Download The World Is Always Coming To An End: Pulling Together And Apart In A Chicago Neighborhood Designed By Carlo Rotella Shown In Hardcover

have long been a fan of Rotella's work, and this new title is a reminder why, It's both academically rigorous and deeply felta blend of journalism, memoir, and sociological investigation that reads smoothly all the way through and manages to add nuance to current discussions about gentrification and displacement without getting bogged down by its source material or sounding pedantic.
The big scoop from the acknowledgments section: Beryl Satter is writing a book about the South Shore Bank, I think this book is actually a series of essays, and although Rotella "pulls out" the personal reflections from most of sociology in the first half in order to try and write two overlapping stories, in the second half they start to blend, especially in the final chapter about "Lost Cities", which is really the section that made me think perhaps the book would feel more coherent if it weren't trying to be coherent.
I could easily edit this into series of essays on the meaning of neighborhood to different people, past and present, influenced by race and class, efficacy of engagement, approaches to safety, relationships to physical space.
Of course these things are all emeshed together, and Rotella is trying to pull them gently apart, which still leaves me a bit tangled,

My bottom line sense of conclusions from this work is that class trumps race and is a highly conservative force, which idealistic leftist organizers with hipster taste cannot mobilize because the middle class does not share their upperclass vision of neighborhood boutiques and cafes withcoffees, and who wants to walk around when you can drive to the mall In the next change over the black middle class will move to the suburbs for the privacy and security they seek but are embattled to achieve in South Shore, and the upper class suburban raised kids who are bored and want to be back in the city with boutiques and a night life and a street life will gentrify these areas again, probably back to mostly white, although Rotello's last scene with the black family who has fixed up the house he grew up in gives some hope for integration.
I see this regentrification of the city happening along the waterfront neighborhoods and those with nice victorian housing stock in Baltimore, This city is "coming back" in select neighborhoods with better shops and improved safety, But for who Not those who lived there when it was worse,

None of it solves the problems of poverty and unemployment which overwhelmed the working class with the closure of the steel mills and the end of the industrial age, and which just gets displaced again into some other neighborhood, ever more concentrated and entrapping.
An urban neighborhood remakes itself every dayand unmakes itself, too, Houses and stores and streets define it in one way, But its also peoplethe people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly, A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out, Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms, If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood
 
In the lates ands Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicagos South Shore neighborhooda place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts.
In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confrontingor avoidingeach other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors.
Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happenedstories of deindustrialization and street life stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Sectionhousing vouchers held by the poor.
At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past halfcentury by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods.
Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.

 
Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us.
Tomorrow is another ending.
 .