Spatial Deconcentration

Gentrification as Social Control in the USA

In the late 1970s US housing activists uncovered evidence of a government-sponsored program, labelled ‘spatial deconcentration’, in which urban decay and subsequent ‘regeneration’ had been deliberately used in the USA to disperse poor, mainly black communities, both to disrupt communal solidarity and subvert organised movements for social change, and to maximise private profit.