered.

Modes of Engagement for Urban Research: Enacting a Politics of Possibility

Cities are increasingly cast as being shaped by globalization and related neoliberal policies. While these diverse literatures have provided needed theoretical advancement to rethink the city in relation to political–economic change, they also run the risk of conceptualizing, studying, and representing cities without sufficient attention to the spatial copresence of multiple actors. The result is that some treatments of the city reproduce a unified story line that conceals human agency, reads as if there is only one trajectory on which all cities are moving, and does not engage in imagining alternative urban futures. In this paper we suggest that there is a continued need to critically examine the spatial narratives mobilized both by researchers as well as by the other actors they encounter. Drawing on the widespread idea that the stories which researchers tell are intimately linked with the conduct of research itself, we advocate a researcher mode of engagement that permits collaborative critique of projects that aim to transform urban space. We report on our experience with two research practices—grounded interviewing, and the public research memo—to provide empirical examples of our perspective.

Performance Management, Managerial Citizenship and Worker Commitment: A Study of the United States Postal Service with Some Global Implications

This exploratory study of the US Postal Service examines worker perceptions of ‘management citizenship’ in a high performance workplace, and assesses the impact of management citizenship on worker commitment. Qualitative data from employee narratives show many workers view performance management practices as unjust and at a disjuncture with perceived organizational and broader societal goals. Especially salient are issues of worker voice, equity and the non-universalistic treatment of employees by managers. Worker perceptions vary across race and gender. Effects of such perceptions on the organizational commitment of workers have been insuf.ciently studied, but regression analyses show that net of other predictors, worker perceptions of management citizenship are consequential to organizational commitment, as are the intersection of their gender and race for black women, and worker views of workplace heterogeneity, colleague citizenship and personal citizenship in the organization. The implications of these .ndings are drawn out generally and globally, with a focus on ameliorative management citizenship strategies.

Creating effective flood mitigation policies

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 increased awareness of the vulnerability of people and property in flood-prone areas of the United States, particularly repetitively flooded properties. Prior to Katrina, repetitive loss properties cost the United States over

Understanding Community Building in Urban America

200 million annually [General Accounting Office (GAO), 2004]. The U.S. Congress passed the Bunning-Bereuter-Blumenauer Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2004 (FIRA) to maintain the fiscal soundness of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and ease the burden of repetitive loss properties on NFIP Federal calculations indicate that every dollar spent on mitigation activities creates a