Yannick Coenders

This book project explains how US-based antiblack anxieties about “the ghetto” became central to urban race governance in western Europe from the 1950s onward. "Dispersal" traces the emergence of a new transnational discourse about race and space that coalesced around opposition to residential concentration of nonwhite populations. Focusing on urban histories in Birmingham, UK, and Rotterdam, NL, it shows how this discourse culminated in local experiments in the 1970s that mobilized public housing allocations to deconcentrate postcolonial migrants. While both cities had diverging rationales for dispersal, they converged in catering to nativist and racist panics of white constituencies, taking inspiration from the supposed failures of the US ghetto.