World More Concrete

Many people understand urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised, and even racist, tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly unearths a far more complex story. Connolly scrutinizes nearly eighty years of history and reveals how real estate and land development in South Florida are expressions of political culture, racial power, and metropolitan transformation. He uses a materialist approach to offer a long view of urban redevelopment and the color line, following much of the money that made Jim Crow segregation a profitable and durable social process in cities throughout the twentieth century. Connolly argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders helped create a political culture that, through rents, took advantage of the poor to generate remarkable wealth and advance property rights at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For elite blacks, as for their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines.Yet confiscating certain kinds of real estate also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners' power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

"A World More Concrete marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in American political and social history. Through a fascinating history of Miami, Connolly brings together politics, culture, and economics in a riveting account of how shared understandings of property rights and real estate were central to the racial segregation that has plagued America's cities. Connolly unpacks the complex dynamics of property transactions and urban development, meticulously analyzing all the various institutional actors who shape this market in order to understand the political economy of racism." (Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University)"

N. D. B. Connolly is assistant professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.