The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem

by Brian D. Goldstein

Displaying gleaming new shopping centers and refurbished row houses, Harlem today bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s widely noted “Second Renaissance” to a surprising the radical 1960s social movements that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny.

In the post–World War II era, large-scale government-backed redevelopment drove the economic and physical transformation of urban neighborhoods. But in the 1960s, young Harlem activists inspired by the civil rights movement recognized urban renewal as one more example of a power structure that gave black Americans little voice in the decisions that most affected them. They demanded the right to plan their own redevelopment and founded new community-based organizations to achieve that goal. In the following decades, those organizations became the crucibles in which Harlemites debated what their streets should look like and who should inhabit them. Radical activists envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African-American population.

In the succeeding decades, however, community-based organizations came to pursue a very different a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. In charting the history that transformed Harlem by the twenty-first century, The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.

Genres: New York, Urban Planning, History

400 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 2017

Reviews

[Ajk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating look at the relationship between community organizers/activists, capital, and the urban planning profession. I was a little intimidated by the size of this book, but it's written very cleanly and does a great job holding the reader's hand. I didn't know a ton about Harlem before starting the book, but since it's more focused on practice than Harlem itself, that's ok! It's not as intimidating as it could've been.

I enjoyed how the book leads with these liberatory concepts, and how Harlem really represents a Black Planet in a way that is tough to understand for outsiders (such as myself). And then goes into how these liberatory concepts just smash against the frankly colonial mindset of the state and federal governments. There's no real bad guys in the book (okay, maybe George Pataki), just people doing what they feel is the best they can. This sort of internal idealism-vs.-realism struggle is fascinating to see play out in the urban form. Like if Howard Roark got his teeth kicked in a couple of times.

Meanwhile, there's this weird undercurrent where the radical language far outlives the methods behind it. So concepts like "Community Development" and "Sweat Equity" live on to describe something completely different than what they started as. It's something seen a lot in living language as well of course, but wild to see how little the practice of planning has changed, versus how much the language surrounding it has.

[Zak Yudhishthu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly original history of gentrification and grassroots organizing in Harlem, stretching from the tail end of urban renewal in the 60s up to accelerating gentrification towards the end of the century.

The book shows how much change in Harlem was driven by local residents — not just gentrifiers or economic actors coming from the outside. Many different visions of economic development existed among Harlem community members. Most of these visions also fit squarely under the umbrella of community control and a strong degree of locally-driven development, but this book does very well to show how many different directions those broad principles can point. I also thought the book took a good balance between attributing a lot of agency to local actors while also staying aware of changing, larger-scale policy and economic constraints during these decades.

Highly recommend, especially as a pairing with The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn and The Battle of Lincoln Park.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on the evolution of Harlem's community development corporations, which arose out of 1960s radical activism but later moved in a very different direction. These nonprofit companies, often began by churches and subsidized by government and foundations, helped to revitalize Harlem in the 1990s by investing in mixed-income housing and by leasing property to a supermarket and to national retailers.

Goldstein's overall point seems to be that gentrification was not inflicted on Harlem by outsiders, but was at least partially a result of choices by neighborhood activists. Since the gentrification of Harlem is fairly recent, I am a bit surprised that Goldstein devoted only one short chapter to the 21st century.

[Mills College Library]

307.14 G6244 2017