Street-Level Brokers: Power and Politics in the New England Rustbelt

Scholarly research on urban political economy has long examined the conditions that enable city growth projects. Such accounts tend to emphasize the power of local elites, technocrats, and large corporate interests. In contrast, we know much less about the role of community leaders, active in city organizations, who broker deals with corporate partners and help win over existing communities that might otherwise oppose undesirable projects. Drawing upon 45 in-depth interviews and participant observation of a casino development project in Westville, a small, deindustrialized New England city, I demonstrate how community leaders move across the structures of city politics to leverage claims for expanded resources and representation of their constituents. I find that such leaders construct two narratives to guide them in this process: the politics of community care and the politics of community entrepreneurialism. How leaders navigate across the city’s civic-political sphere informs the logics of each narrative. Moreover, these maneuvers create intersections of organizations across the city’s civic and political arena. By moving between these positions while brokering community benefits, Westville leaders complement theories of urban political economy that center the role of political and economic elites.