Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

How does the City of Rochester, NY respond to its predicament of being the nation’s fifth-poorest mid-size city while concurrently designated by renowned economists as the nation’s number-one “technology hub” for economic prosperity (Gruber and Johnson, 2019)? This research studies how a mid-size city engages in two related yet non-coordinate attempts to address the predicament: to design initiatives to reduce poverty by 50% in 15 years while restructuring to maximize the riches of a high-technology economy. After nearly a decade, the City’s high rate of poverty persists while many new start-ups evidence the progress of business and real estate development in accommodating “new economy” needs. Consistent with the pattern of large aging industrial cities in the time of post-welfare reform and devolving state support, it is Rochester’s private nonprofit community-based organizations (of which it has more per capita than any city of its size) that play a significant role in the City’s urban politics in general and in its design of poverty-reduction initiatives in particular. Rochester’s nonprofits highlight community participation in principle, but in practice organization officials more closely follow a combination of actions found in other cases: a unilateral definition of community (Dunning, 2022; Levine, 2021); a disregard of “sense of place” (Alfonzo, 2016); and the use their expert knowledge to direct and depoliticize residents’ local knowledge (Fraser and Lepofsky, 2004). With disregard for local cultures, these practices help facilitate an opportunities-focused path for upward and outward mobility while inhibiting alternative, neighborhood-scale struggles for political power and economic equity.