ABSTRACT
This chapter examines conflicting views about public space and citizenship in Mount Pleasant, a multiethnic, multiclass, quickly gentrifying neighborhood in D. C. Washington, where the local Business Association and Community Development Corporation was considering instituting a neighborhood business improvement district on the neighborhood’s main commercial corridor. It explains an ethnographic and discourse-based approach to examining conceptions of Mount Pleasant that are held by a variety of neighborhood constituents, and focuses on groups that are often excluded from the public decision-making process. The chapter analyzes two sets of data: a community mapping project in which community members encode multiple conceptions of neighborhood space in maps they draw of the neighborhood and exchanges about quality-of-life issues on the neighborhood’s e-mail list. Business improvement districts are proliferating across the United States hailed as an effective economic development and revitalization strategy not only for downtowns but also for residential city neighborhoods.
