Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It
... The demolishing of informal settlements and its impacts are further discussed in the book Root Shock by [47], highlighting the experiences faced by a person who, as a result of injury, suddenly loses massive amounts of fluids. Such a blow threatens the whole body's ability to function. ...
... Pre control at its infancy stage before reaching its saturation stage is important. On the contrary to this, informal settlements mainly established at environmentally fragile areas, such as near river banks, are prone to flood risks that have to be controlled [46][47][48][49][50]. Currently, informal settlements found on the riverbanks of Addis Ababa have been demolished as part of the strategic corridor development project aimed at transforming the city and protecting the livelihood of residents. ...
Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia and one of the fastest-expanding cities in Africa, is undergoing rapid urbanization which has led to acute housing scarcity and a growth of informal settlements. The growth of informal settlements seems unstoppable and needs appropriate policy direction to create a sustainable city. Despite the significance of the challenges posed by informal settlements, their coverage is not well-documented or known spatially. The aim of this research is to identify the spatial coverage of informal settlements after restructuring the boundary of the city. This study reviewed the existing literature and different spatial data including city wide line maps, land use plan, all cadaster data, and other spatial maps collected from different sources including city sectoral offices. Furthermore, observation and interviews with experts in the field were conducted to better understand the context of informal settlements. The data were analyzed by ArcGIS 10.8 software to identify the location of informal settlements by overlying those data and verifying this with field observation at selected areas using recent satellite images. The results show that about 50 percent of the settlements are informal. It was revealed that the existing data are fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to access or retrieve. In this regard, informal settlements are still a critical and growing issue with regard to fast urbanization. Therefore, the results can be used for academic research, devising appropriate policy direction, and in decision-making for sustainable development.
... The rationale for this study is threefold. The first is to address the discourse around the African American and White wealth gap, while allowing those impacted to share their perceptions and lend their voices to the foundation of the problem and finally to seek change to the legislative powerful, disruptive policy, eminent domain, which the literature has found that African American's are five times more likely to be displaced than Whites (Fullilove et al., 2016;Fullilove & Wallace, 2011;Schwab, 2018). ...
... The rationale for this study is threefold. The first is to address the discourse around the African American and White wealth gap, while allowing those impacted to share their perceptions and lend their voices to the foundation of the problem and finally to seek change to the legislative powerful, disruptive policy, eminent domain, which the literature has found that African American's are five times more likely to be displaced than Whites (Fullilove et al., 2016;Fullilove & Wallace, 2011;Schwab, 2018). ...
It has been documented that the United States has seized millions of acres of privately
owned land from African Americans in the name of eminent domain. A policy that gives the
government power to take privately owned property for “public good” or commercial use in
exchange for just compensation, is used to obliterate self-sustaining African American
communities throughout the US as early as the 19th century. Compensation was one of the
serious problems faced by families affected by the earliest urban renewal projects guided by
eminent domain (Fullilove et al., 2016).
Eminent domain in African American spaces is a nationwide phenomenon; however, for
this project, the researcher focused on the Washington, DC, and surrounding counties that make
up the DMV area. First, pulling from previous studies, which examined the psychological impact
of eminent domain, this research aims to examine the economic effect to give further context to
the taking of property and other systemic structures that stripped African Americans of
prosperity, leading to the present-day wealth gap.
The research problem addressed in this inquiry addresses whether individuals displaced
due to eminent domain suffered financial loss and the financial impact that loss has on
intergenerational wealth. As a qualitative approach, this study brings forth the lived experiences
of African Americans impacted by eminent domain.
Secondly, this research raises awareness and identified descendants of those who were
victims of land theft. In addition, this research can catalyze reform of eminent domain and seek
restitution for land taken unjustly, starting with examining the African American enclaves in
Montgomery County. Ultimately this research seeks to advance the literature on this
phenomenon and lived experiences of those impacted to provide a resolution to wealth lost.
v
The research questions centered on the understanding of their perceptions and lived
experiences of persons who were displaced due to eminent domain. The researcher for this
present study utilized a purposive and snowball sampling of 5 participants and administered 12
questions to capture reflections and personal stories that uncovered the financial impact of
eminent domain. All interviews were conducted recorded and transcribed via Zoom. NVivo was
used to code the transcribed interviews and to analyze for themes. The findings of this study
conclude that there is a correlation between eminent domain and lack of generational wealth.
