Between Citizen and City: Neighborhood Organizations and Urban Politics in Cincinnati

Neighborhood organizations have been hailed in recent years as promising a rediscovery of the roots of citizenship through decentralized government and participatory democracy. According to many skeptics, however, "local politics is groupless politics," as Paul Peterson asserted in his much-acclaimed 1981 book, City Limits. The area between citizen and city, these skeptics argue, is arid ground hostile to the survival of political life, such as neighborhood groups. Curiously, the advocates of these groups have yet to rebut this skepticism. No one has adequately explained where, why, and how neighborhood organizations could be a significant force in contemporary urban politics.

Between Citizen and City attempts to provide that explanation. John Clayton Thomas defines the place of neighborhood organizations in urban politics by examining the history, composition, and practice of such groups in Cincinnati, Ohio, which the National Municipal League has described as a "leader in the neighborhood movement." In the early 1980s Cincinnati could boast of having half a hundred neighborhood organizations. Undermining the Peterson view of ineffectual local political groups, the Cincinnati experience over the past decade reveals growth in number, activity, and influence of neighborhood organizations, which Thomas attributes to the increased stakes in urban politics. Their growth has been fueled by demographic change, a more receptive municipal government, and federal programs that foster community involvement.

This book offers a significant theoretical contribution by reconciling an extensive popular literature characterized by ebullient optimism about neighborhood groups with a scholarly literature--especially in political science--which is mostly skeptical about any significance for the groups. And, at a time when favorable assessments of governmental action are rare, Thomas suggests that the much-criticized governmental involvement in the neighborhood movement has been essential to the movement's beneficial effects.