Place-Framing’’ as Place-Making: Constituting a Neighborhood for Organizing … Martin... · 2011-12-22 · ‘‘Place-Framing’’ as Place-Making: Constituting a Neighborhood

‘‘Place-Framing’’ as Place-Making: Constitutinga Neighborhood for Organizing and Activism

Deborah G. Martin

Department of Geography, University of Georgia

This article uses social-movement theory to analyze how neighborhood organizations portray activism as groundedin a particular place and scale. I apply the concept of collective-action frames to a case study of four organizations in asingle neighborhood inSt. Paul,Minnesota.Using organizational documents such as annual reports, comprehensiveplans, and flyers, I present a discourse analysis of the ways that organizations describe their goals and agenda. Inparticular, I assess the extent to which the organizations characterize the neighborhood in their justifications oforganizational goals and actions. In order to legitimate their own agendas and empower community activism,neighborhood organizations foster a neighborhood identity that obscures social differences, such as ethnicity andclass, among residents. They do so by describing the physical condition of the neighborhood and the daily lifeexperiences of its residents. These ‘‘place-frames’’ constitute a motivating discourse for organizations seeking tounite residents for a neighborhood-oriented agenda, despite very different substantive issues, from crime to land-useplanning. This perspective allows for a more effective understanding of how place informs activism at a variety ofspatial scales. Further, by inserting place into theories of collective-action framing, this research helps to introduce anew research agenda that addresses the gap between geographical analyses of territorial identities and activism andother scholarly literatures on contentious politics. Key Words: collective action, discourse, neighborhood organizing,place-frames.

We’re dealingwith the neighborhood. Community is culture,faith, etc. Neighborhood is geographic, and we all have [it]in common. Regardless of community. ( Johnny Howard,ExecutiveDirector, Thomas-Dale BlockClubs, conversationwith author, St. Paul, MN, 10 July 1996).

The neighborhood functions as a site of politicalactivism. The statement above, made by a neigh-borhood organizer who founded a block-club

organization in his neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota,illustrates the importance of geographic location in hisorganizing efforts, although it also implies additionalcomplexities in relations among residents. Indeed, ithighlights an important difference between communityand propinquity, one stressed by scholars as well (Cox1982; Lyon 1989; Menahem and Spiro 1989; Johnston1994). ‘‘Community’’-based organizing is traditionallythought to rely not on territory per se, but upon identifyingmultiple issues of common interest—such as health orhousing concerns, schools, or job conditions—among agroup of people (Bailey 1974; Alinsky 1989; Davis 1991).Proximity fosters common experiences of problems andthus common interests, but location does not, in itself,make a community (Cox and Mair 1988; Alinsky 1989;Davis 1991). Yet many scholars have argued that placefosters a common identity, based on common experiences,

interests, andvalues (Tuan1974, 1977; Pred 1984; Purcell1997, 1998; Jonas 1998). The question is not whether thelocal context structures common interests and goals, buthow. In this article, I explore the connectionbetweenplaceand organizing by arguing that, for neighborhood-basedorganizations, place provides an important mobilizingdiscourse and identity for collective action, one thatcan obviate diverse facets of social identity in order to de-fine a neighborhood-based polity. Further, this analysisintroduces a framework for analyzing the ‘‘place-making’’that occurs at a variety of spatial scales through collec-tive action.

Scholars have convincingly demonstrated the persis-tence of local activism and local identities in the face ofglobalizing economies, politics, and cultures (Massey1991, 1994, 1998; Keith and Pile 1997). Indeed, wordslike ‘‘glocalization’’ (Swyngedouw1992;Robertson1995)1

highlight the dialectical relationship between the globaland local, in which both dynamics shape peoples’ dailylives and experiences. Neighborhood organizing occursacross andwithin varied sets of contexts and relationships,ranging from the daily life experiences of residents andorganizers to the local economic and political context andbroader national and global forces operating on andaffecting the urban area in which the neighborhood issituated (Wilson 1993; Jonas 1998; Haughton andWhile

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1999; Wilson and Grammenos 2000). Its focus, none-theless, is on the local context (Alinsky 1989;Davis 1991).

Neighborhood-level activism in U.S. urban areasincreasingly operates in a political context dominated byan elite agenda of urban growth through civic boosterismand redevelopment projects (Logan and Molotch 1987;Jonas and Wilson 1999). Neighborhood- or community-based organizations are increasingly responsible for localservices in neoliberal governance schemes, while regionaland local states prioritize economic relations and the‘‘business climate’’ (Raco 2000;Ward 2000). The conceptof local dependence (Cox andMair 1988) articulates howdiverse urban political-economic interests can be unitedin growth-oriented coalitions in which one urban econ-omy competes against others. But local dependenceaddresses urban economies; it does not conceptualizeplace-coalitions at scales within urban areas, differenti-ated from the broader community. Within any particularurban economy, neighborhood-based or communitygroups may challenge redevelopment schemes, demand-ing greater attention to local, community-based identitiesand concerns (Haughton and While 1999; Bucek andSmith 2000; Wilson and Grammenos 2000; Robinson2001).These community groups assert place concerns andidentity at a more local scale than that of the entire urbanarea. Robinson (2001), Wilson (1993), and Wilson andGrammenos (2000) argue that space—the setting, geog-raphical location, and sociospatial context of a neighbor-hood—influences the formation of collective identitiesand activist agendas. Indeed, Wilson and Grammenos(2000, 367) suggest that political movementsmust appealto ideals about community, or ‘‘terrains of civility,’’ whichrefer to characteristics or spatial processes such as ‘‘thegentrified aesthetic, ‘stable’ blue-collar orderliness,the suburban ideal, and the city beautiful ethic’’ (see alsoPurcell 1997).

Asserting a spatial grounding or discourse in neighbor-hood activism is but a first step in understanding thedynamics of spatial processes and appeals in activism.Geographers recognize the importance of place to sociallife (Tuan 1974, 1977; Mitchell 1993; Purcell 1997), butour theoretical tools for demonstrating where and howplace is deployed in polities are still being developed.Following Mitchell (1993), Boyle (1999), and Gilbert(1999), I argue that scholars need to ‘‘uncover’’ (Mitchell1993, 288) the meanings and representations of activismat the local level, particularly as they constitute place-based activist communities. I do so here by examining howneighborhood organizations draw upon and representexperiences of daily life in the material spaces of aneighborhood. I seek to uncover how common interests,imputed in the shared spaces of residential neighborhoods,

are constructed and portrayed in discourses of neighbor-hood organizations operating in a ‘‘racially’’ and ethnicallydiverse urban area.2These references to shared daily life inthe spaces of a neighborhood seek to legitimate commu-nity organizing at the neighborhood scale.

In the following sections, I define the terms ‘‘place’’and ‘‘neighborhood’’ as I use them here and develop aframework for analysis of neighborhood-based activismthat draws upon and extends theories of social move-ments, which have been used to provide explanations forthe structure and actions of collective organizations. Inparticular, the concept of ‘‘collective-action frames’’(Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988, 1992)provides a basis for exploring how organizational dis-courses situate and legitimate activism in a neighborhood.I use the idea of ‘‘frames’’ (Goffman 1974) to examinethe place-oriented discourses of four organizations in theFrogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota.

I conclude this article by arguing that organizationsdiscursively relate the conditions of the place—thecommon experiences of people in place—to their differentagendas for collective action. In doing so, they constructthe local scale of the neighborhood and its organizations asthe appropriate sphere for political activism, consolidatingthe ‘‘neighborhood’’ as a salient political place. This‘‘place-framing’’ asserts a neighborhood identity, albeitone based on partial accounts of the neighborhood,emphasizing only some social characteristics of residentsand portrayals of the physical landscape to support theorganizations’ different activities. These framings empow-er a neighborhood-based political community whilerhetorically diminishing alternative axes of mobilizationthrough social identities or at other territorial scales. Theframings represent a powerful activist discourse, one thatmay be deployed to constitute places and polities at anumber of spatial scales.

Conceptual Framework: Backgroundand Definitions

Neighborhoods

I employ the term‘‘neighborhood’’ in this article to referto an urban residential district—one codified in localpolitics—but I simultaneously problematize the notion ofneighborhood as a salient, given territory of experience, asplanning practice assumes. ‘‘Place’’ and ‘‘neighborhood’’connote two distinct yet related local-level social con-structions and processes. Place, as geographers haveargued, is socially constructed through several complexand intertwined elements, including interactions among

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people and groups, institutionalized land uses, politicaland economic decisions that favor some places andneglect others, and the language of representation (Pred1984, 1986; Massey 1991; Barnes and Duncan 1992a;Duncan and Ley 1993; McDowell 1999). Harvey (1989),Lefebvre (1991), andMerrifield (1993a, b) have suggestedthat place represents a ‘‘spatialized moment’’ of globalflows of labor, goods, and capital exchange. Place is both asetting for and situated in the operation of social andeconomic processes, and it also provides a ‘‘grounding’’ foreveryday life and experience. In this latter sense of dailylife, place as a territorially bounded residential district(physically, as by railroads or highways or waterways, ormentally, as in a social imaginary) embodies the concept ofneighborhood on which I draw here.

