Clark Atlanta University Launches Race and Regional Equity Initiative
February 2, 2005
(Atlanta, Ga.) – A group of faculty at Clark Atlanta University
has established an initiative aimed at supporting cutting edge research and
policy work on race, smart growth, and equity issues in metropolitan regions
where blacks are concentrated. Over 88 percent of blacks live in metropolitan
areas and 53.1 percent live inside central cities. About 60 percent of blacks
live in the 10 metropolitan areas.
“People of color comprise a majority of the population
in nearly half of the nation’s 100 largest cities and will make up over
half of the U.S. population in 2050,” says sociologist Robert D. Bullard,
who also directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center. Under Bullard’s
leadership, this new initiative will target black scholars, educators, elected
officials, civil rights leaders, health professional, and journalists to build
a national agenda around issues of equitable development, fair growth, and
livable communities.
The project will also target Historically Black Colleges and
Universities for briefings, forums, lecture series, and research collaboratives.
“Many of our HBCUs are located in metropolitan regions where sprawl rules
the day. It makes economic and political sense that HBCUs have informed leadership
on regional growth issues that directly impact them and their constituents,”
Bullard said.
With a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, professor Bullard
and his colleagues will assemble a cadre of black leaders, advocates, and
technical experts who can provide a national voice on regional growth and
metropolitan equity. The center will convene a second roundtable of African
American scholars and authors from around the country to explore new themes
and frameworks for understanding contemporary black urban life in the American
metropolis. The first African American scholars and authors roundtable was
held at CAU in April 2004.
Race maps closely to economic geography. Race and place in urban
America are deeply connected. Place affects access to jobs, education and
public services, culture, shopping, level of personal security, and medical
services, according to Angel O. Torres, an urban planner and geographic information
specialist at the center. “We will map the impacts of regional investments
and smart growth policies to provide decision tools for evaluating whether
or not African Americans and other people of color are receiving their fair
share of the benefits and opportunities.”
This project extends the center’s National
Equity and Smart Growth Initiative that focuses on housing and residential
patterns, transportation equity environmental justice, urban and regional
planning, and community empowerment. One of the first products of the initiative
was a policy paper entitled "Race,
Equity and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Must Speak for Themselves”
(1999).
The center’s research indicates that sprawl has environmental
consequences, i.e., increases traffic, pollutes the air, destroys forests
and greens space, worsens flooding, and wastes energy. Sprawl also has social
and economic consequences, i.e., exacerbates school crowding, heightens urban-suburban
schools disparities, accelerates urban infrastructure decline, concentrates
poverty, creates spatial mismatch between urban workers and suburban job centers,
heightens racial and disparities, and negatively impacts public health.
“We want our center to serve as a national information
clearinghouse on race, smart growth, and regional equity,” says sociologist
Glenn S. Johnson, who co-edited, with Bullard and Torres, Sprawl
City: Race, Politics and Planning in Atlanta (2000), and Highway
Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (2004).
Bullard and his colleagues expect to complete two major book projects from
this grant. Among the areas of scholarship to be explored include black migration,
suburbanization trends, residential segregation, social isolation, wealth
creation, access to jobs and spatial mismatch, transportation apartheid, affordable
housing, home ownership, gentrification and displacement, concentration of
poverty, urban/suburban school disparities, built environment and health disparities,
and environmental justice.
For further information visit the center’s website at http://www.ejrc.cau.edu
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