How It Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia

by Robert P. Fairbanks II

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.

 

To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

Genres: Anthropology, Sociology

312 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2009

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book about the managed persistence of poverty and how recovery discourse is implicated in the perpetuation of the grinding poverty of Philadelphia. I thought the book was relevant to the work I do in the poverty industry in San Francisco, and how community mental health services are about managing the persistence of mental illness and poverty. This is a sociological work. The researcher spent a lot of time in the different recovery houses. He met really amazing people doing work under terrible conditions with few resources. He was able to take the concrete research that he had done and use it to demonstrate Michel Foucault's concept of "governmentality." He makes the connection between government structures, individual subjects and how a recovery discourse circulates to create subjects who recognize themselves in government structures (General Assistance, mental health clinics, detoxes.