Rodney Kirk
Biographic Data
| ID | 164643 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rodney Kirk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rodney |
| FAMILY NAME | Kirk |
| SIGNATURE | KIRK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4918-2082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Acceptable harm
Public housing redevelopment in the United States is increasingly delivered through complex public–private partnerships (PPPs) that disperse responsibility for planning, environmental review, remediation, and construction across public agencies, private developers, consultants, and financiers. This article examines how contemporary PPP governance reconfigures environmental decision-making by orienting it toward maintaining redevelopment feasibili…
On the dichotomy between housing justice and environmental justice
This article challenges the dominant framing of U.S. urban policy that forces a choice between housing production and environmental safety. I argue that this dichotomy is not pragmatic but ideological—an artifact of neoliberal racial capitalism and the financialization of housing that legitimizes continued harm inflicted on marginalized communities. Drawing on fieldwork at the Jordan Downs public housing projects in Los Angeles, along with compar…
DeafSpace and the city
This article presents the first sustained engagement with DeafSpace within urban planning theory. While DeafSpace—a design framework formally developed at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., in 2005—has influenced architectural design by centering Deaf cultural practices and visual-tactile communication, its broader urban implications remain unexplored in the literature. We reposition DeafSpace as a radical planning imaginary challenging ph…
Financialization and the reorganization of U.S. public housing
This article explores the financialization of U.S. public housing, arguing that programs like Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) and the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) have restructured housing policy to prioritize speculative capital over social need. Promoted as reforms to concentrated poverty, these initiatives dismantled traditional public housing in favor of mixed-income developments governed by public–private partn…
Urbicidal Economics and the Racial Geographies of Triage
The contemporary urban system in the United States is characterized by the historic dominance of a few metropolitan regions often termed ‘superstar cities’, while the national political environment is increasingly polarized along urban–rural lines. Furthermore, both inter‐urban and intra‐urban difference in the US are deeply racialized, a fact that suffuses both critical and reactionary discourses which seek to explain and address differences in …
Contesting elite capture
Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to contest the elite capture of our cities. We take this opportunity to critique and thicken the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning and explore the limitations of its resistance against elite capture. The view that we challenge suggests that insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge and technic…
Legitimising displacement
This article explores the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus and how it is advanced by an intellectual pipeline between academics and policymakers in the USA. Despite much research revealing the pathologising narratives latent within displacement-inducing urban policies, little work has explicitly sought to underscore the influence of academic discourses in promoting these policies. Centring a triad of discourses surrounding concentr…
Neoliberal necropolitics and the global competition for urban dominance
I deploy Achille Mbembé’s notion of necropolitics to show that neoliberalism as an urban development strategy has resonant, however differential, impacts between the Global North and South. As neoliberalizing cities throughout the world engage in interurban competition in their efforts to achieve or maintain “global city” and “world-class” city status, this is intertwined with necropolitics in that local governments must decide whose lives are ex…
Changing urban fabrics
In response to DeVerteuil's recent article in this forum, “Urban Inequality Revisited: From the Corrugated City to the Lopsided City,” I offer a generally positive appraisal—considering his call to re-focus class in urban studies and providing further context to his arguments about uneven spatial development and inter-city relationality. I also offer something of a critique, or what might be read as a clarification, which serves to further compli…
What Los Angeles tells us about Dracula Urbanism
In their piece “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) inaugurate Dracula urbanism as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those engaging in smart city initiatives. From the perspective of LA, a radically different context from Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) choices of Flint and Jakarta, I argue that the logic of Dracula u…
Lifestyle centers, the next boom and bust after shopping malls? Governance, public-private partnerships, and Guy Debord's spectacle in Dallas-Fort Worth
The boom and bust cycle of shopping malls has had profound repercussions for U.S. cities. Now, lifestyle centers are ascending, and this latest form of retail development is more costly than the development of classic suburban-style shopping malls. Concerns regarding the sustainability of lifestyle centers are highlighted in this article, which is a critical political economic assessment of how the emergence of lifestyle centers and the boom and …
Neoliberal multiculturalism in Dallas
This article investigates the relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism and gentrification using a case study of the forthcoming Dallas International District. Informed by a conceptual framework considering neoliberal urbanism, the (aspiring) global city, and racial–ethnic identity, this article attempts to reveal the dominant discourses that lay the foundation for gentrification in the Dallas International District, an urban renewal proje…
Are Physical Anthropology Textbooks Color-Blind
Neoliberal necropolitics and the global competition for urban dominance
I deploy Achille Mbembé’s notion of necropolitics to show that neoliberalism as an urban development strategy has resonant, however differential, impacts between the Global North and South. As neoliberalizing cities throughout the world engage in interurban competition in their efforts to achieve or maintain “global city” and “world-class” city status, this is intertwined with necropolitics in that local governments must decide whose lives are ex…
Legitimising displacement
This article explores the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus and how it is advanced by an intellectual pipeline between academics and policymakers in the USA. Despite much research revealing the pathologising narratives latent within displacement-inducing urban policies, little work has explicitly sought to underscore the influence of academic discourses in promoting these policies. Centring a triad of discourses surrounding concentr…
What Los Angeles tells us about Dracula Urbanism
In their piece “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) inaugurate Dracula urbanism as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those engaging in smart city initiatives. From the perspective of LA, a radically different context from Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) choices of Flint and Jakarta, I argue that the logic of Dracula u…
Lifestyle centers, the next boom and bust after shopping malls? Governance, public-private partnerships, and Guy Debord's spectacle in Dallas-Fort Worth
