Welcome

Welcome to the course web site for the Spring 2017 NYU Gallatin course, “(Dis)Placed Urban Histories.”  You will find several different categories of content here.  These include: our syllabus, assignments and due dates, readings materials that are already in the public domain, and our growing archive of collaboratively-produced primary documents.

This semester we are focusing on the individual histories of long-time residents of the Melrose neighborhood of the South Bronx. Some of our class discussions and the histories we collect will be done in partnership with neighborhood residents thanks to the participation of WHEDco (Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation) and its supporters.

Melrose is a neighborhood that has been home to a low-income, majority Black and Latino population for decades.  In recent years, new developments and new planning agendas, as well as increasing gentrification pressures from Melrose’s neighbor to the south, Mott Haven, have begun to transform the area in large and small ways.  This web site should be approached as a kind of unfolding as we learn about Melrose together.  We hope to make sense of the ways that physical changes in the built environment — both imposed by planners and introduced by residents — shape life for the neighborhood’s residents and reveal the workings of the city as a whole.