Spatial Claims, Power, and Links In The Context of American Suburbs

 

    Examples of spatial exclusion are plentiful throughout American history. From the 

creation of the Mason-Dixon line, exclusion on the basis of race has been synonymous 

with American culture. Even during the time of immense civil rights in America that produced 

 Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Fair Housing Act, Black 

Americans continued to find themselves spatially segregated in an emerging geography of 

opportunity. This period saw a mix of de jure and de facto segregation in American urbanism 

but most forms revolved around the emergence of the American suburb.

I am currently working on my undergraduate thesis in the department of political science 

called “The Making of Spatial Inequality: Federal Policy Implications in Post-War America” 

(although this class is making me rethink the title of ‘the making’ as this is far from the 

beginning of spatial inequality in America) where I trace the emergence of American suburbs 

and the resulting exclusion of this landscape. When reading the DS4SI piece and their 

framework for the three aspects of spatial justice, I was really intrigued by it and was 

interested in how what I was writing about ties into what their framework, laid out below.

1. Spatial Claims: the right to be and become

2. Spatial Power: the right to thrive and express

3. Spatial Links: the right to access and connect 

Upon further inspection, I have found that my work touches on how minority communities, specifically 

African American communities, during this period experienced all three forms of spatial exclusion 

simultaneously, sometimes through mechanisms that were often touted as “race-neutral.” 

Spatial Claims

DS4SI defines spatial claims “...as the ability to dwell or stay in a given place” (4). My work has 

found that African Americans have been strategically denied access to Spatial Claims in part by the 

Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) underwriting manuals. In the mid-twentieth century, the 

administration stated explicitly that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties

 shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes" (Rothstein 65). This claim naturally 

underlines the “normality” of white individuals as home owners and builds on the exclusion of 

minorities. The Hansen and Philo piece describes something similar, just instead of race they look at 

ability, arguing that the non-disabled body becomes "arbitrarily established as the 'natural' way of 

appearing, being and doing" (496) while remaining "unmarked." This is similar to what has been 

created in suburbs, whiteness being marked as default. The FHA underwriting worked, and has 

become permeated within society. During this period less than 2 percent of FHA-insured mortgages 

went to non-white Americans (Wiese). As suburbs and opportunities began to expand beyond city 

boundaries, Black Americans found themselves without spatial claims to these areas.

Spatial Power

Black Americans left behind by the new residential patterns experienced their neighborhoods and 

cities experiencing extreme disinvestment as white residents fled to new and desirable suburban towns. 

This greatly affected their ability to thrive as not only were they boxed out of any suburban equity, but

 they found their own formally viable neighborhoods deteriorating as tax bases shrank creating strain 

on services and infrastructure. Given the abundance of housing stock within city limits and the lack 

of alternative options for minorities outside, cities continued to attract Black residents, which only 

further aided in white departures. Boustan found that roughly 2.7 white departures followed every 

Black arrival in a given Northern city (417), meaning that the presence of Black residents accelerated 

disinvestment within cities. As cities bled money and lost population, roads fell into disrepair, 

school quality and outcomes worsened, public transportation became less sustainable, and the 

quality of life within the city deteriorated. As this happened, minorities residing within the city were 

blamed as producing these outcomes, instead of being recognized as the victims of them. 

Spatial Links

The DS4SI article discusses the example of Sweet Auburn and how highway construction has 

systematically targeted a formerly affluent minority neighborhood, in favor of the movement of 

car-owning suburban residents. My thesis too has found this point and I see this as a connection to 

spatial links. The DS4SI article found that the construction of the highway affected “...the ability to 

connect and access is obstructed by the difficulty in navigating in and around the highway." This was 

not an isolated event, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 utilized road construction as a racial sorting 

tool, destroying neighborhoods of color. In my thesis I write about a case in Baltimore where 89 percent

 of families displaced by urban renewal and highway construction between 1951 and 1964 were Black 

(Gioielli 67). Another in Miami, a single interchange between I-95 and I-395 uprooted 10,000 of a 

Black neighborhood's 40,000 residents, in a route planners chose in part because Black objections 

were "easier to disregard" (Alkadry and Blessett 1206).

 Miami I-95, I-395 Interchange

 The development of the American suburb has greatly undermined minorities, specifically Black 

Americans, spatial claims, power, and links. Tying my thesis into this framework, I have begun to 

realize too that forms of exclusion can be self-reinforcing and these works highlight how they are rarely 

isolated. Denied access to property contributed to deterioration within neighborhoods, which ultimately

 justified further neglect of spatial links through the ‘demolition of blight,’ all of which led to 

diminished spatial inclusion in the DS4SI framework. 

Works Cited

Alkadry, Mohamad G., and Brandi Blessett. “Aloofness or Dirty Hands?” Administrative Theory & Praxis (Taylor & Francis Ltd), vol. 32, no. 4, Dec. 2010, pp. 532–56. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.2753/ATP1084-1806320403.

Boustan, Leah Platt. “Was Postwar Suburbanization ‘White Flight’? Evidence from the Black Migration.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics [Oxford], vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 417–43, https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.1.417.

Design Studio for Social Intervention. Spatial Justice: A Frame for Recliaming Our Rights to Be, Thrive, Express and Connect. The Praxis Project, 2012. 

Gioielli, Robert. “‘We Must Destroy You to Save You’: Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons.” Radical History Review [New York], vol. 2011, no. 109, 2011, pp. 62–82, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2010-015.

Hansen, Nancy, and Chris Philo. "The Normality of Doing Things Differently: Bodies, Spaces and Disability Geography." Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, vol. 98, no. 4, 2007, pp. 493–506.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing, 2017.

Wiese, Andrew. Places of Their Own : African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2004, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip044/2003012588.html.