The New School's History Department and the NSSR Committee on Capitalism Studies present Nathan Connolly of Johns Hopkins University.

Connolly will be presenting a talk entitled "America's Playground: Ribbon Cuttings and Racism in the Nation's Urban Redevelopment," on how, in 1969 and to great fanfare, the City of Miami opened what it described as "One of America's First Under-Expressway Parks."  Following a year of racial unrest, politicians, civil rights activists, and business leaders across South Florida pointed to this playground as a well-timed, public demonstration of interracial goodwill. Parks like this one, like the highways above them, were expected to "sweep the nation," journalists claimed. They were also considered proof of the benefits of urban redevelopment, touted as weapons against the infrastructure of poverty and paternalism that rental landlords had built over the previous seventy years.  

Through a focused look at South Florida during the Age of Jim Crow, Professor N. D. B. Connolly explains how infrastructure served as an engine and artifact of struggles over metropolitan growth, property rights, and increasingly diffuse forms of white supremacy.  Connolly argues that objects like parks and expressways helped articulate and enforce apartheid's political culture -- a culture that enabled the better-off to speak for the worse off, and that, to this day,uses the built environment to manage poverty and profit deriving from racial segregation.

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