Pushing Back the Gates: Neighborhood Perspectives on University-Driven Revitalization in West Philadelphia

4. The Dual Nature of Revitalization in the Twenty-First Century

Media coverage of the West Philadelphia story speaks of rapid and positive revitalization. This chapter presents evidence that speaks of the emerging dual nature of current urban revitalization, the contemporary measure of which has taken a decided turn away from poverty alleviation and incumbent upgrading toward more place-based solutions. Here I suggest that this shift is particularly problematic when left to the well-intentioned planning interests and activities of private institutions such as colleges and universities. This chapter also suggests that the impacts of the University of Pennsylvania’s revitalization efforts can be analyzed only with an understanding of how the university’s role in this particular case of neighborhood change is related to a broad and diffuse literature. I present here an analysis of other studies of neighborhood change that reveal how conceptions of change and revitalization are inherently subjective and political.1 Conflicts over the conceptualization of the term revitalization lead various constituencies to engage in contests to control public space, schools, public safety agendas, and The Dual nature of Revitalization in the Twenty-First Century 4 80 C h a P t e r 4 other urban quality-of-life issues.The studies chosen for review discuss how these conflicts reflect the political economy of American cities and society. Conceptions of crime prevention, housing rehabilitation , and improved public education are influenced by racial and class tensions, and are ultimately shaped by white middle-class ethnocentrism .stated differently,the term revitalization mischaracterizes working-class and poor neighborhoods by defining them as socially disorganized places.2 The reinvasion of these areas by middle-class residents (and in this case university students,faculty,and staff) in the 1970s through the 1990s was organized around the tastes of incoming groups and not around the material and social reality of those communities. My brief thematic synopsis of three ethnographic studies of urban neighborhood change—Elijah Anderson’s Streetwise, BrettWilliams’s Upscaling Downtown, and William Julius Wilson and Richard Taub’s There Goes the Neighborhood—is followed by a discussion of how the themes I highlight connect to broader contemporary analyses of neighborhood change and revitalization.3 Both concepts are nested within larger sociological and planning literatures. The area of research now dominating the revitalization discourse is gentrification, a phenomenon that has captured the attention of progressive academics who are concerned about the role it may play in the displacement of incumbent low-income populations from the inner city. Gentrification has also captured the attention of neoliberal policy makers who suggest that it may simultaneously inspire broad private reinvestment at the urban core and in disperse pockets of concentrated poverty. The next section is a brief discussion of two narratives of urban change in which universities made significant contributions. These studies look at the role that the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania played in containing the race-based neighborhood succession that “threatened” to place their campuses in the center of predominantly African American neighborhoods. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the literature of contemporary planning and sociology is lacking in narratives of the contributions of universities to urban redevelopment and t h e d Ua l n at U r e o f r e v i ta l i z at i o n 81 revitalization in the post–Cold War, postindustrial, knowledgecentered urban economy. In the United states, the notion of neighborhood change can mean many things, but primarily it involves neighborhood decline and/or revitalization. I employ a broad definition that refers to revitalization and more specifically to the upgrading or improvement of previously blighted or decrepit urban conditions.4 such a definition encompasses several relevant topics, including gentrification. However, while it is sufficient in a general way, new modes of inner city revitalization have attempted to settle the debate by creating new definitions that center on real estate development,quality of life, and profit generation as metrics of success or effectiveness.5 In the course of the research and in subsequent chapters, I used the broader term neighborhood change so that both my own and my informants’ perspectives would not be informed by normative ideas of urban neighborhood revitalization. This is largely because of the variation and politicization of the terms revitalization and, to a greater extent, gentrification in academic discourse. For this reason, I focus on how residents conceptualize and interpret the changes in their neighborhoods. In many ways, the perception...