Building Downtown Los Angeles: The Politics of Race and Place in Urban America

and unifying efforts of that organization to create a better society based on values espoused by their leader rather than on traditional interpretations of a “good life” characterized by wasteful use of natural resources, alienation from animal life, and traditional paths to material wellbeing. The last portion of the book, the “Coda,” suggests that urbanists don’t understand the basic concept of livability if we don’t understand how we continue to practice racial and class exclusion while offering profound disrespect for Black people, Black communities, and the organizations that they struggle to maintain amid repression, exclusion, incarceration, police harassment, and poverty.