Sugrue and Buffalo

One thing I noticed while reading the blog posts is that not many references to Buffalo were made. To be honest, I was surprised by this. Although my post may stray away from the text in some respects by focusing more on Buffalo, while reading Sugrue, I could not help but think about the multitude of ways that this text was essentially telling the history of Buffalo, just as it was Detroit. Not only is this sort of urban comparison part of Sugrue's larger historical project (as other posts have pointed out by speaking to the value of his methodology of a case study) , but there seems to be many similarities that are both historical and contemporary between Buffalo and Detroit.

Not only do both Buffalo and Detroit have a decaying (if not totally dead) industrial history, both cities rank among the poorest and most segregated cities in the United States.

Poorest - http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2009/09/28/daily18.html

Most Segregated - http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2002/12/16/story3.html

This makes the postwar urban, political, social, and racial histories being told by Sugrue even more applicable to us as scholars because it relates to the environment with which we inhabit.

Hopefully these comparisons can come up in class discussion, because it is an aspect of the text that warrants more exploration.


In addition, I thought that Chapters 7 and 8 was perhaps the most engaging of the work, and what was especially rewarding for me was Sugrue's exploration of the cultural and economic geography and spatial metaphors of urban segregation. Again these ideas related back to Buffalo as in our own Rust Belt City we see space, segregation, urban planning and race weaving together to create a spatial pattern of class and race based segregation.

Despite the many valuable contributions that this text was making, I did however think physical design and urban planning could have had a stronger place in his case study. The physical makeup of space, often influenced by a process of state sponsored design also factors directly into urban segregation.

Relating back to the comparison's with Buffalo, one example of the physical aspects (which is not as much of a focus in Sugrue's text as cultural, political and social factors) of segregation in Buffalo is the creation of Route 33 also known as the Kensington Expressway. Built in stages form the 1920s until the most recent renovations in the 1970s this route was originally built to connect the urban center of Buffalo with the suburbs, Buffalo’s airport and ultimately Rochester, NY. Yet due to the implementation of a subsurface design, in which the expressway is dug into the earth surface and traffic flows at a lowered level, the route became a geographic obstacle of human urban interactions. The subsurface design can be seen in the following images. This design drove segregation and urban decay to the east of Buffalo and allowed the areas to the west and north of the Expressway to be blocked from the city’s growing low income neighborhoods. Whether or not this was an intended effect could be debated, but the results were fairly clear after the expressways completion. This expressway essentially became a physical barrier in Buffalo with which to divide based on race and physically enforce white fear of neighborhood encroachment.