ABSTRACT
Neighborhood organizing has a history as old as the neighborhood concept itself. It is certainly not a product simply of sixties dissent. Community-based resistances-around geographic communities such as a neighborhood or communities of cultural identity such as the black or women’s community-have become the dominant form of social action since the 1960s, replacing more class and labor-based organizing (see, for instance, Epstein, 1990; Fisher and Kling, 1993). This ever-increasing significance helps explain the widespread contemporary interest in community-based organizing and the importance of this book. But it tends to obscure the rich and fundamental history prior to the 1960s that undergirds current neighborhood-based activity and it narrows the debates about neighborhood organizing to contemporary limits. To illustrate the point, this chapter begins with a discussion of the varied types of neighborhood organizing that have persisted since the late nineteenth century and the lessons to be learned from them. It follows with a discussion of neighborhood organizing since the 1980s, demonstrating how the political economy of the larger historical context heavily impacts the nature and potential of neighborhood organizing.
