Abolitionist Planning, Stolen Land, and Urban Housing Theory

Sepuleveda "opening" in Abolition on Stolen land

From reading: idea of Kuuyam -> acting as a guest on stolen land

Connection: Planning being state organized theft

Porter "Against World-Killing Silence"

Context (Conjucture): Written during COVID lockdowns

From reading: "intervention in world killing silence"

Notes: Tyranny of practicality - People question land back, planning is inherently illegitimate (done on stolen land)

Tucker "the Abolitionist University"

Context (conjuncture): climate, war, inequality, and racial capitalism. Universities both reproduce harm (ex. "World-ending activities") and incubate alternatives.

From reading: The ivory tower = academic institutions perpetuating inequity, isolating knowledge from struggle and maintaining systems of privilege

Notes: World-ending activities/world-killing silence, the abolitionist university = formal sites of learning that organize praxis for

liberation

Engels: "How the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Question"

Context (conjuncture): The Industrial City (late 19th C.)

From reading: To solve the housing question you have to solve the social question, to do that

we need to abolish capitalism → the economic system of capitalism is always going to create and recreate slums (the housing systems CANNOT be solved in the system of capitalism - housing shortage is a necessary institution)

Notes:

- Article is based around his criticism of Sax, a liberal thinker/reformer he dismisses as a "bourgeois socialist

- Housing system as social murder because it exposes working class to "invisible"

killers

how the other half lives (Jacob A. Riis) -> immigrants described as most beaten class; visualization & pathologization of urban poverty → creates impetus for social reform to resolve 'moral topographies' or urban poverty

Fishman: "Ebenezer Howard" Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier.

Context (conjuncture): Land Movement in 1870s

From readings: idea of garden cities, 3 magnets (town, country, town-country)

- cooperative socialism without state intervention, abolishment of private property. building garden city without violent revolution

Notes: Influenced by Henry George idea of "Rent is Theft"

Urban planning set in anarchism -> Howard believed that capitalism could be peacefully superseded

K. Sue Park: "Money, Mortgages, and Conquest of America"

From the readings:

Foreclosure's emergence as a practice in Colonial America exposes the myth of "discovery"

Contact economy (wampum)

- disconnect between european value of commodities vs native folks

American colonial innovation → connect to lawlessness of law?

- Mortgage and debt schemes - property is created through theft - what is

- property - property is created to justify taking the land

Blomley: "Enclosure, Common Right, and the Property of the Poor"

From the reading: Conceptualizes the urban commons not as a fixed space or resource, but as a

social relationship — something that exists through collective practice, care, and negotiation, rather than legal ownership.

- A way of relating to space and each other that resists the logic of private property and opens possibilities for collective belonging, justice, and care in the city

Notes: Echo Park Lake example: Unhoused people don't have a right to property

- 41.18 -> anti-camping ban

- 56.11 -> limits unhoused people belongings to 60 gallons

- Couch is an emblem of their self-produced commons. City called this a "bulky item" rather than communal infrastructure → Cause for criminalization, violent policing

Ric Burns' New York: City of Tomorrow.

From the film:

- NYC was shaped by long-standing urban plans (Commissioners' Plan, Central Park),but growth was often driven by unchecked capitalism at the expense of everyday citizens.

- The Great Depression Crisis: NYC hit rock bottom with widespread homelessness (Hoovervilles) and 33% unemployment in Harlem/Bronx, triggering rent strikes and a shift toward strong communal solidarity and government relief.

- Political Transformation (Mayor Fiorello La Guardia): Replacing corrupt Tammany Hall rule in 1933, La Guardia partnered with FDR to turn NYC into a "gigantic laboratory of civic reconstruction." He fought crime/gambling and used New Deal funding to build schools, hospitals, and social safety nets, establishing the idea that government must actively intervene to help citizens.

- Infrastructure Transformation (Robert Moses): Holding power for nearly 50 years, Moses remade NYC for the automobile. He built massive public works (Triborough Bridge, Long Island state parks, expressways, 1,700 renovated parks) funded by self-sustaining bridge tolls.

- The Core Paradox: While La Guardia focused on human welfare and wholesome housing, Moses prioritized physical infrastructure and traffic flow—earning him the reputation that he "loved the public, but hated people.

Robert Caro: "The Meat Axe," and "One Mile," in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

CONTEXT: crisis of the Great Depression, Hoovervilles, mass mobilization that precipitated the new deal, Henry Ford makes (1915-1920: car ownership tripled)

Notes from reading:

- Proposing to building bridge through the heart of the city for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Moses knew that building the bridge would create more traffic, each new bridge would perpetuate the highway machine. Hack your way through with a meat ax.

- One Mile - East Tremont was diverse and was able to use certain language of "tenements"

- Opponents: Lily Edelstein and ETNA (East Tremont neighborhood association), Jane Jacobs: Modernization as anti-urban vision, most planners lack social order

Roy, A: "When is Asia?"

from reading:

- people moving from rural communities to look for work

- Modernity depends on the labor exploitation of workers that can't afford or utilize the structures they create

- Taking land for private investment → relates to Moses' idea of people in the way of public good

- Example: Shenzhen's growth and urban planning transformation through market socialism

Notes: - Asia is inter-referencing itself, disrupting models where the "West" is the development model

Asia economic ascendance as new geo-political and epistemologic

Marshall Berman "Preface: The Broad and Open Way," "The Family of Eyes," and highlighted excerpts from "Petersburg: The Modernism of Underdevelopment," in All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.

from reading:

Berman draws a contrast between the encounter scene in Bauldelaire's "Family or Eyes" and Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground"

Family of eyes: Family of eyes: 2 lovers go to a cafe on a parisian boulevard, a poor family peers thru the window intrigued, his lover is disgusted by the poor people, guy gets the ick from this

importance: Haussmanization made poverty visible and undeniable, inadvertently broke down the wall of urban poverty. Bourgeois face to face with the poor.

