2025/01/05 by George Lipsitz · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Populism, Right-Wing Movements
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soae180
openalex publication_date 2025/01/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In this well-researched and well-written book, Derek Hyra presents a perceptive and persuasive argument that interprets seemingly sudden urban uprisings in response to police violence as predictable outcomes of sustained prior histories of segregation, divestment, displacement, and gentrification. He argues that the anger expressed by masses mobilized in the streets in response to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Freddie Gray in Baltimore stemmed from long simmering grievances. Hyra’s Urban Renewal Unrest Framework reveals how housing discrimination and biased community development policies in both cities (albeit in different ways) produced serial displacements, community destruction, concentrated poverty and police brutality. The battles that took place in these cities between neighborhood residents and armed city, county, and state forces deployed to repress them and the destruction of property that occurred need to be understood in Hyra’s framework in the context of the already existing spatial violence against Black people through disparate and multilevel yet fully linked public and private policies of exclusion and exploitation.