Race, Homeownership, and Urban Interdependence

Abstract This review essay considers two recent treatments of race and urban space in literature. Adrienne Brown’s “perceptual history” of race and homeownership shows how race itself was shaped by the evolution of homeownership. Nikil Saval considers poet June Jordan’s collaboration with architect Buckminster Fuller on “Skyrise for Harlem,” a megaproject designed to rescue the New York neighborhood from the midcentury urban crisis. Each book offers a compelling account of the way literature dramatizes racial exclusions and foregrounds African American urbanisms in fiction and design, but they tend to isolate race as a variable in urban history, leaving its connections to other, multiple strands of urban development less clear.