The boom and bust cycle of shopping malls has had profound repercussions for U.S. cities. Now, lifestyle centers are ascending, and this latest form of retail development is more costly than the development of classic suburban-style shopping malls. Concerns regarding the sustainability of lifestyle centers are highlighted in this article, which is a critical political economic assessment of how the emergence of lifestyle centers and the boom and …
Neoliberal multiculturalism in Dallas
This article investigates the relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism and gentrification using a case study of the forthcoming Dallas International District. Informed by a conceptual framework considering neoliberal urbanism, the (aspiring) global city, and racial–ethnic identity, this article attempts to reveal the dominant discourses that lay the foundation for gentrification in the Dallas International District, an urban renewal proje…
Urbicidal Economics and the Racial Geographies of Triage
The contemporary urban system in the United States is characterized by the historic dominance of a few metropolitan regions often termed ‘superstar cities’, while the national political environment is increasingly polarized along urban–rural lines. Furthermore, both inter‐urban and intra‐urban difference in the US are deeply racialized, a fact that suffuses both critical and reactionary discourses which seek to explain and address differences in …
Contesting elite capture
Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to contest the elite capture of our cities. We take this opportunity to critique and thicken the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning and explore the limitations of its resistance against elite capture. The view that we challenge suggests that insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge and technic…
Are Physical Anthropology Textbooks Color-Blind
Changing urban fabrics
In response to DeVerteuil's recent article in this forum, “Urban Inequality Revisited: From the Corrugated City to the Lopsided City,” I offer a generally positive appraisal—considering his call to re-focus class in urban studies and providing further context to his arguments about uneven spatial development and inter-city relationality. I also offer something of a critique, or what might be read as a clarification, which serves to further compli…
What Los Angeles tells us about Dracula Urbanism
In their piece “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) inaugurate Dracula urbanism as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those engaging in smart city initiatives. From the perspective of LA, a radically different context from Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) choices of Flint and Jakarta, I argue that the logic of Dracula u…
Lifestyle centers, the next boom and bust after shopping malls? Governance, public-private partnerships, and Guy Debord's spectacle in Dallas-Fort Worth
The boom and bust cycle of shopping malls has had profound repercussions for U.S. cities. Now, lifestyle centers are ascending, and this latest form of retail development is more costly than the development of classic suburban-style shopping malls. Concerns regarding the sustainability of lifestyle centers are highlighted in this article, which is a critical political economic assessment of how the emergence of lifestyle centers and the boom and …
Neoliberal multiculturalism in Dallas
This article investigates the relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism and gentrification using a case study of the forthcoming Dallas International District. Informed by a conceptual framework considering neoliberal urbanism, the (aspiring) global city, and racial–ethnic identity, this article attempts to reveal the dominant discourses that lay the foundation for gentrification in the Dallas International District, an urban renewal proje…
Contesting elite capture
Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to contest the elite capture of our cities. We take this opportunity to critique and thicken the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning and explore the limitations of its resistance against elite capture. The view that we challenge suggests that insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge and technic…
Legitimising displacement
This article explores the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus and how it is advanced by an intellectual pipeline between academics and policymakers in the USA. Despite much research revealing the pathologising narratives latent within displacement-inducing urban policies, little work has explicitly sought to underscore the influence of academic discourses in promoting these policies. Centring a triad of discourses surrounding concentr…
Neoliberal necropolitics and the global competition for urban dominance
I deploy Achille Mbembé’s notion of necropolitics to show that neoliberalism as an urban development strategy has resonant, however differential, impacts between the Global North and South. As neoliberalizing cities throughout the world engage in interurban competition in their efforts to achieve or maintain “global city” and “world-class” city status, this is intertwined with necropolitics in that local governments must decide whose lives are ex…
Financialization and the reorganization of U.S. public housing
This article explores the financialization of U.S. public housing, arguing that programs like Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) and the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) have restructured housing policy to prioritize speculative capital over social need. Promoted as reforms to concentrated poverty, these initiatives dismantled traditional public housing in favor of mixed-income developments governed by public–private partn…
Urbicidal Economics and the Racial Geographies of Triage
The contemporary urban system in the United States is characterized by the historic dominance of a few metropolitan regions often termed ‘superstar cities’, while the national political environment is increasingly polarized along urban–rural lines. Furthermore, both inter‐urban and intra‐urban difference in the US are deeply racialized, a fact that suffuses both critical and reactionary discourses which seek to explain and address differences in …
Acceptable harm
Public housing redevelopment in the United States is increasingly delivered through complex public–private partnerships (PPPs) that disperse responsibility for planning, environmental review, remediation, and construction across public agencies, private developers, consultants, and financiers. This article examines how contemporary PPP governance reconfigures environmental decision-making by orienting it toward maintaining redevelopment feasibili…
On the dichotomy between housing justice and environmental justice
This article challenges the dominant framing of U.S. urban policy that forces a choice between housing production and environmental safety. I argue that this dichotomy is not pragmatic but ideological—an artifact of neoliberal racial capitalism and the financialization of housing that legitimizes continued harm inflicted on marginalized communities. Drawing on fieldwork at the Jordan Downs public housing projects in Los Angeles, along with compar…
DeafSpace and the city
This article presents the first sustained engagement with DeafSpace within urban planning theory. While DeafSpace—a design framework formally developed at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., in 2005—has influenced architectural design by centering Deaf cultural practices and visual-tactile communication, its broader urban implications remain unexplored in the literature. We reposition DeafSpace as a radical planning imaginary challenging ph…
Urban Planning and Governance (11 works) · Political science (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Economics (4 works) · Geography (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Political economy (4 works)