City of Segregation (LBE) : One Hundred Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles (Hardcover)

"A majestic one-hundred-year study of segregation in Los Angeles Racism has been central to the way that the city of Los Angeles--and all US cities--have formed and grown. There is a long, ugly history of state-supported segregation, the violent local defence of white neighbourhood and racial boundaries with continuing police oppression, ever growing political and economic inequalities, the drive to neoliberalization and privatisation, and today's mass displacement of communities of colour in central areas--a process too often described as incidental. This book attempts to explain what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls these death-dealing differences. City of Segregation traces one hundred years of the struggle against segregation in Los Angeles; from the struggles that together ended de jure segregation in 1948, to the campaign that resulted in the 1964 prohibition of de facto discrimination and the 2006 fight to implement strict controls over private security forces and to preserve over ten thousand residential hotel units in the heart of gentrifying downtown. Gibbons contends that the study of these struggles, of the cycles of victory and retreat reveals the true shape and nature of the racist logics that must be fought if we have any hope of replacing them with a just city"--