Scott Larson | Queens College of the City University of New York (original) (raw)

Broadly conceived, my work focuses on issues of urban space and social justice. I have studied and written about urbanism, the historical evolution of the built environment, as well as issues of inequality, gentrification and marginalization.

My current research focuses on Community Land Trusts (CLTs) as a mechanism for extracting housing from the market, and for reorienting political and economic power at the community level. In particular, I am interested in unpacking CLTs not merely as the geographic container of resistance, but as the site and political/economic/social structure of community-led action.

A recent paper, "Imagining Social Justice and the False Promise of Urban Park Design," explores the geographic imaginaries of social justice in urban park design. In doing so, it juxtaposes the lofty rhetoric of designing for social justice against the material reality of development-driven, speculative urban regeneration in which parks and park design regularly, and in some cases purposefully, contribute to urban inequalities.

My book "Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind," published by Temple University Press (Urban Life, Landscape and Policy series), uses contemporary debates about the legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses as a lens for examining the redevelopment strategies of the administration of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I am also at work on a book about the historical geography of work in the United States. This work-in-progress explores how changes in the nature of work – who works, the types of work people do and the skills they need to do them – have contributed to changes in where work gets done. It’s a geography because it focuses on how changes in what constitutes meaningful, employable activity in the U.S. have influenced where people live as well as how communities think of and constitute themselves. It’s historical because it traces those changes over the course of the founding and growth of the country.

In the past, much of my work dealt with questions of marginality and space in relation to Latin America, and in the course of obtaining my Master’s and Ph.D degrees I conducted extensive field research in Havana, Cuba, and in the Darién region of Panama.

I wrote my Masters’ thesis (geography, Hunter College, ’05) on the production of male homosexual space in Havana, Cuba, a version of which appears as a chapter in the book, The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights (University of Pittsburgh Press, May 2010).

Prior to turning my attention to redevelopment in New York City, I spent two years studying how, through the establishment of cultural and environmental set-asides and specific land titling and cadastral mapping components of broader development projects, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Panamanian state have introduced market-based conceptions of land ownership and private property that are restructuring traditional economies and modes of production among the Emberá, an indigenous people who live in the Darién Province and along the Chagres River in Panama.

I currently serve as lecturer in the Urban Studies Department of Queens College, where I am co-director of the Office of Community Studies and coordinator of the Service Learning program.

I also teach with the Bard Prison Initiative.
Supervisors: Neil Smith

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