Racism and America's Urban Cycle Research Proposal

Essentially, those in the lower tiers of the urban
socioeconomic hierarchy, rather than having been drawn out of despair, have
been thrust to the periphery of America's 'revitalizing' cities.

Question 2:
One of the most important points raised by the course reading
material would be that underscoring a clear proclivity toward urban design
and planning in those who would first colonize the new lands. Though
massive and ripe with natural resources and incredible frontiers, the new
land was also flowing with inherently profitable waterways, brimming with
commercial trade prospects and inhabited by a native population which,
though Chudacoff reports it to have been significantly underestimated as an
city-dwelling peoples as well, would appear ripe for exploitation. More
importantly though to this discussion would be the text's consideration of
the inherency of the European urban culture to America's development.
Indeed, according to Chudacoff's (2005) account, "the Europeans who
colonized North America were from the beginning urban-minded people, linked
to commercial markets. Even the earliest explores in New England had
viewed the new land in terms of the commodities it promised to yield." (1)
This reveals an important point as applies to the ebb and flow of
urban development or focus through modern history. Especially across the
late 20th century as denoted here, the period of America's greatest growth
would also set off an urban cycle that denotes racially motivated phases of
disinterest in this building block to American society and prosperity. The
result is that even as the city remains in no small regard a center of
industry, of intellectual exchange and of community living space fully
unlike the individual living experience of the suburbs, it also possesses
various symptoms of its periods of decay which cannot be suppressed even in
spite of the considerable efforts of revitalization.
Indeed, if we refer back to the discussion above on gentrification,
it is clear that in fact the crime and poverty which are here disavowed are
not simply forced to the periphery.To the contrary, these failures of
civic equality typically come home to roost even in those neighborhoods
designed to contrast this effect. Jacobs (1961) text would pay focus to
this idea, though in 1961 and therefore considerably less informed on the
cyclical rise and fall and rise of the city thereafter. Jacobs is somewhat
prescient of gentrification's effects though, describing the city streets
as significantly populated by African American dwellers in economically
disadvantaged circumstances, and further denoting that "the barbarism and
the real, not imagined, insecurity that gives rise to such fears cannot be
tagged a problem of the slums. The problem is most serious, in fact, in
genteel-looking 'quiet residential areas' . . . It cannot be tagged as a
problem of older parts of cities. The problem reaches its most baffling
dimensions in some examples of rebuilt parts of cities, including
supposedly the best examples of rebuilding, such as middle-income
projects." (Jacobs, 31) This speaks to a point which would become
altogether less baffling and more sociologically understood as American
began to legally address the economic segregation inherent to deeply racist
nation.
This segregation, imposed by law in the South, would nonetheless
persist as a matter of socioeconomic distribution throughout the nation,
with our reading pointing to pattern in America's urban history where the
moments of greatest disregard thereto (i.e. the 1870s, the 1930s, the
1970s, the 2000s) have also yielded the greatest evidence of a persistent
racial inequality in America.

Works Cited:

Chudacoff H. & J.E. Smith. (2005) The Evolution of American Society,
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-189824

Jacobs, Jane. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New
York, Vintage Books. ISBN:067974195X

Massey, D. and N. Denton. (1998). American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Harvard University….....