Live and Let Live: Diversity, Conflict, and Community in an Integrated Neighborhood

We are in a bind,
writes Evelyn M. Perry. While conventional wisdom asserts that residential racial and economic integration holds great promise for reducing inequality in the United States, Americans are demonstrably not very good at living with difference. Perry’s analysis of the multiethnic, mixed-income Milwaukee community of Riverwest, where residents maintain relative stability without insisting on conformity, advances our understanding of why and how neighborhoods matter. In response to the myriad urban quantitative assessments, Perry examines the impacts of neighborhood diversity using more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. Her in-depth examination of life
on the block
expands our understanding of the mechanisms by which neighborhoods shape the perceptions, behaviors, and opportunities of those who live in them. Perry challenges researchers’ assumptions about what
good
communities look like and what well-regulated communities want. Live and Let Live shifts the conventional scholarly focus from
What can integration do?
to
How is integration done?