‘‘Neighborhood’’ is a frustratingly vague term, asexemplified by Johnston’s (1994, 409) definition in TheDictionary of Human Geography: ‘‘a district within anurban area.’’ Many cities base political decisions on somenotion of neighborhood units (Haeberle 1988, 618),including decisions that organize voters on the basis oflocation. Although neighborhoods ‘‘are certainly not easyto identify empirically’’ ( Johnston 1994, 409), they persistas an idea among many urban residents and as a reality inlocal politics, where neighborhood planning units—or‘‘citizen participation districts,’’ as in the case of St. Paul,Minnesota—are designated (often by city planners) toorganize and categorize residents in various parts ofthe city.

At one time in urban history, neighborhoods comprisedrelatively homogeneous cultural, ethnic, and incomegroups reliant upon one another for mutual aid (Cox1982). These residential districts fostered territoriallybased communities of interest.3 Although neighborhoodand community are not synonymous, Logan andMolotch(1987, 108) hint at an implicit connection between thetwo in their definition of neighborhood as ‘‘a sharedinterest in overlapping use values (identity, security, andso on) in a single area.’’ Their definition highlights thenotion that neighborhoods become meaningful to inha-bitants because of the interactions among people in themor from shared values and interests. Thus, neighborhoodsare the site of and encompass a variety of interactions andexchanges that form a complex set of social and economicrelations. The pernicious problem of how physically tospecify a neighborhood remains.Thevagueness of the ideaof ‘‘neighborhood’’ seems to be inherent to its very nature;neighborhoods are socially constructed in particular timesand places, and therefore they are not fixed and specific.As the setting for daily life, however, socially constructedneighborhoods have real, material consequences forpeople who live in them.

Neighborhood Organizations, Social Movements,and Collective Action

Neighborhood organizations can be thought of asgroups of residents and organizers dedicated to addressingone or a range of issues, including social, political,economic, and quality-of-life concerns at the neighbor-hood level. It is useful to conceptualize neighborhoodorganizations as part of what can broadly be characterizedas ‘‘contentious politics’’ (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly2001). Although they often work within an existingpolitical structure, neighborhood organizations are notformally part of an appointed or elected body, and at timesthey explicitly challenge governance structures. Neighbor-hoodorganizations interactwithanddemandservices fromexisting political institutions while they strive to definecollective polities at a scale different from that of localgovernment. Although there is no nationwide or globally-coordinated neighborhood movement, the presence ofneighborhood organizing in countless cities in NorthAmerica andaround theworld constitutes a formof ‘‘socialmovement’’ that is helping to reshape local governanceby demanding neighborhood-based decision-making. Itis useful conceptually, therefore, to draw upon social-movement scholarship in investigating the efforts of neigh-borhood organizations to mobilize neighborhood action.4

Social-movement scholars examine why and howcollective action occurs. Some have argued that resour-ces—primarilymoney and leadership—have been a key tomotivating action (McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977;Jenkins 1983; Gamson 1990). Other scholars havefocused on the political structure (Kitschelt 1986;Klandermans, Kriesi, and Tarrow 1988) or quality of lifeand the desire of identity groups such as gays or women tobe recognized in the broader political culture (Habermas1981; Melucci 1988; Larana, Johnston, and Gusfield1994). All of these perspectives point to a variety ofinfluences on collective action and to the need forgrievances among a group to coexist with some definitionof a collective sense of agency or community to addressthe grievance.

The question that remains for scholars is how and whycertain collective identities motivate activism at giventimes and places. Social movements can foster activism bydrawing upon class, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, andother identities as ‘‘positions’’ from which to unite coali-tions of citizens for common goals (Laclau and Mouffe1987; Staeheli and Lawson 1995). Neighborhood organi-zations seek to link social goals and activism at the scale ofa neighborhood, but basing community politics at thatscale is just one possible position for urban activism. InSt. Paul, however, neighborhood organizations have a

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place-based mandate in the local polity. By using thatmandate to further define and demarcate neighborhoodsas political communities, organizations prioritize placeoverother social identities. Frame analysis exposes the waysthat organizations highlight particular social positions andthe inclusions and exclusions such choices entail.

Collective-Action Framing

Social movements draw upon social identities to fostercollective activism by framing their goals and activities inorder to appeal to the collective group (Snow et al. 1986;Snow and Benford 1992; Benford 1993, 1997).Collective-action frames denote how social movements articulateissues, values, and concerns in ways that foster collec-tive identity and activism (Snow et al. 1986; Snowand Benford 1992; Benford 1993, 1997; Hunt, Benford,and Snow 1994; Silver 1997). Broadly speaking, ‘‘frames’’—or ‘‘framing’’—is a term that refers to how individualsorganize experiences or make sense of events (Goffman1974). Collective-action framingmakes sense of events inways that highlight a collective set of values, beliefs, andgoals for some sort of change.

Frames are also discourses—‘‘frameworks that embraceparticular combinations of narratives, concepts, ideologiesand signifying practices’’ (Barnes andDuncan1992a, 8)—oriented to collective action. Johnston (1995, 219) arguesthat there is ‘‘an inextricable link between discourse andframes’’ in which collective-action frames articulate theembedded, discursive relationship between shared values,cultural understandings, and activism. Frames are collec-tive organizational narratives negotiated from a combina-tion of cultural values within a movement and from somedegree of deliberate framing choices by social-movementleaders (Roy1994;Benford1997; Paige 1997).Collective-action frames are not fixed and internally cohesive, butthey may contain contradictions and they certainlychange over time (Giddens 1976).

Focusing on neighborhood organizations, I extend theconceptualization of framing to explore how neighbor-hood organizations advance or constitute a place identityas part of their articulating of reasons and goals foractivism. I have created the term ‘‘place-based collective-action frames,’’ or ‘‘place-frames,’’ to highlight the potentialrelationship between activism based on an idea ofneighborhood and the material experiences of that place.Scholars have suggested that real, tangible places can be abasis for identity-based activism, inwhich groups of peopledraw upon distinct political and economic frameworksthat shape identity (Castells 1983; Routledge 1993), theirshared ideals about residential places (Purcell 1997, 1998;Robinson 2001), and specific sites of resistance and

domination (Clark 1994; Keith and Pile 1997). Place-frames conceptually identify this relationship betweenplace and activism by situating activism in place anddefining a collective identity in terms of the commonplace that people—mostly neighborhood residents—share.Place-frames describe common experiences among peoplein a place, as well as imagining an ideal of how theneighborhood ought to be (Mitchell 1988; Anderson 1991;Purcell 1997, 1998). Place-frames thus define the scopeand scale of the sharedneighborhood of collective concern.

As discourses that reveal ideologies about activism andplace, frames havematerial consequences both in shapingpeople’s ideas about places and in fostering social action.While some collective-action frames are aimed primarilyat motivating activism among members, frames affectexternal perspectives of a community aswell. For example,Martin (2000) demonstrates how media representationsof a neighborhood shifted frommostly negative portrayalsof crime to more positive acknowledgements of residents’agency in tandem with organizational discourses aboutneighborhood activism.

In this article, I examine whether the frames of four St.Paul neighborhood organizations advance a commonplace-identity, or characterization, even as they advocatemultiple (and different) agendas, by assessing how theydescribe problems, characteristics, and activities thatmake a neighborhood a unique place.5 Studying place-frames provides the conceptual framework for under-standing howcommunity organizations create a discursiveplace-identity to situate and legitimate their activism. Ifocus on the internal, neighborhood-based ‘‘place-making’’ of the organizations, but their place-frames alsoform part of the external rhetorical negotiations over themeaning and status of the place (Martin 2000). Thisresearch reveals a reification of the local, neighborhoodscale for community organizing. It demonstrates howorganizations define the neighborhood community as auniversal, common interest among residents who mightotherwise see themselves as or be represented by alter-native identities based on race, ethnicity, religion, culture,or household type. In the sections that follow, I describethe research site and explore how place is discursivelyconstituted by neighborhood organizations through col-lective action place-frames.

The Frogtown Neighborhood, the LocalState, and Neighborhood Organizing

This research examines the Frogtown, or Thomas-Dale/District 7 (as it is officially called in city documentsand plans) neighborhood, just northwest of downtown


St. Paul, Minnesota. Frogtown is a mostly working-classneighborhood, and in 1990 it had 50 percent minorityresidents (non-Hispanic), with 35.5 percent of residentsliving below the poverty line. Frogtown has a reputation inthe Twin Cities (especially in the media; seeMartin 2000)as a dangerous (crime-ridden) neighborhood.

The four neighborhood-based organizations in thisstudy address four broad but overlapping themes. Theoldest organization is the one that has a formal ‘‘contract’’or relationshipwith the city of St. Paul, stemming from themid-1970s, when the city mandated official urban‘‘neighborhoods’’ for citizen participation in local spend-ing and planning initiatives (Figure 1).6 The Thomas-DaleDistrict SevenPlanningCouncil, orDistrictCouncil,acts as an official liaison to the city and its planningagencies on issues such as long-range planning, zoning,and land-use policies. Its primary mission is to foster

participation and communication about land-use andplanning among local government, residents, social-service providers, and businesses. The organization has asmall office and staff, which is funded in part by the city ofSt. Paul.7 All residents of the officially designated district,as well as property and business owners and employees ofFrogtown businesses, are considered ‘‘members’’ of thecouncil, with the right to vote for the board of directors.The organization sponsors social events and neighbor-hood clean-ups, but most of its activities are conducted inmeetings that address city andneighborhood land-use andzoning policies.

