Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven

摘要

It is tempting to date the history of "citizen participation" from the mandate in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 that called for "maximum feasible participation" of local residents in the design and implementation of federal antipoverty programs. The clause certainly established a durable legislative as well as moral precedent for including grassroots views in the public policy process. But Mandi Isaacs Jackson's study of urban redevelopment politics in New Haven across the decade of the 1960s makes clear that neighborhood groups in the city's ghettos, often aided by New Left community organizers from the White middle class, hardly needed federal help to participate. They were demanding to be heard on a wide range of renewal projects-and sometimes succeeding and occasionally prevailing-well before and long after the declaration of the short-lived war on poverty.