Telling Neighborhood Stories

In my new book I argue that our thinking about neighborhood has tended to underrate the importance of residents' relationship to physical place, overemphasizing instead the importance of relationships to other people. I wrote about South Shore, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side that has undergone a series of ethnic and racial successions and is now showing the local effects of a nationwide transformation in class structure. In recent decades, the hollowing out of the middle class has left haves and have-nots confronting one another across an expanding gap that makes it harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. One of the most striking features of this situation is the disparity between South Shore residents' passionate commitment to the neighborhood-as-container and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the neighborhood-as-community.

This can be a tricky subject to write about. Sharing space in the container of any neighborhood are very different generational experiences, class outlooks, personal styles, versions of history, ways of knowing the world. I had to try to do justice to individual characters' stories and points of view while also holding their competing versions of reality to an objective standard. One way I did that was by using the built landscape as an active device: reading its expressive form to discern the neighborhood's history and the resources and ideas flowing through it; showing how neighbors converge in shared space to play out conflict and alliance; tracing the lines between robust private lives and a public sphere from which many residents have retreated. In my talk I will explore how such conceptual moves generate specific writing problems: how scene, action, structure, point of view, tone, and word choice can be deployed to make both a place and an analytical argument come alive.