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Sarah Gaby, Review of “How Civic Action Works: Fighting for Housing in Los Angeles”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 2, December 2021, Page e25, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab089
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For many, a look inside campaigns for affordable housing in Los Angeles initiates a series of questions about outcomes—which campaign was successful and why? For Paul Lichterman, the opportunity to intimately observe several groups as they negotiate the complex terrain of affordable housing in one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States instead provides an opportunity to reconceptualize collective action. How Civic Action Works upends existing understandings of strategic collective action by removing the actor and studying the action and by using times of challenge as a tool to uncover the cultural contexts shaping advocacy efforts.
Lichterman's in-depth book recounts the experience of social advocates as they fight for affordable housing, to stop gentrification, and in support of development that enhances the livelihood of low-income residents. The extensive empirical analysis spans four years of participant observations supplemented with archival research across four campaigns, twelve organizations, and three coalitions, two of which are intimately examined. Out of this emerges a challenge to understandings of social advocates as a monolithic group pursuing victory and instead calls into focus the influence of the complex and highly contextual processes of building relationships and generating claims in collective settings.
