The “New Town in Town": The Reproductive and Carceral Politics of Urban Renewal

Repeated redevelopment ravaged the central Minneapolis neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside across the twentieth century, each project displacing residents and further isolating the neighborhood. Developers and city planners who sought to reimagine Cedar-Riverside focused on connecting the suburbs to the central city with new freeways, expanding higher education institutions, or creating a white, “suburban utopia” within the city. Existing residents of Cedar-Riverside, persistently maligned throughout the Twentieth Century by these same institutional actors, were absent from these plans. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Cedar-Riverside insisted on their equal rights to the neighborhood, responding to developers’ impositions with resistance, tension, and survival practices.

Historical scholarship on urban redevelopment has focused on marginalized communities' disproportionate exploitation and dispossession. However, urban redevelopment was also generative – not just of physical structures but of new infrastructure, policies, and ideologies that reinscribed neighborhoods with gendered and racialized understandings of who belonged and who did not. 20th-century urban developers constructed and negotiated freeways, housing, and public spaces with the needs and desires of white, heterosexual, middle-class nuclear families in mind while ostracizing those who lived outside those bounds. Meanwhile, normative, racialized ideas of safety and crime were embedded into the bureaucratic and physical infrastructure, creating hostile environments for the people implicitly othered by these spaces.

This paper argues that the reproductive and carceral politics of urban renewal produced normative understandings of racialized gender and inscribed them into the daily landscape of people's lives, producing safety for some while marginalizing others. It employs a queer feminist methodology to interrogate the sociocultural contingencies of power and control which embedded normative understandings of gender, kinship, and care into urban redevelopment projects. These assumptions manifested in physical, legal, and bureaucratic landscapes that reinforced belonging for those who fit into those normative categories while generating carceral logics and spaces for those who did not.