Selected Books
See also Selected Topics for more resources
Abstract Barrios by ISBN: 9781478012276Date: 2020-08-10In Abstract Barrios, Johana Londoño examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans. Such Latinized urban landscapes, she observes, especially appear when whites feel threatened by concentrations of Latinx populations, commonly known as barrios. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis of barrio built environments, Londoño shows how over the past seventy years urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, business owners, and other brokers took abstracted elements from barrio design--such as spatial layouts or bright colors--to safely "Latinize" cities and manage a long-standing urban crisis of Latinx belonging.
Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City by ISBN: 9463722033Date: 2021-03-22In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.
The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion by ISBN: 9781948765749Date: 2021-06-15With contributions from over fifty architects, planners, geographers, historians, and journalists, The Arsenal offers a wide-ranging view of the forces that shape our cities. This book examines some of the policies, practices, and physical artifacts that have been used by planners, policymakers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, and other urban actors in the United States to draw, erase, or redraw the lines that divide. The Arsenal inventories these weapons of exclusion and inclusion, describes how they have been used, and speculates about how they might be deployed (or retired) for the sake of more open cities in which more people have access to more places.
Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership by ISBN: 9780822371397Date: 2018-05-25In this book, Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property.
Color and Money: Politics and Prospects for Community Reinvestment in Urban America by ISBN: 0791449513Date: 2001-04-12This case study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin--a fairly typical urban area that has experienced systematic disinvestment and a budding reinvestment movement--demonstrates the continuing significance of race in determining who gets home mortgage and small business loans. Confirming the ongoing role of politics in both nurturing urban reinvestment and fueling a backlash by financial institutions, Color and Money offers critical policy recommendations for increasing access to capital in central city communities and for racial minorities throughout the nation's metropolitan areas.
Contemporary Perspectives on Jane Jacobs: Reassessing the Impacts of an Urban Visionary by ISBN: 9781472410047Date: 2019-02-28Jane Jacobs's famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) has challenged the discipline of urban planning and led to a paradigm shift. Controversial in the 1960s, most of her ideas became generally accepted within a decade or so after publication, not only in North America but worldwide, as the articles in this volume demonstrate. Based on cross-disciplinary and transnational approaches, this book offers new insights into her complex and often contrarian way of thinking as well as analyses of her impact on urban planning theory and the consequences for planning practice.
Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance by ISBN: 9781629638287Date: 2021-08-17Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism.
The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America by ISBN: 9781610917810Date: 2018-06-12In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach shows us what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He draws from his decades of experience working in America's cities, and pulls in insightful research and data, to spotlight these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social, and political context.
Generation Priced Out by ISBN: 0520976185Date: 2020-04-07Generation Priced Out is a call to action on one of the most talked-about issues of our time: how skyrocketing rents and home values are pricing the working and middle classes out of urban America. Randy Shaw tells the powerful stories of tenants, politicians, homeowner groups, developers, and activists in over a dozen cities impacted by the national housing crisis.
Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures by ISBN: 9781000580365Date: 2022-05-05Gentrification is one of the most debilitating--and least understood--issues in American cities today. Scholars and community activists adjoin in Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures to engage directly and critically with the issue of gentrification and to address its impacts on marginalized, materially exploited, and displaced communities.
Gentrification and the Housing Crisis by ISBN: 9781534504127Date: 2018-12-30Urban populations are on the rise, fueling a welcome rejuvenation of U.S. cities, many of which have been decaying since the suburban boom of the mid-twentieth century. But such renewal has resulted in the displacement of original residents, who can no longer keep pace with rising rents. Gentrification is often blamed for contributing to the housing crisis, but what about the improvements it has brought to America's cities? The diverse perspectives in this volume explore the different effects of gentrification and imagine solutions for accommodating everyone in this changing urban landscape.
Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies by ISBN: 1839767545Date: 2022-09-06How gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about it. Leslie Kern, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. Kern proposes an intersectional way at looking at the crisis that seek to reveal the violence based on class, race, gender and sexuality. She argues that gentrification is not natural that it can not be understood in economics terms, or by class. That it can only be measured only by the physical displacement of certain people. She argues, it is an continuation of the setter colonial project that removed natives from their land. And it can be seen today is rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities.
