Local officials, housing authorities, and urban planners worked in concert to naturalize and normalize racial segregation, stratification, and difference by aligning inferior physical and built environments with nonwhite, non-single-family residential land uses in the city. There is extensive scholarship and literature on the role of physical environmental features in enhancing the economic value of the built environment. How does landscape play a role in determining land use and separating ‘deviants’ from others? You write about how segregation is made to appear ‘natural’ by utilizing existing features like rivers and creeks and then manmade ones like railroads, walls, and public housing developments. In demolishing public housing’s unique programmatic and political opportunity structure, we have also demolished a critical entry point for deviant, or intentionally underrepresented, interests into local, state, and federal policies. Many ran for office, worked for elected officials, or started new organizations dedicated to tenant politics. As a result, this previously excluded group of public housing tenants engaged with council persons, mayors, governors, and presidents in order to change their community. The public housing development and its tenant association allowed those who lived within and around its buildings to take advantage of its unique political scalar structure as a program that was federally legislated, state authorized, and locally implemented and administered. Over the course of the 20th century, Black public housing developments (first segregated de jure and then de facto) provided political opportunities to groups who were disenfranchised legally or extra-legally, from Black business owners and social workers to single head of households and elderly women. Public housing served as an alternative space for Black participation in urban political life. Yet it is also the site of what you call ‘Black participatory geographies.’ How does this play out in public housing? Plagued by pest issues, a lack of maintenance and infrastructure, and the infamous missing and murdered children cases, Atlanta’s public housing structures were often characterized as a problem, which you talk about in the book.
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