Communities of Resistance and Resilience in the Post-Industrial City

Book excerpt: This book is about the grassroots community revitalization movement in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lyon, France, between 1980 and 2010, an extension of the post-WWII civil rights campaign that is rarely considered. It tells the story of residents' attempts to improve their communities through social capital or people power. In positive ways, citizens created vibrant, attractive neighborhoods. But their actions also generated unintended consequences, such as high real estate prices and minority displacement that threatened to unravel their hard work. Communities of Resistance and Resilience is an ethnographic survey that relies on oral histories, archival research, on-the-ground site surveys, and the author’s personal experience as a neighborhood reinvestment practitioner for more than 30 years. It brings to life stories that would otherwise remain obscured, such as the lingering impact of the March for Equality and Against Racism, organized in Lyon in 1983, and the formation of the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group in Pittsburgh in 1988, both of which launched national movements. This is of great use to scholars of transatlantic history as well as a general audience interested in modern social movements in the United States and France.