About

Samuel Zipp is a writer and historian who is a Professor of American Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University, residing in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author and co-editor of three books on American culture and history, with notable works including 'The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World' and 'Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York.' His research focuses on American history, urban history, and cultural studies, exploring themes such as urban renewal, modernism, public and private power, and the social and political impacts of urban development. Zipp has contributed articles and reviews to prominent publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, n+1, The Baffler, Metropolis, Cabinet, and In These Times, demonstrating his engagement with contemporary cultural and historical discourse.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Art
• Economics
• Economic geography
• Political economy
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Race, Homeownership, and Urban Interdependence

  American Literary History · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This review essay considers two recent treatments of race and urban space in literature. Adrienne Brown’s “perceptual history” of race and homeownership shows how race itself was shaped by the evolution of homeownership. Nikil Saval considers poet June Jordan’s collaboration with architect Buckminster Fuller on “Skyrise for Harlem,” a megaproject designed to rescue the New York neighborhood from the midcentury urban crisis. Each book offers a compelling account of the way literature dramatizes racial exclusions and foregrounds African American urbanisms in fiction and design, but they tend to isolate race as a variable in urban history, leaving its connections to other, multiple strands of urban development less clear.

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• The Social Organization of Property: The Homeownership System, Managed Hierarchy, and the Challenge of Social Selfhood in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

  Modern Intellectual History · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article investigates the intellectual and cultural history of homeownership in the United States. Focused on the work of the economist Richard T. Ely, it argues that this history should move beyond Ely’s intellectual influence on the real-estate industry in the 1910s and 1920s to incorporate his critique of laissez-faire economics, his ideas about “social property,” and his visions of managed hierarchy, all of which originated in the late nineteenth century. The essay tracks Ely’s connections to Progressives like John Dewey—with their visions of a coming social self to displace possessive individualism—and his influence on Herbert Hoover’s 1931 National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership—which prefigured the New Deal’s housing policy. Following Ely’s work reveals how homeownership institutionalized what Dewey called “social values,” but did so by naturalizing a persistent rhetoric of autonomy and individualism that relied on divisions of race, class, and gender for its power.

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• Response to Bas van Heur, ‘What, where and who is urban studies? On research centres in an unequal world’

  Dialogues in Urban Research · 2023-10-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Recognizing the unequal distribution of urban studies research should also spur us to think in more depth about the way we understand and communicate about our shared subjects: cities and urbanization.

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• Between Continuity and Contingency

  Reviews in American History · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Between Continuity and Contingency Samuel Zipp (bio) Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams, eds., Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. viii + 396 pp. Contributors and index. $38.00. Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern. New York: Verso, 2021. 378 pp. Notes and index. $19.99. What are historians for? This is the question I sensed lurking just beneath the surface of Shaped by the State. What might first appear as a rather by-the-numbers undertaking, a standard attempt to tote up the accomplishments and agendas of political history, hints here and there at something else altogether. The editors—and now and then the contributors—appear concerned that historians of twentieth-century U.S. politics are missing something much more profound about the country and its history, some set of underlying or persistent dynamics that have so far eluded work that has been mostly about tracking the rise and fall of governing regimes. This worry leads them toward a series of questions about historical thinking, questions that sometimes hover just in view, and other times move imperceptibly in the murky depths. Ultimately, Shaped by the State allows us to see how some older, somewhat neglected questions about the balance between contingency and continuity in historical writing are with us again, opening up a Pandora's box of dilemmas last sighted a generation or so ago, when the paradigms that political history displaced—the cultural turn and the postmodern—still stalked the land. In introducing the volume, Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason Williams suggest that the overall success of political history over the last two decades or so has left the field in disarray. Having made itself into the dominant tendency in the profession, political history finds itself somehow without fitting tools to account for its subject. The problem, they argue, is a fundamental failure to develop the proper understanding of "politics and historical time" (p. 4). Historians of U.S. politics, by this account, return again and again to a predictable set of stories and periodizing conventions, all of which are shaped by the concept of "crisis." They focus on "why seemingly stable political orders crack up, and how American politics gets reconstructed in the aftermath of those [End Page 391] crack-ups" (p. 4). Stuck rerunning "established paradigms," particularly the "rise and fall of the New Deal order" and the consolidation of modern conservatism out of the conflicts of the 1960s and 70s, they have obscured more profound "continuities" and "deeper forms of consensus" (p. 6). "Continuity" emerges as the keyword for this volume. This is despite the title, which might make one think of attempts to "bring the state back in" or to register fuller accounts of the relations between social movements and the state—both markers of political history's rise to dominance in U.S. history departments in the years since the turn of the millennium. The title is ostensibly meant to convey affinity with work by historians of political development who have argued for the longstanding (and thus "continuous") importance of state power in a supposedly decentralized nation. But the editors—and some of the contributors—seem most concerned to show that there are overarching structural phenomena that shape the state, as it were. The real energy in the introduction goes toward arguing that forces like global capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and sexuality, American exceptionalism, U.S. military and imperial power, legal or property regimes, metropolitan, urban, and rural spatial divisions, the carceral state, migration, consumption, and any number of other "social, cultural, spatial, and economic factors" map uneasily on conventional stories of political crisis. The editors admire what they call "unofficial political historians" (p. 7). Books by Margot Canaday, N.D.B. Connolly, and Mae Ngai show us "how the American state and its regnant ideologies and parties have been structured by normative values and assumptions," and "have in turn embedded… those same deeply rooted values through governance" (p. 7).1 With their investigations of sexuality and the state, race and property markets, and immigration and citizenship, these works avoid the usual "red...

