The Anatomy of Hope: Community Organizing and Urban
Political Change

Book review: Community Organizing and Urban Political
Change Marion Orr, ed. Transforming the City: Community
Organizing and the Politics of Change. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2007. 264 pp. Reviewed by:
Sheila Radford-Hill, Executive Director, Luther
Diversity Center, Luther College. Published by: H-Urban
(January, 2008)
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=190861201883684


Barack Obama's stump speech always includes a reference
to his days as a community organizer in South Chicago,
a community that in the 1970s and l980s was devastated
by the downsizing and eventual closing of the U.S.
Steel Mills-South Works. This plant closing was among
that decade's most visible symbol of an emerging global
economy as well as a harbinger of the massive economic
dislocation that characterized the late seventies
through the early nineties. Millions have never
recovered from this economic restructuring in
postindustrial United States. The political rhetoric of
most Democratic candidates for president in 2008 tries
to connect the will, work, money, and dreams of the
working class to the revitalization of American
communities. No candidate makes these connections quite
like Obama, yet even he would benefit from reading
Marion Orr's edited book, Transforming the City. This
collection of ten essays discusses community organizing
in central cities and how it differs in such places as
Chicago, New Orleans, El Paso, and Baltimore, based on
both the issues involved and the political economy of
the specific cities. In addition to these case studies,
contributors also discuss the strategic ability of
community organizing to foster progressive political
movements and to influence state and national policies.
Because the contributors developed their material
together at working group meetings held at Brown
University, each chapter reinforces the other.
Similarly, the authors' insights strongly support the
conceptual framework that they created to analyze
organizing strategies and tactics and to provide an
overall assessment of the field. Most of the twelve
contributors are well-known sociologists, political
scientists, and historians, however several have
experience in community development, education, and
social work.[1]

Three important aspects of this study on community
organizing make this book a "must read." The book
contains analytical discussions about the history of
community organizing in the United States. Several of
the book's authors discuss the nature of community
organizing and how it has changed in response to
transformations in American political culture. Finally,
each author approaches organizing from the perspective
that these grassroots efforts, including those that
directly involve poor people in developing and
implementing an organizing strategy, continue to make a
difference in communities even as new modes emerge.
These three aspects speak directly to those whose
analyses of community organizing have predicted its
demise; according to this book, the doomsayers'
predictions are not sufficiently research based. For
instance, Orr uses Robert D. Putnam's book Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(2001) and Theda Skocpol's Diminished Democracy: From
Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2004)
to make a key point. He argues that their concept of
civic disengagement does not adequately represent the
experiences of low-income central city residents. In
low-income communities, organizing is still an
effective strategy for reinvigorating civic engagement.

This book's central premise, therefore, is that to
judge the validity of community organizing as an aspect
of civic engagement requires to go beyond general
observations by systemically engaging the complexity,
diversity, and limits of community organizing. The
authors accomplish this goal through a series of urban
case studies on community organizing campaigns. Most of
the essays include micro-level studies about organizing
for environmental justice, living wages, education, and
immigrant rights. In addition, the contributors analyze
organizing across race, ethnic, and class boundaries
and also discuss how organizing is being changed by the
Internet and by technology-based organizing models as
well as by a new generation of Americans that want to
make the world safer, sustainable, and more just.

Because the book is about organizing in cities across
the United States, it takes a critical look at the
urban fiscal crisis that began in the 1970s and
assesses the impact of the crisis on several models of
community organizing. In some cases, the organizing
efforts described failed, but the essays present these
shortcomings as a response to the changing ecology of
civic engagement. These shifts include changing
political constituencies and the different structures
of political regimes (or non-regimes) in cities across
the United States.

The authors lament the fact that such reformist
strategies as community development corporations,
partnerships with business rather than (or in addition
to) labor, and the emergence of professionally managed
civic organizations have replaced more participatory
forms of grassroots organizing. Yet, they conclude that
these trends are in response to a political culture
characterized by diffuse systems of power that are
difficult to target and negotiate; the growing number
of low-wage jobs that have replaced the skilled and the
semiskilled jobs protected in the industrial economy by
unions; changes in family structures due in part to
work demands, including an increasing number of workers
who are single heads of household; the increasing
number of single wage households who are working full
and part-time to make ends meet as well as the growing
number of families that need two full-time wage earners
to maintain their standard of living; and the
hypermaterialism and consumerism that undermines
collective action.

