Making Model Cities Model Lives

Maki Smith
History
UC San Diego

This project examined War on Poverty-era urban politics and its emphasis on “citizen participation” and the inclusion of “community” as a novel form of urban governance. The grantee paid particular attention to the ways in which the politics of inclusion served to absorb previously marginalized and aggrieved communities into the sphere of liberalism. He argued that citizen participation and community inclusion not only served as strategies of governance but also became contested categories in which urban communities imagined new forms of political power and recognition. Renewed attention to the multiple and contested deployments of inclusion in California during this period also recentered the Golden State as critical to national concerns about cities and the paradox of poverty in the so-called “Affluent Society”. Indeed, careful attention to the complicated history of inclusionary rhetoric sheds light on the trajectories of citizen participatory governance that have proliferated from the 1960s into our current moment.