University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 Community Consumed: Sunbelt Capitalism, A Praxis For Community Control, And The (dis) Integration Of Civic Life In Maryvale, Arizona Anthony Charles Pratcher Ii University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Public Policy Commons, United States History Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Recommended Citation Pratcher Ii, Anthony Charles, "Community Consumed: Sunbelt Capitalism, A Praxis For Community Control, And The (dis) Integration Of Civic Life In Maryvale, Arizona" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2536. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2536 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2536 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Community Consumed: Sunbelt Capitalism, A Praxis For Community Control, And The (dis) Integration Of Civic Life In Maryvale, Arizona Abstract Civic activists have worked to embed community institutions in the Phoenix area from the time of initial Anglo settlement in the Salt River valley. Civic elites sought to monopolize control over regional development via municipal governance in the period after the Second World War. This dissertation places qualitative sources on community life in conversation with quantitative sources on political economy to explain how civic elites, as manifest in the civic organization of Charter government, worked with suburban activists to maintain spatial racialization in Phoenix. This process reveals that the socio- political value of civic life has waned in metropolitan Phoenix after the political ascent of Charter government. The outcome of this change is that marginalized Anglo communities like Maryvale, the first master-planned community built in Phoenix after World War II, were consumed by racial transition once local civic activists lost control over neighborhood economies.