Brian D. Goldstein, an urban and architectural historian, is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.
[A] meticulously researched account of Harlemites’ efforts to
exercise control over their area since the urban crisis of the
1960s… Full of telling details. [This] is not a popular history but
a work of rigorous scholarship.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Intensely detailed, this important historical analysis reads not
like a play-by-play account but rather like a drama, due to the
author’s strong sense of narrative. The story is deeply relevant
today as the processes of gentrification and the resistance to
those processes continue to produce and reproduce urban spaces
across the U.S. and throughout New York City, including Harlem.
Goldstein investigates how structures of racism, paternalism, and
the creative destruction wrought by capitalism intersect in this
iconic ‘underserved’ neighborhood, and how residents fought—and
fight—to retain a degree of autonomy. The author skillfully links
events in Harlem to the broader black power and civil rights
movements, and to shifting political regimes. This volume covers a
considerable span, from the early 1960s during the heyday of
blanket ‘urban revitalization,’ which threatened to clear swaths of
‘urban blight,’ to the late 1990s.
*Choice*
The Roots of Urban Renaissance is a social and political history of
the built environment. In it, Goldstein tells the story of Harlem’s
gentrification from the inside out: rather than chronicle the
experiences of migrants to the neighborhood, he recovers the points
of view of the people who were already there…[It] is a pleasure to
read and a major contribution to urban studies, to the history of
the black freedom struggle, and to twentieth-century American
social and political history writ large.
*American Historical Review*
The most fascinating question posed again and again by Harlem
residents, and echoed throughout Goldstein’s book, is what the
streets of Harlem should look like, who should design them, and who
gets to inhabit them…His point, essentially, is to debunk the idea
that the gentrification of Harlem was solely imposed by outside
developers and investors…Goldstein illustrates well how Harlemites
not only asked, but thoroughly engaged. Although the results were
mixed, it’s impossible to deny how the neighborhood was radically
shaped by the opinions, persistence, and ingenuity of the people
who actually lived there.
*Architects Newspaper*
The metamorphosis of Harlem since the mid-twentieth century has
been remarkable. A symbol of urban crisis and a black power utopia,
it was reshaped both by advocates of community participation and by
the forces of global capitalism. With attention to the ironies of
urban renewal, community control, black power, and privatization,
Goldstein takes us on a surprising, unpredictable, and revelatory
tour of one of America’s most famous neighborhoods.
*Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban
Crisis*
A fascinating book that will make a major impact on our
understanding of Harlem and the life of the American city. The
Roots of Urban Renaissance is a must-read for those interested in
urban design and politics, the civil rights movement, and African
American history.
*Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone
Brooklyn*
We’ve waited far too long for a book like Goldstein’s. We see,
through his efforts, how debates over community control, modernist
and insurgent architecture, and public/private partnerships owe
much of their ongoing salience to the experience of redevelopment
in Harlem. Indeed, if the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s captures
a distinctive cultural flowering, the Harlem of the 1960s and
1970s, in Goldstein’s able hands, similarly stands in for
America.
*N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete*
Goldstein shows us how the neighborhood that nurtured Malcolm X
also gave birth to one of the first community development
corporations in the United States, helping readers to understand
the multifarious and shifting forces—from self-determination and
radical democratization, to privatization and gentrification—that
ultimately created the Harlem we know today. By knowing Harlem,
Goldstein demonstrates, we can better understand the complex
histories of the inner city in the last decades of the twentieth
century.
*Dianne Harris, author of Little White Houses*
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