We'll gather at Berg'n beerhall with urban geographer Lauren Hudson for the story of how U.S cities became what they are today. We'll discuss rural outmigration, changes in our food, homeownership, and gentrification over drinks and dinner.

Urban Development: From Reconstruction to Gentrification

Lauren Hudson at Berg'n

Wed, Mar 27 at 7:30 p.m.   |   90 minutes

Cities are inherently contradictory. For example, only about 3% of the land area in the U.S. can be qualified as ‘urban’, yet those areas host about 80% of our total population. Urban space is both a minority in its use and a majority in terms of how many people live within it. Another contradiction is how dependent urban space is on the rural; the cities that we see today are legacies of rural transformation.


This Olio will cover the historical flashpoints of urban ‘development’ in the U.S. from the rural outmigration from the South after the end of Reconstruction, to the urban displacement wrought by gentrification. Between these two periods, we see changes in our food production, homeownership, and the state’s role in economic development--all of which created outcomes that we are still struggling to deal with today. Let's talk about it.

Teacher: Lauren Hudson

Lauren Hudson is a peer educator with the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York, an organization that she and other collective members of SolidarityNYC, a solidarity economy advocacy collective, co-founded. In addition to her organizing work, she is a recent PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center and an adjunct in Africana Studies at CUNY’s John Jay College.

Venue: Berg'n
Add to Calendar March 27, 20197:30 p.m. March 27, 2019 America/New_York Think Olio | Urban Development: From Reconstruction to Gentrification We'll gather at Berg'n beerhall with urban geographer Lauren Hudson for the story of how U.S cities became what they are today. We'll discuss rural outmigration, changes in our food, homeownership, and gentrification over drinks and dinner. None

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Olio: A miscellaneous collection of art and literature.