From LA to Glasgow A book launch for City of Segregation

Los Angeles may seem a long way from Glasgow, but with a century of vibrant civil rights struggle against exclusionary housing policies and recent attempts to displace communities for boutique hotels and lofts, its current patterns of development may seem all too familiar. We would like to invite you to a launch of City of Segregation: 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles, where author Andrea Gibbons will explore some of the rich lessons from LA’s social movements and housing justice struggles against changing forms of exclusion, privatisation and gentrification. The talk will explore how race and class have historically come to underpin property values and definitions of community in the US, and how this continues to inform the intensifying efforts of business interests to push people from the city centre – yet LA’s residents refuse to move. This is a story of state-supported segregation, violent grassroots defense of white neighborhoods, police oppression, and growing political and economic inequalities. We must fight these racist ideologies for a different vision of housing, and justice at the soul of our cities.

The book is a product of both research and her seven year’s experience working as a tenant organizer in Central and South Central LA. Mike Davis has called City of Segregation ‘A Landmark Study’, and Junot Diaz calls it ‘Astute, passionate, radical, and utterly invaluable’. We hope you will join us for a discussion bringing it all back to Glasgow.