Title: Rahim Kurwa: Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing | City & Regional Planning Lecture
The book focuses on Antelope Valley, a destination for those priced, policed, and evicted out of Los Angeles. It follows the valley’s segregated development after World War II, and the resulting emergence of Sun Village, an all-Black town whose civil rights organizing challenged the valley’s segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. It traces how the valley sought to defend itself as a white space, finally landing on policing as a mechanism of resisting racial integration after a new wave of Black families were pushed out of Los Angeles and into the valley at the end of the 20th century.
About the Speaker
Rahim Kurwa is associate professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His scholarship focuses on questions of housing justice. His book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing offers a case study of the national crisis of the policing of housing, told through a history of Black organizing and resistance in one of Los Angeles’s most overlooked areas, the Antelope Valley. Kurwa’s current research focuses on evictions by the Chicago Housing Authority.