Between 'blight' and a new world: Urban renewal, political mobilization, and the production of spatial scale in San Francisco, 1940--1980

This dissertation examines the intersection of racial formation and spatial production in the Western Addition's post-Second World War urban renewal. Specifically, the dissertation investigates why redevelopment had a different social and spatial impact on this San Francisco district's neighboring African American and Japanese American communities. Although these two racially marginalized groups shared similar historical circumstances of segregation and redevelopment supporters perceived both neighborhoods to be blighted, the policy affected these two racially marginalized communities differently. To understand this impact, this dissertation argues that redevelopment was a spatialized racial project, which differentially racialized these two communities and positioned them in terms of space and race. In order to understand how redevelopment proponents positioned these two communities, this dissertation examines several areas. First, this study analyzes the spatial politics behind the pro-growth coalition and argues that these were scalar interests that reshaped the neighborhood's landscape but were driven by regional, national, and transnational concerns. Next, the dissertation investigates the discourse of blight, the Orientalization of the Japan Center, and the spatialized racial triangulation of the Japanese American and African American communities as interrelated means of racialization in the redevelopment process. Blight discourse pathologized the neighborhood and conflated these conditions with the behavior of its inhabitants. Juxtaposed with blight discourse was the construction of the Japan Center as an Orientalized space for experiencing things Japanese. The valorization of Japanese/Japanese American space and culture must be contrasted with the lack of a similar development in the African American part of the district. This absence and the Redevelopment Agency's differential treatment of Japanese American and African American organizations were both instances where redevelopment proponents triangulated Japanese American spaces with respect to African American spaces. Finally, this dissertation examines how four community groups, two Japanese American and two African American, mobilized in response to redevelopment as a spatialized racial project. These groups reacted to the crisis of displacement and won small and/or temporary victories against redevelopment. However, they were unable to halt the process. Their actions, however, ranged from collaboration to direct action and protest and included spatial attempts to affect change at larger spatial scales.