Urban Research Seminar

The NYU Urban Initiative presents Professor Mark Vestal as the next speaker in a line up of eminent international scholars for Urban Research Seminar.  This event series is open to the greater NYU community in an effort to integrate NYU's faculty and students with a keen interest in cities.

Mark Vestal is the Assistant Professor of Critical Black Urbanism in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. He is also Faculty Advisor for Million Dollar Hoods of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. Marques is an urban historian uncovering the violent social history of residential property in Black Los Angeles during the rebellious Twentieth Century. His work links everyday urban property conflict—the broken contracts, bent solicitations, indignant complaints, contentious lawsuits, and regular violence—to broader transformations of real estate, urban development, and Black land politics. He argues that this space of urban property conflict is the unwritten housing policy of racial capitalism in the United States.