“Writing the Ghetto, Inventing the Slum” traces the changing definitions, representations, and meanings of the “slum” and the “ghetto” in American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. The chapter considers writings by Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, Hutchins Hapgood, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, and Claude Brown, reading them alongside turn-of-the-century muckraking, Chicago School sociology, and “culture of poverty” social science discourse. Instead of a single, overarching story, the imaginative literature analyzed in the chapter offers competing and divergent representations of the “slum” and the “ghetto” as places of cultural and linguistic vibrancy and vitality, but also as places of poverty and pathology, as zones of acculturation, but also as zones of inassimilable ethnic and racial difference. These contradictory understandings within and between texts reveal the unsettled status, historically changing nature, and enduring fascination of the “slum” and the “ghetto” in the American imagination.

Chapter 6 addresses the “black ghetto”-the persistent concentration of African-American poverty in the country's inner cities. The interwar Chicago School's race-agnostic paradigm was challenged by a handful of high-profile sociologists and economists in the mid-1940s in works that, though they documented a discriminatory thicket, failed to win public or policy traction. Only with the televised urban riots of the mid- to late 1960s, in the midst of Johnson's Great Society, did the black ghetto attain full-fledged problem status. Social scientists registered the new stakes in a wave of studies that established the battle lines for decades. Works that stressed the spatially concentrated legacy of racial discrimination were pitted-in a highly charged political climate-against culture-of-poverty accounts. The research lines, in turn, informed competing remedies, notably geographic dispersal, community development, and-in a reflection of the country's rightward drift-outright disengagement. The broad if uneven patterns in the post-1960s scholarship are a de-emphasis of race, on the one hand, and the strengthening of individualistic frames, on the other. There is, moreover, a rough disciplinary divide: Sociologists, he shows, have tended to highlight spatial and social factors, with economists and political scientists favoring, for the most part, more individualist and class-based accounts.

This chapter examines cities and urban life from the perspective of social avalanches and tensional individuality. I discuss the ways in which contemporary sociologists and other commentators on nineteenth-century urbanisation saw modern cities as constituting the optimal habitat for the emergence and rapid diffusion of contagious ideas. Several argued that in the metropolis one’s immunity against corrupt ideas is constantly weakened, paving the way for contagion dynamics that could escalate into social avalanches carrying urban inhabitants away in collective frenzy. I also show how sociologists examined metropolitan life as wedded to a notion of tensional individuality: in the city, the individual is at once exposed to a bombardment of external mimetic forces which threaten to undermine individuality and is characterised by an anti-mimetic core which works to counteract such external influences. Finally, the chapter argues that many of the concerns that sociologists expressed concerning late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century cities were shared by architects and urban planners at the time. Their contemplations led to a series of design proposals: suggestions for urban planning believed to eliminate the problem of social avalanching in cities and minimise the mimetic component of urban individuality.