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Connolly N. D. B. . A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2015. xiii + 389 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-11514-6, $45.00 (cloth); 978-0-226-37842-8, $27.00 (paper); 978-0-226-13525-0, $7 to $45 (e-book).
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Joining a robust collection of works examining race, class, and housing, A World More Concrete exposes how strategies of land development reflected and constructed power, race, and class in Miami, Florida, and how real estate and its control informed modern notions of liberalism. Along the way, Nathan Connolly reveals the heretofore overlooked role of rental housing development and landlord power in the making of the twentieth-century city. Organized into three sections, and drawing on government program and gubernatorial records, interviews, and newspaper and radio stories, A World More Concrete sorts through the foundation building (roughly the late 1800s to the Great Depression), construction (1930s and 1940s), and renovation (post-World War II) of the relationship between real estate, power, and citizenship.
Miami's early twentieth-century development was, Connolly explains, informed by racial practices and protocols common to U.S. cities. As job opportunities lured Bahamians and others to Miami, whites felt the need to tighten the boundaries of Colored Town, the locus of black housing originally launched by railroad magnate Henry Flagler. Expressing a pragmatism that would endure the next few decades, the land-owning blacks of the Colored Board of Trade agreed to firmer racial segregation if it dampened the worst elements of white terrorism and protected black property and capital. Status distinctions within black Miami continued to emerge, in part through national origin. Blacks of British and British colonial descent networked through South Florida's Overseas Club, for example. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, in contrast, allowed Miamians of color...