Managed Integration

Managed Integration: Dilemmas of Doing Good in the City by Harvey Luskin Molotch is a groundbreaking sociological study of how urban communities navigated racial transition in mid-twentieth-century Chicago. Focusing on the South Shore neighborhood, Molotch probes the tensions between ecological forces of neighborhood change and the deliberate efforts of local organizations to preserve stability through managed integration. Through a close study of the South Shore Commission, he traces the tools—tenant referral programs, appeals to white residents, organizational mobilization—used in an attempt to resist resegregation and maintain a racially mixed, middle-class community.

With a combination of archival data, interviews, field observation, and landlord surveys, Molotch situates South Shore’s struggles within the larger urban processes of white flight, real estate markets, and racial succession. The book critically interrogates the dilemmas of “doing good” through community action, showing both the promise and limits of voluntarism in the face of entrenched structural pressures. At once a vivid case study and a broader meditation on urban sociology, Managed Integration continues to resonate for scholars of race, housing, policy, and the contested meaning of integration in American cities.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.