Live and Let Live: Negotiating Difference in a Diverse Urban Neighborhood

Author: Evelyn M. Perry

Dissertation School: Indiana University

Pages: 169

Publication Date: August 2010

Availability:
Available from the HUD USER Helpdesk P.O. Box 23268 Washington, DC 20026-3268 Toll Free: 1-800-245-2691 Fax: 1-202-708-9981 Email: oup@oup.org

Access Number: 10873

Abstract:

Inequalities in the United States are often rooted in place. Researchers have convincingly demonstrated that persistent racial and economic segregation constrains social mobility, access to opportunities, and efforts to achieve a higher quality of life. Many advocate increased residential integration as a policy goal. However, the long-held view of heterogeneous communities as unsteady and conflict-ridden suggests that such communities are vulnerable to resegregation. Integration, the conventional wisdom goes, is desirable but not sustainable. Yet demographic trends (globalization, immigration, decreased segregation) are contributing to increases in the number and stability of diverse neighborhoods. Because these increases are relatively recent, the processes contributing to the durability of neighborhood heterogeneity have received little scholarly attention.

Through a case study of Riverwest, a racially and economically mixed neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I address two linked research questions: How do residents of a socially diverse community negotiate difference? How does Riverwest maintain its social diversity? I combine 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork and 60 in-depth interviews to illuminate patterns in neighborhood interaction processes and neighborhood negotiation strategies, and investigate processes of conflict and cohesion.

My analyses indicate that neighborhoods play a significant role in shaping how residents define and negotiate difference-and that investigating these boundary-drawing processes is key to understanding social organization and intergroup relations in diverse neighborhoods. Riverwest's location as a buffer neighborhood between concentrated disadvantage and concentrated privilege produces tensions that require continual management. Living with difference is a stream of confrontations, resolutions, accommodations, and collaborations. Local culture provides a shared rubric for neighborhood navigation that influences residents' everyday practices: their social control strategies, interactions with neighbors, and interpretations of their proximate environment. As a result, residents are able to produce a tentative social order without sacrificing their neighborhood's distinct social diversity. I argue that this tentative order also contributes to the durability of neighborhood heterogeneity. Instability, in this case, contributes to stability.

Back to Search Result of DDRG Dissertations