Building Suburban Power. The Business of Exclusionary Housing Markets, 1890-1960
The 1890s saw the rise of segregated planned suburbs in the United States. A wide cross-section of the British public made those suburbs possible. Building Suburban Power is the first site to map the connections between British investment, large and small, and segregated suburban development. It is part of a larger book project of the same name. Following the money that financed segregated suburbs links those suburbs to people, processes, and places across time and space. Suburbs may seem uniquely American, yet Caribbean slavery, British industrialization, imperialism, and even the battles for women’s rights all directly affected who invested in them and where the capital came from. As the maps show below, Egypt, India, Antigua, the Congo served as some of the other sources of wealth for those who financed America’s segregated suburbs. Just as scholars are now working to understand the impact of slavery long after emancipation throughout the Atlantic world, so too must the history of American housing—of the very streets, trees, buildings, and pipes—be placed in a long global view. Doing so does not elide the local specificity of housing development, nor does it erase the grassroots movements that fought the white supremacy at its core. Rather, determining who bankrolled the start of modern American housing segregation sharpens our understanding of why exclusion assumed particular forms and allowed people—such as developers and certain homeowners—to stake new claims to power. British investment initiated a wave of experimentation with the profitability of racial segregation in real estate that ultimately became codified into federal housing policy. The rise of suburban housing segregation not only coincided with the rise of #Jim_Crow; it formed one of Jim Crow’s strongest foundations. The legacy endures today.
▻https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/visualizing/buildingsuburbanpower/index.html
#business #banlieues #logement #ségrégation #USA #Etats-Unis #investissements #Baltimore #Roland_Park_Company #histoire #UK #Angleterre #cartographie #visualisation #scroll
cc @reka @fil