Gregory Smithsimon is associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero (New York: New York University Press, 2011), about the role of public space in redevelopment conflicts in Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001. He is also the author, with Benjamin Shepard, of The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), on protest movements and New York’s privately owned public spaces. He is currently completing Liberty Road: African-American Middle-Class Suburbs Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism, a study of how suburban space reframes political conflicts for middle-class African Americans.