Urban Renewal and Resistance

Urban Renewal and Resistance: Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to Early Twenty-First Century examines how urban spaces are rhetorically constructed through discourses that variously justify or resist processes of urban growth and renewal. This book combines insights from critical geography, urban studies, and communication to explore how urban spaces, like Detroit and Harlem, are rhetorically structured through neoliberal discourses that mask the racialized nature of housing and health in American cities. The analysis focuses on city planning documents, web sites, media accounts, and draws on insights from personal interviews in order to pull together a story of city growth and its consequences, while keeping an eye on the ways city residents continue to confront and resist control over their communities through counter-narratives that challenge geographies of injustice. Recommended for scholars of communication studies, journalism, sociology, geography, and political science.

A robust, rigorous, and critical critique of the often unexamined impact of the ‘colorblind neoliberal paradigm’ in U.S. urban renewal programs. Useful for understanding urban space, race, and the Black Lives Matter movement., In Urban Renewal and Resistance, Mary E. Triece foregrounds and carefully analyzes the voices, rhetorics, and experiences of those marginalized by America’s racially oppressive and exclusionary urban landscapes. She shows how African American urban residents suffering through gentrification-driven displacement in post-bankruptcy Detroit and enduring toxic exposure in contemporary Harlem are organizing, speaking out, and fighting back. As such, this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the discursive dimension of the struggles surrounding the racial and class inequalities that define the neoliberal city.

Mary E. Triece is professor of communication studies at the University of Akron.