How it Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia
Robert P. Fairbanks II, PhD
How it Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia, examines the phenomena of Philadelphia’s recovery house movement. School of Social Service Administration Assistant Professor Robert Fairbanks, II, Ph.D, describes the movement as “an informal housing strategy for drug addicts and alcoholics located in the city’s poorest and most heavily blighted zones.” Sixty thousand vacant properties exist in Philadelphia, and half of them are abandoned row houses that street-level entrepreneurs have repurposed over the last twenty-five years 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 study this gray economy, Fairbanks goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides addicts with food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy. 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. As Fairbanks explains, “the central purpose of this book is to understand something more broadly about the relationship between techniques of self-governance – as embodied in recovery – and systems of power that converge on the neighborhood of Kensington.”
Assistant Professor Robert Fairbanks focuses on urban ethnography, urban studies, welfare state theory, and critical social policy analysis and teaches courses on urban poverty, the political economy of urban development, and the history and philosophy of the welfare state. Professor Fairbanks' research focuses on the ways in which informal poverty survival mechanisms articulate with the restructuring of the contemporary welfare state and the political economy of cities.
This book is of interest to academics and students in social work, urban studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and geography as well as social service providers, community leaders, policy experts and planners working at the urban scale.
Professor Fairbanks received a B.A. in English from Boston College, an M.S.W. from the University of Vermont, and a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
How it Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia has been published by the University of Chicago Press.
August 3, 2008
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Rocio Reyes, AM '12
“A lot of the clinical approach is second nature to me, but it is compelling to take what I learn in class and really make it work,” says Rocio Reyes, AM '12.