A World More Concrete by N D B Connolly

A World More Concrete by N D B Connolly

Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story.  Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy.  Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred  approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century. A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth.  Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida’s landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines.  Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America.  It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners’ power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

Arnold R. Hirsch (1949-2018) was the Ethel and Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans and coeditor of Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America and Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. N. D. B. Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, published by the University of Chicago Press.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780226378428
ISBN 10	022637842X
Titel	A World More Concrete
Autor	N D B Connolly
Serie	Historical Studies Of Urban America
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	University Of Chicago Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2016-03-25
Seitenanzahl	403
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar