Expand transcript of audio narration
My future book project, Plundering the City, asks: How can a city’s social infrastructure be built up—or dismantled? Social infrastructure includes the everyday places that make it easy to meet people and build relationships outside the home. Corner stores and family businesses. Neighborhood associations and local newspapers. Public parks, libraries, and mass transit. Dense, walkable streets. These are all proven tools of urban design to promote social mobility.
I use the inner city of Newark, New Jersey, as a case study to examine the broader loss of social infrastructure in American urban life. The loss of local newspapers and family-owned grocery stores weakened the fabric of civic life and local democracy. Newark is an ideal site for this question. It is the poorest city in the world’s wealthiest region: the New York City metro area. Poverty is geographically close to economic opportunity but remains spatially separated and segregated due to urban design. My central claim is that this modern landscape of inequality is not accidental. It is the result of historically traceable investment, technology, and policy decisions.
To study this transformation, I built a large historical record from archives rarely used at this scale: 170,000 business records from city directories. 2,400 photo comparisons of past versus present street scenes. And decades of local newspaper reporting about neighborhood life. Rather than relying on mono-causal explanations like “race” or “white flight,” the findings tell a clear story of rise and erosion. In the early 1900s, the city’s compact, transit-oriented form empowered city dwellers and immigrants with access to economic opportunity. That intensity supported a thick web of small enterprises and civic institutions—the fabric of urbanism. However, over the twentieth century, technological change and market forces replaced old forms of social infrastructure with automobiles, highways, shopping malls, and TV entertainment.
The relevance to Detroit and peer cities is immediate. Plundering the City concludes that rebuilding requires more than construction or isolated design fixes. It requires rebuilding the ecosystem of institutions, using urban history as the guide for designing Detroit and peer cities. In order to be “good ancestors” and create an egalitarian metropolis, we must use urban history as our guide.
Expand 500-word summary of project
My future book project, Plundering the City, asks how a city’s social infrastructure can be built up, and how it can be dismantled. Social infrastructure includes the everyday places and neighborhood spaces that make it easy to meet people and build relationships outside the home. By social infrastructure, I mean the neighborhood institutions that organize daily life: corner stores and family businesses, neighborhood associations, local newspapers and libraries, public parks, mass transit, and dense, walkable streets that bring different groups into routine contact.
I use the inner city of Newark, New Jersey as a case study to examine the loss of social infrastructure in American urban life more broadly. The loss local newspapers, family-owned corner grocery stores, and thousands of other local institutions weakened the fabric of civic life and Newark’s ability to function as a democracy. Newark is a striking site for this question because it sits inside the extraordinarily wealthy New York City metro region—yet it is the region’s poorest city. Wealth and hardship are geographically close while remaining socially separated. The design of neighborhoods and public space helped produce that separation. My central claim is that this American city’s modern landscape of inequality is not accidental; it is the result of historically traceable investment, technology, and policy decisions that systematically weakened the social infrastructure of neighborhood life.
To study this transformation, I built a large historical record from archives that are rarely used at this scale: about 170,000 business records from city directories, roughly 2,500 photo comparisons of past versus present street scenes, about 250 building-level fire insurance maps, and decades of local newspaper reporting about neighborhood life. Rather than relying only on ten-year census snapshots—or on a mono-causal explanations like “race” and “white flight”—I track institutions: what existed, where it clustered, and when it disappeared.
The findings tell a clear story of rise and erosion. In the early 1900s, Newark’s compact, transit-oriented form concentrated people, jobs, shopping, and culture in and around downtown. That intensity supported a thick web of small enterprises and civic institutions—the fabric of urbanism—through which immigrant groups built community networks and, often, pathways into the middle class. Over the mid‑twentieth century, technological change and market dynamics helped replace this older city with a landscape shaped by automobiles, highways, supermarkets, shopping malls, office parks, and suburban housing. Mid-century “slum” further clearance accelerated the removal of remaining neighborhood institutions and weakened the city’s social fabric.
The relevance to Detroit, Michigan and peer cities is immediate. Detroit, Flint, and many smaller industrial communities face parallel questions about mobility, neighborhood investment, and the institutions that support social connection and opportunity. Plundering the City concludes that rebuilding cannot be reduced to new buildings or isolated design fixes. It requires rebuilding the ecosystem of institutions and local power that sustains everyday community life—and asking what it would mean, now, to be “good ancestors.” This is exactly where my historical research at the University of Michigan can lead: My work uses the template of now-vanished urban forms and demolished neighborhood spaces as the template for rebuilding mass transit, small businesses, and the social fauna of community-owned institutions. Plundering the City encourages students and readers to use urban history as the guide to create an egalitarian metropolis today.
