William Sites

REFRAMING COMMUNITY PRACTICE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: MULTIPLE TRADITIONS, MULTIPLE CHALLENGES

ABSTRACT: “Community” in the twenty-first century seems to be everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, the rhetoric of community is omnipresent, as nonprofit organizations, civic associations, government agencies, and even multinational corporate entities routinely describe their activities to be community-oriented. On the other hand, community in the broader sense of shared interests or solidarities appears to be under unrelenting attack, challenged by sociopolitical forces and intellectual currents that point toward more fragmented social orders. Locating community as a particular field of practice poses similar dilemmas. This article summarizes the broad outlines of the history of “community organization” in the United States, emphasizing both its multiple traditions and the enduring nature of its practical and strategic dilemmas. It provides an analysis of the key intellectual and social challenges facing the field and the different kinds of pressures they may be exerting on the different traditions of community action. Finally, it suggests four “boundary-crossing” areas of activity that cut across the inherited traditions and may represent emerging sources of innovation for community-based action.

Beyond Trenches and Grassroots? Reflections on Urban Mobilization, Fragmentation, and the Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign in Chicago:

Studies of the relationship between urban-based contention and neoliberal capitalism have recognized the relatively fluid and potentially empowering ways in which networked and multiscaled mobilizations strive to overcome fragmentation. Yet this work has not focused sufficiently on national urban politics for understanding the legacies of division and circumscription that may shape the city as a terrain of conflict. Reconsidering two classic treatments of fragmentation in the work of Katznelson and Castells, I contend that the historically racialized and politically decentralized institutional patterns characteristic of US urban governance continue to hamper urban social-justice mobilizations that seek to grapple with sectoral and scalar cleavages. Drawing on recent work in urban history, labor sociology, and urban politics, my discussion acknowledges the emerging potential of certain kinds of cross-sectoral and multiscalar efforts—such as labor–community coalitions and translocally supported multilocal campaigns—while also emphasizing that these mobilizations take shape within urban political arenas that, in the United States, are notoriously divisive and ‘sticky’. The paper illustrates these points through a brief case example involving the anti-Wal-Mart movement in Chicago.

Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement*

Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term “primitive globalization” in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marxs Capital, this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neoliberal globalization by “separating” or disembedding social actors from conditions that otherwise impede short-term economic activity. This conception, which is considered primarily in relation to the United States, positions the state as both facilitator and victim of globalization, draws attention to state fragmentation and national politics, and places the role of the national state in the local state at the center of unstable linkages. It is suggested that under these conditions the national/local state may be caught between the roles of government and governance; for this reason, as well as others, contemporary globalization remains transitional.

What Do We Really Know About Racial Inequality? Labor Markets, Politics, and the Historical Basis of Black Economic Fortunes

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets.

God from the Machine? Urban Movements Meet Machine Politics in Neoliberal Chicago

This paper examines the anti-Wal-Mart and immigrant rights movements in Chicago in order to understand how local political institutions influence dynamics of exclusion and incorporation. Tracing the post-1970s reconfiguration of the citys machine politics, I argue that a mayor-centered neoclientelism has enabled the local state to flexibly manage the political challenges posed by movements. This analysis seeks to contribute to broader conceptions of contemporary urban governance, suggesting how a ‘deviant’ set of local institutions may facilitate the sort of hybridized formations upon which a neoliberal politics relies.

The bi-national road to immigrant rights mobilization: states, social movements and Chicago's Mexican hometown associations

Although immigrant hometown associations (HTAs) are most often recognized as important for sustaining transnational ties to sending societies, Chicago HTAs took a leadership role in the 2006 marches for US immigrant rights. Employing a binational historical framework focused on the influence of political opportunities and threats on social movement activism, we argue that the involvement of Chicago HTAs in US-oriented mobilization resulted from an evolving series of organizational responses to state actors in both Mexico and the USA. We find that these interactions conferred growing levels of organizational capacity and political legitimacy upon CONFEMEX, the Chicago-based HTA confederation, and played a key role in its embrace of US-centred strategies of popular mobilization in 2006. These findings suggest the utility of a long-term, binational focus on multiple state actors in order to understand the complex political evolution of HTAs and the emergence of the US immigrant rights movement.

