American Project
Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto
Contributors: William Julius Wilson (Foreword)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: November 13, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780674003217
Subjects: Housing; Urban communities; Social Science; Illinois; Housing (Sociological Aspects); Urban Sociology; Sociology - Urban; Robert Taylor Homes; Sociology; USA; Low-income housing; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General; Public Policy - City Planning & Urban Dev; Social Science / Sociology / Urban; Chicago; African Americans; Public housing
Description: "Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the story of daily life in an American public housing complex. Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have viewed only from a distance.

Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book recreates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.".

"American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter."--BOOK JACKET.