Academic literature on the topic 'Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Boston (Mass.)'

Community–university partnerships that purport to promote the public good are often fraught with institutional and cultural challenges that can contribute to the injustices they seek to address. This paper describes how one partnership has been navigating these tensions through a critical approach to power. The Co-Education/Co-Research (CORE) partnership has been built over the last decade between Tufts University and Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a community organizing and planning group in Boston. We have been co-producing knowledge and action to further community control over development, and we have found that institutional shifts, such as co-governance and the equitable sharing of funding, are leading to longer term impacts for the community partner and breaking down the boundaries between university and community. However, using a relational view of power, we have also found that some of our everyday practices can subtly maintain and reinforce inequities, such as valuing academic knowledge over that of community residents and practitioners. Addressing these cultural and ideological challenges requires critical and reflexive practice. It is messy relational work that requires a lot of communication and trust and, most of all, time and long-term commitment.

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Boston’s version of community-centered HOPE VI practice. Chapter 6 narrates the rise and fall of the Orchard Park public housing project while also explaining the origins of Boston’s Plebs governance constellation that brought such deeply felt resident engagement to the cause of public housing preservation. Boston’s city leaders created Orchard Park in 1942 to house upwardly mobile workers. As in other cities, public housing conditions deteriorating after the 1960s, but in Boston—partly in response to overzealous urban renewal and highway projects surrounding Orchard Park—community-driven movements such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative emerged to protect low-income residents. The Boston Housing Authority’s board gained a “tenant-oriented majority” in 1970, and, in the 1980s, a receiver-led BHA completed major public housing redevelopment efforts that remained 100 percent public housing. Elected officials increasingly found it politically imperative to support residential neighborhoods rather than just downtown business interests.