COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...

Although the anthropological literature on the city published since the 1980s has
incorporated a number of models and paradigms from other disciplines, the dominant
research trends in urban anthropology appear to be post-structuralist studies of race, class,
and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and
symbolic and social production studies of urban space and planning (Low 1996b:401-
402). And while “cities are seen as sites of polarization, segmentation and differentiation,
and also of important struggles—what is missing from these conceptions of spatial scales
as continuous and nested, however, is attention to spatial scales ‘below’ the level of the
urban (such as the body, home, community, and neighborhood)” (Vaiou and Lykogianni
2006:731).
The most important transition in the anthropological study of the city occurred in
the 1980s, with the introduction of the political economy model. 4 Walton (1993:304)
suggests that the political economy model has been the dominant paradigm in urban
sociology for the past 25 years. Further, Amin and Graham (1997:411) suggest that
“urban studies has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the past fifteen years, fueled
by the replacement of tight, positivistic approaches with structuralist and more recently,
post-structuralist theories.” This model allowed researchers to introduce a different
framework or critique of urban anthropology to research in the United States, thus
ushering in a decade of ethnographies that demonstrate how structural forces shape urban
experience (Low 1996b:386). Examples of a few of these landmark ethnographies
include Norman Street by Ida Susser (1982a), which focuses on a Brooklyn working-
class neighborhood, a monograph by Ulf Hannerz (1980) titled, Exploring the City, and
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