Abstract
The countdown has begun. the end is in sight. Indeed, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. No, I am not writing about the current Great Recession, but instead my term as the editor of City & Community. I have come to realize that a good deal of my identity as a scholar has become interwoven with the pages of this Journal. It has been a great adventure for me, and I intend to offer my final thanks and farewells in the next issue. the last issue of my tenure as editor will be devoted entirely to studies of Mumbai and Shanghai. It will be edited by my good friend, Xiangming Chen, who served as the guest editor of City & Community while I was in China. We have great expectations for this particular issue and hope that it experiences the same good fortune as has the recent movie about Mumbai, “Slumdog Millionaire.”
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For those of you who have not yet heard, Hilary Silver, our book review editor, has been chosen as the new editor of City & Community. I think she will do a wonderful job, bringing a continental perspective to these pages. I know she is very excited and eager to get her work underway. on the last page of this issue, we identify her address and where submissions and other correspondence should now be mailed.
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These last two issues under my editorship contain the usual good array of materials about cities and communities. This issue, in particular, has four articles that touch on these matters directly. the first article is by Mark Warren, the well–known writer/activist who has been engaged over the years with the Industrial Areas Foundation, the organization originally created by Saul Alinsky. Warren wrote a very compelling book about this organization, Dry Bones Rattling, his experience with it, and the ways in which faith–based community organizing can mobilize and extend the benefits of social capital. Here in this article, he takes his interest abroad, to England, to examine the work of the counterpart there to the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization called the British Citizens Organizing Foundation. He uses the comparison to deepen our understanding of the ways in which the success of these kinds of community–organizing efforts can be achieved.
Warren finds that while the British organization was successful as a nationwide effort, it did not have the same degree of success at the local levels—where, of course, it really counts. in the end, he believes that broad institutional forces shape the work and success, or failure, of community organizing, and that the effectiveness at the local levels in the United States is at least partly the result of the federal constitutional structure here as compared to the national structures in England. He also believes that community organizing can only really be effective if it begins at the local level; or, to quote him, “the unusual success of community organizing in cultivating broad participation rests, in an important way, in its ability to provide people with a viable form of local politics.” This is an exceptionally well–written and insightful article, one that I am sure all of you will find of considerable interest now that we have a community organizer sitting as President of the United States.
The second article is by Jody Vallejo, a young doctoral student of immigration who has just assumed a position at the University of Southern California. She is interested in the ways that middle–class Latinas develop professional organizations and use such organizations to advance their economic and business interests. in particular, she takes on the well–known thesis of Alex Portes and Min Zhou regarding the different paths to assimilation that groups take today in America, a set of paths largely determined by their human capital, on the one hand, and their broader social/geographic environs on the other hand. in the theory, the children of groups with low human capital on arrival, such as immigrants from Mexico, tend to be channeled off to the lower rungs of the ladder of success and assimilation in America. But the theory, like all such structural theories, tends to downplay the active agency of immigrants and their children, and grandchildren, and it is at this point that Vallejo makes an important contribution, showing precisely how in Santa Ana, California, a city in Orange County, second– and third–generation Latinas organized and mobilized resources for their own professional advancement and success in America. Or, as she says in her abstract: “while contemporary immigration research maintains that Latino ethnic communities lack the ‘high quality resources’ that might buffer against downward assimilation and advance upward mobility, these findings suggest that it takes one or two extra generations for Latinos to mobilize class and ethnic resources to promote mobility.” This is very important research that I hope will receive widespread attention among students of immigration.
The last two articles cover the issues of poverty in the American suburbs, on the one hand, and an example of the ways in which the vested interests and powers of cities and suburbs can be mobilized on behalf of an effective metropolitan–wide policy, on the other hand. in the first article, Amy Holliday and Rachel Dwyer of the Ohio State University show how suburbs are far more diverse in terms of the location of poverty than we heretofore had been led to believe. Indeed, they reject the old concentric zone theory of the Chicago School, specifically, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, insofar as contemporary students have used it to talk about how poverty from the inner zones can spill over into the outer zones, the suburbs. for aficionados of the old Chicago School of Sociology, these are instructive lessons about the nature of the modern metropolis. and the last article is by a young doctoral student, Paul Knudson, from that breeding ground of great urban sociologists, the Department of Sociology at the University of Albany. Knudson undertakes a study of the origins of light–rail transit in the Twin Cities of Minnesota to uncover how power can be mobilized to tip the balance of forces against the usual growth machine politics. He finds, in this case, that it took a combination both of governor–brokered deals and of other important local players to avoid, if you will forgive the expression, getting this particular project derailed.
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As usual—and thanks again to Hilary Silver and Leonard Nevarez—we have a group of three very interesting book reviews. One is a new book by Loïc Waquant, Urban Outcasts. It receives a very nice and thoughtful treatment from Nikki Jones. It is also a book I am currently reviewing for another journal so, though I have not yet finished it, I have a good sense of what it is about. I think all urban scholars are likely to find it of great interest even though they may disagree with some of the arguments. What I most like about the book is the muscular writing of Waquant, something to be especially admired because English is not his native tongue. Sparks fly off his pages along with a good deal of passion. It's a treat to read and, like me, I think many of you will find it fun to read as well.