Notes from the Underground: man wanted security guard to notice him, becomes obsessed with acknowledgement

importance: Occurs in St. Petersburg

Authoritarian and borrowed modernism

Point: eurocentricism

Berman consumed w arguing Paris is a republic with actual modernity whereas St. Petersburg is "modernism of underdevelopment"

The whole time, colonies have been the first site of experimentation with & implementation of modern city

Harvey, D. "Introduction: Modernity as Break" in Paris: Capital of Modernity.

From reading: David Harvey's analysis in Paris: Capital of Modernity provides a critical Marxist reading of this period that connects urban form to capitalist development:

- Haussmannization as capitalist reimagining serving developers, speculators, and financiers

while leaving masses with sense of dispossession and loss, what Harvey describes as the victory

of market forces over social needs

Harvey's sophisticated analysis contains critical silence regarding constitutive role of French colonialism in shaping Parisian modernity, representing what Paul Gilroy calls "innocent modernity" that ignores the colonial foundations of European wealth and power

The Battle of Algiers (film)

NOTES:

-Algerians lived under systems of segregation, humiliation, poverty (colonialism as structural violence)

- Surveillance through upper and lower city, security checkpoints

- Colonial rule = unsustainable against a population determined to end it.

- Made to replicate european cities like wide boulevards, europeans and settlers would come to experience the charming exotic orient

Two-cities, one side french quarter other Arab town -> "dual city"

CONTEXT:

Assimilation

French occupy Algeria 1830

1830-1865: french military in charge of urban planning

Idea: build grand boulevards to ease facilitation of transport & military

Treat algiers as a tabula rasa that could be re-made as a European city

Associationism

1865 onwards - Civiling mission

Mission civilisatrice

Mission of the French to civilize Algeria

Celik, Z.: Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism. Assemblage

"Plan Obus"

Romanticization of the old city and historic preservation

- The idea that European and Algerian society are incompatible and should

be kept separate

Plan Obus

- Associationism: Physical manifestation between native and colonizers expressed

by the city. I.e. Algiers city infrastructure of half French/half Algerian

Yiftachel's Deepening Apartheid: The Political Geography of Colonizing Israel/ Palestine

From reading: Occupation as a "temporary" thing is NOT temporary - it's being formalized and institutionalized → meant to be permanent and evident through the illegal infrastructure they're building

Notes: Increase of rate of colonizing and creating laws to support it

- Lawlessness of the law (planning legality constructed - international law

saying it's not legal but Israel law trumping international law)

- racial segregation enacted by law, system of spatial segregation (white, black, colored)

Samudzi, Z.: "Reparative Futurities: Postcolonial Materialities and the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide"

Reparations - cannot be financial have to be about land

"Reparative Futurities" - reparations (actual monetary and return of land and

remains), rewriting and acknowledging history and epistemological justice

(people deserve to know dark history and use that to reckon with their identities),

envisioning a new future led by and centering Black and Indigenous knowledge

and experiences.

example: Germany has done this before - it's a pattern - people took the behavior of genocide against people in Namibia and applied it in a way that lead to the

Holocaust

Drake, S.C. and Cayton, H. "Midwest Metropolis" and "The Black Ghetto" in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City.

Conjuncture: Rise in black population in Chicago (1940s?)

Ghettoization create poverty

- These cities are a recreation of the Jim Crow south

- "A world without spaciousness" (Fanon) - and that is enforced by the

colorline

- Forced mobility / Forced containment - there's movement but containment

-Black and white spatial imaginary - the unequal leading practices of redlining is

holding the colorline

Key argument:-

- Immigrants often moved from ethnic enclaves → working-class

neighborhoods → general population as they achieved upward mobility.

Black migrants, however, faced systemic barriers that prevented this

progression. Discriminatory housing practices and white hostility confined them to specific neighborhoods—the South Side "Black Belt."

- The dynamics that affected white migration into northern cities are fundamentally different from the experience/dynamics of black migration, Where white immigrants were able to move into other parts of the city (social and economic mobility), that was never going to be possible for black migrants in this

city

Banfield, E. "Race: Thinking May Make It So" in The Unheavenly City Revisited.

Conjuncture: Great migration black folks moving to the north to try and have upward mobility

People imagine racism and they stay in racial groups

- Moralizes poverty, and says that class is the true indicator of social/economic inequality

- Black culture as culture of poverty - reframe thinking as other minorities were

able to

- Black people could choose to assimilate into the northern city if they so

wanted

- Part of institutions that create ghettoization - head of model city Ghettoization is self driven

Taylor, K.Y. "How Real Estate Segregated America."

PREDATORY INCLUSION (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor):

- As overt exclusion became illegal, new policies "induced mortgage lenders

and the real estate industry to lend to black home buyers."

- However, these loans came with "discriminatory terms," known as

subprime lending, targeting Black communities, and especially Black

women, with "crappy houses at exorbitant interest rates."

- This led not to wealth-building, but to a "new forms of dispossession" and

the foreclosure crisis, reinforcing segregation through debt and financial

exploitation.

Pulido, L. "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California" Annals of the Association of American Geographers

- Laura Pulido on White Privilege: Examines "how did whites distance themselves from industrial pollution and nonwhites?"

Purifoy, D. 2023. "Black Towns and (Legal) Marronage." Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Readings: Freedom colonies - Marron communities

- Black settlements continue after emancipation

- Town of Talboro (white) vs Princeville (Black town)

- extracted and exploited Princeville

Purifoy asks us to take seriously Princeville, practice livingness in the context of persistently ascribed social wealth