Metropolitics

“The Apartment You Can Own with Pride”: Federally Insured Black Housing Cooperatives, 1950–1955

Nicholas Shatan — 2025-11-25T06:00:00Z

Postwar Black cooperatives insured by the federal government trouble the binary of public and private in housing development.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” In October 1950, civil-rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune spoke when the cornerstone was laid for Parkway Gardens, perhaps the first apartment development cooperatively owned by African Americans in Chicago (Chicago Defender 1950). Built next to the “L” rapid-transit station at 63rd St and South Park Avenue on the

- Essays / race, segregation, residential segregation, housing, cooperative housing, Federal Housing Administration, United States, Black neighborhoods, real estate

Marielle Franco and the Fight for the City Statute in Rio de Janeiro

Ty Redden — 2025-02-14T06:00:00Z

Marielle Franco's 2018 assassination roiled social media and sent shockwaves through activist communities. The subsequent investigation revealed that her death was a part of a larger land-grabbing plot enacted by militias and enabled by local politicians. This case study explores the City Statute and its relationship to housing struggles—particularly, how the City Statute has forged a brutal partnership of oppression in Rio de Janeiro's most vulnerable neighborhoods.
---- Series: Horizons in

- Essays / Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, militias, favela, informal settlements, local politics, politics, race, gender, activism

The Black Radical Imagination in a Rural Forgotten Space

Brad Stephens & Chris Stephenson & Max O. Stephenson Jr. — 2024-01-16T06:00:00Z

How does the Black Radical imagination manifest in “forgotten places” amid shifting populations? Brad Stephens, Chris Stephenson, and Max Stephenson, Jr., attend to this question by considering the role of “communitas” in the work of St. Paul's College 4 Life, a group working to reimagine the possibilities for a shuttered historically Black college in rural Lawrenceville, Virginia.
---- Series: Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces On the surface,

- From the Field / Black Power, Black politics, university, space, race, Blackness, United States, Virginia

Create, Don't Destroy: Laying the Foundation for a Public Discourse on Racial Justice in Germany

Janina L. Selzer — 2020-09-15T05:00:00Z

A night of violence left Stuttgart, a usually peaceful German city, with many unanswered questions. While politicians immediately condemned the violence as an attack on liberal democracy, some journalists saw the event as an uprising by young men of color against systemic racism. In this article, Janina Selzer makes a case for moving past these partial framings by accepting the possibility of a chaotic, multifaceted, and intersectional explanation for a destructive night.
In the German

- Essays / violence, Germany, racism, justice, racial justice, race, Stuttgart, riots, urban unrest

The New Suburban Secession: A Postfascist Turn in Atlanta's Cityhood Movement

Coleman Allums & Scott Markley — 2020-03-10T06:00:00Z

In this essay, Coleman Allums and Scott Markley analyze a suburban secessionist movement in Atlanta, Georgia. They argue that the case of Eagle's Landing exemplifies a neoliberal reaction to racial change and represents a critical departure from Atlanta's contemporary suburban secession movements.
In a recent article for the online publication CityLab, Brentin Mock (2018b) gives a critical account of the movement for Eagle's Landing, a proposed city in the suburbs south of Atlanta which he

- Essays / suburbs, secession, white flight, race, race and space, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, cityhood

Displacement, Demobilization, and Democracy: Current Eviction and Historic Dispossession in Richmond, Virginia

Kathryn Howell & Benjamin F. Teresa — 2020-02-04T06:00:00Z

High eviction rates in Black Richmond neighborhoods must be understood in the context of a long history of political and physical displacement that has suppressed activism in these neighborhoods.
In April 2018, the Princeton Eviction Lab released a nearly nationwide dataset of eviction filings and judgments between 2000 and 2016. From this work, a New York Times article identified Richmond, Virginia, as having the second-highest eviction rate of large cities in the United States. Five of the

- From the Field / Black neighborhoods, Black politics, democracy, displacement, race, race and space, United States, Richmond, Virginia, evictions

Understanding School Closures in Chicago: A Review of Eve Ewing's Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Ryan M. Good — 2019-12-17T06:00:00Z

Eve Ewing's Ghosts in the Schoolyard portrays recent school reform efforts in Chicago through the eyes of those devastated by the imposition of “choice” and “market discipline” in public education.
The great deceit of marketized education reform—and the mass school closures such reforms produce in communities like Chicago's Bronzeville—is the suggestion that the introduction of choice and market discipline can undo histories of racism that have systematically disadvantaged communities of

- Reviews / United States, Chicago, race, racism, school, education, education reform

Black Homeownership Under Racial Capitalism: A Review of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit

Hilary Botein — 2019-12-10T06:00:00Z

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit examines the urban homeownership programs of the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how they exploited rather than enriched black homeowners and communities, and set the stage for the retreat from racial liberalism.
In Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real-Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores black urban homeownership in the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on the public–private partnerships that facilitated

- Reviews / race, homeownership, property ownership, capitalism, United States, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Black women

Reinventing Segregation in Northern California: An Interview with Alex Schafran

Alex Schafran & Darian Razdar — 2019-05-14T05:00:00Z

Darian Razdar interviews Alex Schafran about his new book Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics. They discuss a new form of segregation called “resegregation” and the roots of this manifestation of unequal geography that impacts poor and racial-minority residents in Northern California's peripheral cities.
Over half a century since the Civil Rights Era, cities and urban regions in the United States remain divided and rife with inequality. Alex Schafran's new

- Interviews / segregation, resegregation, housing, race, social class, inequalities, California, Bay Area, Northern California

Fixing the Accessibility Gap in Municipal Procurement

Emily Holloway & Nicholas Shatan — 2019-03-05T06:00:00Z

How can minority- and women-owned businesses overcome structural disadvantages to building wealth through entrepreneurship? Emily Holloway and Nicholas Shatan assess minority- and women-owned business enterprise (M/WBE) procurement policies in New York City and show that while these programs are designed to generate equitable access to business growth, M/WBE participants are not receiving enough contracts—however, if implemented more strategically and equitably, such policies have the potential

- Debates / New York, Brooklyn, Bronx, United States, accessibility, procurement, women, gender, ethnicity, race, businesses, minorities, entrepreneurship