This review essay considers two recent treatments of race and urban space in literature. Adrienne Brown’s “perceptual history” of race and homeownership shows how race itself was shaped by the evolution of homeownership. Nikil Saval considers poet June Jordan’s collaboration with architect Buckminster Fuller on “Skyrise for Harlem,” a megaproject designed to rescue the New York neighborhood from the midcentury urban crisis. Each book offers a compelling account of the way literature dramatizes racial exclusions and foregrounds African American urbanisms in fiction and design, but they tend to isolate race as a variable in urban history, leaving its connections to other, multiple strands of urban development less clear.

This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification. Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs’ contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs’ “reticence” on the problem of racism in urban history. Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs’ signature ideas – the “sidewalk ballet,” organized complexity, the “self-destruction of diversity,” and others – appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.

This article investigates the intellectual and cultural history of homeownership in the United States. Focused on the work of the economist Richard T. Ely, it argues that this history should move beyond Ely's intellectual influence on the real-estate industry in the 1910s and 1920s to incorporate his critique of laissez-faire economics, his ideas about "social property," and his visions of managed hierarchy, all of which originated in the late nineteenth century. The essay tracks Ely's connections to Progressives like John Dewey-with their visions of a coming social self to displace possessive individualism-and his influence on Herbert Hoover's 1931 National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership-which prefigured the New Deal's housing policy. Following Ely's work reveals how homeownership institutionalized what Dewey called "social values," but did so by naturalizing a persistent rhetoric of autonomy and individualism that relied on divisions of race, class, and gender for its power.

Recognizing the unequal distribution of urban studies research should also spur us to think in more depth about the way we understand and communicate about our shared subjects: cities and urbanization.

Between Continuity and Contingency Samuel Zipp (bio) Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams, eds., Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. viii + 396 pp. Contributors and index. $38.00. Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern. New York: Verso, 2021. 378 pp. Notes and index. $19.99. What are historians for? This is the question I sensed lurking just beneath the surface of Shaped by the State. What might first appear as a rather by-the-numbers undertaking, a standard attempt to tote up the accomplishments and agendas of political history, hints here and there at something else altogether. The editors—and now and then the contributors—appear concerned that historians of twentieth-century U.S. politics are missing something much more profound about the country and its history, some set of underlying or persistent dynamics that have so far eluded work that has been mostly about tracking the rise and fall of governing regimes. This worry leads them toward a series of questions about historical thinking, questions that sometimes hover just in view, and other times move imperceptibly in the murky depths. Ultimately, Shaped by the State allows us to see how some older, somewhat neglected questions about the balance between contingency and continuity in historical writing are with us again, opening up a Pandora's box of dilemmas last sighted a generation or so ago, when the paradigms that political history displaced—the cultural turn and the postmodern—still stalked the land. In introducing the volume, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason Williams suggest that the overall success of political history over the last two decades or so has left the field in disarray. Having made itself into the dominant tendency in the profession, political history finds itself somehow without fitting tools to account for its subject. The problem, they argue, is a fundamental failure to develop the proper understanding of "politics and historical time" (p. 4). Historians of U.S. politics, by this account, return again and again to a predictable set of stories and periodizing conventions, all of which are shaped by the concept of "crisis." They focus on "why seemingly stable political orders crack up, and how American politics gets reconstructed in the aftermath of those [End Page 391] crack-ups" (p. 4). Stuck rerunning "established paradigms," particularly the "rise and fall of the New Deal order" and the consolidation of modern conservatism out of the conflicts of the 1960s and 70s, they have obscured more profound "continuities" and "deeper forms of consensus" (p. 6). "Continuity" emerges as the keyword for this volume. This is despite the title, which might make one think of attempts to "bring the state back in" or to register fuller accounts of the relations between social movements and the state—both markers of political history's rise to dominance in U.S. history departments in the years since the turn of the millennium. The title is ostensibly meant to convey affinity with work by historians of political development who have argued for the longstanding (and thus "continuous") importance of state power in a supposedly decentralized nation. But the editors—and some of the contributors—seem most concerned to show that there are overarching structural phenomena that shape the state, as it were. The real energy in the introduction goes toward arguing that forces like global capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and sexuality, American exceptionalism, U.S. military and imperial power, legal or property regimes, metropolitan, urban, and rural spatial divisions, the carceral state, migration, consumption, and any number of other "social, cultural, spatial, and economic factors" map uneasily on conventional stories of political crisis. The editors admire what they call "unofficial political historians" (p. 7). Books by Margot Canaday, N.D.B. Connolly, and Mae Ngai show us "how the American state and its regnant ideologies and parties have been structured by normative values and assumptions," and "have in turn embedded… those same deeply rooted values through governance" (p. 7).1 With their investigations of sexuality and the state, race and property markets, and immigration and citizenship, these works avoid the usual "red...

In the 1870s a new kind of built environment emerged in American cities: “bottoms,” “hollows,” and “flats.” The product of industrial development, railroad construction, and vernacular working-class home building, “urban lowlands” sprang up on the floodplains of urban rivers, creeks, and tidal flats. Heterogeneous groups of working-class and poor people made homes there because the land was cheap and relatively unregulated—conditions that attracted land speculators, too—and these residents could maintain quasi-rural ways of life in the city on spare patches of land in ravines or at the foot of bluffs. Railroads and industry targeted the lowlands because in undervalued areas they encountered less resistance to their high-impact uses. But lack of value became stigma in short order. “A new urban landscape for an increasingly stratified society,” the new lowlands became “potent symbols of hierarchy and power in the urban landscape,” writes Steven T. Moga, “through both vernacular speech and professional discourses on poverty and environment” (pp. 29, 12). Codifying a “new sociospatial understanding” of the city “as an uneven physical landscape with ‘slums’ in low places,” journalists, reformers, and city residents labeled these areas “with ethnic and racial descriptors, animal names, or adjectives associated with poor air quality or other environmental conditions” (pp. 27–28). More than a half century of intervention ensued, as public health officers, city officials, planners, and housing reformers sought to either contain or evict the people of the lowlands. By the New Deal these places had been transformed: zoned for industry only or made into parks or sites for public housing.

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller,One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered auniversalview of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial powercontested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial powerobscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour fromOne World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.

Journal Article When Wendell Willkie Went Visiting: Between Interdependency and Exceptionalism in the Public Feeling for One World Get access Samuel Zipp Samuel Zipp *samuel_zipp@brown.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 26, Issue 3, Fall 2014, Pages 484–510, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/aju040 Published: 31 July 2014