Nihilism, Post-Truth and the Moral Future of Planning

Planning Theory & Practice · 2026-01-01 · 1 citations

Book Review: <i>Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis</i> by Kimberley Johnson JohnsonKimberley, Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025), 370 pp.

Urban Affairs Review · 2026-04-01

Reparative-advocacy planning to address racialized inequities in public school facilities

Journal of Race Ethnicity and the City · 2025-02-25

<i>Hope and struggle in the policed city: Black criminalization and resistance in Philadelphia</i> , by Menika B. Dirkson

Journal of Urban Affairs · 2025-08-27

Book Review: J. T. Roane, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Life and the Politics of Place Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Life and the Politics of Place, by RoaneJ. T.New York: NYU Press, 2022. 312 pp. $75 (hardcover). $24 (paperback). ISBN: 9781479847679.

City and Community · 2025-04-30

“What Is Our City Doing for Us?”: Placing Collective Care into Atlanta’s Post-Public Housing Movements

Planning, Environment, Cities · 2025-01-01

Introduction to special issue: “Urban Movements within and against Racial Capitalism: Housing as a Site of Oppression and Resistance”

Environment and Planning C Politics and Space · 2025-03-01

This special issue seeks to unpack key mechanisms and processes at the intersections of mobilizations around homelessness, excessive policing, evictions, public housing, and vacant building occupations. Three questions drive its contributions: (1) How are the rising tide of housing movements—as well as their repression—around the world (re)shaping urban politics today? (2) What insights have social, urban, and housing movement scholars brought to produce a better understanding of housing under racial capitalism? (3) How does the Black Radical Tradition provide a generative framework for expanding our understanding of housing movements around the world? We build on work that views these processes as systemic and spatial, wherein practices of white supremacist capital accumulation and anti-Black and Indigenous dispossession are embedded and reproduced through individual transactions, such as the purchase and sale of real estate, which are then subsumed into a system of racialized spatialization. In the reproduction of urban space through new iterations of racialization, perceptions of individual outcomes become naturalized as consequences of a colorblind and democratic society that allots success and failure based on individual adherence to the system’s core tenets. We therefore urge housing researchers and organizers to look to the Black Radical Tradition, the role of women tenant organizers, the spatial divergence of the encampment, and the deployment of care as a means of resistance. These frameworks are critical to the remaking of urban space against public and private policies, institutions, and agents who continue to deploy violence to maintain the oppressive structures of commodified housing.

The ‘colorblindness’ of climate finance: how climate finance advances racial injustice in cities

City · 2024-05-29 · 8 citations

The interactions between climate change and financial markets are increasingly becoming a topic of study, yet the ways in which climate finance reinforces new modes of racialization in urban climate adaptation projects remain an under-represented line of questioning in both academic and policy worlds. In order to uncover myriad processes of racialization occurring within financing modes that are mobilized to solve the climate crisis, this paper focuses on three different urban deal-making spaces: Cagayan De Oro City located in Mindanao, in the southern part of the Philippines; Mexico City, the capital of Mexico; and Philadelphia, PA, situated in the northeastern corridor of the United States. Through analysis of the financial deals structuring urban climate endeavors in these three different cultural and environmental milieus, we find that the 'colorblindness' of climate finance both reinforces historical environmental injustices and creates new spatialities of environmental racism through its reliance on structures of racial capitalism. In doing so we also show the relevance of the racial capitalism framework beyond its theoretical heartlands.

“Broken Home”: (De)constructing the Moral Standards of Mobility for Atlanta’s Early Black Public Housing Families

City and Community · 2024-05-02 · 3 citations

The public housing program was designed as a stepping-stone into upward socioeconomic mobility when the first developments were constructed for White and Black households in the 1930s. White residents were able to save and move into private housing with greater speed than Black residents, who faced both external and internal constraints on their socioeconomic status. As a result of this decreased mobility, scholars and policymakers soon associated public housing developments with impoverished Black containment, categorizing it as the home of the underclass and those who are stuck in place. This article employs a Du Boisian approach to understand the categorical differences and political economic conditions shaping mobility rates among Atlanta’s early Black public housing families. Using historical documents and approximately 40 years of administrative data collected from the first Black public housing development in Atlanta, Georgia by housing managers, Du Bois, and a group of research assistants from Atlanta University, this article examines how internal and external constraints shaped Black tenant mobility. It demonstrates how housing administrators and their actions shaped eviction rates—and by default, public housing’s ability to advance Black tenant mobility—through elite housing managers’ moral judgments of impoverished Black families.

Putting the ‘public’ back into public schools in the US

Dialogues in Human Geography · 2023-09-10 · 4 citations

Public schools serve as vital centers of urban life. However, the long history of these centers are racialized, classed, and produce disparate outcomes across space in the United States. This commentary outlines this history and puts forth the need to re-center the increasingly diversifying and high-need public in the production and maintenance of these critical infrastructures.