Reviews for Daily Life along the Mississippi [Daily Life through History Series]

The average rating for Daily Life along the Mississippi [Daily Life through History Series] based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-30 00:00:00 Ward James I highly recommend this book to anyone doing community development or community organizing or doing any sort of work to make their community a better place. The bulk of the book is a narrative about the struggle of the Cedar-Riverside community in Minneapolis to fight off complete demolition and high-rise redevelopment from the early 1970's until the early 1980's. What I really like about it was that Stoecker weaves in a whole lot of social movement and urban theory into his narrative. For me, this is the best way to learn theory, seeing it in practice (or, conversely, seeing what the practice is not). The second section of the book details what happened after the community 'won,' and took ownership and leadership of its own redevelopment. Here Stoecker highlights the tradeoffs that become necessary when you move from community organizing to community development. For instance, Federal money has income requirements, so what happens when one of your leaders gets a better job? Well, they can be forced out of the community they spent 15 years fighting to save. However, he puts these compromises in context, pointing out that the current affordable housing and community redevelopment systems in the USA create a stark contradiction between community control and affordability. Even though it is 260 pages, it is a quick read.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-16 00:00:00 Jeff Fardella Amazingly deep research went into this well-organized and nicely told history of landscape intervention on the Upper Mississippi. Fair warning that the ecology of the river gets short shrift in the book's purported mission to illustrate the debate between improvements for navigation and preservation and use of the natural resources of the river; this book is mostly about the politics of public megaprojects in 1860s-1930s USA.