Model City Blues Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven Mandi Isaacs Jackson paper EAN: 978-1-59213-604-9 (ISBN: 1592136044) $25.95, Apr 08, Available cloth EAN: 978-1-59213-603-2 (ISBN: 1592136036) $74.50, Apr 08, Available 296 pp 6x9 1 table 5 figures 45 halftones

"Mandi Jackson brings us back to the once-fabled struggle in New Haven over ‘the right to the city’. On the one side, the city's powerbrokers, in the name of urban revitalization, planned to bulldoze the neighborhoods in which African Americans had settled. On the other side, the people of those neighborhoods fought to hold onto the places that had become integral to their lives. Jackson's story shows us the centrality of place in human life and politics, and helps us to recognize the many tragedies that continue to result from contemporary processes of gentrification"
—Frances Fox Piven, Brooklyn College, Graduate School of the City University of New York

"Model City Blues breaks new ground reassessing New Haven politically through the lens of ethnographic and historic research. Through an urban context, Jackson synthesizes the cultural and economic foundations of past and future social movements. This book is the most impressive culmination of the most significant social and political research on New Haven in at least a generation."
—Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Model City Blues tells the story of how regular people, facing a changing city landscape, fought for their own model of the “ideal city” by creating grassroots plans for urban renewal. Filled with vivid descriptions of significant moments in a protracted struggle, it offers a street-level account of organized resistance to institutional plans to transform New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1960s. Anchored in the physical spaces and political struggles of the city, it brings back to center stage the individuals and groups who demanded that their voices be heard.

By reexamining the converging class- and race-based movements of 1960s New Haven, Mandi Jackson helps to explain the city’s present-day economic and political struggles. More broadly, by closely analyzing particular sites of resistance in New Haven, Model City Blues employs multiple academic disciplines to redefine and reimagine the roles of everyday city spaces in building social movements and creating urban landscapes

About the Author(s)

Mandi Isaacs Jackson is a writer and researcher who teaches urban history and social movements. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

Subject Categories

Urban Studies
History