In the late 1980s, the District Council developeda program called the Sherburne Initiative to buy, reha-bilitate, and sell several properties on a particularly run-down street. In 1995, the Greater Frogtown CommunityDevelopment Corporation (GFCDC) was established asa separate organization, with a mission to maintain anddevelop the housing stock in Frogtown, continuingand expanding the work of the Sherburne Initiative (DawnGoldschmitz, Director, GFCDC, interview, St. Paul, MN,4 September 1996; Michael Samuelson, Director, DistrictSeven Planning Council, interview, St. Paul, MN, 23 July1996). The GFCDC was initially financed by a nationalnonprofit, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation,which wanted to support low-income housing develop-ment in St. Paul. The GFCDC identifies vacant lots forhousing construction and builds new homes that aredesigned to fit into the scale and architecture of thesurrounding houses. It also targets abandoned homes forrehabilitation and buys homes forfeited to the city for taxarrears, rehabilitates them, and then sells them for single-family residential use. In addition, the GFCDC acts as aninformation clearinghouse for prospective homebuyersin the neighborhood and for homeowners interested inrehabilitation and maintenance. Because of the technicalnature ofmuch of its work, theGFCDCdoes not set out toformally organize residents. Its board of directors, how-ever, is composed of neighborhood residents, who set themission and direct the activities of the organization, andits staff spends a fair amount of time in the neighborhoodtalking with residents about current or upcoming con-struction and rehabilitation projects.

Another development-oriented agencywas establishedin the early 1990s with support from theMinnesota-basedMcKnight Foundation.8 The primary goals of the Frog-town Action Alliance (the FAA) are to address economicdevelopment, jobs, and training in Frogtown. One of itsmain activities in this regard is to provide resourcesfor residents to become more involved in the busi-ness community, primarily through entrepreneurshipclasses (which have been geared especially to African

Figure 1. Frogtown/Thomas-Dale and the citizen planning districtsin St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Americans). The second area of emphasis has been toimprove the ‘‘business climate,’’ which has involvedinitiating and coordinating infrastructural improvementsto commercial districts and corridors, including workingwith the city to repave a major corridor through Frogtownand to help businesses in a shopping center to design andfinance a new facade.

The final organization in this study, which wasestablished in 1990 by two residents, addresses crimeand public safety in the neighborhood. The Thomas-DaleBlock Clubs organizes residents into block clubs andmobilizes them to build community and protest illegalactivities in the neighborhood. Its funding comes from acombination of private foundations, member donations,and city contracts for specific projects. The Block Clubcoordinates activities for youth and seniors and maintainspublic and private property through agreements with thecity and through programs—such as a ‘‘beautiful block’’contest—that encourage people to care for their yards andhomes. In many ways, the Block Club is the most visibleof the four organizations, as it holds block meetingsand conducts street marches, complete with bullhorn andsigns that call for residents to work for a better com-munity. The primary goal of the group is to create pride inthe neighborhood.

In the mid-1990s, at the time of this study, all of theseorganizations had various formal and informal relationswith city agencies, including annual payments to theDistrict Council for its citizen participation program,planning coordination and initiatives among the DistrictCouncil, the FAA, and planning and economic develop-ment units at the city, and contracts with theGFCDCandthe Block Club for housing development and mainte-nance of publicly owned property in the neighborhood,respectively. Despite these many relationships with thecity and its agencies, however, each organization operatedas an autonomous entity, responsible for its own planningand agenda-setting for activism in the neighborhood, withlittle city oversight other than required audits of financialrecords (Nancy Homans, planner with St. Paul Depart-ment of Planning and EconomicDevelopment and liaisonto District Seven during the development of the Thomas-Dale Small Area Plan, interview, St. Paul, MN, 22 August1996; Hope Melton, former St. Paul city planner, inter-view, St. Paul, MN, 11 September 1996).9 Formal cityefforts at planning and urban development were concen-trated on improving the manufacturing-job base withindustrial district redevelopments—including a site partlyin Thomas-Dale—and downtown development. Theplanning staff was cut in the mid-1990s as part of effortsto reduce the size of government, leading to less interac-tion between individual planners and neighborhood

organizations (Homans, interview, 1996; Melton, inter-view 1996).

The basis for activism and organization within the cityframework is its district-council system and boundaries,which assumes common interests and experiences amongresidents within districts like Frogtown, providing resour-ces and autonomy for neighborhood groups to act withintheir communities. In Frogtown, the district-councilsystem had evolved by the mid-1990s into an amalgamof organizations addressing issues far beyond citizen inputinto planning and zoning. Although the district bound-aries were, at one time, created in part by neighborhoodorganizations, the continuing salience of the neighbor-hood ‘‘district’’ may rely in part upon fostering a sense ofidentity and community among its diverse residents.Organizations working to improve the level of citizenparticipation, physical infrastructure, economy, and safetyof the neighborhood, therefore, define a neighborhood-scale, place-based identity as part of their discoursesfor activism.

Research Approach

Examining theways in which organizations use place tosituate and structure neighborhood collective actionrequires attention to the discursive frames of neighbor-hood-based organizations. Since discourses are narratives,conceptual frameworks, and ideologies (Barnes andDuncan 1992b), they may be manifest in several ways ina given social enterprise. For the purpose of this research(conducted in 1996 and 1997), I sought representations ofthe neighborhood and organizational activism by acti-vists—most of whom are residents—including group andindividual portrayals, written and spoken accounts, inpublic and in private. I focus here on a primarily internalneighborhood dialogue: organizational discourses aimedat neighborhood residents and businesses.10 The sourcesfor these accounts include announcements in a localneighborhood newspaper (the Frogtown Times11); organi-zational documents such as annual reports, comprehen-sive plans,meetingminutes, brochures, leaflets, andflyers;and my own notes of announcements and conversationsduring public, board, or committee meetings that Iattended for each of the four organizations.12

For each organization, I had a least one major doc-ument that set out the purpose and scope of theorganization, with supplementary literature that providedsome insight into the activities and discourses of eachorganization in 1996–1997. I examined the documentsand notes repeatedly, reading documents individually aswell as grouping themby topics and organizations. I lookedfor themes and words that explained the activities of the


organization or indicated representations of the neighbor-hood and neighborhood issues. I used the discourses of theorganizations to identify their frames, specifically thoseelements of the frames that referred to and describedthe neighborhood and its characteristics. What I includehere as my findings are the themes that described theneighborhood and organizational visions for its improve-ment—a discourse about place and collective action.

Although I refer to the frames as ‘‘organizationaldiscourses,’’ I recognize and stress that they were devel-oped by people—especially organizational leaders, staff,and board members—through interaction and negotia-tionwith one another.As Benford (1997) has emphasized,organizations donot act—people do.Once assembled intoformal documents, presented at meetings and in the localneighborhood newspaper as coherent messages, how-ever, these discourses must be understood as organiza-tional. In this sense, therefore, it is useful to conceptualizethe frames as organizational, rather than individual,discourses.

Although Frogtown’s organizations have staff memberswho are not neighborhood residents, the discoursescannot be dismissed as outsiders’ views of Frogtown.Indeed, the participation in and direction of organiza-tional discourses by resident members makes thesediscourses part of internal, neighborhood-based represen-tations of residents’ daily life and perspectives. While notall neighborhood residents are involved in organizing, theresidents who are active in these organizations help toshape their agendas and discourses. The majority of theseresidents were homeowners, but many were not: myinterviews with residents active in organizational boardsand events in 1996 included 33 percent current or one-time renters in the neighborhood—compared with 56percent of all neighborhood households comprised ofrenters in the 1990 census (Wilder Research Center2002). Furthermore, all of the organizations seek residentparticipation and support of their missions, and assuch, aim to appeal to residents on the basis of sharedconcerns in the neighborhood. Consequently, I expectthese organizational discourses to say something aboutthe context or site—the neighborhood—of the activism,and I examine these discourses with the question inmind of how the organizations portray the context oftheir activism.

Collective-Action Frames:Discourses of Place

Analyzing collective-action frames involves examiningboth language and practices that describe or exemplify

motives and goals of collective activism. One way to do sois to use a conceptual heuristic from Snow and Benford(1988, 1992). They argued that collective-action framesconsist of three functions: a motivational element, whichdefines the community that acts collectively; a diagnosticelement, specifying a problemand its cause; and a prognosisof the solution that involves collective action. Thus,collective-action frames articulate or define a communityof people who identify a particular problem and who elsemight be affected by it, how the problem occurred, andactions to solve or remediate the problem.

Using Snow and Benford’s (1988, 1992) heuristic ofmotivational, diagnostic, and prognostic frames, I breakorganizational discourses into three parts: characterizingand defining the community (motivation), describingproblems and assigning blame (diagnoses), and advocat-ing for certain types of action to solve problems (prog-noses). Examining neighborhood organizations as socialmovements—with collective-action frames that articu-late values and agenda for activism—posits such move-ments as full actors in the local political arena, withstrategies that construct the urban neighborhood as animportant site of citizenship. Indeed, the framework of St.Paul’s district-council system also posits neighborhooddistricts as a basis for citizen involvement in the localpolity. The collective-action frames identified here illus-trate how organizations construct those neighborhooddistricts as places for collective community and politicalidentity. I start the frame analysis with definitions of theactivist community.

