Governing the “New Hometowns”: Race, Power, and Neighborhood Participation in the New Inner City

Abstract

Inner city residents, once shunned and ignored by city planners, are now seen as a vital resource in United States urban redevelopment plans. This shift in perspective has come at a time when municipal elites routinely champion the neoliberal strategies of privatization, marketization, and consumerism across the urban policy spectrum. In this article, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a gentrifying neighborhood in Philadelphia to illuminate the ways in which race, power, and neighborhood participation shape urban governance. Against the governmentalist approach, which tends to present a totalizing vision of neoliberal rule, this article emphasizes the failures and instabilities of urban governance under contemporary conditions. In particular, I direct attention to the overlooked dynamics of racial politics as they play out at the neighborhood level, where attempts to encourage self-governance on the part of inner city residents are predicated upon post-civil rights era notions of diversity and multiculturalism. The imposition of this politics produces new forms of racial inequality and class division that, paradoxically, undermine neoliberal rule itself.

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