Neighbourhood Planning and Community Based Development - The Potential and Limits of Grassroots Action

THIS BOOK IS about neighbourhoods, neighbourhood-based grassroots development efforts and the role that planning can and does play in strengthening neighbourhood development efforts. Chapter 2 begins with discussions of the meanings of neighbourhood and the community, Chapter 3 with the notion of empowerment. In this chapter, it is argued that empowerment means different things, depending on the ideological context in which the term is used. The author offers an alternative meaning, one that is more supportive of true community development. Chapter 4 focuses on the changing dynamics and structure of urban places with special emphasis on changes that have taken place in Chicago in the past decades.
The heart of the book, Chapters 5-8, is an account of four community-based efforts to control or stimulate neighbourhood development. Taken as a whole, they help to clarify both the potential and the limitations of community development that arise from grassroots organizing, community-based development and neighbourhood planning. In each of the case studies, a neighbourhood group, responding to a real or implied challenge to neighbourhood stability, attempts to organize and plan for neighbourhood improvement. In Chapter 4 the issue is gentrification, in Chapter 5 the threat is physical destruction. In Chapters 6 and 7 the issue is lack of community viability, stemming from community deterioration in the first case and dealing with an already deteriorated community in the second. Four conditions which are deemed necessary for fully empowering a community are then presented in Chapter 8. The concluding chapter seeks to assess and summarize what planners and other urban specialists can expect to accomplish through a community-based approach to planning.