Keywords: black/white wealth gap, eminent domain, stolen land, stolen property,
property rights
August Wilson is one of the twentieth century's most important and acclaimed playwrights. This volume demonstrates Wilson's significance to contemporary theatre, culture, and politics by providing fresh and compelling insights into his life, practices, and contributions as an artist and public intellectual. Across four thematically organized sections, contributors situate Wilson's work in his social, cultural and political contexts, examine ongoing developments in Wilson studies, explore the production contexts of his plays, and explicate his dramaturgical sensibilities and strategies. This is the authoritative guide to Wilson's career and artistic legacy for students, theatre practitioners, and general readers interested in this remarkable figure.
The growth machine theory uses a political economy approach to explain why city politics center development interests. We argue that the growth machine operates not only to profit from capitalism, but from White supremacy. To capture this dimension of power and oppression, we theorize the growth machine as an agent of racial capitalism and illustrate it through a study of news media’s assessments of gentrification in two cities. Our findings demonstrate that the news media assesses gentrification as good for Asian and Black neighborhoods, but as bad for White and increasingly White, Latinx neighborhoods. These racialized patterns of assessment reinforce the connections between race and value: White spaces are valued as in need of protection, while non-White spaces are devalued as in need of change. The findings suggest the need for racial capitalism in studies of how the growth machine operates and the decisions it makes.
In the late 1950s, the Minnesota Department of Transportation used eminent domain to clear the path for I-94, displacing over 700 families and 300 businesses in Rondo, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. In the 2010s, Rondo residents and faculty at Macalester College teamed up to create Remembering Rondo , a digital public history project that included (among other things) a community-based archive and map of the neighborhood’s historic businesses from 1920 to 1960. Rondo Avenue, Inc., the neighborhood’s community council, asked to host the project themselves. Then in 2020, they forgot to renew the domain. The site went dark. This essay explores where we went wrong and what we can do about it, and raises questions about how we can reimagine digital sustainability through the lens of a shared authority.
We are continuing to live in unsettling times that demand responses from researchers, scholars and activists to create and mobilise knowledge for liberation, wellbeing, and justice. This commentary draws from my lived experience and research in migration that I use to highlight the rootshock of displacement and the contributions of community psychology to understand these impacts. The commentary invites engagement with the decolonial turn, the need to examine longer histories of colonization and imperialism and how these continue to shape understandings of self and others, and intergroup relations. The commentary also emphasizes decoloniality as a movement of embrace that involves expanding our ecologies of knowledge and practice to support critical solidarities for liberation, wellbeing, and justice.
This study examines how race shapes the displacement of Black-owned businesses during commercial gentrification in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Utilising an autoethnographic case study approach, the author integrates two decades of personal experience as a Black business owner with testimonies from 19 other Black business owners. The findings reveal the multidimensional nature of displacement – including exclusionary, physical, social, cultural and psychological aspects. Physical displacement is categorised as either economically induced or regulatory induced. A push–pull theory is introduced, highlighting how racial biases – even within the Black community – push Black-owned businesses towards displacement, while Black social capital and other forms of support pull them towards survival. The study underscores the need for policy interventions that support Black business owners in resisting gentrification and advocates for anti-discrimination protections in commercial leasing.
This chapter focuses on the issues in current city planning and rebuilding. It describes the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding. The chapter shows how cities work in real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principles will deaden these attributes. In trying to explain the underlying order of cities, the author uses a preponderance of examples from New York. The most important thread of influence starts, more or less, with Ebenezer Howard, an English court reporter for whom planning was an avocation. Howard's influence on American city planning converged on the city from two directions: from town and regional planners on the one hand, and from architects on the other.
This book focuses on one aspect of urban political economy,redevelopment, because it is a key concern in most cities and because it shows up clearly the relationship between local and national forces. Each chapter approaches a different city with the same basic questions: what has caused state activity in restructuring the city? What is the character of the state programme and what has shaped it? What social groups have lost, which benefitted? The effect of policy on growth, land use, housing; the tensions of inbuilt social and racial inequality; the effectiveness or otherwise of local demands are all analysed in this comparative case analytic study of New Haven, Detroit, New Orleans, Denver and San Francisco. -M.Cawkwell
In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.
One winter's day in 1649, a band of warriors from the Petun Indian village of St. Jean, south of the Georgian Bay, went out to intercept an invading war-party of Iroquois. They did not find the enemy. When they returned to the village, four days later, they saw only the ashes of their homes and the charred and mutilated bodies of many of their wives, children, and old men. Not one living soul had escaped death or capture; not one cabin had been spared from the flames. The Petun warriors sat down in the snow, mute and motionless, and no one spoke or moved for half a day; no one even stirred to pursue the Iroquois in order to save the captives or to gain revenge.
Thesis (Ph. D)--University of Pittsburgh, 1977. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-319). Photocopy.