By Sustainable Housing and Urban Studies Unit, University of Salford
When: 25 June 2019, 16:30-19:30
Where: University of Salford MediaCityUK campus (directions available here)
Register for free attendance here
Los Angeles may seem a long way from Manchester, but with a century of vibrant civil rights struggle on the one hand and an ever-evolving effort to drive up property values on the other, its current patterns of development may seem all too familiar. We would like to invite you to the launch of City of Segregation: 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles, where author Andrea Gibbons will explore some of the rich lessons from LA’s social movements along with the new forms of privatisation and of social and racial cleansing that have evolved in response. The talk will explore how whiteness has historically come to underpin property values and definitions of community, and how such logics continue to inform the intensifying efforts of business interests to push people from the city centre and displace homelessness to outlying areas rather than work to solve it. Yet LA’s residents refuse to move, and this is as much a story of their ongoing struggle for a different vision of housing and justice at the soul of the city. The book is a product of both research and her seven years’ experience working as a tenant organizer in Central and South Central LA. Mike Davis has called her book ‘A Landmark Study’, and Junot Diaz calls it ‘Astute, passionate, radical, and utterly invaluable’.
Joining her will be Anna Minton, author of Ground Control and Big Capital for a discussion of what the US and the UK share. Anna has written extensively of the fate of housing under UK policy, but also of the attempt to borrow from the US, from Business Improvement Districts to broken windows policing. These efforts will be discussed, along with the ways in which all that is unique in cities like Manchester might be marshalled to chart a very different course for UK cities.
Refreshments will be available and the book will be on sale at a special discounted launch price.
Outline agenda
4:30pm - Registration
5:00pm - Introduction by Prof. Philip Brown, Professor of Social Change and Director of the Sustainable Housing & Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU) at the University of Salford
5:10pm - Dr Andrea Gibbons, Research Fellow in the Sustainble Housing & Urban Studies Unit (SHUSU) at the University of Salford, author of City of Segregation
5:40pm - Anna Minton, author of Big Captial
6:00pm - Conversation and Discussion with audience
6:40pm - Drinks reception
7:30pm - Close
12 June 2019
