The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (Hardback)

A fascinating book that will make a major impact on our understanding of Harlem and the life of the American city. The Roots of Urban Renaissance is a must-read for those interested in urban design and politics, the civil rights movement, and African American history.--Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn
The metamorphosis of Harlem since the mid-twentieth century has been remarkable. A symbol of urban crisis and a black power utopia, it was reshaped both by advocates of community participation and by the forces of global capitalism. With attention to the ironies of urban renewal, community control, black power, and privatization, Goldstein takes us on a surprising, unpredictable, and revelatory tour of one of America's most famous neighborhoods.--Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis
We've waited far too long for a book like Goldstein's. We see, through his efforts, how debates over community control, modernist and insurgent architecture, and public/private partnerships owe much of their ongoing salience to the experience of redevelopment in Harlem. Indeed, if the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s captures a distinctive cultural flowering, the Harlem of the 1960s and 1970s, in Goldstein's able hands, similarly stands in for America.--N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete
Goldstein shows us how the neighborhood that nurtured Malcolm X also gave birth to one of the first community development corporations in the United States, helping readers to understand the multifarious and shifting forces--from self-determination and radical democratization, to privatization and gentrification--that ultimately created the Harlem we know today. By knowing Harlem, Goldstein demonstrates, we can better understand the complex histories of the inner city in the last decades of the twentieth century.--Dianne Harris, author of Little White Houses
The Roots of Urban Renaissance is a social and political history of the built environment. In it, Goldstein tells the story of Harlem's gentrification from the inside out: rather than chronicle the experiences of migrants to the neighborhood, he recovers the points of view of the people who were already there...[It] is a pleasure to read and a major contribution to urban studies, to the history of the black freedom struggle, and to twentieth-century American social and political history writ large.--Tracy Neumann"American Historical Review" (12/01/2017)