Chinese residential communities are places of intense governing and an arena of active political engagement between state and society. In The Government Next Door, Luigi Tomba investigates how the goals of a government consolidated in a distant authority materialize in citizens' everyday lives. Chinese neighborhoods reveal much about the changing nature of governing practices in the country. Government action is driven by the need to preserve social and political stability, but such priorities must adapt to the progressive privatization of urban residential space and an increasingly complex set of societal forces. Tomba’s vivid ethnographic accounts of neighborhood life and politics in Beijing, Shenyang, and Chengdu depict how such local "translation" of government priorities takes place. Tomba reveals how different clusters of residential space are governed more or less intensely depending on the residents’ social status; how disgruntled communities with high unemployment are still managed with the pastoral strategies typical of the socialist tradition, while high-income neighbors are allowed greater autonomy in exchange for a greater concern for social order. Conflicts are contained by the gated structures of the neighborhoods to prevent systemic challenges to the government, and middle-class lifestyles have become exemplars of a new, responsible form of citizenship. At times of conflict and in daily interactions, the penetration of the state discourse about social stability becomes clear.

Public participation in the housing permitting process empowers unrepresentative and privileged groups who participate in local politics to restrict the supply of housing.

An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector. American cities are rife with nonprofit organizations that provide services ranging from arts to parks, and health to housing. These organizations have become so ubiquitous, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were fewer, smaller, and more limited in their roles. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an eye-opening story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning's book connects these two stories in histories of race, democracy, and capitalism, revealing an underexplored transformation in urban governance: how the federal government funded and deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place. ​Nonprofit Neighborhoods begins in the decades after World War II, when a mix of suburbanization, segregation, and deindustrialization spelled disaster for urban areas and inaugurated a new era of policymaking that aimed to solve public problems with private solutions. From deep archival research, Dunning introduces readers to the activists, corporate executives, and politicians who advocated addressing poverty and racial exclusion through local organizations, while also raising provocative questions about the politics and possibilities of social change. The lessons of Nonprofit Neighborhoods exceed the municipal bounds of Boston, where much of the story unfolds, providing a timely history of the shift from urban crisis to urban renaissance for anyone concerned about American inequality--past, present, or future.

Since the 1950s and the advance of urban renewal, local governments and urban policy have focused heavily on the central business district. However, such development has all but ignored the inner-city neighborhoods that continue to struggle in the shadows of high-rise America. This analysis of urban neighborhoods in the United States from 1960 to 1995 presents fifteen essays by scholars of urban planning and development. Together they show how urban neighborhoods can and must be preserved as economic, cultural, and political centers.

Benjamin Looker investigates the cultural, social, and economic complexities of the idea of neighborhood in postwar America. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood s significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. Looker examines radically different neighborhood visions by urban artists, critics, writers, and activists to show how sociological debates over what neighborhood values resonated in art, political discourse, and popular culture. The neighborhood- both the epitome of urban life and, in its insularity, an escape from it was where twentieth-century urban Americans worked out solutions to tensions between atomization or overcrowding, harsh segregation or stifling statism, ethnic assimilation or cultural fragmentation."

New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

From 1980 to 2000, half the new housing in the United States was built in a development project governed by a neighborhood association. More than 50 million Americans now live in these associations. In Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, Robert Nelson reviews the history of neighborhood associations, explains their recent explosive growth, and speculates on their future role in American society. Unlike many previous studies, Nelson takes on the whole a positive view. Neighborhood associations are providing the neighborhood environment controls desired by the residents, high quality common services, and a stronger sense of neighborhood community. Identifying significant operating problems, Nelson proposes new options for improving the future governance of neighborhood associations.

At a time of intense urban civil unrest in the United States, this classic text by Milton Kotler was the first to forcefully demonstrate how governance on the neighborhood level could allow Americans to regain liberty and the right to govern their own lives. Kotler's original project showed how towns--once independent but then later annexed by adjacent cities--became exploited by centralized downtown power. As relevant today as it was when originally published in 1969, Neighborhood Government continues to speak to American cities whose faces have been radically changed by immigration, urban sprawl, and communities fractured by pervasive economic and racial inequality. With a new critical foreword by Terry L. Cooper that places the text within contemporary debates and a new foreword and afterword from the author, Neighborhood Government continues to be a vital work for anyone interested in the economic, social, and political health of American cities and the continuing struggle to increase community investment and control.

The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, and at a higher rate than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. What’s more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, it’s become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarceration are much more pervasive than previously thought, extending beyond those imprisoned to the neighbors, family, and friends left behind. For Trading Democracy for Justice, Traci Burch has drawn on data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates up to fourteen times the national average to chart demographic features that include information about imprisonment, probation, and parole, as well as voter turnout and volunteerism. She presents powerful evidence that living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood significantly decreases political participation. Similarly, people living in these neighborhoods are less likely to engage with their communities through volunteer work. What results is the demobilization of entire neighborhoods and the creation of vast inequalities—even among those not directly affected by the criminal justice system. The first book to demonstrate the ways in which the institutional effects of imprisonment undermine already disadvantaged communities, Trading Democracy for Justice speaks to issues at the heart of democracy.