Motivation Frames

Motivation frames define the community that actscollectively (Snow and Benford 1988, 1992), describingthe group of actors and potential actors and exhortingpeople to act. Scholars also refer to motivational framingas ‘‘frame resonance’’ because motivational frames articu-late community values (or ought to, to be successful)(Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988; Marullo,Pagnucco, and Smith 1996). Motivation place-framesshould refer to the daily-life experiences residents arelikely to have in the neighborhood (such as common sightsor conditions in the neighborhood) in order to fosterrecognition by residents of their location-based common-alities. In the frames of Frogtown’s neighborhood organi-zations, I identified several discursive characterizations ofthe neighborhood, as well as its residents, that form thecore of the motivation frames (Table 1).

The most explicit motivation frames are those that callupon residents to get involved in activism in theneighborhood. These frames do not all reference place

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explicitly. Instead, they address individual residents andsuggest that residents ought to think of themselves as partof a community and as responsible to that community. Inparticular, Table 1 shows that the Block Club and theDistrict Council evoked community and personal respon-sibility in their calls to action. A key theme of thisdiscourse was that all individuals in the neighborhoodshare the responsibility for being active in the community.The Block Club was the most blatant in calling forindividual responsibility: ‘‘You are either part of theproblem OR part of the solution’’ (TDBC 1996b, 4), butboth it and the District Council used the theme of

neighborhood commitment in their motivation frames.The references to place are subtle (deciding how to live inFrogtown, making the neighborhood great), but theimplicit message is that Frogtown is a territorially definedcommunity.

Somemotivation frames addressed andmade explicit arelationship between people and place. The GFCDC andthe District Council called for residents to ensure thateveryone has a ‘‘decent home’’ (GFCDC 1996c, 14) andreferred to the neighborhood as a place to raise families.The Block Club admonished residents to maintain thelandscape: ‘‘[T]ake ownership of the space you occupy’’

Table 1. Motivational Framing by Organization

Thomas-Dale District SevenPlanning Council (TDD7PC)

Greater Frogtown CommunityDevelopment Corporation

(GFCDC)Frogtown Action Alliance

(FAA)Thomas-Dale Block Clubs

(TDBC)

� Wake up—our children needus (1996a, 7)

� There’s power in numbers(1996b, 10)

� Only with your involvementcan . . . Thomas-Dale . . . bea great place to live, work,and raise our families!(1996h)

� Join our . . . planning efforts(1996e, 12–13)

� A community is strongerwhen its residents are linkedtogether around sharedconcerns and a commonpurpose (PED 1996, 20)

� Don’t miss Clean-up Day(1996c, 16)––––––––––––––––––

� Welcome . . . We appreciate[our community] for itsstrength [from] . . .diversity—racial, cultural,and economic (1996g)

� Thomas-Dale . . . anattractive residential option. . . across the . . . racial,cultural, and socioeconomicspectrums (PED 1996, 10)

� You will notice . . . working-class Victorian cottages andquaint, brick railroad houses(1996i)

� Learn how to buy a home(1996b, 15)

� We need your help!Frogtown housing will onlyget better if residents areinvolved . . . so everyone hasa decent home (1996c, 14)– –––––––––––––––––

� The area contains . . . homeshaving architectural andhistoric significance . . .[T]hese modest-pricedhomes represent anopportunity to create prideand a cohesive sense of placeamong area residents(1995, 2)

� Many houses have beeninsensitively altered,resulting in eyesore houses(1995, 2)

� Make it a reality (1996a, 16)� Many . . . problems . . . canbe resolved with a high levelof neighborhoodparticipation (1994, 20)

� Problems affecting theneighborhood . . . arecommon to Frogtown’sresidents without regard toracial or ethnic distinctions(1994, 4)– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

� Frogtown . . . sustains about$850 million in economicactivity per year (Meter1994, 1)

� It’s your home—it should doyou proud (Reporter 1995,14)

� You are either part of theproblem OR part of thesolution (1996b, 4)

� You can stand for something.Or you can get stepped on(Reporter 1997, 20)

� Take ownership of thespace you occupy (Reporter1996a, 10)

� Togetherwe really can decidehow we’re going to live inFrogtown (Howard 1994, 7)

� Win great prizes in TDBC’sfirst bright and beautifulblock contest (Reporter1996b, 13)

� Frogtown or Pigtown? . . .[S]tart cleaning or startoinking (Reporter 1996c, 7)– –––––––––––––––––

� Our community is diverselyrich in the creeds, cultures,and colors of its people(1996b, 13)

� Youth . . . are less than 27%of our population but 100%of our future (1996b, 6;Howard 1996b)

� The future is in our children(Paulson 1995, 5)

Note: The excerpts in this table are quotations from the organizations. They were chosen as representative of the words or themes used repeatedly in organizational

documents for each group. Sources cited here are fully listed in the references section under the name of the organization in the column heading unless otherwise

specified. The dotted line in each column indicates a break between frames that mostly exhort people to act (above the line) and those that describe the physical/

economic conditions or social characteristics, of the neighborhood (below the line).


(Reporter 1996a, 10). They announced contests for ‘‘mostbeautiful’’ block, linking residents’ lifestyles with thephysical landscape. These exhortations implied thathomeowners and renters ought to have common interestsin maintaining the area (see Davis 1991). A call toresidents to ‘‘take ownership’’ of space is important in anarea with 56 percent of housing units occupied by renters.It recognizes that residents have varying economicrelationships to their homes. At the same time, however,the Block Club did not use this tenure differential to callfor sweeping social change. It sought to unify residentsaround landscape maintenance, rather than to constituteidentities around tenure status.

In describing why he became active in his neighbor-hoodby founding theBlockClub, the executive director ofthe organization, Johnny Howard, said, ‘‘Five years ago Ilooked out my window and realized that there was a drughouse on my block’’ (Howard 1994, 7). By invoking drug-dealing on his street, Howard illustrated the very realconnection between individual daily life and the localenvironment. He suggested, therefore, that residents, byvirtue of their common location, also share concerns andproblems, and can work together to address them.

While one aspect of motivational frames—illustratedin the top sections of each column in Table 1—comprisesexhortations to residents to act, giving self- or community-interested individuals reasons for doing so, anotherelement of motivation frames defines or characterizesthe community itself. In Frogtown, these references—illustrated in the bottom sections of each column inTable 1—described characteristics of neighborhood re-sidents and the look of the physical landscape.

Theorganizations that characterized theneighborhoodmost frequently in terms of its people were those two thatalso had strong responsibility-orientedmotivation frames:the District Council and the Block Club. Both of thesegroups referred to the ethnic, racial, and cultural diversityof the neighborhood in a celebratory tone (see Table 1).The references to diversity, though, were generic; theydidnot specify particular groups or cultures.Thus, they didnot problematize relations among diverse residents orquestion the ability of people to identify and sharecommon needs or interests in the neighborhood. TheFAAtook a different approach. They hinted that diversitycould be a basis for fragmentation in the neighborhood,but they argued that everyone in the neighborhood facesthe same problems. The implication, of course, was thatpropinquity does foster common problems, a foundationalnotion in neighborhood-based organizing (Alinsky 1989).All of these references to a diverse neighborhood popula-tion, therefore, ignored potentially pressing concerns, forexample, of Asian immigrants, some of whom came to

Minnesota as refugees, or of African-American residentswho face racialized experiences in the housing market,schools, and everyday social interaction.

References to children and families constituted an-other means of universalizing individual residents into ageneric neighborhood population who share a place.Evocations of children sought to define a broad respon-sibility among neighbors for one another, but they alsodefined the neighborhood as a family-oriented place. TheBlock Club described the high percentage of childrenliving in the neighborhood and, like the District Council’sannouncement that children ‘‘need us,’’ argued thatchildrenwere the ‘‘future’’ of Frogtown. Peoplewhodonothave children still have some responsibility to them asadults, the organizations implicitly suggested—ignoringthe potential sense of exclusion adults without childrenmight feel upon hearing a ‘‘family’’ discourse. Assertinggeneric ‘‘neighborhood-ness’’ (people sharing a commonlocation, common experiences, raising families and withsome responsibility to each other) is oneway to situate andmobilize residents for place-based organizing. It illustrates,however, the inherent exclusions of the frames inattempting to define a territorially inclusive community.

Motivational frames did not focus only on residents,however. In fact, the GFCDC and FAA made fewreferences to residents in their motivation frames (Table1). Instead, these organizations focused on the economicand physical characteristics of the neighborhood—twoelements of place that related directly to their ownagendas. The FAA characterized the neighborhoodthrough statistical analyses of economic activity in theneighborhood. In doing so, it constituted its primaryactivism issue—the economy—as coherent with itsterritorial scope of Frogtown. Yet this constructionbelies—or, at a minimum, ignores—the broader contextof the neighborhood. Frogtown is but oneneighborhood inthe larger city of St. Paul, which itself is situated as part of ametropolitan regional economy, within a broader mid-western, national, and international economy. Thus, it isalmost peculiar to view or describe Frogtown as a separateentity in what the FAA surely recognized as an integratedglobal economy. By situating Frogtown as an economicregion, the FAA supported or perhaps even sought tolegitimate its own mission of economic development inFrogtown. Clearly, describing Frogtown as a distincteconomic place was an important frame for the organiza-tion, as part of establishing the importance of its work forthe neighborhood. In doing so, the frames could fosteractivism as well as legitimating the existence and focus ofthe organization.

Perhaps the most obvious place-oriented motivationalframes are those that addressed the physical condition of

Martin738

the neighborhood. All four of Frogtown’s organizationscharacterized the neighborhood by describing its land-scape or physical infrastructure, but these frames weremost evident with the GFCDC. These physical descrip-tions blurred the line somewhat between mobilizingdiscourses that define the community and diagnosticdiscourses that describe problems needing action. None-theless, they clearly defined the neighborhood as a placewith certain landscape features that were distinctively‘‘Frogtown.’’ The District Council and the GFCDC, forexample, described the housing as ‘‘Victorian’’ and‘‘cottages.’’ These and other references highlighted theneighborhood as a residential communitywith a particularhistory.

