While the urban crisis debate has expanded to examine a variety of American cities, the general exploration of how African Americans have responded to, and challenged, racial and urban inequality remains focused on grassroots political and community activism. This account of postwar New York City seeks to examine how structural discrimination created racial inequality, how African Americans suffered from a complex system of social consequences that further marginalized them, and how a politically conscious art form emerged from the destitution of the urban crisis. As illustrated through Robert Merton’s theory of Anomie, restricted opportunity for social and economic advancement created an environment vulnerable to crime. Not only were African American neighbourhoods susceptible to crime, but the conservative agenda tended to demonize African Americans as dangerous criminals, targeting them in the rise of mass incarceration. Resources were funneled into imprisoning more people, and African Americans were disproportionately represented in the American corrections system. As a result of this, African Americans were consistently excluded from certain jobs and denied basic civil rights. This thesis will also explore how African Americans responded to, and challenged, racial and urban inequality through the arts. The Black Arts Movement emerged from New York City in the mid-1960s. The movement was both confrontational and socially conscious. Artists sought to articulate the struggles of urban African Americans while empowering, educating, and protesting racial injustices. The Black Arts Movement was fundamentally political, and a predecessor to the Hip Hop culture which emerged from the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City.

While the urban crisis debate has expanded to examine a variety of American cities, the general exploration of how African Americans have responded to, and challenged, racial and urban inequality remains focused on grassroots political and community activism. This account of postwar New York City seeks to examine how structural discrimination created racial inequality, how African Americans suffered from a complex system of social consequences that further marginalized them, and how a politically conscious art form emerged from the destitution of the urban crisis. As illustrated through Robert Merton’s theory of Anomie, restricted opportunity for social and economic advancement created an environment vulnerable to crime. Not only were African American neighbourhoods susceptible to crime, but the conservative agenda tended to demonize African Americans as dangerous criminals, targeting them in the rise of mass incarceration. Resources were funneled into imprisoning more people, and African Americans were disproportionately represented in the American corrections system. As a result of this, African Americans were consistently excluded from certain jobs and denied basic civil rights. This thesis will also explore how African Americans responded to, and challenged, racial and urban inequality through the arts. The Black Arts Movement emerged from New York City in the mid-1960s. The movement was both confrontational and socially conscious. Artists sought to articulate the struggles of urban African Americans while empowering, educating, and protesting racial injustices. The Black Arts Movement was fundamentally political, and a predecessor to the Hip Hop culture which emerged from the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In the last two decades, the study of postwar American cities has gone through a significant revisionist reinterpretation that overturned an older story of urban decay and decline beginning with the tumultuous 1960s and the notion that a conservative white suburban backlash politics against civil rights and liberalism appeared only after 1966. These new studies have shown that, in fact, American cities had been in jeopardy as far back as the 1940s and that white right-wing backlash against civil rights was also much older than previously thought. This “urban crisis” scholarship also directly rebutted neoconservative and New Right arguments that Great Society liberal programs were at fault for the decline of inner-city African American neighborhoods in the past few decades by showing that the private sector real estate industry and 1930s New Deal housing programs, influenced by biased industry guidelines, caused those conditions through redlining. My case study similarly recasts the history of American inner cities in the last half of the twentieth century. It uses the Greater Kansas City metropolitan area, especially Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, as a case study. I deliberately chose Kansas City because traditional urban histories and labor histories have tended to ignore it in favor of cities further east or on the west coast. Furthermore, I concur with recent trends in the historical scholarship of the Civil Rights Movement towards more of a focus on northern racism and loczating the beginning of the movement in the early twentieth century. In this study, I found evidence of civil rights activism in Kansas City, Missouri as far back as the late 1860s and 1870s. I trace the metropolitan area’s history all the way back to its antebellum beginnings, when slavery still divided the nation and a national railroad system was being built. I weave both labor and changes in transportation over time into the story of the city and its African-American population over time.

"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" examines the construction of the South Bronx in the American imagination during the 1970s and 1980s--a time when the South Bronx was synonymous with the failures of urbanism. The project attempts a multidisciplinary excavation of the cultural manifestations of urban ruin as articulated through the histories, literatures, and visual arts produced within and inspired by the ruins of the Bronx. The dissertation contends that Bronx ruins offered a site for visual artists, writers, and photographers to create new ways of understanding the production and perception of urban environments, while shaping the forms and styles that these creations took. The project theorizes the emergence and legacy of these forms alongside what it terms "municipal art": public works of city governmental bodies which, themselves, responded to ruin, and that might also be read as art. The dissertation's first part places the building cuts of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in dialogue with the trompe l'oeil window decals of New York's "Occupied Look" program. It argues, on one hand, that Matta-Clark's artworks employ the tactics and effects of trompe l'oeil, and, on the other, that the seemingly failed "Occupied Look" project presents, upon close examination, vastly more interesting questions about temporality, duration, stasis within the built environment. The dissertation's second part views 1980s New York City Department of Finance tax assessment photographs within and against documentary and conceptual art contexts to reveal aesthetic debts owed by photographers and artists to "administrative" or systematic modes. The dissertation argues that these tax photos, despite their empirical intention, are inevitably productive of narrative, and demand an empathetic model of viewership that gestures at historic ruin-gazing while puncturing mythological understandings of urban ruin. The dissertation's third part examines how the popular fiction of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo imagined the Bronx built environment. The dissertation argues that the infrastructures that animate these portions of their fiction--abhorred in one and celebrated in the other--bind the South Bronx to city, making it less an alienated nowhere than one that is intimately tied to the world around it.

