Visions of Autonomy

Abstract

To date, urban scholars have given little attention to the radical politics of neighborhood autonomy that characterized the utopianist vanguard of the broader 1970s neighborhoods movement. Focusing on a constellation of little-known theorists, activists, and institutions—Milton Kotler, Karl Hess, the Alliance for Neighborhood Government, Washington’s Adams-Morgan Organization, and others—this article explores the cultural and intellectual impulses undergirding this fractured movement. It begins by identifying the movement’s New Left origins, then investigates the tensions and fissures that defined this network, as leftists, libertarians, counterculturalists, civil rights organizers, and alternative technology proponents forged provisional alliances. In the end, the article suggests, elements of the burgeoning New Right found partial success in appropriating these ideals of urban community self-reliance, harnessing them to a free market political project. This trajectory demonstrates, however, that the localist language of neighborhood communalism is a place where traditional distinctions among left, liberal, and right often blur or even crumble.