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FOREWORD

I tell everyone that it is worth listening to anything Mindy Fullilove has to say. For decades, she has pursued her ideas and intuitions with a singular intellect. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts American and What We Can Do About It is an important and timely book that sprang from her work as a public health psychiatrist who thought deeply about her patients and followed their sources of suffering and resilience outward to locate them in communities, traditions, and history. This book marked Fullilove’s emergence as one of the most important urban thinkers of our time, work that continues in her 2013 book Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities. Cities count, not just because they are large, they count because cities are the way humans now live, everywhere. How to make them settings where people not only live but thrive is a challenge that stretches across disciplines and belongs to us all.

In 1995, I was working in Harlem where Fullilove had just begun the work and thinking that would inform this book, first published in 2004 and now opportunely reprinted in a second edition. At the time, she was unravelling what had happened and what was happening in the Bradhurst section of Harlem. This was a devastated pocket of Harlem, itself a community that had lost fully one-third of its housing stock to abandonment and destruction in less than 30 years. We didn’t know it yet, but Fullilove had begun her exploration of “root shock,” a term she coined to capture what happens to a community and its people when its geography—its neighborhood—is destroyed. The telling begins with the end of the World War II and ends with current day 21st century, largely focusing on a retelling of “urban renewal,” a federal project that targeted so-called “urban decay.” Fullilove estimates that, as a consequence of what was billed as “upgrading,” some 2500 city neighborhoods ceased to exist, mainly through large-scale clearances. Of these 2500 communities, fully two-thirds (about 1600 according to Fullilove) were home to African-Americans. “Urban renewal means Negro Removal” was a common catchphrase. The subsequent reconfiguration of cities was devastating to urban African-Americans. To this day, the loss of communities—told here from Roanoke, Pittsburgh, and Newark—still reverberates through families, neighborhoods, and entire cities, affecting all who live and lived there.

It was over 20 years ago that I listened at a Harlem community center as Fullilove wove together the strands from archival research, personal narratives she had collected, and experiences she had had through activities with the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement. The result was a story that included architecture, history, activism, health, and the enduring power of place in our lives. I personally will never forget the way Fullilove described the importance of the entryway to a renovated apartment building and how it can signify respect for community, or not. Most people who listened knew that she had identified something important, really important, though admittedly there were some people who thought she had gone off the deep end. Today, all who care about health, dignity and wellbeing—and that should be everyone—owe Fullilove a great debt for carrying on this work (with others, I am sure she would hasten to add) and writing this book. If you have already read it, read it again. You will be inspired. If you are reading it for the first time, you will be both angered and enlightened. Most of all, Fullilove’s Root Shock is a call to action to consider very carefully any effort that seeks to “protect and promote neighborhoods.” Fullilove is clear that the legacy of urban renewal was that it literally tore up communities, squelching and squandering extraordinarily hard-won sources of community, culture, wisdom, and kindness. We may not know how to measure that elusive sense of what we call wellbeing, but each of us can easily summon the experiences that contribute to it. The neighbor who greets you, the yard you admire, the shop owner who goes to the back to find you something, the postal worker who stops to talk, the sense of safety and security in the known, the familiar. Lose all this and what’s at stake is our health, our social fabric—our lives.

Root Shock emerged as a pioneering, synthesizing work that perches at the intersection of history, sociology, architecture, urban planning, and public health, all of which are embedded in where we conduct our everyday lives. Today, focusing on neighborhoods and place-based interventions is common in many fields. Across New York City government, city agencies seek to bring resources and programs to neighborhoods, treating them as settings that have the capacity to mold social outcomes independent of the particular individuals who live in them. In my field—public health—we talk a lot about how disease burden varies by community, with some neighborhoods—for example, Harlem or the South Bronx—experiencing enduring excess burdens of ill health and early death compared to wealthy enclaves such as the Upper East Side. These neighborhoods are the legacy of ghettoes segregated by both race and class, which in New York are virtually synonymous. What Fullilove conveys, often through the words of the residents whose narratives she has preserved and shared, is that all neighborhoods have assets, histories, and memory. Gone are the archetypal images of poor Black neighborhoods as sad, needy, and downtrodden—neighborhoods that need our benevolence, our help. Fullilove uncovers the complex histories of neighborhoods and debunks the enduring creation myth that troubled neighborhoods arise from troubled people. In some of the most moving passages of this book, residents of poor, largely working-class neighborhoods speak as powerful witnesses to and analysts of the destruction of the communities that nurtured them in a harsh world.

Deprivation is not a natural state, but one visited upon communities by bad policies, both past and present. When I first read this book, I was struck by its forthright exposition of the ongoing presence of structural and institutional racism. A decade ago, racism was a word that had practically vanished from both intellectual and everyday conversation. But racism is not gone, and, as groups like Black Lives Matter and other emerging movements articulate, racism will not disappear without attention to the structures that perpetuate it. Many such policies are embedded in our cities, in our housing policies and siting practices. And, while “slum clearance” I hope has ended, how to make cities places where people of all races and classes can survive and flourish is very much a challenge of today. Creating more affordable housing is critical, as the poor and middle class face escalating real estate prices, and gentrification continues to change and challenge neighborhoods. It is also critical to maintain the character of communities that makes cities—all cities, including my city—the vibrant places we love. Read this book as a cautionary tale and an extraordinary call to action.

—Mary T. Bassett, MD

New York City, July 2016