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This book revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro over the course of the twentieth century. Through the dual lens of political agency and critical historical events, this book follows the transformation of the neighborhood from being predominantly black at the beginning of the twentieth century into a largely white upper-middle-class and commercial neighborhood by the century’s conclusion. Employing the insights of an array of scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, James Scott, Cathy Cohen, William Julius Wilson, and Mary Pattillo, the book argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere victims of large-scale socioeconomic, structural, and political changes such as deindustrialization of the local and national economy, urban renewal, and the growing federal intervention into urban America following World War II. As the book shows, black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intraracial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. Whereas most urban studies analyze multiple facets of black life over the span of a few decades, the book extends the chronology to nearly a century, capturing events such as banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led antiurban renewal mobilization, and the changing politics emergent in post–civil rights Philadelphia.

While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region's “coming of age”? This is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, the author shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogotá, Colombia, the book is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also a concrete example of spatial justice in action. This book argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, the book interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, it demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. The book focuses on such innovative labor-community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice.

Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff’s first-of-its kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society. Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world’s fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying “conspicuous disposal” habits to today’s waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World’s Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present.

Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon. This book showcases how American jazz defined a culture particularly preoccupied with place. By analyzing both the performances and cultural context of leading jazz figures, including the many famous venues where they played, the author bridges two dominant scholarly approaches to the genre, offering a framework for musical analysis that examines how the geographical realities of daily life can be transformed into musical sound. Focusing on white bandleader Jan Garber, black bandleader Duke Ellington, white saxophonist Charlie Barnet, and black guitarist Charlie Christian, as well as traveling from Catalina Island to Manhattan to Oklahoma, the book depicts not only a geography of race but how this geography was disrupted, how these musicians crossed physical and racial boundaries—from black to white, South to North, and rural to urban—and how they found expression for these movements in the insistent music they were creating.