The Siege of Harlem and Its Commune

Warren Miller’s Siege of Harlem is a strange and vexing novel that draws on the “internal colony” thesis of black power thinkers and imagines Harlem’s secession from the United States. It is also a novel that marks the end of the era of urban renewal and the passing from the era of Robert Moses to that of Jane Jacobs. This concluding chapter suggests that Siege can help us refuse the forced choices between Moses and Jacobs, or the planners and the walkers, that dominate conversations about post-war planning. Siege does so, the conclusion argues, by offering a different trajectory of urban thinking and politics, one that stretches from the multicultural and often Communist-led left in the 1930s and 1940s, to the working class, Puerto Rican, and black urban revolts of the 1960s, which put forward a militantly socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist urban vision. It is this form of urbanism, the conclusion suggests, that we need to return to today.