urban history

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  7/10/2020
  

  Riots Long Ago, Luxury Living Today

  High-end development has transformed some Black neighborhoods decades after they were scarred by unrest. And not by coincidence.

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• SOURCE: Boston Globe
  7/5/2020
  

  MIT Professor Tunney Lee, an Architect, Urban Planner, and Historian of Chinatown, Dies at 88

  An architecture professor who taught at MIT and the Chinese University of Hong Kong is remembered as a historian of Chinese American community and an advocate for including the public in the process of planning.

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  7/7/2020
  

  A New Data Analysis Can Answer the Question "Do I Live in the Suburbs?"

  The U.S. hasn’t had a formal definition for what constitutes a suburb. A new data analysis comes closer to defining America’s most popular neighborhood type. 

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• 7/12/2020
  

  Centuries of Protest at City Hall Park

  by Marika Plater

  Closed gates around City Hall Park in New York not only restrict access to the park as a site for protest, but ignore the site's history as a theater for political expression. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  6/25/2020
  

  New York Opens Traffic-Clogged Streets to People During Pandemic, the City’s Latest Redesign in Times of Dramatic Change

  by Amy D. Finstein

  The COVID-19 pandemic presents large cities with an opportunity to remake public space around different priorities, putting people before automobiles. 

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• SOURCE: New York Magazine
  7/30/2020
  

  The Best Histories of U.S. Policing, According to Experts

  A panel of experts including historians Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Simon Balto, Max Felker-Kantor, Carl Suddler, Stuart Schrader and Melanie Newport assemble a reading list for understanding policing and its relationship to racism and social class in the US. 

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• SOURCE: The Metropole (Urban History Association)
  6/26/2020
  

  UHA Summer 2020 Virtual Roundtables On Race, Policing And Abolition (JULY 1)

  The Urban History Association will live stream a panel discussion on the history of racist police violence and organization to fight against it. 

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• 6/28/2020
  

  Liberal Reform Threatens to Expand the Police Power--Just as it did in the Past

  by Max Felker-Kantor

  The history of liberal law-and-order reveals that procedural reforms implemented on top of a structure of policing that has been empowered to protect property and control “disorder” are not only doomed to fail but will produce the conditions for more protest and resistance. 

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• SOURCE: The Metropole
  6/25/2020
  

  Building The Chicago Police State: A Review Of Occupied Territory

  by Davarian L. Baldwin

  "With scrupulous archival detail and sharp analytic focus, Occupied Territory shows how Chicago’s “powerful carceral machinery,” which present-day Black communities condemns for its under-protection and over-policing, was built in the early twentieth century." 

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• SOURCE: KTVU
  3/22/2020
  

  Local Activists on How this Racial Justice Movement Fits in Oakland's History

  Protests on Oakland reflect the energy of young organizers but also a legacy of African American activism. Five community leaders reflect on continuity and change in the city. 

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  6/23/2020
  

  “This Is Chaos:” Order Maintenance and the Fear of Black Anarchy in Atlanta

  by Danielle Wiggins

  Although the city has been called the "Black Mecca" of America, Black political leaders have long tried to suppress protest as part of a strategy to win over the city's business community. Today's protests reflect the limits of that strategy. 

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• SOURCE: Iowa City Press-Citizen
  6/19/2020
  

  UI Historian Reveals Iowa City's Racially Restrictive Covenants

  A project from historian Colin Gordon and his research team accounts racially-restrictive deed covenants and subdivision restrictions in Johnson County, Iowa.

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  6/24/2020
  

  Want to Tear Down Insidious Monuments to Racism and Segregation? Bulldoze L.A. Freeways

  Los Angeles historian Gilbert Estrada's work shows how planners in the city used federal highway funding to disrupt multiracial communities and serve whites-only suburban developments, increasing segregation and inequality in the region. 

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• SOURCE: Vox
  6/24/2020
  

  How Police Unions Became so Powerful — and How they Can Be Tamed

  Over about half a century, police unions have become one of the most powerful lobbies in local government. Historian Will Jones is among the experts who explain how. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/24/2020
  

  Don’t Be Fooled by Seattle’s Police-Free Zone

  by Margaret O'Mara

  Protest is forcing our city to reckon with truths that can and should make white citizens like me uncomfortable, and that remind us just how much Seattle is like the rest of America: impossibly divided, and impossibly full of hope.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  6/20/2020
  

  To Avoid Integration, Americans Built Barricades in Urban Space

  Urban inequality didn’t happen by accident.

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  6/19/2020
  

  In Suburbs and Small Towns, Racial Justice Takes Center Stage

  These protests reflect the demographic shifts and diversification of U.S. suburbs and exurbs in recent decades, a challenge to the stereotype of a monochromatic suburbia.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/22/2020
  

  Donald Trump’s Message is Falling Flat Because it is Outdated

  by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

  Our cities and suburbs look and feel very different than they did in the depths of the urban crisis in the late 1960s. That’s one reason Trump’s attempt to revive the law-and-order playbook of that era has fallen flat.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  6/16/2020
  

  When Crime Photography Started to See Color

  A new book of crime photographs by the late Gordon Parks reveals the photographer's art and his efforts to fight back against dominant and frequently racist ways of depicting crime and law enforcement.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/13/2020
  

  The End of Black Politics

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  The 1960s generation of Black protest demanded a stronger presence in local government. The current protest movement recognizes that presence isn't enough; leaders must advance an agenda that serves their least advantaged constituents.