Living Together

The closing chapter presents an explanation for the durability of Riverwest’s social diversity that centers on local culture and everyday processes of difference negotiation. It discusses the implications of these processes for inequality, power relations, and popular and scholarly understandings of the “good” community. In Riverwest, place grounds a shared rubric for neighborhood interactions that facilitates boundary-blurring processes—processes that can grind down the categorical boundaries erected to distance and exclude. This chapter revisits the paradoxes of integration and explores the productive possibilities of conflict. Finally, it contemplates what is required to make diversity work.

Drawing Boundaries

To make sense of urban areas, we create mental maps. Our maps break down the city into simplified, manageable chunks that facilitate navigation and guide decisions about where to go, who belongs where, and what to do. Those who share a neighborhood context often share a way of seeing—of reading and responding their environment. This chapter examines the social bases for shared perceptions of specific features of the neighborhood: graffiti and groups of young black and brown men hanging out. Shared meanings of these environmental cues of “disorder” are contested in Riverwest. Local culture offers distinct approaches to social boundary-drawing. Repeated block-level interactions that contextualize neighbors’ behavior further complicate interpretations of the social surround. Through these conflicts over what constitutes a problem, broad social categorization schemes, white normativity, and racialized notions of criminality—though sometimes reinforced—are often challenged.

Regulating Difference

This chapter examines how local culture mediates the impact of neighborhood heterogeneity on social organization. Social diversity presents challenges for local social control. There is considerable variation in residents’ everyday on-the-block practices and these differences sometimes produce tension and conflict. This chapter details the links between neighborhood frames and residents' strategies for reading and responding to difference. Mainstream notions of what constitutes crime (that which is illegal) and how to address it (call the police) run up against flexible conduct norms and a preference for informal, direct strategies of social control. Residents are able to maintain relative stability and contain crime without insisting on assimilation to “mainstream” (raced and classed) standards. The chapter considers how difference negotiation practices map onto processes of social inclusion and exclusion.

Drinking

This chapter continues the examination of social perceptions of disorder. To an outsider passing through the neighborhood, Riverwest’s numerous bars, pronounced public drinking and seeming tolerance of public intoxication may be seen as cause for concern. However, residents’ perceptions of local drinking establishments and activities are more varied. Bars can be serious trouble spots or valued amenities. Those with visible addictions can be nuisances or accepted neighbors. Porch drinking can degrade the neighborhood’s reputation or signal a vibrant public life. Definitions of uncivil or out-of-place practices are embedded in constructions of cultural membership and social distance. This chapter demonstrates how Riverwest residents’ sense of who and what belong in the neighborhood is shaped by their accumulated experiences and situated in residents’ framing of the neighborhood and its trajectory. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the consequences of these collective perceptions of “disorder” for neighborhood engagement, investment, and stability.

Placemaking

People make and remake places through the stories they tell, the descriptions they fashion, and the working theories they develop about a particular place. Collectively constructed perceptions and shared interpretations shape how insiders and outsiders act on and within places. This chapter introduces two prevailing neighborhood frames that residents use to make sense of Riverwest. Some residents see diversity as the defining characteristic and central strength of the neighborhood. They believe that Riverwest’s diversity, culture, inclusiveness, and right to self-determination need to be nurtured and protected. Other residents are focused on the neighborhood’s potential. They believe that increased homeownership and responsible economic development will stabilize and improve the neighborhood.

Interrogating Integration

The chapter introduces the book’s central questions: How do residents of a racially and economically mixed neighborhood make sense of and live with diversity? How do neighborhoods shape the perceptions, behaviors and opportunities of residents? It reviews the harms of residential economic and racial segregation and discusses the paradoxes of integration. While integration holds promise for bridging social divides and reducing inequality, the tensions and conflicts associated with diversity pose challenges to community engagement, order and stability. This book begins to fill gaps in our understanding of integration through an ethnographic exploration of how residents of a diverse neighborhood make sense of their local experiences and negotiate difference. The chapter previews a place-sensitive analysis that focuses on Riverwest’s geographic location, material form and investment with meaning (i.e. culture). It closes with a description of the author’s approach to participant observation and an overview of the chapters.

Moving Up, Moving Down, Moving Out

An individual’s residential mobility trajectory tells us a great deal about that individual but also about place. Where someone has lived, the changes they have witnessed, and where they hope to be, together, affect how they think about where they are. This chapter presents five residential mobility narratives. These residents’ stories bring together key themes from preceding chapters to illustrate place effects, showing how features of the neighborhood interact with individual preferences and skills to jointly affect understandings and experiences of place. For example, experiences in previous neighborhoods generate sets of expectations and comparisons that shape evaluations of the quality and livability of Riverwest. The strategies residents develop to manage previous environments may or may not be effective in a new residential context. Finally, the chapter draws on an analysis of residential mobility narratives to identify mechanisms that mediate the effects of neighborhood diversity and help explain differences in residents’ lived experiences of integration.

Locating Riverwest

This chapter provides an introduction to the Riverwest neighborhood. It situates Riverwest in Milwaukee, a city that is highly segregated by race and class and characterized by deeply entrenched social divisions. It reviews the history of Riverwest and describes how, by the early 1980s, the community became home to substantial black, white and Latino (largely Puerto Rican) populations. The chapter illustrates how Riverwest’s ongoing struggle to manage the countervailing pressures of gentrification and crime and decline is expressed in its geographic location as a buffer neighborhood. Finally, the chapter identifies the face block—the two sides of one street between intersecting streets—as central to local social organization and a key site for difference negotiation.