Creating Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington, D.C.

by Ruth Landman

Overview

Landman studies four communally-oriented settings in Washington's urban environment. Through ethnographic field work she learned that cooperation, sociability, and self management overcame the common urban challenges posed by isolation and largely impersonal, single purpose contact with others. The settings were a cooperative food store, a cooperative bakery, community gardens, and a cooperatively owned low-cost housing project. Landman shows how the participants in these economically related activities are socially bound together in a web of relations considered unusual in large American cities, and how these exceptionally connected urban lives prove very satisfactory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780897893169
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/30/1993
Series:	Contemporary Urban Studies
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1340L (what's this?)

About the Author

RUTH H. LANDMAN is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the author of related studies, including one of Washington's Yard Sales (1987), and other studies about the working lives of anthropologists in the U.S. and Britain, including Anthroplogical Careers: Perspectives on Research, Employment and Training (1981), and Applied Anthropologist and the Public Servant: the Life and Work of Philleo Nash (1989).

Table of Contents

Preface
Creating Community: Realizing an American Ideal
Washington: Home to Four Million and Capital of the Nation
Lakeland Community Market: "Food for People, not for Profit"
The Community Bakers Mix their Dough with Social Philosophy
Maple Green's Tenants Create a Housing Cooperative and Call it a Village
Community Gardens: Pockets of Pastoral Pleasure, with Produce in every Plot
Effects of Public Policies on the Gardens and the Cooperatives
Lessons for the Larger Community
References Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

An ethnographic study carried out at community gardens, a cooperatively owned housing development, a bakery, and a food market in the Washington, D.C. area, mostly in 1989-90. Landman (anthropology, American U.) details creating and maintaining communities within a larger urban setting. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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