Book Reviews: Clément Rivière, Leurs enfants dans la ville. Enquête auprès de parents à Paris et à Milan

Abstract

neighborhood-specific “quality-of-life plans,” which the NCP’s programming was meant to advance. As Gonzales convincingly shows, however, residents ultimately had little influence over the NCP’s neighborhood implementation. The NCP’s central leadership socialized its local partners to become trusting and loyal partners, which required avoiding contentious programs as well as anything that might trigger conflict with city hall and downtown elites. The third and fourth chapters focus on grassroots organizations in Englewood and Little Village. These organizations launched initiatives that flowed more directly from resident demand and variably included such things as improving access to public transit and nutritious food, increasing park space, enhancing safety, and demanding political accountability from city hall representatives. Gonzales describes how these community organizations “educated residents about politics, urban policy, and processes related to land use” (p. 87), thus increasing residents’ ability to assert their own needs when confronting powerful individuals, agencies, and corporations. Deploying their collective skepticism, furthermore, community organizations strategically activated ties to experts, universities, environmental groups, and sometimes even NCP-affiliated organizations while ensuring that their vision would not be coopted. As a reader interested in local activism and mobilization, I was especially captivated by the chapters dealing with grassroots activism, which provide a wealth of fascinating cases and political dynamics. In relation to the study of the NCP itself, I would have appreciated an even deeper engagement in two ways. First, Gonzales criticizes the NCP at length for its focus on social service provision rather than a more radical agenda of mobilizing and durably empowering residents. Her diagnosis of the NCP as fundamentally nonradical and even elite-friendly is certainly persuasive, but it will not entirely surprise readers familiar with the history of urban antipoverty and development initiatives. I would have liked more discussion of how the NCP case extends this literature. Second, the book does not describe the NCP’s local social services or the experience of using them in any detail. As Gonzales notes, some residents criticized the NCP for “poverty pimping,” but the perspective of those who relied on the program’s services remains largely unexamined. How did clients feel about the NCP’s programs? Did they see them as belittling patronage or did they feel more favorably, possibly even empowered? Including their experiences would have enabled the reader to come to an even more complete assessment of the NCP. Building a Better Chicago represents a valuable addition to the literatures on neighborhood development, community organizations, and urban activism. The book is closely attuned to the recent trend of analyzing neighborhoods as political fields that are shaped by both local and nonlocal actors, including, in this case, downtown elites and corporations but also potential allies like college students and sympathetic experts. The book thus represents an important source for anyone who wishes to better understand urban politics and neighborhood change in low-income and racialized communities today.