Scholarship examining the political, social, economic, and moral significance of the places where people live is nothing new. From urban classics such as Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton's American Apartheid (1993) and William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears (1996), to suburban treatises such as Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (1985), to ethnographies such as Carol Stack's All Our Kin (1974), to social histories such as Mike Davis' City of Quartz (1990), scholars have explored the “politics of place.” Each of the three new books under review makes an important contribution to this scholarly literature on the political significance of place. Yet each book specifies different ways in which our politics has become inimical to movements seeking to change the fundamental inequalities that cause sprawl and poverty in the first place.

Most work examining the relationship between politics and place—simply, the relationship between how we live and where we live—has taken one of two paths: 1) identify a political or social problem (e.g., poverty, job loss, crime, segregation) and examine it at the national or citywide level (e.g., Massey and Denton 1993; Wilson 1996); or 2) identify a land-use trend (e.g., urbanization or suburbanization) and trace its historical and political developments (e.g., Jacobs 1961; Jackson 1987). By contrast, these three studies argue that understanding the politics of place requires understanding the lives and experiences of people who live in specific places—indeed, specific neighborhoods. In distinct ways, all three—Thad Williamson's examination of sprawling neighborhoods, the review by Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan Popkin, and John Goering of what they call “ghetto” neighborhoods, and Gary Paul Green and Ann Goetting's study of a variety of neighborhoods engaged in so-called asset building—sharpen our neighborhood lens. In so doing, they teach us that where people live tends to define how people live—not just in simple economic terms but also in terms of core values, political and social choices, and ethical judgments.

At the same time, these three books do not enter into the politics of place from a value-neutral perspective. All three of these authors articulate what Williamson aptly describes as the “civic costs of the American way of life.” Americans' land-use choices not only reflect our political values but also help to define our politics in important ways. Where we live, who is allowed to live in those places, and how the people in those places understand their assets and needs largely define the scope and reach of our politics. As such, anyone interested in political change must be closely attuned to the politics of place.

I begin with Williamson's Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship, which is the most far-reaching, indeed sprawling, work among the three. Williamson starts with a simple premise: Suburban sprawl—defined as “recently built suburban development characterized by low density and high reliance on automobile transportation” (p. 28)—provides substantial benefits for millions of Americans, but at a high cost to our nation. As he puts it: “Suburban sprawl as currently practiced is fundamentally hostile to the aspiration of achieving a society capable of meeting even modest norms of equal opportunity” (p. 4). The massive tide of suburban sprawl provides residents with strong feelings of safety and opportunity, even as it buries the most civically minded residents and “prioritizes privatism and consumerism over engaged political participation and ecological sustainability” (p. 4). Williamson's evidence comes from a massive project called the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS) conducted at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2000. The SCCBS, he claims, allows him to “explore the relationship” between sprawl and a “variety of important goods, including local quality-of-life, social trust, political ideology, and political participation” (p. 11). Williamson does not simply theorize the politics of place. He uses self-reported data from residents of sprawling metropolitan areas to assess the degree to which their neighborhood affects their values and politics.

The author carefully avoids the simplistic view that where a person lives determines whether or not he or she participates as a citizen. Instead, he argues that “physical form can help structure the nature of interactions that occur in the ‘public realm,’ so as to make some forms of interactions more likely and others less likely” (p. 219; original emphasis). Citizens who live in sprawling suburbs are less able to be citizens—to participate politically and engage in discussions of the common good. In other words, while sprawl does not cause failed citizens, it creates the conditions within which citizenship is unlikely to flourish.

Yet Williamson never accounts for the possibility that certain Americans are getting exactly what they want. Is it not possible that it is disengaged citizens—people who choose to reject notions of the common good—who tend to choose the suburbs? It is precisely the kind of citizenship that Williamson advocates—engaged participation in the common good—that “suburbanites” tend to reject. Instead, America's suburbs tend to attract citizens who want to pursue private goods while participating politically just enough to ensure that politics protects their ability to pursue those private goods. (For a detailed analysis of this suburban worldview, see Lisa McGirr's excellent Suburban Warriors [2002], especially Chapter 4.)

