A research atlas
The Atlas documents how urban renewal destroyed Mexican-American and African-American communities across the twentieth century, recovers the record of the people who organized against the policies, and carries what those organizers learned into the fights now underway in the twenty-first century.
Three goals at once
Record
Each essay names the blocks, the families where the archives permit, the churches, the union halls, the cafes, the canneries, and the corner stores that vanished. A specific record lets a reader see each displacement as an act against specific people on a specific block in a specific year.
Recover
Communities have organized against urban renewal since the policies began. The Cooper Square Committee defeated Robert Moses on the Lower East Side in 1970. Eighty-two farmworker families bought Cabrillo Village as a cooperative in 1976. The Malone Community Center has anchored Black Lincoln since 1942. Their victories carry the same weight the essays give to the destructions.
Transfer
The site links every place to the organizing groups still active there. Where a historical case applies to a current fight, the essay names the parallel and describes what the earlier organizers did that present organizers might borrow. A forthcoming section on data-center displacement will carry the same method into rural and exurban counties.
Cities in version 1
San Pedro and Ventura County
Terminal Island cleared in forty-eight hours in February 1942. The Harbor Freeway cut through Mexican-American Wilmington and South Los Angeles in the 1950s. La Colonia in Oxnard faced a cancelled urban-renewal plan in the early 1960s. Cabrillo Village in Saticoy became a farmworker cooperative in 1976.
Read the city →Malone and the Antelope Valley
The Malone neighborhood, sometimes called T-Town, is the Black enclave that the Malone Community Center has anchored since 1942. Interstate 180 and the Antelope Valley Project redrew the ground between 1968 and 2012. The University of Nebraska extended eastward into Clinton and Hartley. The archival record is thin, and the Atlas treats the thinness as part of the subject.
Read the city →The Moses era and its afterlives
San Juan Hill became Lincoln Center between 1955 and 1966 at the cost of about seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses. The Cross Bronx Expressway displaced roughly sixty thousand people. The Cooper Square Committee defeated the Moses plan for the Lower East Side in 1970 and kept defeating successor plans. Columbia University carried the Manhattanville expansion into West Harlem after 2003.
Read the city →About the project
Read the project motivation, the research methodology, the editorial standard, and the bibliographies that ground every essay.