The book's weaknesses include a much too limited
discussion of women's womanist or feminist organizing
around employment, economic development (including
micro-lending), HIV-AIDS and other health care issues,
and antiviolence. The book is also somewhat limited by
its focus on national organizing groups, like
Industrial Arts Foundation and Associations of
Community Organizations for Reform Now. While the
authors concede that there are possibly hundreds of
thousands of organizations and volunteer efforts
working on numerous issues, they give community
organizing a tepid rating because the "gold standard"
of organizing involves affecting policy at the national
level. What is lost in this honest and entirely
appropriate critique is that there are other variables
that have an impact on the potential of organizing, a
few of which I enumerate below.

First, groups are developing transnational and
multinational organizing models; none of these is
included in this book's case study approach. Second,
while acknowledging that local organizing mobilizes and
helps to develop individuals' skills, resources, and
consciousness necessary to remain active, the book
contains a limited discussion on the implications of
organizing for ordinary people. Moreover, while
acknowledging that local organizing can empower
citizens to think more deeply and act decisively on
social issues, there is little discussion about the
fact that organizing creates an expectation of change
that may be necessary before local groups can coalesce
around national initiatives.

Further, college campuses are important incubators for
social activism. Increasingly, young Democrats and
independent voters are as active as young Republicans
on campus. There are a host of campus chapters, like
Amnesty International and other global concerns groups,
that increasingly link U.S. foreign policy to
injustices in trade policy, civil liberties, and human
rights. Social networking and Internet sites have
become a vehicle for connecting organizations that
fight for global causes in local areas. Instead of
thinking locally and acting globally, thanks to the
Internet, more groups are thinking globally and acting
locally. The Internet is also playing a role in
strengthening research about the field itself. Putnam
and Lewis M. Feldstein's (with Don Cohen) recent work
on social capital and civic engagement in the United
States, Better Together: Restoring the American
Community (2004), and Paul Hawken's latest book on the
environmental movement worldwide, entitled Blessed
Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into
Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (2007), are fine
examples of Internet-based research and organizing. For
instance, both books include data-based methodologies
and research collaborations with such nonprofit
organizations as Putnam's Saguaro Seminar and Hawken's
work with the Natural Capital Institute.[2]

Of course, it is difficult to write a book about a
topic as dynamic as community organizing without
leaving something out; so despite wanting to hear more
about the points discussed above, I think this book
will make an important contribution to academic and
strategic discussions about the topic. As the landscape
of community organizing grows and changes, those who
are interested in this field will be well served by
reading this book carefully and by using it as a
resource to guide future discussions about local,
regional, national, and/or transnational organizing.
There is also no question that urban organizers and
community developers will appreciate the authenticity
of the urban landscape that each author describes.

Finally, as I read this book, I was struck by the idea
that since Americans across the political spectrum are
increasingly dissatisfied with the presidency and
Congress, there could well be an increase in the type
of organizing that promotes oppositional strategies and
confrontational tactics. What the authors describe as
slow-moving reformist strategies may yet be replaced by
calls for more robust reforms and/or for fundamental
changes in U.S. foreign and domestic policy. This
widespread dissatisfaction may be one main reason why
community organizing is experiencing a resurgence.

Notes

[1]. In addition to Orr, contributors include Peter
Burns, Peter Dreier, Michael Evans, Robert Fisher, Mark
Santow, Dennis Shirley, Eric Shragge, Kathleen Staudt,
Clarence Stone, Heidi Swarts, and Richard Wood.

[2]. Putman founded the Saguaro Seminar to
"significantly increase Americans' connectedness to one
another and to community institutions." See
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro. The Natural Capital
Institute is a California-based nonprofit organization
"committed to the restoration of the earth and the
healing of human culture." See
http://naturalcapital.org.

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