Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves

The first few pages of the first chapter explain why Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves provides an important, new way of looking at neighborhoods that transcends the narrow perspectives of previous books on the subject.

The last page of the conclusion provides a rousing challenge. It argues why on normative grounds Americans should pursue the directions advanced in this book if we are to be serious about moving toward a more just society.

Understanding how we make our neighborhoods and then they make us in turn, forces us to ask a critical normative question. Do our human-made neighborhoods make all of us equally? Sadly, the answer is a resounding “no.” Savage inequalities embedded in our neighborhoods, most critically manifested as low-quality environments segregated by economic and racial status, expose the fiction in our cherished notion of “equal opportunity in America.” We must intervene strategically in the market-driven processes governing flows of resources across metropolitan space if as a society we want to affirm our better selves and restore “equal opportunity” to its rightful place as a hallowed premise, instead of a hollow promise.