Creating Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington, D.C.

(Hardback)

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Landman studies four communally-oriented settings in Washington's urban environment. Through ethnographic field work she learned that cooperation, sociability, and self management overcame the common urban challenges posed by isolation and largely impersonal, single purpose contact with others. The settings were a cooperative food store, a cooperative bakery, community gardens, and a cooperatively owned low-cost housing project. Landman shows how the participants in these economically related activities are socially bound together in a web of relations considered unusual in large American cities, and how these exceptionally connected urban lives prove very satisfactory.

Author Bio

RUTH H. LANDMAN is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the author of related studies, including one of Washington's Yard Sales (1987), and other studies about the working lives of anthropologists in the U.S. and Britain, including Anthroplogical Careers: Perspectives on Research, Employment and Training (1981), and Applied Anthropologist and the Public Servant: the Life and Work of Philleo Nash (1989).