The Meaning of Neighborhood in the Modern City

Abstract

From 1910 to 1917, the city of Baltimore engaged in the first American effort to separate black and white neighborhoods by law. Often interpreted as a component of early twentieth-century reform agendas, residential segregation actually had a different genealogy than elite progressive reform. Professional reformers and Baltimore elites presaged a trend in later residential segregation battles by allowing less affluent whites with vested interests in a neighborhood to wage the frontline attacks. At the heart of the struggle was the relationship of class and geography in the spatially unstable modern city. Middle-class whites and blacks both hoped to inscribe status onto Baltimore's residential landscape to secure their social positions and their access to municipal services. They found instead that the single-purpose neighborhoods of the modern city could abruptly change character in a way that the mixed space of preindustrial cities had not, threatening their careful investment in select urban spaces.