Housing and Racial Justice: Current Events Urban Resilience

To understand housing inequities that exist today, we must look to how we have developed and built our communities in the past. Collectively, speakers in this webinar drew from their work to offer valuable insight into the current housing crisis in America, the lines that are drawn within it among race and income levels, and what steps are necessary for our cities to move forward.

Moderator: Christina Jackson, Stockton University
Christina Jackson, PhD is a resident of West Philadelphia. She is an urban sociologist and scholar-activist with interests in the relationships between poor/middle class neighborhoods of color, their environments and city entities/institutions. She takes a social justice approach by centering the stories and lives of residents through immersing herself within community struggles. Christina is a professor of Sociology at Stockton University in New Jersey. She graduated from Temple University, received her PhD from University of California Santa Barbara and completed her postdoctoral studies in Africana Studies. She is co-author of "Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse" (Lexington Books) and "Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line" (Polity Inc).

Panelist: Dr. Lawrence T. Brown, University of Wisconsin
Lawrence T. Brown is the proud grandson and son of Mississippi and Arkansas Delta sharecroppers and preachers. He is currently a visiting associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. Lawrence’s first book The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in January 2021.

Panelist: Shane Phillips, University of California Los Angeles
Shane Phillips is an urban planner and housing policy expert based in Los Angeles. He currently manages the UCLA Lewis Center Housing Initiative and has taught public policy as an adjunct instructor at the University of Southern California. Shane is author of The Affordable City, published by Island Press, in which he argues that Supply, Stability, and Subsidy must be co-equal priorities in housing advocacy, and recommends more than 50 policies and strategies for achieving those goals. He also writes (infrequently) about housing and transportation policy at his blog, Better Institutions.

Panelist: Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School in the Department of City & Regional Planning. Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Dr. Rodriguez’s forthcoming manuscript, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, explores the alternative benefits of public housing, outside of shelter provision, to challenge the overwhelming narrative of public housing as a dysfunctional relic of the welfare state.

This webinar was recorded on September 30, 2020 during Current Events - Urban Resilience, a virtual conference hosted by Ticco with support from Island Press. To learn more about this event visit go-ticco.co/ce-retreat. For additional information about Ticco and events like this one visit go-ticco.co.