Urban Lowlands

In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City; Black Bottom in Nashville; Swede Hollow in St. Paul; and the Flats in Los Angeles to interrogate the connections between a city’s physical 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 that stretches from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Moga reveals patterns of inequitable land use, economic dispossession, and social discrimination against poor and working-class residents. 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.