The Differential Impact of Civic Associations’ Strategies on the Well-Being of Neighborhoods and Cities

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Civic Associations and Civil Life

Abstract

This study complicates research on civic associations and their impacts on well-being by analyzing how two types of civic association—neighborhood associations and community organizing—impact well-being in neighborhoods and in cities. In today’s cities, civic associations play a large role in city governance and in the promotion of communities’ well-being. Civic associations have been shown to be essential in the formulation and implementation of a city’s policies, actively involving some citizens in the governmental process. Some social scientists argue that this role of civic associations is the key to well-functioning democracy, allowing people the ability to collectively organize for the promotion of their common-interests, but others have argued that civic associations instead breed exclusion, leaving only those communities organized in the position to reap the benefit of civic organization. This paper argues that the strategy of civic associations—place-based verses identity-based civic associations—is a vital factor in whether or not civic associations increase the well-being in a neighborhood, but harm the well-being of the city as a whole, leading to rising neighborhood stratification between those civically organized and non-civically organized neighborhoods. Analyses of neighborhoods and cities from 1990-2010 provide tests of these assertions.

Author

• Bryant Crubaugh, University of Notre Dame