As I indicated earlier, Frogtownwas settled by working-class immigrants, and although the District Council andthe GFCDC have undertaken historic rehabilitation andrenovation, little if any private-market gentrification hasoccurred there. In contrast, the district directly to thesouth of Frogtown—also a neighborhood with high levelsof people in poverty and of minority residents—hasexperienced considerable gentrification since the mid-1980s, in Victorian-style homes that were once part ofa solidly middle- and upper-income neighborhood. Insuggesting that Frogtown’s smaller ‘‘railroad houses’’ or‘‘workers’ cottages’’ that date from the Victorian era have‘‘architectural significance’’ in their own right, theGFCDC and the District Council were highlighting‘‘workers’’ as a neighborhood class identity of whichresidents could be proud. These organizations claimedworking-class residences as a strength of the neighbor-hood, distinguishing it from gentrifying areas while alsoasserting an economic value for its smaller houses. Indoing so, the organizations challenged economic valuingof larger, ‘‘historic’’ houses anddistinguished theFrogtownhousing market as different from other areas in St. Paul.At the same time, however, the organizations did notchallenge the functions or logic of the housing marketoverall, nor did they criticize gentrification as a pro-cess. Perhaps because of their own territorial limits, theorganizations inscribed Frogtown’s working-class housingas valuable for and valued in the neighborhood, ratherthan questioning the forces that devalued it.

The organizations that drew attention to the physicalinfrastructure in their mobilizing frames did not simplydiscursively celebrate the housing stock. The GFCDC, inparticular, wrote positively of a neighborhood ‘‘look’’ butalso indicated negative features of the physical landscape,suggesting that many houses had been ‘‘insensitivelyaltered’’ (GFCDC1995, 2). TheGFCDC frame describedthe neighborhood in a way that suggested a need forresidents to restore a previous history and pride. Although

the GFCDC board was one of the most diverse of the fourorganizations in the neighborhood in the mid-1990s (40percent of its members were Asian or African American),its references to aworking-class history ironically evoked atime when the neighborhood was primarily white,populated mostly by European immigrants. The focus onthe material, built landscape of the neighborhood ob-scured the flexible, shifting character of the place as itsresidents change over time.

The motivation frames that described the physicalfeatures or general socioeconomic conditions of theneighborhood made a discursive connection betweenthe goals and missions of the neighborhood organizationsand the daily life experiences of residents. In doing so, theygenerated a universalizing discourse that simplified thecharacteristics of place as ‘‘diversity,’’ ‘‘children,’’ and ageneric working-class identity. These frames may be themost important element of organizational portrayals oftheir place- or neighborhood-based missions, becausethey attempted to link individuals to the experience ofneighborhood and to activism. The motivation framessought to draw upon residents’ experiences in place anduse them dialectically, both to articulate and to createa place identity based on organizations’ activities. Butcollective-action frames do not only characterize actorsand places; they also define problems and proposesolutions (Snow and Benford 1988, 1992). To analyzeneighborhood organizational place-frames fully, therefore,it is also necessary to examine how they diagnose andassign blame for problems and recommend action in theneighborhood.

Diagnostic Frames

According to Snow and Benford (1988, 1992), whencollective-action organizations describe problems thatthey purport to address and assign blame or causes for theproblems, they are framing diagnostically. We mightexpect the diagnostic frames of these neighborhood-basedgroups to locate the problems in the place. Diagnosticframes should also provide a notion of what organizationsbelieve the neighborhood should be like if it had noproblems. By describing problems, organizations identifiedthose activities or elements in the neighborhood that theyconceived as ‘‘out of place,’’ not belonging in Frogtown orin a residential place more generally (Cresswell 1996). Asin the mobilization frames, a crucial way for organizationsto describe problems was to evoke the physical landscape.The District Council lamented a lack of public space, theBlock Club cited problems with dirty or unkempt publicand private spaces, and the GFCDC, as in its motivationframes, referred to degraded housing (Table 2).


TheDistrict Council’s 1996SmallArea Plan containedmany diagnoses of neighborhood problems (see PED1996references in Table 2, column 1). The Small Area Plan(PED 1996) was a planning document for Frogtown inwhich the District Council described a broad range ofproblems in the neighborhood and solutions for improvingthe community. It was developedwith the assistance of St.Paul’s Planning and Economic Development (PED) staff,with a committee of neighborhood residents to directthe project. Such area plans were a regular part of citybusiness, managed through the planning department, upuntil the mid-1990s, when budget cutbacks reduced suchactivities (Homans, interview, 1996). The Thomas-DaleSmall Area Plan represents one of the last such planscreated by a St. Paul neighborhood, funded and shep-herded through PED.

The plan highlighted a series of issues and problemsfacing the neighborhood. Those problems that directlyreferred to the neighborhood landscape involved con-cerns about the need for public space to foster the informalsocial interactions that help to create or support aneighborhood community. The plan—and therefore theDistrict Council—cited an ‘‘acute lack of . . . space’’ inthe neighborhood (PED 1996, 23), and pointed out thatThomas-Dale had much less public green space perresident than other neighborhoods in the city. Thisattention to a lackof public space indicated an ideal of howa neighborhood—specifically Frogtown—should look andfunction (Purcell 1997, 1998).

A different approach to the problems of the physicallandscape was to highlight the decay or deterioration ofthe neighborhood and the need for people to maintain

Table 2. Diagnostic Place-Framing by Organization



(CDC)Frogtown Action Alliance


(TDBC)

� Gathering places play animportant role in the life ofany community . . .[A]mong the challenges . . .is the acute lack of . . . space(PED 1996, 23)

� Thomas-Dale has among thesmallest amount of greenspace per resident of anyneighborhood in the city(PED 1996, 35)

� Thomas-Dale . . . [is] indanger of being caught in acontinuing cycle ofdisinvestments and isolation(PED 1996, 10)

� Metropolitan decisions . . .have aprofound impact on thehealth and vitality of . . .Thomas-Dale (PED1996, 24)

� Access to quality, affordablehealth care is a national issue. . . with particular concernfor Thomas-Dale (PED1996, 32)

� Vacant lots: expensiveeyesores (1996d, 7)

� Many houses have beeninsensitively altered,resulting in . . . loss ofneighborhood character andvalue . . . [T]he good pointsof the area’s housing areobscured . . . [by] the media(1995, 2)

� Some of the infrastructurehas been altered or destroyed(1995, 2)

� This big old house has beenvacant . . . [I]t’s still a solidbuilding (1996e, 13)

� Frogtown has an increasingnumber of vacant lots due tothe aggressive efforts of theCity’s Environmental HealthDivision . . . Frogtown’s taxbase is declining, and givesthe perception that there arenot many good reasons toinvest . . . in theneighborhood(1996a, 2)

� [The CDC] expects to gain. . . insight into . . . thefinancial impediments [to]. . . improving . . . housing(Biko Associates 1997, 4)

� !Action to meet problems isfrequently fractured alongracial and ethnic lines(1994, 4)

� Frogtown residents pay . . .$8 million of income taxes,which more than covers the$7 million of publicassistance collected by allhouseholds (Meter 1994, 1)

� None of [St. Paul’s economicdevelopment] programs havebeen implemented in theFrogtownneighborhood in thelast two years (1994, 11)

� [Perceptual issues inFrogtown include] lack ofclear, action-orientedpriorities . . . negative imageof the neighborhood . . .undeveloped leadership . . .shallow capacity . . . poorcoordination . . . poorlydefined sense of geographicidentity (1994, 4–5)

� [Residents] shouldn’t haveto live with garbage, disrepair(Reporter 1996c, 18)

� There has been blowing trashand broken glass in this areathat needs to be cleaned(1996a)

� It’s not the economics. It’sattitude (Howard, interview,1996; Howard 1996a,1996b)

� There are drug dealers insomeof your homes . . . [L]et[the police] take care of them(Howard 1996b)

� Neighbors are tired of alltypes of disrespectfulbehavior (1996c)



specified.

Martin740

the streets and yards of Frogtown. The BlockClub was themost strident in calling for individual and collectiveresponsibility for the existing (public and private) space,saying that there was too much garbage littering theneighborhood: ‘‘[Residents] shouldn’t have to live withgarbage, disrepair’’ (Reporter 1996d, 18). TheBlockClub’splace-frame diagnoses, like the District Council’s, had anormative element in referring to the landscape. Quitesimply, according to the Club, a degraded landscape‘‘should not’’ exist. The Block Club assigned blame forthe problem simply by noting that garbage was in thestreets and spaces of the neighborhood and, in itsmotivation frames, calling for every resident to help cleanup the neighborhood. By leaving the culprit for garbageunspecified, the Block Club suggested a universal respon-sibility among all residents for the problem. The solu-tion—or prognosis, whichwill be explored in greater detailshortly—was quite simple: individual and collectiveaction, coordinated by the Block Club. The collective-action frame located problems in the physical condition ofthe neighborhood, and blamed it on a lack of action on thepart of residents. In a flyer, the Block Club also specificallycited ‘‘disrespectful behavior’’ for problems in the neigh-borhood. It did not define such behavior, but problemsof drugs, trash, and dilapidated property were also men-tioned (TDBC 1996c). In this vague reference to beha-vior, every neighborhood resident was potentially thesource of the problem or responsible for the solution.Onlythe Block Club explicitly blamed individuals for problems.

