The Culture of Property
Race, Class, and Housing Landscapes in Atlanta, 1880–1950

LeeAnn Lands

A history of the cultural biases undergirding housing segregation

Reviews

"The Culture of Property prompts us to consider the social actors, groups, and interests that drove the re-engineering of Atlanta's landscape at the turn of the twentieth century, from a city where washerwomen lived near their employers to a city that sought to move an entire black university for the sake of ensuring white control of space. The author brings the discussion to a critical edge by relating the events of the early twentieth century to the current housing crisis in Atlanta and the insensitivity of contemporary white elites to issues of social justice. The book will cut across and contribute to a variety of disciplines and readerships. The great strength of the work comes from its explicit analysis of geography and landscape, demonstrating that the history of Atlanta (or any other city) must be re-told and analyzed in the context of the spaces and places that people inhabited, constructed, and struggled over."
—Derek H. Alderman, coauthor of Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory

"An important contribution to the literatures of urban and suburban history. Lands investigates the transformation of neighborhoods and property markets in Atlanta to explain the making of a new cultural and political infrastructure for segregation, an infrastructure that continues to shape the United States today. Illuminating the many links between local and nationwide trends, she makes a persuasive case for Atlanta’s role as a national exemplar as well as a city with its own local and regional peculiarities."
—Andrew Wiese, author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century


More / Hide

Description

This history of the idea of “neighborhood” in a major American city examines the transition of Atlanta, Georgia, from a place little concerned with residential segregation, tasteful surroundings, and property control to one marked by extreme concentrations of poverty and racial and class exclusion. Using Atlanta as a lens to view the wider nation, LeeAnn Lands shows how assumptions about race and class have coalesced with attitudes toward residential landscape aesthetics and home ownership to shape public policies that promote and protect white privilege.

Lands studies the diffusion of property ideologies on two separate but related levels: within academic, professional, and bureaucratic circles and within circles comprising civic elites and rank-and-file residents. By the 1920s, following the establishment of park neighborhoods such as Druid Hills and Ansley Park, white home owners approached housing and neighborhoods with a particular collection of desires and sensibilities: architectural and landscape continuity, a narrow range…

More / Hide


Series/imprint:
Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South

Illustrated
Trim size: 6 x 9

Cloth
List price: $69.95
Your price: 978-0-8203-2979-6
11/1/2009
  

Paper
List price: $24.95
Your price: 978-0-8203-3392-2
11/1/2009

View Cart

Share with a friend

LeeAnn Lands is an associate professor of history and American studies at Kennesaw State University.