Greening the Black Urban Regime

Greening the Black Urban Regime is easily the best ethnographic account available of twenty-first- century Detroit. It is a substantial contribution to urban political theory, African American studies, and sustainability studies, and it is also a good read.

~Josiah Rector

Instead, she situates a changing Detroit in the broader landscape of Black urban politics and contemporary environmental justice concerns—both of which are crucial considerations across disciplines. As she does this, she moves effortlessly between scales, from the boardroom to the corner grocery. This level of intimacy is rare in academic writing. It is possible in large part because she moved to Detroit out of a commitment to engaged and accountable scholarship. For three years she walked its streets, attended its events, and chatted with its residents. She captures these in such detail that by the book’s end, we feel we have too.

~Allison Puglisi

An impressive work of meticulous scholarship [. . .] will prove to be of immense interest and value for both academia and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in social and environmental justice concerns arising from Urban Renewal projects utilizing Detroit's experience as an example.

~Carl Logan

Montgomery’s work is a model for not only scholarly inquiry, but also for how to craft and do the work of listening to a city, to your respondents, to the ancestors.

~Rebecca J. Kinney

Greening the Black Urban Regime illuminates the 'politics of the return'—the structural and interpretive contexts in which sustainability planners, growth elites, and community/arts activists shape the gentrification in majority-black cities. The historical bridges and everyday dialogues that Montgomery establishes should stay with urban scholars for a long time.

~Leonard Nevarez, Author of Pursuing Quality of Life and New Money, Nice Town

With captivating prose and insightful analysis, Alesia Montgomery has crafted an extraordinary book about Detroit. Greening the Black Urban Regime vividly demonstrates why any effort to create 'greener' cities must also address the systemic racism that underlies the status quo of urban development in America today.

~Andrew Newman, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University and Co-Editor of a People's Atlas of Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2020)

In Greening the Black Urban Regime, Montgomery provides a vibrant and highly original account of the shifting intersections between race, class, and urban environmental politics in post-industrial Detroit. With her meticulous analysis and eloquent prose, Montgomery has marked out a distinctive intellectual terrain at the interface of critical black studies, oral history, and sustainability discourse.

~Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of Cambridge