AS: Urban renewal, or negro removal?
Regardless of what they built afterwards, these projects often obliterated vibrant communities of color, displacing their residents and businesses with minimal compensation. Communities of color were targeted at a much higher rate than white communities, and Black people knew it, as James Baldwin told us.
At the Renewing Inequality project developed at the University of Richmond, below, you can see the consequences of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s.
For a particularly well-documented example of the racialized effects of urban renewal, See LaToya S. Gray's Planned Destruction, about Richmond.
As the NPR interview below explains, highway projects sometimes did intentionally target communities of color.
Today, many communities continue to bear the imprint of these projects. Elliot Rivera and Reginauld Williams' Highway to Segregation shows how the three largest New England cities still suffer from its effects.
The destruction of urban renewal occurred not only in big cities, but also in much smaller ones, such as Dayton, Ohio, as investigated and reported on by the Dayton Daily News.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Segregation by Design, a labor of love by architect Adam Paul Susaneck, is priceless. Susaneck has compiled then-and-now ground-level and aerial photographs to show how urban planners have decimated neighborhoods in cities across the country.
