Great article in yesterday's Boston Globe - a sort of a review of current books and scholarship about urban politics and gentrification. The article is by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia, and challenges the (outdated) notion that gentrification equals well-off whites displacing poor blacks. It's more complicated than that nowadays, more like a mosaic of financial interests, political clout (or lack thereof), public and private entrepreneurship, and local/state/federal investment.
New work includes William Julius Wilson's _There Goes the Neighborhood_, Lance Freeman's _There Goes the Hood_, and Mary Pattilo's _Black on Black_, the latter of which Venkatesh critiques for the "unorthodox methodology" of participant observation, but considers to be a follow-on to WEB DuBois, which is a pretty big compliment. If I should end up in Chicago, or teaching planning, these would be worth reading, and probably worth reading in any case for ideas about civic engagement.
Posted by otto0114 at April 2, 2007 08:58 AM