Title:
Plundering the City:
How Capital Eroded a Community’s Social Infrastructure
Dissertation Committee:
Ana Morcillo Pallarés,
Robert Fishman,
Matthew Lassiter,
Dan O’Flaherty,
Kenneth Jackson,
Associate Professor of Architecture, Co-Chair
Professor Emeritus of Architecture, Co-Chair
Professor of History
Professor of Economics at Columbia University
Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University
Prince Street in 1916 vs. 1990
Full text of project:
The full text is not published anywhere online. Please email me privately to request access.
Interactive mapping and web component of dissertation project:
Please visit NewarkChanging.org, a geo-located collection of 2,400 past vs. present photo comparisons of Newark’s vanished neighborhoods and community spaces in the 1950s vs. present day.
Abstract: This is the history of a nation told through the story of one place…
Social infrastructure describes the quality of your social interactions outside the home. Corner stores, bodegas, family-owned businesses, and local newspapers all promote social interactions outside the home. Some cities have social infrastructure: walkable streets, public parks, population density, mass transit, local-scale craft industries, and shared neighborhood spaces that encourage different social classes to mix. Other cities lack social infrastructure. Social infrastructure can be created or destroyed – nurtured or plundered.
Newark, New Jersey is now the poorest city in the world’s wealthiest metro region. As a city of 300,000 people in just 24 square miles, the racial and spatial politics of this city are a mirror for urban history, a microcosm for twentieth-century American history. Newark used to be a city where wealthy people lived, and where working-class people built up a vibrant social infrastructure. It is a now a city that lacks abundant social infrastructure and meaningful pathways for working-class people to re-shape their built environment. In lonely pockets of urban poverty, a generation of people are living quiet lives of struggle and desperation. In neighborhoods without grocery stores and communities with limited social infrastructure, a generation of young people and families struggle to acquire the skills and tools needed to improve their situation.
A subway ride away from Newark, New York City is the world’s wealthiest metro region, in what is the most powerful nation in world history. This expansive metro region includes a dozen satellite cities, 27 counties, 300 satellite suburbs, and homes for at least 20 million people. One-fifth of all container ships carrying international goods pass through the Port of New York. This region alone generates one tenth of the nation’s GDP. The New York City metro region alone – if measured separately from the nation’s GDP – has a larger GDP than all of Russia’s. Despite its population, land area, and mineral wealth, the GDP for all of sub-Saharan Africa is still lower than New York City metro’s. Due to social policies and income inequalities, the world’s wealthiest people in New York City are only a short drive from communities of the impoverished and unemployed in Newark. This study examines how capital and technological change created a landscape divided by income and social class – new forms of spatial apartheid.
From the 1910s to the 1960s, technological change and market forces systematically eroded the city’s social infrastructure of craft industries, corner grocery stores, and family-owned businesses. Market forces demolished an older city of mass transit, small businesses, and dense urban streets to create a newer city of highways, shopping malls, and endless suburbs.1 Population flight to the crabgrass frontier2 of suburbs deprived cities of the ability to sustain social infrastructure. The results are the death of great American cities3 and an urban culture of bowling alone.4
The poverty of families and loss of social infrastructure in the city today were not inevitable. Decline was engineered. Thousands of other American cities – large and small – struggle on with the consequences of capital flight and technological change. Through novel research methods and spatial analysis of hundreds of thousands of phone book and census records, this study illustrates the decline of social infrastructure in neighborhoods that are now cultural and food deserts. The decline of social infrastructure shapes the origins of today’s urban crisis.
As arson raged across the city and as capital fled to the suburbs in the 1970s, Newark’s first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, welcomed outside investment – in hopes that technological progress and corporate investors would reshape and revive his troubled city. His words of hope promised that the best was yet to come:
“We’re going to make this a model city. […] If you talk about the urban problem in America, it’s here. If we solve the urban problem here, we can export our solution to other areas. [….] Wherever American cities are going, Newark is going to get there first.”5
A half-century later of false starts and broken promises, these words ring hollow. The city might be able to regrow and build back new towers and apartment buildings. But – in a world now reshaped by mass consumption and the modern means of production – the older patterns of urbanism, social infrastructure, and craft production are not coming back. To truly rebuild the city requires something more: systemic change. To imagine this city – this metro region – as it should be requires a serious and sustained engagement with urban history. Planning for a truly egalitarian metropolis in the future requires us to learn from the templates of urbanism and social infrastructure that worked, and did not work, a century ago. This study describes the patterns of urbanism that worked, and did not work, a century ago – so as to equip communities today with a historically-informed vision for social justice and community organizing. To create social infrastructure today demands nothing less than community ownership of the means of production.
The evolution of the Howard Savings Institution, c.1916, 1995, 1998, 2026
notes
- The methods of this study are largely inspired from the work of these four authors: Douglas Rae, The City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). ↩︎
- Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985). ↩︎
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). ↩︎
- Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). ↩︎
- Joseph P. Fried, “Kenneth Gibson, 86, Dies; Newark Mayor Broke Race Barrier in Northeast,” The New York Times, March 31, 2019, nytimes.com/2019/03/31/obituaries/kenneth-a-gibson-dead-at-86.html. ↩︎