Indeed, the assigning of blame in these diagnosticframes reflects important differences between the BlockClub and the other three Frogtown organizations. Iidentify two main sources or causes of neighbor-hood problems: those that focused on structural forces(mostly political-economic) that shaped the neighbor-hood, evident in frames of the FAA, the GFCDC, andDistrict Council; and those that cited individual behavioras a dominant force for both problems and solutionsin the neighborhood, most common with the BlockClub.

These differing views indicate contrasting perspectiveson the scope and scale of neighborhood problems. TheFAA, for example, stressed Frogtown’s connections tobroader economic forces, including the state, in situatingthe neighborhood as a site of poverty and underdevelop-ment. It blamed a lack of funding by the city for econo-mic development programs in the neighborhood. TheGFCDC, meanwhile, attributed causes of neighborhooddecay to homeowners or (often absentee) landlords whofailed to maintain their houses, reconstructed houseswithout regard to architectural style, or abandoned homesentirely. Even more so, however, the GFCDC blamed city

policies for abandoned and decaying housing in Frogtown.They argued that the ‘‘aggressive efforts of the City’sEnvironmental Health Division’’ led to the razing ofhousing in the neighborhood, which increased vacant lotsand decreased the tax base in the neighborhood (GFCDC1996a, 2, excerpted in Table 2). Both the GFCDCand theFAA situated problems in the structural relationshipbetween the neighborhood and the local state. Thus, theyfostered an image of the neighborhood as a coherentterritory maligned by outside government forces. As wewill see in the section on prognosis frames, the solution isto take government functions of planning and develop-ment and conduct them in/have them conducted by theneighborhood.

In contrast to these two more structural causes ofneighborhood decay, the Block Club identified the causalforces at the level of neighborhood residency and citizens’actions and responsibilities to a local community: ‘‘It’s notthe economics. It’s attitude’’ ( Johnny Howard, ExecutiveDirector, Thomas-Dale Block Clubs, interview, St. Paul,MN, 25 June 1996; Howard 1996). Yet it addressedproblems of degradation and crime that could also beconstrued as having structural causes, such as poverty,lack of job opportunities, or investments in local infra-structure.

These divergent attributions of blame highlight howdifferently the organizations framed their actions and thesituation of the neighborhood. The FAA, like theGFCDCand the District Council’s Small Area Plan, blamed statepolicies for at least someof thephysical and socioeconomicproblems in the neighborhood. These organizationsimplied that the neighborhood ought to assert its needsto the state, demanding greater financial assistance fromthe city or decision-making at higher levels of governmentthat attended to their impacts at the neighborhood level.But these frames had another, more important effect: theyconceptually and discursively broadened the scope andscale of the neighborhood’s problems beyond its ownresidents and territory to the local and national economy.The neighborhood in these portrayals was not a separate,isolated and ideal place, but one grounded in a broaderreality of actors and political and economic forces thatwere outside of, and acting upon, the neighborhood itself.Nonetheless, these organizations worked to constitute aneighborhood-scale community in order to assert theirdemands and claims to the local state.

The Block Club focused much more on the very localand immediate scale of the neighborhood in characteriz-ing the sources of problems, commenting on the ‘‘atti-tudes’’ and ‘‘behavior’’ of neighborhood residents. Indoing so, the Block Club represented neighborhoodresidents—and neighborhood organizations—as the only


actors who could truly make a difference in the neighbor-hood. Outside actors or influences seemed, in theirabsence, irrelevant to the Block Club’s imaginings andportrayals of struggles in the neighborhood.

Given these very different descriptions of neighbor-hoodproblems and, especially, causes for theproblems, theorganizations proposed very different solutions.

Prognostic Frames

According to Snow and Benford’s (1988, 1992) frame-work, prognostic frames identify the actions that collec-tive organizations take, the solutions that they propose to

solve the problems that they have identified. Like theirdiagnoses, the prognoses of the four Frogtown organiza-tions highlighted the differences among the organizationsin their approaches to problem-solving in the neighbor-hood, because they focused on the actions of each group(Table 3).

One theme that resonated throughout all the phases ofthe collective-action frames was that of the physicalcondition of the neighborhood. The specific solutions thatthe organizations undertook and advocated, therefore,included attention to the physical landscape. There weretwo elements to this discourse. One, used by the DistrictCouncil and BlockClub, cited the importance of residents

Table 3. Prognostic Framing by Organization



(CDC)Frogtown Action Alliance


(TDBC)

� [D7’s goals are] to stimulategreater interest . . . inplanning [and] . . .improving the physical,economic, and social qualityof life (1995, 3)

� The council strives toconserve, foster, and restorethe well-being of ourneighborhood (1996h)

� We . . . work . . . tostrengthen families;[support] decent, affordable. . . homes; provideopportunities foremployment; create . . .productive businesses; makeThomas-Dale a safe, cleanplace to live (PED 1996, 1)

� Spring Clean-up Day . . .resulted in . . . tons of trash. . . being cleaned from ouralleys, garages, and backyards (1996f, 17)

� Here’s our people’s plan forThomas-Dale! (1996e:12-13)

� Join our Dale Street/MaxsonSteel Industrial Parkplanning efforts (1996d, 17)

� The mission of the [CDCincludes] promoting thearea’s advantages as anaffordable, diverse, safe,and congenial place to live(1995, 1)

� GFCDC would like to . . .[build] single family homes[to achieve] . . . land . . .back on the tax roles . . .market interest . . . inFrogtown . . . residents cantake pride (1996a, 2)

� The mission of the FAA is tobring together diverseindividuals andorganizationsin Frogtown (1996b, 6)

� Key elements of the FAAstructure [include] buildinga sense of geographic identity(1996b, 6)

� The Frogtown communityneeds to be revitalized in away that is responsive toresident needs, leads togreater community control,and develops local capacity(1994, 5)

� [FAA] achieves its goals andobjectives by working . . . incollaboration with otherorganizations (1995a, 16)

� Shop Frogtown (1995b, 16)� Our business is buildingbusiness for the Frogtownneighborhood (1997)

� Neighbors helping neighbors(1995, 1996b)

� [Development of pocketparks] has turned spaceused for illegal activity intoplaces of peace and beauty(1996b, 8)

� [Giving away flowers] notonly changes the perceptionothers have of ourcommunity, it changes ourperspective (1996b, 7)

� Events have been a staple. . . [T]hey bring neighborstogether . . . to share in thestruggle for a clean, safe, andcomfortable community(1996b, 5)

� [TDBCworks to] close downdrug houses, clean up ourblocks and hold neglectfulproperty owners accountable(Lammers 1994, 3)

� [Street protests] increaseneighborhood visibility,disrupt disrespectful andillegal behavior, and . . .encourage pride (1995, 16)

� When neighbors know whois REPSONSIBLE . . . and. . . hold themselves andothers ACCOUNTABLEthe POSSIBLITYof a betterneighborhood becomesreality (1996a)



specified.

Martin742

coming together to clean and maintain various spaces inthe neighborhood. The second, used by the GFCDC,referred to the physical infrastructure of housing stock(Table 3).

TheBlockClub andDistrictCouncil referred to actionsthat they had taken and were continuing to take to keepthe neighborhood looking clean and pleasant. In parti-cular, the Block Club explained its organizational beliefthat the physical look of the neighborhood affectsperceptions of the neighborhood: ‘‘[Giving away flowers]. . . changes our perspective’’ (TDBC1996b, 7). Images ofthe neighborhood clearly mattered to these organizations,which sought to change the way the place was bothperceived and experienced.Actions to clean andmaintainthe neighborhood, therefore, were essential for fostering apositive place-image. The solutions that the Block Clubadvocated included marches against drug dealing andprostitution, protests of police inaction, pickets of propertyowned by landlords identified by the organization asirresponsible, building pocket parks, maintaining emptyneighborhood lots, and citizen watch programs.

While theDistrict Council and BlockClub emphasizedcleaning the neighborhood as one way to enhance itsimage, the GFCDC, FAA, and District Council also allparticipated in and advocated for various long-termplanning and development strategies, each focused on adifferent area or component of development. TheCounciland the FAA collaborated on planning for an abandonedindustrial site, with the FAAdoing so as part of its broaderbusiness development and the District Council partici-pating as part of a comprehensive look at land use in theneighborhood. Each organization stressed planning andlocal, community involvement—‘‘community control,’’according to the FAA (FAA 1994, 5).

In the case of the industrial redevelopment, both theFAA and the District Council referred to the redevelop-ment of the site as being about jobs and economic growthin Frogtown; their discourses ignored the broader St. Pauleconomy. Although the site itself crossed Frogtown’sdistrict boundary into another neighborhood and was partof the city’s economic development strategy, the FAA andthe District Council referred to the site as ‘‘Dale StreetShops’’ or ‘‘Maxson Steel,’’ names of two entities that hadexisted on the Frogtown side of the industrial site. Forthese organizations, the site was a neighborhood one, andtheir actions were situated in and addressed at theneighborhood level. In its diagnostic frames, the FAAexplicitly blamed the local state for some of Frogtown’swoes; prognostically, however, it situated solutions foreconomic growth in planning at the neighborhood scale.