Gentrification Trends in the United States by ISBN: 9781032108872Date: 2023-08-18Gentrification Trends in the United States is the first book to quantify the changes that take place when a neighborhood's income level, educational attainment, or occupational makeup outpace the city as a whole - the much-debated yet poorly understood phenomenon of gentrification. Applying a novel method to four decades of U.S. Census data, this resource for students and scholars provides a quantitative basis for the nuanced demographic trends uncovered through ethnography and other forms of qualitative research.
Ghosts of Atlanta: Cultural Gentrification of the Black Mecca by ISBN: 1496853326Date: 2024-09-25The Black community of Atlanta, a city once heralded as the "Black Mecca of the South," is currently under threat of dislocation by cultural gentrification. Amid the city's urban renaissance, residents face rising property values, taxes, and rents, as well as the more insidious loss of a collective identity and belonging. In Ghosts of Atlanta: Cultural Gentrification of the Black Mecca, author Rhana Gittens Wheeler examines the fading echoes of African American memory and historical narratives in Atlanta.
Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Disiplacement by ISBN: 9781447313489Date: 2015-02-01This book critically assesses and tests the meaning and significance of gentrification in places outside the 'usual suspects' of the Global North. Informed by a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond, the book (re)discovers the important generalities and geographical specificities associated with the uneven process of gentrification globally. It highlights intensifying global struggles over urban space and underlines gentrification as a growing and important battleground in the contemporary world.
Green Gentrification: Urban Sustainability and the Struggle for Environmental Justice by ISBN: 9781138920163Date: 2016-07-14Green Gentrification looks at the social consequences of urban "greening" from an environmental justice and sustainable development perspective. Through a comparative examination of five cases of urban greening in Brooklyn, New York, it demonstrates that such initiatives, while positive for the environment, tend to increase inequality and thus undermine the social pillar of sustainable development.
Handbook of Gentrification Studies by ISBN: 9781785361739Date: 2018-04-27This Handbook, the first ever in gentrification studies, is a critical and authoritative assessment of the field. Although the Handbook does not seek to rehearse the classic literature on gentrification from the 1970s to the 1990s in detail, it is referred to in the new assessments of the field gathered in this volume. The Handbook covers processes of gentrification in the global north and the global south. It also looks at different mutations of gentrification and pays proper attention to both resistance to gentrification and the importance of thinking about alternatives. The Handbook challenges readers to look at both the future of gentrification studies as well as the actual process of gentrification itself.
Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City by ISBN: 9781800735736Date: 2022-07-08Authors explore a variety of attempts to interrupt and interrogate urban restructuring, and to imagine alternative forms of urban organization, produced by diverse coalitions of resisting groups and individuals. Armed with historical narratives, oral histories, objects, physical built environment, memorials, and intangible aspects of heritage that include traditions, local knowledge and experiences, memories, authors challenge the 'devaluation' of their neighborhoods in official heritage and development narratives.
Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues by ISBN: 9780429762796Date: 2020-10-14This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice - a central issue in urban injustices.
How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by ISBN: 9781568585246Date: 2017-03-07P. E. Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing.
Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction by ISBN: 9780190948146Date: 2024-01-26Just Shelter is a work of political philosophy that examines the core injustices of the contemporary U.S. housing crisis and its relation to enduring racial injustices. It examines the harms of segregation, and asks: are desegregation or integration morally required of our communities and societies? Are the concerns that are expressed about gentrification related to the moral and political concerns that we have with segregation? Is there a moral imperative, and would it be politically legitimate, for our communities and society to mitigate or stop gentrification?
The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods: Renaissance and Resurgence by ISBN: 9783030660727Date: 2021-03-20This book examines the significance of gay neighborhoods (or 'gayborhoods') from critical periods of formation during the gay liberation and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to proven durability through the HIV/AIDS pandemic during the 1980s and 1990s, to a mature plateau since 2000. The book provides a framework for contemplating the future form and function of gay neighborhoods. Social and cultural shifts within gay neighborhoods are used as a framework for understanding the decades-long struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and equality.
Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History by ISBN: 9780812249545Date: 2017-10-18Making Cities Global explores the intertwined development of urbanization and globalization using a historical approach that demonstrates the many forms transnationalism has taken, each shaped by the circumstances of a particular time and place. It also emphasizes that globalization has not been persistent or automatic--many people have been as likely to resist or reject outside connections as to establish or embrace them.
The Misunderstood History of Gentrification: People, Planning, Preservation, and Urban Renewal, 1915-2000 by ISBN: 9781439920442Date: 2021-01-22The Misunderstood History of Gentrification, provides a recontextualization of American gentrification, planning, and policymaking. David Gale argues that gentrification must be understood as an urban phenomenon with historical roots in the very early twentieth century.
