|
Product Description
High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post–World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex.
Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.
American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Explosion of Chicago's Black Street Gangs-1900 to Present
- Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
- The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia
- Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio
- Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
- American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
- Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 (Historical Studies of Urban America)
- The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics)
- High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness)
- Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
*If this is not the "American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 7, 2024 02:24 +08.