Routledge Cities and Race: America's New Black Ghetto (Questioning Cities)

This fascinating book examines the 1990s rise of a new black ghetto in rust belt America, 'the global ghetto'. It uses the emergent perspective of 'racial economy' to delineate a fundamental proposition; historically neglected and marginalized black ghettos, in a 1990s era of societal boom and bust, have become more impoverished, more stigmatized, and functionally ambiguous as areas. As these ghettos grow in size and become more stigmatized entities in contemporary society, our understanding of them in relation to evolving cities and society has not kept pace. This book looks to the heart of this misunderstanding, to find out how race and political economy in cities dynamically connect in new ways ('racial economy') to deepen deprivation in these areas. This book is an essential read for students of geography, urban studies and sociology. Review Cities and Race details how fluid racial characterizations change in response to political economic pressures. David Wilson's commitment to making scholarship useful for undoing the cruelties of anti-black racism in general, and the new black ghettos in particular, is without question. reviewd by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, University of Southern California, USA At his best, Wilson lays bare the inner working of this discourse through the scalar common sense it creates. Bradley Gardener Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences CUNY Graduate Centre About the Author Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA