The Urban Affairs Association (UAA), an international professional association for urban scholars, researchers and public service professionals, recognized a book co-written by Mark Joseph, an associate professor at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and founding director of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities, as one of the field’s best published works of the year.
Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which Joseph co-authored with Robert Chaskin, a professor at the University of Chicago, received UAA’s 2017 Best Book in Urban Affairs Honorable Mention Award.
The award was presented during UAA’s 47th Annual Conference in Minneapolis, April 19-22, in recognition of outstanding scholarship and service.
Joseph’s book was one of 69 nominations UAA received for the Best Book in Urban Affairs Award this year. Nominated authors represented various disciplines and urban topics.
In particular, the Award Committee’s assessment praised the authors’ important findings and clear writing style: “The book tackles Chicago’s ‘Plan for transformation,’ which demolished public housing in favor of building mixed-income communities. The book clearly lays out the theories motivating mixed-income housing developments, such as the growth of social capital for relocated public housing residents. Years of in-depth empirical evidence, however, show the limited evidence of such theories. Joseph and Chaskin reveal crucial blind spots in these theories, namely the day-to-day interactions between the different income groups shape the success of mixed-income housing. Tensions between residents’ expectations of appropriate public and private behavior undermine the very goals of the developments, as the different income groups avoid each other to minimize uncomfortable interactions. This finding has both scholarly and policy implications for the future viability of such projects. The easily accessible writing style will make Chaskin and Joseph’s work available to a wide range of audiences.”