Moreover, most of these suburban residents both ignore and depend on the inexorable consequence of sparsely populated suburbs and exurbs: densely populated cities that contain high-poverty neighborhoods. In fact, then, we can think of Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship and Moving to Opportunity as two sides of the same coin—one telling the story of suburban sprawl and why it simultaneously depends on and ignores urban poverty, and the other telling the story of so-called ghetto poverty and a massive social experiment that sought to transform the lives of people by enabling them to move from a “ghetto” neighborhood to what was perceived to be a safe, suburban neighborhood.

In Moving to Opportunity, Briggs, Popkin, and Goering assess the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, a massive and unique social experiment to save thousands of American families from the ravages of urban poverty. The MTO program was launched in 1994, ironically, the same year that the Republican Party won control of the House of Representatives and began to dismantle the social safety net. This program sought to test the idea that where a person lives can define a person's well-being, economic health, and life prospects (p. 13). It was the latest in a series of federal programs aimed at mitigating the worst forms of poverty in America's cities (following such efforts as the Community Action program begun in 1965).

As these three authors powerfully describe, during its first decade of operation, the MTO program operated in relative obscurity. It was limited to five cities—Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore—and only in Baltimore was there broad public opposition to the program (pp. 60–64). Also, during the 1990s urban poverty sank more deeply into the political shadows, and there was virtually no national coverage of the MTO program (pp. 55–57). This changed, however, when the levies failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. (Like many commentators, Briggs, Popkin, and Goering describe the flooding of New Orleans in 2005 as one of the “deadliest and costliest natural disasters in American history.” Yet while they hint at the real cause, they fail to emphasize enough that the massive flooding of 80% of New Orleans was one of the deadliest and costliest policy failures in American history—the lack of funding to build adequate levies [see p. 25]. Recognizing this fact is essential in understanding the civic costs of our political decisions.) For the first time in more than a decade, Americans were presented directly with the reality of urban poverty (pp. 25–26).

What the nation saw was bleak indeed. While the majority of poor people in the United States live outside highly segregated, dangerous, and distressed urban neighborhoods, the experiences of those people who live in conditions of urban poverty are “some of the harshest, most extreme burdens and contradictions of a wealthy and increasingly unequal society” (p. 43). The MTO program provided ghetto residents with a unique opportunity—housing vouchers that would allow them to move to a “safer” neighborhood and “escape” the high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods in which they lived (pp. 135–37).

In their book, the authors sought to analyze critically whether or not such a program to transform the lives of the people living in some of the most abject poverty in the United States can work. What they found was that the overall way in which American politics structures place—what they call “the geography of opportunity”—proves a substantial barrier to success. Overcoming urban poverty, therefore, requires a dramatic restructuring of land use, in particular “a major national commitment to make rental housing affordable in safe, livable neighborhoods” (p. 16). In other words, an end to ghetto poverty requires an end to suburban sprawl, because adequate affordable housing requires suburban neighborhoods to be more densely populated—and therefore less sprawling.

Importantly, Briggs, Popkin, and Goering, as well as Williamson, do not limit their discussions of poverty and sprawl to the economic consequences (e.g., resources, jobs, housing, etc.). Instead, they claim that the life a person leads is significantly shaped by their place of residence. The social, political, and moral values, choices, and relationships cannot be separated from the place in which people live. People who live in so-called ghettos are “embedded in ‘communities’ of kin that often expose them to extraordinary risk and burden,” even if they move to another, safer community (p. 18; emphasis mine). Moreover, suburban sprawl “has had the effect of locking in and reinforcing racial and economic inequalities and of weakening (if not eliminating) the possibilities of meaningful redress of social and economic inequalities within metropolitan regions” (Williamson, p. 268). The politics of place can be as intransigent as the physical buildings that define those places.