New Directions in Urban Theory: Introduction

The idea for this special issue grew out of a panel session at the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which was organized by one of the coeditors (Simon Parker) and included papers by the other co-editor (William Sites) and a third contributor (Talja Blokland). Elvin Wyly, who had attended the Boston session, was kind enough to suggest that the papers might make an interesting special issue for Urban Geography, and he also shared our enthusiasm for the transatlantic editorial collaboration that we hoped would bring together a range of scholars and subjects that might not otherwise have been found within the pages of this journal. As our ideas for the special issue developed, we were very pleased to have our invitations to contribute articles accepted by colleagues who were not able to participate in the Boston session but whose work, we felt, fit very well with the theme of this special issue. These authors included Robert Beauregard, Louise Callier, Robert Fairbanks, Laurie Hanquinet, Susan Parnell, Jennifer Robinson, and Mike Savage—all of whom reflect diverse national geographies and disciplinary affiliations while sharing, along with the other contributors, a strong belief and commitment to theoretical and critical inquiry as an essential dimension in the evolution of urban studies. Despite working on different continents and in somewhat different social science departments, both editors discovered that they shared an enthusiasm and admiration for the way in which human geography had, through the subfield of urban geography, maintained a central concern for the “life of cities” at the core of the discipline far more successfully than what might even be considered the pioneering urban disciplines of sociology and anthropology (for a discussion see Parker, 2004, 159–176; Amin, 2007). As “geography-curious” fellow social scientists, we were therefore delighted to have the opportunity through this journal to share some of the ideas and perspectives that have most engaged and excited us by contemporary urban theorists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. The selection of articles for this special issue does not emerge from a systematic effort to take stock of the current state of the field, and does not pretend to represent the full variety of innovative and field-shaping work in the domain of urban theory. Rapidly developing subfields such as urban political ecology, assemblage theory, complexity theory,

We Travel the Spaceways: Urban Utopianism and the Imagined Spaces of Black Experimental Music

Recent geographical studies of music (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Wood et al., 2007) suggest their potential to contribute to critical utopian thinking. This study offers a preliminary examination of musical utopianism, focusing in particular on its contribution to several questions provoked by the emerging dialogue between urban spatial theory and artistic cultural practice (Pinder, 2008). Drawing insights from philosophy, musicology, sociology, geography, and urban studies, this theoretical investigation centers on how music creates imagined spaces and whether these spaces might be considered utopian. Following a discussion of black musics distinctive engagement with utopia and the city, the Chicago-based work of the composer and bandleader Sun Ra is examined as a complex, experimental exploration of musical utopia in a post-utopian age.

Radical Culture in Black Necropolis: Sun Ra, Alton Abraham, and Postwar Chicago

Post–World War II urban history, by prioritizing either political economy or cultural consumption, has tended to produce narratives of African American experience that emphasize marginalization or incorporation. This article examines a group of Chicago activists and musicians surrounding the jazz experimentalist Sun Ra and his business partner Alton Abraham to explore the contribution of radical political currents and heterodox cultural practices to black urban culture of the early postwar period. Sun Ra and his colleagues engaged in various modes of vernacular dissemination—public preaching, political broadsheets, and, especially, musical performances for community associations and local commercial audiences—to challenge what they saw as the catastrophic degradation of black Americans in the postwar city and to present utopian alternatives. In the process, Ra, Abraham, and their associates developed a distinctive form of cultural production, one that departed from the market-liberal, race-relations orthodoxies of metropolitan elites, black or white, and that anticipated the more visible black cultural radicalism of the 1960s.

Global City, American City Theories of Globalization and Approaches to Urban History

CARL ABBOTT, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, pp. xv, 252, illustrations, tables, maps, notes, index,