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Revisiting the Citadel and the Ghetto

Revisiting the Citadel and the Ghetto The author examines the relevance of racial discourses to neoliberal urban development occurring in older, former industrial cities in the United States. Rather than treating the production of new development spaces as separate from the adjacent inner-city neighborhoods, the author focuses on the significance of race to “making sense of,” and, in turn, legitimizing the stark contrasts between revitalized enclaves and the inner city as a central component of contemporary neoliberal urban development. The concept of legibility is introduced and developed to demonstrate how ideological and discursive strategies simultaneously promote middle-class urban development enclaves and strategically account for—or make legible—the presence of minority, poor communities adjacent to them. The process of legibility is explored in waterfront developments in Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania. The methods involved extensive fieldwork and semistructured interviews with city officials, employees of economic development authorities and public-private partnerships, leaders of community development organizations, and local residents from each city, conducted between 2009 and 2015. The study’s key findings incorporate an ideological dimension of race into an analysis of uneven urban development. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Sociology of Race and Ethnicity SAGE

Revisiting the Citadel and the Ghetto

Mele, Christopher
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity , Volume 2 (3): 18 – Jul 1, 2016
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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© American Sociological Association 2015
ISSN
2332-6492
eISSN
2332-6506
DOI
10.1177/2332649215608874
Publisher site
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Abstract

The author examines the relevance of racial discourses to neoliberal urban development occurring in older, former industrial cities in the United States. Rather than treating the production of new development spaces as separate from the adjacent inner-city neighborhoods, the author focuses on the significance of race to “making sense of,” and, in turn, legitimizing the stark contrasts between revitalized enclaves and the inner city as a central component of contemporary neoliberal urban development. The concept of legibility is introduced and developed to demonstrate how ideological and discursive strategies simultaneously promote middle-class urban development enclaves and strategically account for—or make legible—the presence of minority, poor communities adjacent to them. The process of legibility is explored in waterfront developments in Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania. The methods involved extensive fieldwork and semistructured interviews with city officials, employees of economic development authorities and public-private partnerships, leaders of community development organizations, and local residents from each city, conducted between 2009 and 2015. The study’s key findings incorporate an ideological dimension of race into an analysis of uneven urban development.

Journal

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity – SAGE

Published: Jul 1, 2016

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