American Project

"Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the story of daily life in an American public housing complex. Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have viewed only from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book recreates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an…