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A review by gabsalott13
Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence by Patrick Sharkey
2.0
This was a required book for my major's senior seminar. Our class is meeting with Sharkey next week, and wish I were more surprised or intrigued by his findings, but they just seem like recycled versions of things less privileged/tenured/etc urbanists have been saying for decades.
I'm sure I'm just in a jaded place with the overwhelming savior complexes of many white people who have made their livings off of "fascinations" with cities and the (poor, POC) people living in them. However, Sharkey's particular complex kind of made this book insufferable at times.
He simultaneously insults the intelligence of longtime residents fearing gentrification (which he, like all of my professors, says is an "imprecise term" to discuss the "complex phenomenon") and waxes poetic about how these people need to "join the front lines" of the war on violence by becoming "community advocates."
In short: he thinks highly of himself and his ideas, and I'm not sure any of them warrant the praise.
I'm sure I'm just in a jaded place with the overwhelming savior complexes of many white people who have made their livings off of "fascinations" with cities and the (poor, POC) people living in them. However, Sharkey's particular complex kind of made this book insufferable at times.
He simultaneously insults the intelligence of longtime residents fearing gentrification (which he, like all of my professors, says is an "imprecise term" to discuss the "complex phenomenon") and waxes poetic about how these people need to "join the front lines" of the war on violence by becoming "community advocates."
In short: he thinks highly of himself and his ideas, and I'm not sure any of them warrant the praise.