City Neighborhoods Hurts America Summary

In her book, Root Shock: How Tearing up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, Dr. Mindy Fullilove explores urban planning of cities through discussing the beauty versus equity aspects of planning. First she introduces urban renewal in terms of piercing the streets of cities in order to widen and make them beautiful (Fullilove, 53). However in the effort to beautify cities or make “progress”, as they called it at the time, urban planners destroyed the homes and lives of the poor (Fullilove, 53). An individual by the name, Marc Weiss, had stated that ‘ “urban renewal agencies in many cities demolished whole communities inhabited by low income people in order to provide land for private development of office buildings, hotels, trade centers to high income luxury buildings”’ (Fullilove, 59). In many cities,

Urban designers began to find ways to simply hide the poor away from the main cities and the upper class society in the cities (Fullilove, 197). A lot of the city planning decisions were made by the white majority in the United States at the time, while blacks, the poor and women were excluded from the decision making process (Fullilove, 60). Moreover, the black society felt threatened in that they were not accepted or allowed anywhere else after being separated from their homes (Fullilove, 60). It was as if their right to live like the rest was snatched from them. David Jenkins, a displaced resident from the Philadelphia society, is a great example of how those kicked out of their homes struggled to build relationships like the ones they had at home, elsewhere (Fullilove, 121). This is where the equity struggle became the new life of the displaced residents; “ Systems that house the rich in splendor at the cost of putting the poor in squalor are unjust systems” (Fullilove,