The purpose of this study is to understand the short- and long term implications of the Covid-19 virus on the city center and what is done to revitalize it to a more attractive and available place. This case study is done on Umeå city center, where the municipality is going through a massive transformation and plans to increase its population size from 130 000 to 200 000 by 2050. That is a 50% population increase over a 30-year period, this also entails doubling the amount of constructing on a yearly basis. With the municipality focusing on densification of its cities, with a particular focus on the city center since they want to build a dense and vibrant city where everything is within a 5 km distance radius. The case study is done with a qualitative method using semi structural interviews. The observations made from the interview are compared to previous scientific studies, documents and theories made by urban planners and culture geographers. They include Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida and previous work on the correlation between urbanization and spread of infection as well as studies on people’s preferences on where to live, either being in or outside the city perimeter.  To gather empirical information a selection of people in suitable positions were interviewed. The results from the interviews and document shows that the city center has not been affected by the Covid-19 virus on a macro level. There has however been a wide impact on the microgeographic level, where stores and restaurant have been highly affected by the restrictions imposed. People have also seen their daily lives affected which has changed their routines and behavior in consumption and movement. There has been little change in the planning process or vision for the city center expect that there has been a greater emphasis on cooperation between businesses and the municipality.

A partir de duas monografias paralelas que analisam territórios emblemáticos de habitação social na periferia de São Paulo e Paris, propomos nesta tese um entendimento simultâneo da situação da Cité Balzac, um grand ensemble característico dos anos 1960 que atravessou recentemente um profundo processo de \'renovação urbana\', confrontada com a história de um fragmento do maior complexo de conjuntos habitacionais da América Latina, a Cidade Tiradentes, como estratégia para compreender os últimos cinquenta anos da história da habitação social em ambos os países. Projetos recentes de renovação urbana, de novos conjuntos habitacionais e equipamentos públicos de excelência em ambos os territórios confirmam a excepcionalidade dos casos estudados, a partir dos quais buscamos estabelecer similitudes, contrastes, questões comuns e \'olhares cruzados\'. / In this thesis, we propose a simultaneous understanding of the history of two emblematic territories in the outskirts of São Paulo and Paris as a strategy to comprehend the last fifty years of the social housing history in both countries, through the analysis of the transformations of a tipical grand ensemble build in the 1960 that has been recently through a deep renewal process, the Cité Balzac, confronted with the particular case of one fragment of the biggest housing projects complex in Latin America, the Cidade Tiradentes. Recent projects of urban renewal, new collective housing constructions and some special public equipments in both territories reinforce the exceptionality of the chosen cases, starting point for parallels, contrasts, common questions and crossed sights.

A partir de duas monografias paralelas que analisam territórios emblemáticos de habitação social na periferia de São Paulo e Paris, propomos nesta tese um entendimento simultâneo da situação da Cité Balzac, um grand ensemble característico dos anos 1960 que atravessou recentemente um profundo processo de \'renovação urbana\', confrontada com a história de um fragmento do maior complexo de conjuntos habitacionais da América Latina, a Cidade Tiradentes, como estratégia para compreender os últimos cinquenta anos da história da habitação social em ambos os países. Projetos recentes de renovação urbana, de novos conjuntos habitacionais e equipamentos públicos de excelência em ambos os territórios confirmam a excepcionalidade dos casos estudados, a partir dos quais buscamos estabelecer similitudes, contrastes, questões comuns e \'olhares cruzados\'. / In this thesis, we propose a simultaneous understanding of the history of two emblematic territories in the outskirts of São Paulo and Paris as a strategy to comprehend the last fifty years of the social housing history in both countries, through the analysis of the transformations of a tipical grand ensemble build in the 1960 that has been recently through a deep renewal process, the Cité Balzac, confronted with the particular case of one fragment of the biggest housing projects complex in Latin America, the Cidade Tiradentes. Recent projects of urban renewal, new collective housing constructions and some special public equipments in both territories reinforce the exceptionality of the chosen cases, starting point for parallels, contrasts, common questions and crossed sights.

Habiter, c’est être mobile. C’est à partir de cette hypothèse issue d’une expérienceprofessionnelle de plus de quinze d’ans d’accompagnement au logement auprès de ménagesvulnérables, que s’est engagée une étude sur les effets, les freins et les leviers de la mobilitérésidentielle contrainte sur les quartiers de l’Agence Nationale de Rénovation Urbaine(ANRU) d’Angers et de Trélazé (France). Associant les résultats de l’étude à la notion dela mobilité contextuelle, se révèle l’étroite relation homme-environnement. En effet, leprocessus cognitif de la mobilité et de l’habiter se met en oeuvre dans une atmosphèresécurisante et apaisante. Or, vivre dans les quartiers d’habitat social dégradé, dévalorisé,empêche cette mise en oeuvre. Ainsi, l’étude du relogement contraint montre la nécessaireconjugaison entre les politiques d’aménagement urbain, les politiques sociales et lespolitiques environnementales. / Living in one place also implies mobility. This hypothesis was developed over 15 years’experience accompanying the underprivileged in housing issues and lies at the basis ofthe present study, which examines the effects, obstacles and levers involved in restrictedresidential mobility in residential neighborhoods of the National Agency for Urban Renewal(Agence Nationale de Rénovation Urbaine – ANRU) in Angers and Trélazé (France). Lookingat our results in the light of contextual mobility, the close relationship between man andnature becomes apparent. Indeed, the cognitive process connecting mobility and residencecan only take place within a reassuring and calming environment. On the other hand, livingin degraded, depreciated social housing clearly hinders this process. The present study onforced relocation thus demonstrates the need for combining urban planning, social andenvironmental approaches in policymaking.