The Making of the Philadelphia “Badlands”: Race, Class, and the Moral Geography of Neighborhood Decline

During the early 1990s Philadelphia police officers and Philadelphia Inquirer reporters dubbed the Black and Latine neighborhoods of North Philadelphia the “Badlands.” This geologic term evoked landscapes in the American West to convey the deleterious impact of deindustrialization and the rise of the drug trade on these neighborhoods. I argue that this discourse obscured the social, political, and economic transformations these neighborhoods experienced due to postwar deindustrialization and disinvestment, the national right-wing rollback of public services and social entitlements, and carceral state expansion. Police and public officials saw the “Badlands” as neighborhoods that had fallen into moral disrepute, and that cried out in need of moral correction. As a representation of these transformations, the Badlands discourse shifted explanatory power from economic and policy choices to the ostensible moral shortcomings of those who embraced the illicit drug trade. It did so in part by invoking the moral grammar of the western frontier. Like frontier mythology, the Badlands discourse was, I argue, a declensionist script that naturalized and racialized the problem of neighborhood decline by locating it within the landscape itself. The Badlands discourse also shaped how municipal officials approached the improvement of North Philadelphia neighborhoods; the solutions that officials pursued followed from how this discourse framed the problems. Too often, improvement meant demolition, as when the city demolished several entire blocks of rowhouses where drug users sought shelter from the streets. I argue that these demolitions exacerbated long-term processes of disinvestment by expanding the punitive terrain of policing and incarceration.