Panel:
Reorganizing Space: Property, Deviance, and Infrastructure
(Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
The twentieth century urban experience featured grand plans invoking deviance to justify new infrastructures that would rationalize neighborhoods and bring order to cities. These plans failed. In some cases the plans were followed through on, and failure came later as deviance was re-constructed in response. In others, the plans were abandoned in the face of protest. How did these construction projects––of freeways, of housing, of deviance, and of a middle class––affect the mobility of residents in the short term and in the long term? And in what ways have the targeted citizens responded and worked around and through these infrastructures? This panel will pursue a layered conversation centered on these questions. Freeway plans and housing condemnations displaced people immediately. The construction of deviance rendered new homes unstable for the indeterminate future. The communities re-constructed around these infrastructures became ever-more attractive sites of displacement as urban growth pushed inward. The panel will also address the long echoes of this historical moment that resound still today.
