Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, by Seth D. Kaplan, Little Brown Spark, 272 pages, $30
As America has become richer, it has paradoxically suffered from higher levels of social decay: broken families, loneliness, drug overdoses, decreasing life expectancy. Many writers have offered solutions to such problems, but most of their proposals see the emptied neighborhoods of Detroit or Appalachia as empty vessels to be filled or as backward vestiges that need to be retooled and saved.
Seth Kaplan sees those communities differently. In every place, he discusses Fragile neighborhoods, leaders and activists are working to make things better. Rather than replacing these leaders with imaginative new policy interventions, public policy should help communities build on what works.
Kaplan, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, brings a unique perspective to these issues: He has spent his career working on issues of state fragility outside the United States. His first book, Repair fragile states (2008), is unique in the long litany of texts on post-conflict reconstruction written during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has argued with foresight that top-down approaches to such problems do not work. Kaplan warned against big projects and the Marshall Plans, arguing forcefully that lasting solutions lie not in more aid but in giving societies the space to restructure political arrangements that suit their purposes. Washington was never able to do this: it could only offer more money and tired models of development assistance.
In Repair fragile statesas in Fragile neighborhoods, Kaplan demonstrated that customs and traditions in even the most underdeveloped communities should generally be preserved. But most state-building efforts instead aimed to sweep them away and replace them with uniform and seemingly more equitable social institutions. The new structures may have made sense to the average UN employee, but they never had legitimacy in the eyes of the people they were meant to serve. Instead of dictating what good institutions should look like, Kaplan argued, outsiders should let these societies build institutions from scratch on their own terms. Communities and social norms are not obstacles to development; they are precious assets that must be strengthened and enhanced.
What valuable resources does Kaplan find in America today? Fragile neighborhoods introduces us to community leaders working to solve social ills, from crime to housing shortages to low high school graduation rates. The approaches he highlights come not from Washington, D.C., or state capitals, but from the communities themselves. These groups don’t just tackle social problems: they seek to strengthen social bonds along the way.
For example: Thread, based in Baltimore, helps vulnerable and low-performing students by building a “network of trusting and caring relationships”; its volunteers seek not only to improve education but to develop support networks. Partners for Rural Impact does similar work in Appalachia, working with families and community leaders to support students not only with schoolwork but in their lives. Life Remodeled rebuilds Detroit’s crumbling infrastructure and strengthens community cohesion along the way.
There’s also Communio, a national nonprofit—Kaplan doesn’t stick to purely local groups—that seeks to repair the social fabric by improving marriages. Failed marriages, Kaplan argues, are a major reason for feelings of loneliness; the unattached, he writes, “are more likely to act irresponsibly and are at greater risk of loneliness and poor physical and mental health.” The group partners with churches to help communities foster healthier relationships.
Some of the people who founded these social enterprises came from outside and set up camp in the communities they helped, but most of them did not. Lasting efforts for change usually come from within.
The path to revitalization, Kaplan concludes, is to “work horizontally across the landscape to strengthen the interconnected network of institutions and relationships on a local-by-local basis, while finding ways for each local to work with the others. Resources can help , but without social cohesion, they are insufficient. Strong societies can always find resources, but divided societies with weak institutions will struggle, no matter how many resources they have.”
Relationships are everything to Kaplan. What communities lack is not wealth, but connections. Community bonds help people lead more productive, meaningful, happy and healthy lives.
But officials often prefer to focus on wealth: whenever society faces a crisis, be it domestic or global, they declare the need for a new Marshall Plan. I live in the Rust Belt, where a group of academics and officials recently devised a “Marshall Plan for Central America,” which aims to use federal funds to spur a “transformation of local communities” from desperation to resilience. The hope is that top-down investment will generate the economic growth needed to support a recovery, which will in turn generate prosperity and resilience. Big investments and big projects are always the panacea.
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The strength of Fragile neighborhoods it lies in diagnosing the problem and chronicling the efforts of local groups. Few books have done a more thorough job on this topic. Kaplan has difficulty offering guidance to readers hoping to emulate the successes he chronicles. Indeed, his underlying theme – that lasting solutions are best found from within – limits the level of political guidance he can provide in the first place. It may simply not be possible for the government or even national nonprofits to do much to solve these problems.
But Kaplan provides some general frameworks for action, such as encouraging a decentralization of authority that allows communities the space to find their own solutions. And he deduces a set of common design principles in each case: Officials, he suggests, should think about how to build a shared vision with community leaders, develop coalitions for action, and make sure “change agents” have the data That they need. at their disposal.
Unlike many writers who tackle these tragedies, Kaplan sees beauty in the American landscape. Communities are not empty, he says; they still have the tools to address these problems. But well-intentioned efforts to help them have crippled the foundations of social cohesion that make communities strong. Top-down solutions to problems like poverty and education unintentionally suck the life out of local efforts. Even when local efforts are second-rate, they can provide the basis for community cooperation.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Neighbors, not planners, fix troubled cities.”