Building the Progressive City One Neighborhood at a Time: The Story of the East St. Louis Action Research Project (USA)

This article describes how powerful deindustrialization, disinvestment, and suburbanization forces undermined the health of the East St. Louis, Illinois (US) economy and municipal government leaving the city’s 40.000 residents without basic municipal services. What distinguishes this story is the emergence of a small group of low-income African American women who responded to these failures by self-organizing a “bottom-up, bottom-sideways” organizing, planning, and development initiative. In particular, this article explains how a community-university partnership carried out by these women and students and faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was able to generate more than $200 million in new investment that stabilized their neighborhood and encouraged residents from other East St. Louis communities across the region to undertake similar resident-led planning efforts.