Revisiting Neo-Bohemia: Persistence, Politics, and Moving Past an Ecological Model of Neighborhood Reputation

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Neighborhood Change

Abstract

Why do place reputations “stick” past their point of usefulness or accuracy? Using interview data from merchants in the reputationally hip Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park, this paper addresses the puzzle of why neighborhood reputations persist in the face of changes to the ecological conditions that undergird those reputations. Specifically, it suggests that scholars need to complicate the way we think about place reputation by moving beyond questions about how reputations emerge to questions about how reputations persist. By moving the analytic frame from reputation emergence to reputation maintenance, we move from a focus on ecological conditions that are necessary but not sufficient for a reputation to emerge to a focus on coordinated action among neighborhood actors who do the work to maintain a neighborhood’s reputation. Heeding Burawoy’s (2003) call for ethnographic revisits, the paper uses the case of Wicker Park, contrasting Lloyd’s ecological account of how Wicker Park emerged as a hip neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s with contemporary ethnographic and interview data from the current decade that testify to the importance of coordinated action for the maintenance of a neighborhood’s reputation.

Author

• Jeffrey Nathaniel Parker, The University of Chicago