Urban Lowlands

A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning

Cloth $50.00 ISBN: 9780226710532 Published September 2020

E-book $10.00 to $49.99 About E-books ISBN: 9780226710679 Published September 2020

In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City, Black Bottom in Nashville, Swede Hollow in Saint Paul, and the Flats in Los Angeles, to interrogate the connections between a city’s actual landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the history of US urban development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Moga reveals patterns of inequitable land use, economic dispossession, and social discrimination against immigrants and minorities. In attending to the landscapes of neighborhoods typically considered slums, Moga shows how physical and policy-driven containment has shaped the lives of the urban poor, while wealth and access to resources have been historically concentrated in elevated areas—truly “the heights.” Moga’s innovative framework expands our understanding of how planning and economic segregation alike have molded the American city.

Table of Contents

Contents
Review Quotes

Contents

Introduction: The Low Wards

1 From Bottomlands to Bottom Neighborhoods

2 Harlem Flats

New York, New York

3 Black Bottom

Nashville, Tennessee

4 Swede Hollow

Saint Paul, Minnesota

5 The Flats

Los Angeles, California

6 Landscapes of Poverty and Power

Epilogue: Lowland Legacies

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Review Quotes

Choice

“Although not all urban poor lived in lowland neighborhoods, this study of the demographic is an important contribution for all urban scholars, though not for general readers. It is well written and effectively illustrated and researched.”

The Metropole

“Urban Lowlands offers ideas that should attract widespread attention among urban historians. . . . This fine book weaves together several strands of United States urban history over the period from Reconstruction to the New Deal. . . . Moga makes excellent use of maps and illustrations to show correlations between altitude and social or political discourses. Among other things, he casts new light on geographic processes in relation to changing understanding of disease, attitudes about immigrants, the introduction of zoning, redlining, and the ongoing redefinition of 'slum.'”

David Soll, author of Empire of Water: An Environmental and Political History of the New York Water

“Moga makes an exceptionally persuasive case regarding the factors shaping the development of lowland areas. He clearly establishes the importance of disease theory and racial attitudes as critical to urban decision-making. What is most impressive about Urban Lowlands is that Moga seamlessly connects his story of bottomlands to larger developments in urban planning in the post-1930s period.”

Dolores Hayden, author of The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History

“Moga’s original and well-illustrated history of bottoms and lowlands in four American cities will fascinate everyone interested in urban landscape history.”

Anne Whiston Spirn, author of The Language of Landscape

“Urban Lowlands marshals compelling evidence to illuminate the intersection of topography, poverty, health, and race. This important book is required reading for all who care about the environment of cities and how it shapes the lives of those who live there.”

For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://press.uchicago.edu

Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography | Urban Geography

History: American History | Urban History

Sociology: Social Organization--Stratification, Mobility

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