To constitute neighborhood-based solutions, the orga-nizations called for residents to help direct planning

efforts. Residents could—and should—attend meetings,listen to presentations about land-use planning, and helpdecide future redevelopment schemes, including types ofbusinesses to attract and neighborhood amenities toinclude in the construction. The FAA also suggested thatbusiness development in Frogtown relied in part onindividual consumer actions. A solution, therefore, wasfor residents of the neighborhood to ‘‘Shop Frogtown’’(FAA 1995b, 16). This was a very simple, direct, andexplicit prognosis frame on the part of the FAA. Itcontinued a discursive theme for the organization ofreferring to Frogtown as an economic entity, a focus of theorganization’s own business development and supportfor neighborhood entrepreneurs. This role of individualconsumers on the local economy contrasted with theFAA’s main activities, which focused on: coordinatingcitizen and business input in industrial redevelopment,particularly for physical infrastructure; entrepreneurialskills and opportunities, including a business incubator;business coalition development in two commercial corri-dor areas; and other long-range planning and develop-ment for economic growth in the neighborhood.

The GFCDC’s main development strategy, of course,focused on the housing stock. Its prognosis discourselinked housing to the broader economic and physicalhealth of the neighborhood by describing the need to buildhouses for families, adding to the tax value of neighbor-hood property and, according to the GFCDC (1996a, 2),developing greater neighborhood pride among residents.The GFCDC’s representation of its activities in buy-ing abandoned houses and fixing them or building newhouses on vacant lots suggested impacts far beyond anysingle house or homeowner. The GFCDC connected itshousing-development efforts to financial investments inthe neighborhood and to the overall character and theperception of the neighborhood by residents and outsiders(potential investors and residents, and even the taxassessors). For the GFCDC, individual and group deci-sions to invest in housing through ownership or rehabi-litation provided tangible evidence of support for theneighborhood as a community.

The prognoses by the FAA, the GFCDC, and theDistrictCouncil for physical development and communityplanning reflected a broader theme of community develop-ment. For example, theBlockClubwas quite explicit aboutthe role of organizational gatherings in fostering a sense ofcommunity. It used events to ‘‘bring neighbors together’’(TDBC 1996b, 5); the FAA talked about developing‘‘local capacity’’ (FAA 1994, 5); the District Councilspoke of the need for space for neighbors to gather and getto know one another; and the GFCDC presented theneighborhood as a ‘‘congenial’’ place to live (GFCDC


1995, 1) (Table 3). These many references to communityreflected the goal of connecting residents and organiza-tions together in the place called Frogtown. In otherwords, these organizations worked discursively to consti-tute the place as a ‘‘neighborhood,’’ with the connotationsthat word carried of community or shared residentialexperiences. The actions of these organizations rangedfrom block parties and street protests against crime andinadequate policing to meetings about zoning ordinances,development of business associations, arranging for newbusinesses, and building new houses. Their discoursesand actions strove to foster a sense of place, one thatemphasized the local dependence of residents, in whichpositive events and investments were good for everyone(Cox and Mair 1988). But the local dependence ofFrogtown, its organizations asserted discursively, was notbased in St. Paul or the metropolitan area: it was adependence situated at theneighborhood scale of daily lifeinteractions in and near people’s residences.

The unifying theme of community and shared neigh-borhood commitments was also apparent in a prognosis ofcollaboration. The FAA was most blatant in advocatingfor cooperation among the four Frogtown organizations,arguing that ‘‘[A]n organization with the word alliance inits name achieves its goals and objectives by workingwith others’’ (FAA 1995a, 16, emphasis in original). Indifferent ways in their discourses and actions, each ofthe Frogtown neighborhood organizations recognized theactions of the others and the importance of workingtogether to achieve certain ends. It was in this sharedconcern and collaboration among organizations that aneighborhood dependence was most apparent. The FAAand the District Council collaborated to solicit input andplan with city officials for the redevelopment of anindustrial corridor along the northern part—and bound-ary—of the neighborhood. The GFCDC and the BlockClub cooperated in efforts to notify residents and seektheir input on housing rehabilitation and constructionprojects through door-to-door visits and public meetings.TheGFCDCalsomet regularly with the physical planningcommittee of the District Council in order to discussparticular sites for housing rehabilitation or construction.In addition, the organizations’ leaders cooperated in theirinteractions with the city, such as when they demandedresident input on a street-paving plan for which cityofficials had failed to consider street design and traffic-calming, replacing lead pipes, and funds for housingimprovements in conjunction with the paving project.

Like a city with competing interests among its boosters,however, Frogtown organizations’ prognosis discoursesevidenced competing agendas as well. The DistrictCouncil encouraged and coordinated planning and

physical improvements to the neighborhood (such asthrough an annual clean-up). TheGFCDChighlighted itsrole as a developer of housing but linked its actions to theoverall quality of life in the neighborhood; in this respect,it remained quite focused on the neighborhood environ-ment—and perceptions thereof—as the locus of itsproblem-solving activity. The FAA sought solutionsoriented around business development, primarily plan-ning-related ones as well as some fostering local invest-ments in businesses. Finally, the Block Club helpedresidents to get to knowone another through block partiesand anticrime rallies and cleaned up the neighborhoodthrough planting flowers and creating small parks onvacant lots.

In the next section, I discuss how the analyticseparation of collective-action frames into the three-partheuristic of mobilization, diagnoses, and prognoses isuseful for understanding how territorially based action isdiscursively sited.

Place-Framing as Place-Making

Ultimately, the four organizations in Frogtown in 1996and 1997 were all trying to solve—or at least address—problems in and of a place. Thus, by all logic, the ways thatthey presented themselves and their agendas should havereferred to the neighborhood in which they were located.Yet it is too simple to say that a concept of place wasevident in the discourses of the organizations. Rather, itis more important to examine how place appeared in thediscourses of the organizations, and why. Unravelingthe elements of place in neighborhood-based communityorganizing illustrates how local dependence is constitutedat multiple scales within urban areas. Through localgovernance structures, the neighborhood organizations inFrogtown were locally dependent at multiple scales, thoseof the urban area and of the neighborhood in which theyoperate. They used place-framing to legitimate andcircumscribe their neighborhood sphere of activism bydrawing upon presumed daily experiences of life in theneighborhood to locate both problems and potentialsolutions at the scale of the residential place. In doing so,the organizations constituted themselves and their resi-dent-members as citizens, not just of a broader city, but of aparticular location within the city, with needs anddemands that were directed at the local state and itsofficials, even as they cast the neighborhood as the mostsalient sphere of community.

The framework of collective-action frames facilitatesan analytical separation of motivational, diagnostic, andprognostic elements. Although it is somewhat artificial to

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separate dynamic, integrated organizational discoursesabout the neighborhood and activism into such fine-grained parts, theoretically it permits an examination ofthe construction of place-based agendas for activism.Separating the components of framing discourses revealsthat place was invoked by the organizations primarily inmotivational and diagnostic frames (Table 4).

Motivation frames included descriptions of the neigh-borhood in terms of its population—as being diverse

racially and ethnically, having high numbers of children,and being mixed by housing tenure (renters and home-owners). These characterizations of the neighborhoodrepresented the place and its residents in a universali-zing manner, identifying them as having shared character-istics, rather than divided by differences. Frogtown’sdiversity was reduced to a set of general elements withwhich residents presumably could identity. In acknowl-edging difference among residents, the organizations’

Table 4. Themes in Organizational Frames by Type (Summary of Tables 1–3)

Organization

Motivational FramesExhort action and define/describe the community

(who, what)

Diagnostic FramesDescribe problems and

assign cause/blame

Prognostic FramesSolutions (specific actions)


Exhortations:� Plan for future� Clean up neighborhood� Support/protect children� Create community

Descriptions:� Racial, cultural, economicdiversity

� Historic homes (railroad,working-class)

� Lack of green, public space� Cycle of disinvestment� Broader processes/decisionsaffect local conditions

� Plan for future development:* Industrial* Social* Economic* Infrastructure* Long-range

comprehensive plan� Clean-up days

Greater Frogtown CommunityDevelopment Corporation(CDC)

Exhortations:� Buy a home� Families need homes

Descriptions:� Architectural andhistorically significanthousing:

� Modest prices� Run-down

� Degraded, run-down houses� City policies increasenumber of vacant lots

� Lack of investment� Financial barriers tohomeownership

� Negative images ofneighborhood

� Promote neighborhood as aresidential location

� Build and rehabilitate houses

Frogtown Action Alliance (FAA) Exhortations:� Everyone faces the sameproblems and should helpsolve themDescriptions:

� Economic activity inneighborhood

� Fracturing by race, ethnicity� More money leavesneighborhood than isinvested

� Frogtown is neglected by thecity

� Negative perceptions,undefined geographicidentity

� Unite individuals andorganizations:* Create geographic

identity* Foster community control

� Entrepreneurship classes� Business development andsupport

Thomas-Dale Block Clubs(TDBC)

Exhortations:� Keep neighborhood andhomes clean

� Individuals responsible forcommunity

� Win prizesDescriptions:

� Cultural, religious, racialdiversity

� Children

� Garbage in streets, yards� Poor attitudes, behavior, andlack of responsibility byresidents

� Foster residentialinteractions andneighborhood pride

� Clean up area, plant flowers,and build pocket parks

� Protest criminal behavior:* Work with police* Hold property owners

accountable for tenants,clean up


motivational frames aimed to portray difference as merelyanother descriptive feature of a single, place-orientedcommunity. This strategy reveals a place-based identityconstruction, one that sought to subsume other socialidentities under a territorial identity in order to establishand maintain place-based collective-action agendas.

