Berkeley Planning Journal

Beginning with the Chicago school of sociology in the 1 920s, scholarly works on inner-city decline have tended to adopt an almost antiseptic scientific approach to the study of "neighborhood invasion and succession," often neglecting in the process to describe the actual experiences of inner-city residents. In Left Behind in Rosedale, Professor Scott Cummings of the University of Louisville promises to add a human element to the analysis of social and economic decay in an inner-city section of Fort Worth, Texas. Guided by the ethnographic principle that a researcher "should allow the subjects to speak for themselves," Cummings employs the techniques of participant observation and in-depth interviewing to portray the full complexity of institutional and cultural change in Rosedale.