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For long-time residents of Washington, DC’s Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city’s most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers’ market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from “ghetto” to “gilded ghetto,” where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block. Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City is an in-depth ethnography of this gil...
Two of the most celebrated black neighborhoods in the United States—Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago—were once plagued by crime, drugs, and abject poverty. But now both have transformed into increasingly trendy and desirable neighborhoods with old buildings being rehabbed, new luxury condos being built, and banks opening branches in areas that were once redlined. In The New Urban Renewal, Derek S. Hyra offers an illuminating exploration of the complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—driving the remarkable revitalization of these two iconic black communities. How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas...
Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, DC uncovers and explains the dynamics that have influenced the contemporary economic advancement of Washington, DC. This volume's unique interdisciplinary approach using historical, sociological, anthropological, economic, geographic, political, and linguistic theories and approaches, captures the comprehensive factors related to changes taking place in one of the world's most important cities. Capital Dilemma clarifies how preexisting urban social hierarchies, established mainly along race and class lines but also along national and local interests, are linked with the city's contemporary inequitable growth. While accounting for historic...
Introduction : alternative approaches to regional equity and racial justice -- The integration imperative -- Affirmatively furthering community development -- The "hollow prospect" of integration -- The three stations of fair housing spatial strategy -- New issues, unresolved questions, and the widening debate -- Conclusion : everyone deserves to live in an opportunity neighborhood
Bringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades. Claire Herbert lived in the city for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas. She participated in community meetings and tax foreclosure protests, interviewed various groups, followed scrappers through abandoned buildings, and visited squatted houses and gardens. Herbert found that new residents with more privilege often have their back-to-the-earth practices formalized by local policies, whereas longtime, more disempowered residents, usually representing communities of color, have their practices labeled as illegal and illegitimate. She teases out how these divergent treatments reproduce long-standing inequalities in race, class, and property ownership.
The Green City and Social Injustice examines the recent urban environmental trajectory of 21 cities in Europe and North America over a 20-year period. It analyses the circumstances under which greening interventions can create a new set of inequalities for socially vulnerable residents while also failing to eliminate other environmental risks and impacts. Based on fieldwork in ten countries and on the analysis of core planning, policy and activist documents and data, the book offers a critical view of the growing green planning orthodoxy in the Global North. It highlights the entanglements of this tenet with neoliberal municipal policies including budget cuts for community initiatives, long-...
David S. Kirk follows the lives of prisoners released in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to examine what happens when they do not return home after incarceration. Home Free offers a story of redemption and illustrates the power of a fresh start to help end the cycling of people in and out of prison.
Uncovers how people aged 60 and older struggle, survive, and thrive in twenty-first-century urban America. To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life. These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a publ...
An acclaimed history of Harlem’s journey from urban crisis to urban renaissance With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical social movements of the 1960s that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. Young Harlem activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African American population. In the succeeding decades, however, the community-based organizations they founded came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.
Substantial gaps exist between Black Americans and other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., most glaringly Whites, across virtually all quality-of-life indicators. Despite strong evidence that neighborhood residence affects life outcomes, we lack a comprehensive picture of Black neighborhood conditions and how they have changed over time. In Where the Hood At? urban planning and public policy scholar Michael C. Lens examines the characteristics and trajectories of Black neighborhoods across the U.S. over the fifty years since the Fair Housing Act. Hip hop music was born out of Black neighborhoods in the 1970s and has evolved alongside them. In Where the Hood At? Lens uses rap’s growth a...