In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 3 Participatory Alternatives The Neighborhood Approach Where the state is the only environment in which we can live communal lives, they inevitably lose contact, become detached, and thus society disintegrates. A nation can be maintained only if, between the state and the individual, there is intercalated a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their spheres of action and drag them in this way into the general torrent of social life. —Emile Durkheim To develop alternatives to pure representative democracy, we need to examine the building blocks and networks that make participatory, face-to-face interaction possible. The smallest unit in the network clearly needs to accommodate all who want to be involved and allow them to work with each other productively . One kind of group that meets this criterion is the neighborhood organization . We will delve into the detailed requirements that such an organization should satisfy in the following three chapters. In this chapter, we will lay the groundwork for that examination by describing the neighborhood structures that are part of this study, and the data that has been gathered on their activities. Neighborhood organizations have been the subject of a great deal of literature in the social sciences, but most work has focused on the concept of neighborhood itself, on neighborhood change, or on the social interactions that do or do not take place at this level. For many, the only political role of neighborhoods has been a reactive one in response to racial and other “destabilizing” pressures of change. Juliet Saltman has classified this literature into three basic perspectives:1 the traditional “degenerative theory” of neighborhood change, which postulates a standard pattern of decay following low-income racial or ethnic migration to the area, described by Wilson2 and Molotock;3 an 33 “interactionist” theory, which argues that social support networks can prevent this kind of decay, based on the work of Suttles4 and Hunter;5 and an “interventionist ” theory growing in the 1980s, which states that racially integrated neighborhoods will stabilize if sufficient resources are mobilized for collective action early enough. Leading advocates of the latter include Orfield,6 Taub,7 and Saltman8 herself. A major version of this line of thought, expressing a kind of historical determinism in the form of a five-stage “neighborhood life cycle,” has been advanced by Downs,9 and has become widely accepted. Naparstek10 and Cohen,11 however, have offered serious critiques of this view. Another vast body of neighborhood research has focused on the desirability of a kind of village life that neighborhoods may or may not be able to provide . This work began with assertions by researchers such as Wirth,12 Nisbet ,13 and Stein14 that urban neighborhoods cannot duplicate the functions of the small village community that we all know and love. Others, however, such as Janowitz,15 Jacobs,16 Gans,17 and Fischer18 have pointed out that many people remain involved in their neighborhoods, have significant numbers of attachments there, and even use neighborhood interaction as a guide to social behavior. The perspective of this book differs from that of most neighborhood research in that it attempts to look at neighborhoods in an organizational framework tied into, or potentially tied into, the larger political reality. While many of the issues that neighborhoods in this study do become involved with, particularly in the area of zoning and land use, reflect the kind of pressures for neighborhood change considered in the foregoing literature, the vast majority of the organizations are not in a reactive mode. Their neighborhoods are not threatened by daunting social forces. For the most part, in fact, these neighborhoods are relatively stable. And they are working on issues that encompass the whole range of quality of life in an urban setting. In addition, our understanding of these organizations is not limited by the extent to which village-like communities are a reality in their neighborhoods. While the social interaction that takes place in the neighborhood, within the organization itself and between the organization and the community at large, is important to this study, the focus here is upon those forms of interaction that have relevance to the political issues of concern to neighborhood residents. Some of these issues may be very local and “village-oriented,” but many others involve problems that ultimately must be dealt with at city, state, and even national levels. The question for this book is how well such...

Share