Theorganizations also highlighted the physical featuresof the neighborhood in their motivation frames, either bycelebrating historic housing stock or by deploring run-down and unkempt landscapes. The organizations arguedthat residents had a responsibility to the physical land-scape and to each other. In all of these discourses, theneighborhoodwas taken for granted as a place, an entity inwhich people experienced life in a particular way. TheFAA even sought to establish it as an economic region byciting government taxing and spending statistics at thelevel of the neighborhood.

The organizations continued to describe the physicaland economic conditions of the neighborhood in theirdiagnostic frames, thereby locating the problems thatorganizations addressed in the material realities ofthe place (Table 4). They cited the degradation of theneighborhood in terms of a lack of cleanliness anddecaying buildings, as well as the lack of green space.The causes of problems cited in the organizationaldiagnostic frames, however, represented a difference inhow the organizations located Frogtown in relation toother places, especially to the state. Thus, the Block Clubidentified the causes of problems as mostly in the behaviorof its own residents, which also implied that the solutionswere locally rooted. The GFCDC and the FAA, bycontrast, were quite explicit that actors and forcesworkingoutside of the neighborhood were at fault for theabandonment of houses and the economic struggles ofthe businesses and residents. Nonetheless, their focus foractivismwas at theneighborhood level, both in identifyingproblems and in recommending solutions.

The differences among the organizations in assigningcauses to the problems certainly reflect their differingagendas, which were most evident in the prognosticframes. The District Council stressed planning, theGFCDC housing development, the FAA business devel-opment, and the Block Club the physical maintenance ofthe neighborhood and the protesting of crime (Table 4).Yet Table 4 illustrates that even in the prognostic frames,the organizations conceptualized Frogtown as a particularand specific place, a neighborhood where these fourorganizationsworked to improve the perception, the senseof pride, the community, and the collaborative efforts ofpeople in the neighborhood.

In all of these collective-action frames, therefore,the neighborhood was repeatedly invoked or cited as the

sphere of action, as having particular features andproblems that residents could understand and identifywith because of their common, shared location.Of course,the ‘‘neighborhood’’ was created and maintained in apublic imaginary—or, at least as illustrated here, inorganizational discourses—based on a series of idealsand ideas about a residential ‘‘place.’’ Thus, in referring toFrogtown as a ‘‘place,’’ the organizations asserted that itwas a coherent ‘‘district within an urban area’’ ( Johnston1994, 409). Their descriptions of physical infrastructure,such as housing or the presence of garbage in streets,evoked common sights that most residents would likelynotice on a daily basis, thereby connecting problems toexperiences of everyday life. The organizations evoked ‘‘ashared interest in overlapping use values’’ by asserting thatproblems in the neighborhood were common to allresidents and that everyone in the neighborhood hadsome responsibility to try and solve those problems (Loganand Molotch 1987, 108). Yet the organizations did notassert that the neighborhood is unique. Indeed, while theycited important, distinctive features—such as the historic,working-class housing, the problems of the economy, orthe diversity of residents—none of the organizationsargued that Frogtown had characteristics or faced prob-lems unlike those of any other place. Instead, theydiscursively situated the particular configuration ofhistory, architecture, people, economy, and problems atthe scale of the residential neighborhood, one thatcorresponded to the ‘‘citizen participation’’ district ofFrogtown in the St. Paul polity.

Conclusion

This research expands social-movement theories tounderstandmore adequatelymicroscale dynamics of placeconstitution through the collective-action frames ofneighborhood organizations. It examines a framework inurban politics in which neighborhood or communitygroups operate in a relatively small and delineatedgeographic location, organizing residents to participatein the local polity. These groups then use their territoriallybounded political identities to constitute a justification forplace-based action and to foster concern and communityat the scale of the neighborhood. They do so throughplace-frames, which legitimate neighborhood-based ac-tion and define the neighborhood community organiza-tion as the best actor both to represent neighborhoodresidents and to respond to neighborhood needs. Place-frames discursively legitimate the sphere of the neighbor-hood, siting blame at the local and regional level, butaction within the neighborhood. They thus reveal the

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creation of urban spaces at scales below the broader urbanfabric of city- or metropolis-wide local dependency andgrowth coalitions (Cox and Mair 1988; Gilbert 1999).

Place frames do not simply reveal the ways that placeprovides important grounding for neighborhood activismand community development. They provide a conceptualframework for analyzing collective action more generally,in multiple places and at scales beyond the local. Place-frame analysis investigates the concrete references toplace, people, and events in organizational discourses andthe ways that they are linked to recommended actions. Assuch, it goes beyond asserting an importance of place inactivism by illustrating how the conditions of daily life—inherently spatial and geographically located—informand underlie activist discourses. The place-frames in thecase of Frogtown, for example, discursively represent Coxand Mair’s (1988) local dependence at a neighborhoodscale, nested within the urban political economy.

This analysis demonstrates how local communitiesconstitute their territorial sphere as a legitimate andmeaningful site for activism. As Harvey (1989, 1996)cautions, locally based approaches to problems that haveorigins in national and international social, political, andeconomic processes may undermine global activist agen-das. Place-frames, however, offer a conceptual frameworkfor analyzing global and regional activist-claims, as well asthose of locally situated groups. With the conceptualiza-tion of motivation, diagnostic, and prognosis frames asthey relate to place in mind, geographers can assess thedegree to which various types of activist frames draw uponand constitute place-based identities or offer alternativegeographies grounded in the spatialities of social life. AsJonas (1998) suggests, locally based discourses rhetoricallyorganize andmake sense of the daily experiences of life in aparticular place, helping to link local-level events andproblems with broader processes. Place-frames at a multi-tude of scales can make sense of daily experiences andconnect them to particular types of social or communityaction.

The Frogtown organizations situated their activism in asingle place and context, one that the local politicalstructure assigned them.Asmanifested in Frogtown in the1990s, their place-frames represented an assertion ofcommunity at the neighborhood scale and did not addressalliances with other neighborhoods in St. Paul. Yetalternative frames certainly would be possible. Eventhe discursive grounding of specific experiences of theneighborhood could reconfigure themeaning and salienceof the local by focusing on common experiences—ofphysical decay or drugs, for example—across a varietyof locales. Focusing on these common experiences indifferent locales could form a set of place-based, collec-

tive-action frames that situated calls for activism across abroader political and social sphere than that of a singleneighborhood. Indeed, international local-global coali-tions fighting the impacts of globalization may provideexamples of how spatialities of daily life are beingdiscursively drawn upon to articulate calls for activism ata variety of scales. A place-frame analysis would elaborateon how these coalitions are being deployed by many typesof collective organizations.

This research demonstrates an important theoreticaland practical insight: that place-based collective actioninvolves definitions of problems, goals, and strategies withexplicit reference and attention to the site and subject ofthe activism through place-frames. It continues the‘‘geographical project’’ (Herod 1991, 398) of specifyinghowplace informs social action, and provides a conceptualtool for imagining and understanding alternative scalesand forms of place-based organizing. Place-framing illus-trates the meaning-making that groups of people under-take in their social and political lives.

Acknowledgments

Several people deserve thanks for their valuablefeedback and support as I developed this article: SarahElwood, Steve Holloway, J. P. Jones, Audrey Kobayashi,Helga Leitner, Doug McAdam, Eric Sheppard, and theanonymous reviewers for the Annals. Remaining errorsand omissions are my own.

Notes

1. Swyngedouw (1992, 40) credited conversationswithAndrewMair for his coining the term ‘‘glocalization,’’ althoughRobertson (1995, 28) indicated that the term was popular inbusiness in the 1980s and suggested that the initial use of theword came from Japan. I do not think that there is necessarilyone origin; the many uses of ‘‘glocalization’’ indicate that itarticulates an idea that many people find salient.

2. I put the terms ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘racial’’ (‘‘racially’’) in quotes toemphasize their social constitution.

3. They were also the basis for Alinsky-style political activism,which seeks to identify and build upon common interestsamong a group of people, be it based upon race or ethnicity,work status, or, most commonly, residential location (Bailey1974, 106; Alinsky 1989; Fisher 1994).

4. I do not wish to argue that all neighborhood organizations aresocial movements, merely that, as collective organizationsoutside of formal governments, they act like social move-ments.

5. I focus here on the frames of the organizations and what theysay about place, not on the reception of the place identity anddiscourse among residents.

6. The boundaries of each district were determined primarily bycommunity groups in existence at the time, in consultationwith city planning officials.


7. The city of St. Paul provides funds for a district council ineach of the seventeen planning districts of the city, of whichFrogtown/Thomas-Dale is one.

8. The McKnight Foundation primarily supports communityand family development programs.

9. In fact, organizations were not all audited regularly by the cityor the nonprofit foundations that supported them. In 2000,the Alliance declared bankruptcy after financial mismanage-ment (Balaji 2001).

10. Martin (2000) examined organizational discourses aimed atexternal audiences: nonresidents and the media in St. Paul.

11. For more about the Frogtown Times as a neighborhooddiscourse in its own right and in juxtaposition to major mediaportrayals of the neighborhood, see Martin (2000).

12. I collected and analyzed over one hundred documents for allfour organizations. I also attended a total of twenty-nineorganizational or neighborhood meetings from June 1996through January 1997, although most of my observations ofmeetings were conducted in July, August, and September1996.

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