Race Culture And The Right To The City

'Race', Culture and the Right to the City offers a clear and critical account of the spread of multiculture from the central city to the periphery. The text adopts an international and interdisciplinary approach and explores multicultural life in London, Paris and New York, drawing upon primary and secondary research. The spatialized perspective of the book is inspired by Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of space and considers the role that 'race' continues to play in structuring the metropolis at a multiplicity of levels. In particular a contrast is drawn between the racialized inner cities of the 20th century and the 'outer-inner cities' that characterize the contemporary global city. -- Back cover.

Adopting a perspective inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this book considers the spread of multiculture from the central city to the periphery and considers the role that 'race' continues to play in structuring the metropolis, taking London, New York and Paris as examples.

This book proposes a pedagogy of black urban struggle and solidarity.

Does the concept of ethnicity divide the oppressed or unite minorities? Is the term `community' a dangerous fiction? What are the relations between the liberal capitalist democratic state and racialized minority groups? The contributors to this book confront and discuss these questions, bringing together ideas on urban social theory, contemporary cultural change and analysis of racial surbordination in order to explore the relationship between racism, the city and the state. The book concentrates on the urban context of the process of racialization, demonstrating that the city provides the institutional framework for racial segregation, a key process whereby racialization has been reproduced and sustained. Individual chapters explore the profound divisions inscribed on the face of the city, showing for example that ethnicity is more powerful than social class in moulding the identities of new migrants to California, and that the reconstruction of French capitalism has opened new opportunities for the growth of right-wing popularism. The contributors show how, in the UK, urban space over the last two decades has been redefined and reconstructed in ways which sustain separation and racial inequality, and they highlight how black minorities struggling for survival in Britain's cities are seen as responsible for violence, crime, poverty and overcrowding.

How local, specific, and personal understandings about belonging, ownership, and agency intersect with law to shape the city. In Owning the Street, Amelia Thorpe examines everyday experiences of and feelings about property and belonging in contemporary cities. She grounds her account in an empirical study of PARK(ing) Day, an annual event that reclaims street space from cars. A popular and highly recognizable example of DIY Urbanism, PARK(ing) Day has attracted considerable media attention, but has not yet been the subject of close scholarly examination. Focusing on the event's trajectories in San Francisco, Sydney, and Montreal, Thorpe addresses this gap, making use of extensive interview data, field work, and careful reflection to explore these tiny, temporary, and often transformative interventions.

The author argues that "race" as a social construction is one of the most powerful categories for constructing urban mythologies about blacks, and that this is significant in a dominant white supremacist culture that equates blackness and black people with both danger and the exotic. The book examines how these myths are realized in the material landscapes of the city, in its racialization of black residential space through the imagery of racial segregation. This imagery along with the racializing of crime portrays black residential space as natural "spaces of pathology," and in need of social control through policing and residential dispersion and displacement. It is in this context that Haymes proposes the development of a pedagogy of black urban struggle that incorporates critical pedagogy.

"Focusing on Liberty Road, a Black middle-class suburb of Randallstown, Maryland, Smithsimon tells the remarkable story of how residents broke the color barrier, against all odds, in the face of racial discrimination, tensions with suburban Whites and urban Blacks, and economic crises like the mortgage meltdown of 2008. Drawing on interviews, census data, and archival research he shows us the unique strategies that suburban Black residents in Liberty Road employed, creating a blueprint for other Black middle-class suburbs"--

Critical, wide-ranging analyses of Detroit’s redevelopment and alternative visions for its future.