Creating Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington, D.C.

Landman studies four communally-oriented settings in Washington’s urban environment. Through ethnographic field work she learned that cooperation, sociability, and self management overcame the common urban challenges posed by isolation and largely impersonal, single purpose contact with others. The settings were a cooperative food store, a cooperative bakery, community gardens, and a cooperatively owned low-cost housing project. Landman shows how the participants in these economically related activities are socially bound together in a web of relations considered unusual in large American cities, and how these exceptionally connected urban lives prove very satisfactory.