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• 11. Structures of the Impasse

  transcript Verlag eBooks · 2022-03-29

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 11. Structures of the Impasse

  American culture studies · 2022-03-07

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning

  Journal of American History · 2022-01-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the 1870s a new kind of built environment emerged in American cities: “bottoms,” “hollows,” and “flats.” The product of industrial development, railroad construction, and vernacular working-class home building, “urban lowlands” sprang up on the floodplains of urban rivers, creeks, and tidal flats. Heterogeneous groups of working-class and poor people made homes there because the land was cheap and relatively unregulated—conditions that attracted land speculators, too—and these residents could maintain quasi-rural ways of life in the city on spare patches of land in ravines or at the foot of bluffs. Railroads and industry targeted the lowlands because in undervalued areas they encountered less resistance to their high-impact uses. But lack of value became stigma in short order. “A new urban landscape for an increasingly stratified society,” the new lowlands became “potent symbols of hierarchy and power in the urban landscape,” writes Steven T. Moga, “through both vernacular speech and professional discourses on poverty and environment” (pp. 29, 12). Codifying a “new sociospatial understanding” of the city “as an uneven physical landscape with ‘slums’ in low places,” journalists, reformers, and city residents labeled these areas “with ethnic and racial descriptors, animal names, or adjectives associated with poor air quality or other environmental conditions” (pp. 27–28). More than a half century of intervention ensued, as public health officers, city officials, planners, and housing reformers sought to either contain or evict the people of the lowlands. By the New Deal these places had been transformed: zoned for industry only or made into parks or sites for public housing.

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• The Forces of Decline and Regeneration: A Discussion of Jane Jacobs and Gentrification

  2021-02-19

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification. Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs’ contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs’ “reticence” on the problem of racism in urban history. Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs’ signature ideas – the “sidewalk ballet,” organized complexity, the “self-destruction of diversity,” and others – appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.

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• 2. The Forces of Decline and Regeneration : A Discussion of Jane Jacobs and Gentrification

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2021-03-23 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter takes the form of a discussion about the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the legacy of her work in the era of gentrification.Zipp introduces, Storring surveys Jacobs' contributions to our thinking about gentrification, and Hock analyzes Jacobs' "reticence" on the problem of racism in urban history.Then all three discuss the ways that Jacobs' signature ideas -the "sidewalk ballet," organized complexity, the "selfdestruction of diversity," and others -appear now, in a time when cities are beset by problems she predicted but only glancingly addressed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Aesthetics of Gentrification

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2021 · 5 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Economic geography

  Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city.\nIn this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gerard Sandoval

  Fordham University

  56 shared

• Christoph Lindner

  Universität Hamburg

  56 shared

• Jennifer Hock

  Technical University of Munich

  52 shared

• Brandi Thompson Summers

  Columbia University

  49 shared

• Nate Storring

  Los Angeles City College

  49 shared

• Beatriz Kalichman

  Universidade de São Paulo

  49 shared

• Maria Beatriz Cruz Rufino

  Hospital Universitário da Universidade de São Paulo

  49 shared

• Jenny Lin

  University of Southern California

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D., American Studies

  Brown University

  2000

• M.A., American Studies

  Brown University

  1996

• B.A., American Studies

  Brown University

  1993