Mapping Decline
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Mapping Decline
Author: Colin Gordon
language: en
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Release Date: 2014-09-12
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.
Citizen Brown
Author: Colin Gordon
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2019-09-11
A study of the 2014 killing in Ferguson: “Pioneering . . . A larger, more complicated consideration of the recent history of race relations in American suburbs.” —Mark Krasovic, author of The Newark Frontier The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited nationwide protests and brought widespread attention to police brutality and institutional racism. As Colin Gordon shows in this book, the events in Ferguson didn’t just expose the deep racism of a local police department—it also revealed the ways in which decades of public policy effectively segregated people and curtailed citizenship not just in Ferguson but across the St. Louis suburbs. Citizen Brown uncovers half a century of private practices and public policies that resulted in bitter inequality and sustained segregation in Ferguson and beyond. Gordon shows how municipal and school district boundaries were pointedly drawn to contain or exclude African Americans and how local policies and services—especially policing, education, and urban renewal—were weaponized to maintain civic separation. He also makes it clear that the outcry that arose in Ferguson was no impulsive outburst but rather an explosion of pent-up rage against long-standing systems of segregation and inequality—of which a police force that viewed citizens not as subjects to serve and protect but as sources of revenue was only the most immediate example. Worse, Citizen Brown illustrates the fact that though the greater St. Louis area provides some extraordinarily clear examples of fraught racial dynamics, in this it is hardly alone among American cities and regions. “[An] innovative study . . . Citizen Brown also benefits from being grounded in political theory about citizenship and its many meanings.” —Missouri Historical Review
Making Cities Global
Author: A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
language: en
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Release Date: 2018
Making Cities Global argues that combining urban history with a transnational approach leads to a better understanding of our increasingly interconnected world. In order to achieve prosperity, peace, and sustainability in metropolitan areas in the present and into the future, we must understand their historical origins and development.