Managed Diversity: Governance and the Cultural Dimension of Urban Politics in a Multi-Ethnic Enclave

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2. Constructing Place Character

Abstract

How do a place’s objective characteristics become socially and culturally relevant? This article answers this question by examining the case of Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood, a historically Jewish enclave which has undergone a demographic and cultural transition into the city’s “most diverse” neighborhood. I first elaborate a framework for studying the cultural dimension of urban governance by bridging the field theory of Fligstein & McAdam (2012) with theorization on Discursive Fields. Then, combining historical and ethnographic methods, I demonstrate the utility of this framework by tracing the evolution of diversity discourse in the neighborhood over four decades and show that, rather than arising organically alongside demographic change, the neighborhood’s reputation for diversity is the result of the concerted political efforts of various neighborhood actors across multiple institutional domains. In addition to contributing to the sociological study of place, these findings extend the sociological scholarship on urban governance, an emerging approach to the study of urban process relating neighborhood outcomes to the relationships and practices of strategic actors.

Author

• Nisarg Mehta, University of Chicago