So, the challenges that we face within the “geography of opportunity” are massive. In addition to concentrated poverty and suburban sprawl described previously, our places face challenges from globalization, segregation, and gentrification. Simultaneously, there has been a dramatic devolution of responsibility for these problems, from the federal and state governments to local governments and communities. Green and Goetting's edited volume Mobilizing Communities is an effort to explain more comprehensively how communities can productively respond to such massive challenges.

In particular, Green and Goetting examine a particular way that communities are increasingly organizing themselves to advance their interests: so-called asset-based development. Originally conceived by John McKnight and John Kretzmann, asset-based community development focuses on the resources and assets of a neighborhood or community, rather than on the problems and needs. The focus on what a community has, rather than what it does not have, has been “transformational” as an approach to the empowerment of people in the places in which they live (Green and Goetting, p. 4). But whether the transformative approach has actually transformed anyone's life is the question that they seek to begin to answer.

Collected in this volume are assessments of asset-based development in six different settings: community development financial institutions (CDFIs) on three Indian reservations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and South Dakota; arts-based community development in rural Alabama; environmental development in Guatemala; economic development in small-town Vermont; health- and religion-based community development in Chicago; and so-called amenity-based development in rural Michigan. What Green and Goetting and their contributors find in all of these contexts is that real communities, when faced with real problems and that maintain real assets, do not distinguish between “problem-first” and “assets-first” strategies (p. 185). Instead, communities—whether they are rural, urban, or suburban—have a keen understanding of their needs and assets, and they face their needs and activate their assets to the extent that the “geography of opportunity” allows them to do so. Not surprisingly, asset-based community development proves to be simply another tool for a community to use in order to challenge the politics of place. But it does not change the fundamental geography of opportunity. Green and Goetting thus conclude: “Our only hope is to build stronger and more resilient communities that can challenge these powerful political and economic forces” (p. 186).

All three books, then, ask us to think about key “place” questions for the twenty-first century: What, if anything, should we do to change the dynamics that cause urban poverty and suburban sprawl? What, if anything, should we do to empower and mobilize communities (urban, suburban, and rural alike) to overcome the massive challenges they currently face? In addition to these direct questions, however, all three books also ask us to think deeply and critically about issues we now most commonly ignore: How and why do we use our land in the ways we do? How do we understand “community” and what are the causes and consequences of that understanding? How should we regulate the “private” decisions that have “public” consequences? And to what extent can we change the “public” decisions that have “private” consequences? These questions too often remain opaque in public policy debates and in political science scholarship about such debates.

At the same time, each of these books also underscores the limits of any effort to transform the politics of place. In his introduction, Williamson describes the “anti-sprawl movement,” while Green and Goetting detail multiple efforts to “mobilize communities” and Briggs, Popkin, and Goering explore a “massive social experiment.” They have big ambitions that the politics of place can be changed. But the fact is that there is no anti-sprawl movement, no anti-poverty movement, and no community development movement. There are individual scholars and activists who oppose sprawl, poverty, and community disempowerment in a variety of important ways. But these anti-sprawl, anti-poverty, and pro-empowerment arguments do not constitute a social movement. Short of a group of citizens forming a movement to demand change in the “geography of opportunity,” such changes are unlikely to occur.

By contrast, there are at least two significant social movements occurring in the United States today—the so-called Tea Party and Occupy movements. Both of these movements seek to identify and change what they argue are forms of injustice (too much or too little government intervention in the sources of inequality are the most prominent). But they also largely ignore the places in which these forms of inequality are lived in America today—in the high-poverty urban neighborhoods, the sprawling suburban neighborhoods, and the shrinking rural communities. If urban poverty, suburban sprawl, and destabilized rural communities are to be addressed in a meaningful way, there will likely have to be a significant mobilization of grievances aimed at transforming the politics of place by demanding massive change in land use and access to essential resources. Will we see such a social movement in the United States to challenge the three-legged regime of urban poverty, suburban sprawl, and rural destabilization? Only time will tell.