Good Neighbors

Cities are the prime locus of class conflict today. Often described as gentrification, the material bases and concrete manifestations of this new form of social violence have too often gone uncharted, however. Through a historical and ethnographical account of the changing face of one former working-class neighborhood in Boston, Good Neighbors provides fascinating insights into how the urban elites have reshaped the neighborhood they now inhabit. Investigating the mix of inclusion and exclusion that characterizes elite culture, Tissot demonstrates that while new mixed demographics emerged and coexistence alongside “different” populations – whether for their income, their ethnic origins, or their sexual orientation – have become a prized quality, social barriers have not in any sense been erased, indeed quite the contrary.