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

On a Road to Nowhere? Military Urbanism and the Architecture of Segregation

Tim Cunningham — 2024-05-03T05:00:00Z

Comparing the experiences of Belfast, Northern Ireland, with the United States, Tim Cunningham shows how physical barriers, especially roads, can precipitate the dismembering of targeted communities from the wider city ecosystem, in turn accentuating patterns of spatial inequality and deprivation.
By the late 1960s, Belfast was experiencing many of the secular challenges that afflicted industrial cities across western Europe and the US at that time (Bryan 2012). Economic crises precipitated

- Essays / Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ireland, United Kingdom, United States, infrastructure, segregation, urban planning, urbanism, military urbanism, socio-spatial inequalities, barriers

Immigration in the French Countryside

Julie Fromentin & translated by Oliver Waine — 2024-02-27T06:00:00Z

What place do immigrants occupy in the French countryside? By examining detailed data from the last five decades, Julie Fromentin shows that while there has been moderate growth in their numbers over this period, there has above all been considerable diversification in terms of their countries of origin and the places in which they settle.
Since the 2000s, French society has been marked by growing social and territorial inequalities (Lambert and Cayouette-Remblière 2021; Fleury et al. 2012).

- From the Field / settlement, inequalities, countryside, immigration, segregation, rural

Before Redlining and Beyond

Alex B. Hill — 2021-11-02T06:00:00Z

There is a larger story of spatial racism in cities before and beyond redlining. Spatial racism was not limited to a single set of maps, but is embedded within institutions. The long history of spatial racism must be teased out and examined as new data-driven practices generate inequitable opportunity in cities.
Over the past decade, “redlining” has received increasing attention in the popular press and across academic disciplines. Redlining, or the discriminatory practice of denying

- Essays / redlining, racism, spatial racism, neighborhood, residential segregation, segregation, housing, cartography, mapping

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

Closed Quarters

William Helmreich — 2016-12-13T06:00:00Z

As we contemplate an era marked by official hostility to fair-housing laws, we would do well to heed the distinction between forced and voluntary segregation. Tracing the construction—both literal and cultural—of the ghetto, Mitchell Duneier's new book is a sensitive guide to the scholarship and history of Jews' and Blacks' intersecting paths through it. William Helmreich reads and reviews the work through his own reflections on contemporary New York City.
In today's world, the word ghetto is

- Reviews / ghetto, gentrification, segregation, racism, United States, New York, discrimination, minorities, race, ghettoization, race relations

The Crisis of Geographical Imagination in Turkey

Luka Lucić — 2016-06-21T05:00:00Z

Ethnic, nationalistic and social tensions are at an all-time high in Turkey, exacerbated by the re‑emergence of the “Kurdish problem” and the influx of Syrian refugees fleeing the war. Minorities are persecuted and academics denouncing exactions are targeted by the government. Luka Lucić compares this situation to the collapse of Yugoslavia and warns of possible dire times to come.
There was an old joke often told in Sarajevo during the early days of the siege (1992‑1995). All across former

- Essays / refugees, segregation, Turkey, crisis, minorities, ethnonationalism, Syria, former Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, persecution, ideology

Federal Anti-Segregation Milestones Demand Local Mobilization

Justin Steil — 2015-11-24T06:00:00Z

In June 2015, the US Supreme Court affirmed a legal tool that stands to hold municipalities and lenders accountable to fair housing and residential integration goals. In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released a rule that offers new points of leverage in the fair-housing planning process. However, both will require sustained mobilization if they are to have any real impact.
The past year has witnessed the most vigorous public discussion of residential segregation and

- From the Field / segregation, housing, United States, discrimination, supreme court, fair housing, residential segregation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, mobilization, redlining

Jerusalem: divisive urban planning at the heart of the Holy City

Vincent Lemire & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-06-19T04:50:00Z

How is the Israeli–Palestinian conflict reflected in the way the city of Jerusalem has been planned and developed? In this book, based on meticulous fieldwork, Irène Salenson reveals the various actors and the manifold complex and contradictory processes involved in this particularly conflictual urban-planning context.
As a revised and abridged version of a PhD thesis defended in 2007, this work – “Jerusalem: Building Two Cities in One” – by geographer Irène Salenson is devoted to examining

- Reviews / segregation, urban planning, Palestine, local governance, Jerusalem, conflict, Israel, religion, urban geography, geopolitics, local politics

“Gentrification or ghetto”: making sense of an intellectual impasse

Anne Clerval & Mathieu Van Criekingen & translated by Oliver Waine — 2015-01-29T06:00:00Z

The debate on the causes, effects and extent of the “gentrification” of working-class neighbourhoods in the central areas of our cities has animated (and divided) the fields of geography and urban sociology for the last decade or so in France. This debate was reignited in September 2013 by the publication of a book by Anne Clerval titled Paris sans le peuple (“Paris Without the People”). In this article, Anne Clerval and Mathieu Van Criekingen reply with force to those fellow researchers and

- Debates / France, ghetto, gentrification, segregation, urban renewal, social diversity, suburbanization, periurban, metropolis, urban regeneration, metropolization, metropolitan areas, urban geography, urban sociology, depoliticization