• Urban Studies

.AbstractThis chapter develops the concept of “American Apartheid” (Massey and Denton, ) by placing access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food for urban youth in the context of structural racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. An important way to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and local knowledge and advance preventative policy is through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). YPAR is an increasingly utilized research approach that involves the affected community identifying a local issue, developing a research agenda, and planning an appropriate intervention to address the issue. We document a YPAR partnership in the East Oakland neighborhood and the development of a community food security intervention in response to youth-led research. Specifically, we describe how Streetwyze—a new mobile, mapping, and SMS platform that allows users to find goods and services, take action on important issues, and visualize health and well-being in their neighborhoods—coupled with “ground-truthing”—an approach in which community members work with researchers to collect and verify “public” data—sparked a food revolution in East Oakland that led to an increase in young people’s self esteem and environmental responsibility and encouraged urban youth to become more civically, community, and academically engaged. We discuss recommendations and implications for future research and collaborations between researchers, teachers, neighborhood leaders, and youth-serving organizations.

Urban Studies

This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to 'hypersegregation.' The authors demonstrate that this systematic segregation of African Americans leads inexorably to the creation of underclass communities during periods of economic downturn. Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities. As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society. This book is a sober challenge to those who argue that race is of declining significance in the United States today.