The community-based approach to health research and intervention is a model of inquiry rooted in Freire's participatory action research (PAR). We need to show, in concept and practice, what it is about PAR that may be well suited for the types of health issues we encounter in inner-city environments. What type of learning results, how does this respond to particular health issues in the urban context, and what are the particular challenges faced in translating Freire's model into today's urban setting?To investigate these questions, we describe a recent PAR project in Southeast Los Angeles, California-an area known to some as "Asthmatown." One salient finding of the research is that PAR allows the integration of complex and multiple forms of knowledge, and this is a necessary response to the complex and multiplex nature of cumulative impacts. There are challenges to translating the model to the urban setting, however, such as the difficulties of participation in today's urban milieu. The research leads to some lessons for practitioners, such as the need to build "constant" elements into PAR projects. Lastly, we reflect on implications of this model for institutional reform.

IntroductionA growing number of low-income urban neighborhoods in the United States are being redeveloped along the lines of New Urbanism (NU). NU advocates the end of segregation between the rich and poor and among races by``bring[ing] people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction'' (Congress for the New Urbanism and US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000, page 4). NU supports this agenda mainly by encouraging mixed income residential communities and architectural design that respects local history, culture, and regional character (Day, 2003;Fainstein, 2000). Explicit to this agenda is recreating`traditional' American neighborhoods (Saab, 2007).NU gained popularity in the early 1990s for mitigating suburban sprawl in predominately white and high-income neighborhoods. Today, there are over 200 self-classified NU urban projects in the United States, including those in inner-city neighborhoods (Langdon, 2007). A growing body of research discusses the challenges and successes of inner-city NU housing projects (Talen, 2008). Little is written, however, about the implications of NU projects in Mexican immigrant barrios in the urban center. Our research objective is to critically examine NU in the light of efforts to revitalize two barrios and the contiguous downtown district. We use a case study of the draft Renaissance Specific Plan (RP) in Santa Ana, California (see figure 1).Our research employed a discourse analysis vis-a© -vis Wacquant's ( 2008) spatial alienation and the dissolution of`place ' and Foucauldian (1977) and Villa's barriological (2000) perspectives. We found that policy actors created a planning discourse for the (re)development of urban place which paradoxically erases, celebrates as both a problem and asset, and neutralizes distinctive cultural and working-class qualities of the Mexican immigrant barrios and constituency in the downtown district. The RP,

No abstract

Communities are sorted through differencing, the social construction of distinction. This, in turn, enables what we term social rendering: erasure of existing community and reimagination of an alternative one. This practice is founded upon an evolutionary notion of development as ecological succession, involving the intersectionality of race, class, and other markers. Such social genotyping leads to a genitocracy built around systems of differences. We examine the effect of present-day redevelopment practice on the Southern California community of Santa Ana. We illustrate how the processes of differencing and rendering undermine the sociocultural fabric of authentic community life.

No abstract