The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City by ISBN: 9780415132541Date: 1996-09-20This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness.
The Planetary Gentrification Reader by ISBN: 9781003341239Date: 2022-12-30This new Planetary Gentrification Reader follows on from the editors' 2010 volume, The Gentrification Reader, and provides a more longitudinal (backwards and forwards in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo/Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrification studies over time and space, drawing on key readings that reflect the development of cutting edge debates. Revisiting new debates over the histories of gentrification, thinking through comparative urbanism on gentrification, considering new waves and types of gentrification, and giving much more focus to resistance to gentrification, this is a stellar collection of writings on this critical issue.
Selling the Lower East by ISBN: 0816631816Date: 2000-03-15Tracks the shifting views of the Lower East Side from ghetto to desirable urban niche. In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the political and cultural forces that have influenced the development of this distinctive community. Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic, and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray it as "new and improved."
Shaking up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question by ISBN: 9780520303041Date: 2021-09-21Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater "shakes up" mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation.
Social Justice and the City by ISBN: 9780713156874Date: 1973Analysis of urban sociology, urban area economic structures and the urban spatial environment in the USA, including some urban planning implications - discusses theoretical aspects of urban development, the concept of urban land utilization, income distribution, income redistribution, urbanization, urban social structures, etc., and considers the prospects for socialism and for radical social change.
Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory by ISBN: 9781478006732Date: 2019-12-20Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present.
White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America by ISBN: 1529235456Date: 2024-06-25This book explores the connections between race, place and space, and their role in maintaining racial hierarchies. Focusing on White residents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, it employs interviews, participant observation and content analysis to unveil the enduring racial inequality in this supposedly progressive area.
These selected books are focused on the Los Angeles and Southern California in general. For more resources, check out the Los Angeles and Southern California section
Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America by ISBN: 9781503632394Date: 2022-07-26From the 1970s on, Los Angeles was transformed into a center for entertainment, consumption, and commerce for the affluent. Mirroring the urban development trend across the nation, new construction led to the displacement of low-income and working-class racial minorities, as city officials targeted these neighborhoods for demolition in order to spur economic growth and bring in affluent residents. Responding to the displacement, there emerged a coalition of unions, community organizers, and faith-based groups advocating for policy change. In Building Downtown Los Angeles, Leland Saito traces these two parallel trends through specific construction projects and the backlash they provoked.
City of Quartz: Evacuating the Future in Los Angeles by ISBN: 9781844675685Date: 2006-09-17No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West - a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.
City of Segregation: 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles by ISBN: 9781786632708Date: 2018-09-18City of Segregation documents one hundred years of struggle against the enforced separation of racial groups through property markets, constructions of community, and the growth of neoliberalism. This movement history covers the decades of work to end legal support for segregation in 1948; the 1960s Civil Rights movement and CORE's efforts to integrate LA's white suburbs; and the 2006 victory preserving 10,000 downtown residential hotel units from gentrification enfolded within ongoing resistance to the criminalization and displacement of the homeless. Andrea Gibbons reveals the shape and nature of the racist ideology that must be fought, in Los Angeles and across the United States, if we hope to found just cities.- Gentrification, Power and Versions of Community: A Case Study of Los Angeles by Date: 1989Discusses gentrification and community in Los Angeles
Preserving Los Angeles: How Historic Places Can Transform America's Cities by ISBN: 9781626400757Date: 2021-04-20Ken Bernstein, a Principal City Planner for the City of Los Angeles and a national advocate for historic preservation shares how Los Angeles has led the nation in historic preservation and how other cities can do the same.
Taking Back the Boulevard by ISBN: 9781479895700Date: 2019-01-15The promises and conflicts faced by public figures, artists, and leaders of Northeast Los Angeles as they enliven and defend their neighborhoods. Los Angeles is well known as a sprawling metropolis with endless freeways that can make the city feel isolating and separate its communities. Yet in the past decade, as Jan Lin argues in Taking Back the Boulevard, there has been a noticeable renewal of public life on several of the city's iconic boulevards. These arteries connect neighborhoods across the city, traverse socioeconomic divides and ethnic enclaves, and can be understood as the true locational heart of public life in the metropolis. Focusing especially on the cultural scene of Northeast Los Angeles, Lin shows how these gentrifying communities help satisfy a white middle-class consumer demand for authentic experiences of "living on the edge" and a spirit of cultural rebellion.
