The Urban Sociology of Racial and Colonial Dispossesion

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Displacement and Eviction

Abstract

ABSTRACT
While the urban sociology of Urban Renewal has long documented the reproduction of white property interests through this state project, it fails to consider how the intersections of both settler colonialism and anti-Blackness shaped these property interests. This reflects a broader trend in the field of tending to undertheorize the structures of Black and Indigenous dispossession and how they shape the racial and colonial production of urban space. I consider, through two cases, how to theorize how dispossession is foundational to the production of urban inequality. Focusing on Chicago, I examine how anti-Blackness and settler colonialism intersect through the politics of Urban Renewal. This paper asks, why were urban spaces marked as slums framed as not only economic threats but also existential threats to the future of the city and the country? Drawing on archival research of Chicago’s first Urban Renewal project, Lake Meadows, I find that settler colonialism and antiblackness intersected through constructing Black spaces as internal enemies threatening to pull Chicago back to an Indigenous past. Relatedly, elite articulations of Urban Renewal framed US sovereignty in antagonism to Black spaces while disregarding the humanity of Black people displaced by Lake Meadows through a carelessly executed relocation program.
In my second case, I examine the politics of Urban Relocation by focusing on the dynamics of Indigenous displacement and resistance, considering how this dialectic shapes the production of urban space, alongside how Urban Relocation policy mirrored and was shaped by the anti-Black logics of Urban Renewal.
keywords: Urban Renewal, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, racism, Chicago

Author

• Peter Kent-Stoll, University of Massachusetts-Amherst