AS AMERICA HAS grown wealthier, it has paradoxically suffered from higher levels of social decay: broken homes, loneliness, drug overdoses, decreased life expectancy. Many writers have offered solutions to such problems, but most of their proposals view the hollowed-out neighborhoods of Detroit or Appalachia either as empty vessels to be filled or as backward vestiges that need to be reorganized and rescued.
Seth Kaplan sees those communities differently. In each place, he argues in Fragile Neighborhoods, leaders and activists are working to make things better. Rather than replace these leaders with fancy new policy interventions, public policy should help communities build on what’s working.
Kaplan, who the United States. His first book, (2008), is unique in the long litany of texts about post-conflict reconstruction that were written during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It argued presciently that top-down approaches to such problems don’t work. Kaplan warned against big blueprints and Marshall Plans, making a strong case that lasting solutions lie not in more aid but in giving societies the space to restructure political arrangements that suit their purposes. Washington was never able to do this: It could only offer more cash and tired models of development assistance.
