Enacting an Equitable Agenda: Exploring Community Strategies in Milwaukee's Inner-City Redevelopment1

Abstract

Due to the increasing importance of alternative visions and practices for redevelopment and difficulties with enacting these agendas, scholars call for more examination of progressive practices in the current constraining economic and political environment. By focusing on a major redevelopment initiative in Milwaukee's inner city, I explore how a coalition of local groups managed to represent the interests of disadvantaged residents in this project. I show how Good Jobs and Livable Neighborhoods (GJLN) successfully responded to multifaceted challenges to fostering organizing capacity and community engagement in the redevelopment of the 30 th Street Industrial Corridor by forging extra-and intra-local multisector alliances, manipulating spaces for public participation, and positioning its efforts at both the project-and city-wide scales. I argue that this politics of scale eventually fostered an altered space of mutually beneficial engagement between social action groups and local government agencies that allowed GJLN to advance its equitable agenda in the Corridor. [

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