Karen Ferguson

Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900–1950

This collection of 12 new essays will tell the story of how the gradual transformation of industrial society into service-driven postindustrial society affected black life and culture in the city between 1900 and 1950, and it will shed light on the development of those forces that wreaked havoc in the lives of African Americans in the succeeding epoch. The book will examine the black urban experience in the northern, southern and western regions of the U.S. and will be thematically organized around the themes of work, community, city buliding, and protest. the analytic focus will be on the efforts of African Americans to find work and build communities in a constant ly changing economy and urban environments, tinged with racism,hostility, and the notions of white supremacy. Some chapters will be based on original research, while others will represent a systhesis of existing literature on that topic.

Introduction—Special Issue on the Urban Legacies of the Winter Olympics

Living and teaching in Vancouver, it was impossible to ignore the Winter Olympic Games. The seven-year lead-up was filled with media prognostications of gloom and glory, torn-up streets and construction cranes. Normal routines, university teaching included, were suspended during the event. For those who stayed on—and not everyone did, the Games themselves were an uncharacteristically open-air (for our rainy city) celebration. Yet, what was being celebrated, by whom, was actively contested in the streets, and remains contested. Then overnight the temporary stages and fencing came down; it was all over, except that it wasn’t. The City Council that came to power amidst the controversy over the completion of the Olympic Village soon found itself dragged down in the polls by the ongoing financial problems of this flagship waterfront development. Conversely, Canada’s first airport rail link, long mired in controversy about how it was planned, funded, built, and for displacing other regional transit projects in fast-growing municipalities, is today embraced even by suburban commuters. The Vancouver Organizing Committee issued reports making dubious claims about its sustainability performance and balanced budget. These conflicted experiences, observations, and assertions about what the Games mean for our city provided one impetus for this special journal issue. Another impetus was our students, who found in the Olympics many rich and puzzling research questions. Some tackled the physical imprint of the Games on the city. Tracy Vaughan’s study of the Athletes’ Village—also known locally as Southeast False Creek (SEFC)—raised difficult questions about the gap between aspiration and reality. Through a close reading of the SEFC planning process, she traced how the focus on social sustainability and inclusivity in the city’s pre-bid SEFC plan, the product of a long-term and painstaking collaborative planning process, was scuttled by developer resistance and compliant elected officials, development costs, and the need to get the project done in time for the Games. In contrast, transportation impacts within the city limits, if not within the wider region, appear more positive. Jillian Glover and Carolyn Ruhland highlighted

Supporting Global Sustainability by Rethinking the City

FEW, if any, cities have had the luxury of an extended respite from change. Contending with recurring physical and social challenges is a core element of the urban experience and a defining characteristic of the future of cities. Urban boosters often depict their future as filled with boundless opportunities. But for most cities, the future also has the potential to deal a wild card that can undermine the raison d’être of a particular agglomeration. How such challenges are addressed makes the difference between either accomplishing urban regeneration that enables the better future promised by the boosters or watching the forces of change generate urban decline that can lead to decay or collapse and abandonment. This special issue of The Journal of Urban Technology explores how the world’s more affluent cities could respond to major disruptions in energy supply and global climate change by pursuing changes that would lead to regeneration. Such a struggle to adapt cities to a changing world provides a window on the dynamics of urban paradigm change. The contributors to this volume investigated this issue in a workshop organized by the Urban Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, immediately following the Third World Urban Forum, held in June 2006 in Vancouver Canada. The workshop focused on the ways in which affluent cities could meet the challenges posed by energy disruption and climate change. These For more about the World Urban Forum and other global gatherings as triggers for paradigm change, see the last article in this issue, Holden et al, “WUF3: The Dog That Didn’t Bark.”

Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America

freedom for African Americans, Green argues that the striking garbage workers’ slogan ‘I Am a Man’ resonated with thousands of urban working-class African American men and women who identified with the freedom movement and who ‘desired a break from the plantation regime they associated with an earlier time and place but still saw reflected in everyday racial practices in the city. Grounded in memory, migration, and critical thought, their attack on the ‘‘plantation mentality’’ denounced not only whites who acted like plantation bosses but also blacks who appeared fearful of breaking free of their white supervisors’ (252). No other civil rights book delves as deeply as Battling the Plantation Mentality into the world views of the ground soldiers of the black freedom struggle, or situates them so completely in context. By focusing on the quotidian as well as the spectacular, Green illuminates the process by which consciousness can be changed and, sometimes, translated into successful political action. Jane Dailey University of Chicago a 2009, Jane Dailey

WUF3: The Dog That Didn't Bark

THIS special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, emerging from a full-day workshop held immediately after the World Urban Forum 3 (WUF3) in Vancouver, references the Forum itself remarkably little. Given the seriousness with which the authors of this special issue treat matters of urban development, peak oil, and climate change and the rare opportunity presented by the worldwide forum on cities in Vancouver in June 2006, this may come as somewhat of a surprise to the careful reader. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it must be admitted that the most significant contribution made by WUF3 in addressing the challenges of unsustainability is the evidence the Forum did not provide. In this sense, our closing commentary reveals the case of WUF3 as the dog that didn’t bark, much like the hound in the Sherlock Holmes mystery “Silver Blaze” that provided the clue to what occurred by failing to make an expected noise when something serious was happening. There is a great deal within an event like WUF3 to drive cynicism. The Government of Canada, for example, did a large amount of public relations work in the lead-up to WUF3, publicizing the “global season for urban sustainability” they were staging in Vancouver. Rather than a season to mark a new era of policy attention to urban sustainability challenges, however, WUF3 seems to have marked the end of an urban agenda that had been re-emerging from two decades of obscurity for the two years leading up to the Forum. The Federal Cities Secretariat, the Minister of Infrastructure Government of Canada