Racial Justice in American Land Use

Over a century after racial zoning was invalidated, American land use remains racially unjust. When racist tools were abolished, other facially neutral tools were created or adapted to maintain white power and wealth. Policies, practices, and laws evolved to embed racial inequality and white supremacy deeply into institutional structures and landscapes. Despite modest improvements since the early twentieth century, land use and neighborhood conditions for Black people and other people of color remain dramatically worse than for whites. Discrimination and segregation persist. This enduring and multi-faceted nature of racial injustice in the American land use system means that there is no one cause and no one solution. Instead, this book advocates for nuanced systemic change. Using cross-disciplinary analysis in social-movement history, legal theory, and public policy, the authors call for a racial-justice transformation that integrates grassroots racial-justice activism, newly revitalized anti-subordination legal theories, and many different public policy reforms.

Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold is an internationally renowned transdisciplinary scholar, receiving numerous honors for his pioneering ideas and research in land use, environmental justice, equitable planning, and resilience justice, as well as grants from EPA, USGS, HUD, and NOAA. He is an elected member of Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society. He has also served as a planning commission chairman and city attorney.

Cedric Merlin Powell is a prominent Constitutional Law scholar and structural inequality theorist on neutrality and post-racial constitutionalism. He is the author of two other books from Cambridge University Press: Post-Racial Constitutionalism and the Roberts Court: Rhetorical Neutrality and the Perpetuation of Inequality (2022); Post-Racial Federalism: Race, Liberty, and the Democratization of Oppression (forthcoming). He is also an elected member of the American Law Institute.

Catherine Fosl is an interdisciplinary scholar of twentieth-century US social justice movements, especially the history of race, gender, and grassroots-level activism in the US South. She has received numerous awards and fellowships for her research and is the author of Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (2006), the definitive biography of civil-rights activist Anne Braden.

Laura Rothstein is a renowned leader in US legal education and elected member of the American Law Institute. By using her scholarship to 'advocate through education,' she has worked to promote diversity and raise awareness on issues of disability, gender, and race, as well as to develop policy solutions.