This includes the way “whiteness” functions in US history as a property relationship. See Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review, June 10, 1993, 1707-1791; for theoretical examinations of property, see N. Blomley, Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property (London: Routledge, 2003) and Daniel Loick, The Abuses of Property (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).
On the concept of “access” in design practices, see Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The politics of property in discussions of disability and space is limited, but adjacent critical analyses include Rob Imrie, Disability and the City (London: Sage, 1996); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and David T Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
See John Locke, “V. Of Property,” in Second Treatise on Civil Government, in Readings in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Robert M. Stewart (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), 10-17; and Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
See Stacy Clifford Simplican, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Richard Neugebauer, "Exploitation of the insane in the New World: Benoni Buck, the first reported case of mental retardation in the American colonies," Archives of General Psychiatry 44, no. 5 (1987): 481-483; and Kim Nielsen, “Property, Disability, and the Making of the Incompetent Citizen in the United States, 1860s-1940s,” in Disability Histories, eds. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 308-20.
See Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021); and Anne Brice, “How the US created an insane asylum to imprison Native Americans,” UC Berkeley News, November 19, 2020.
According to the last census, the national average of self-described disabled people was 13% of the US population; rates of disability among Native Americans are approximately 20%, and in St. John the Baptist Parish (in the area called “Cancer Alley”) the average is 16.5%.
For frameworks that examine the legacies of former plantation spaces, see Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1-15; Mabel Wilson, “Carceral Architectures,” Superhumanity (e-flux Architecture, 2016); and Alexandra Eaton et al., “Searching for the Lost Graves of Louisiana’s Enslaved People,” New York Times, June 7, 2021.
On the architectural history of racialization and the single-family house, see Diane Harris, Little White Houses: How the Post-War Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); see also, Jonathan Massey, “Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 21-46. On racial histories of multi-story buildings, see Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017); James E. West, A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022); and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Post-war New York (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010).
See Ray Lifchez and Barbara Winslow, Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People (Winslow Design Library, 1979); Michael Daniels, Ramps are Beautiful (Berkeley: Center for Independent Living, 1982); and Ignacio G. Galán, "Unlearning Ableism: Design Knowledge, Contested Models, and the Experience of Disability in 1970s Berkeley," Journal of Design History 36, no. 1 (2023): 73-92. On the experiments at Urbana-Champaign, see Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York: NYU Press, 2019); and Hamraie, Building Access. On the University of Connecticut experiments, see Barbara Penner, "The Flexible Heart of the Home," Places Journal, 2018.
Information on Ohlone Park and Greg Brown Park comes from the Berkeley Historical Society. On the coastal commission, see Todd Holmes, “Tides of Tension: A Historical Look At Staff-Commissioner Relations In the California Coastal Commission,” Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University, ➝; and Thomas J. Osborne, “Saving the Golden Shore: Peter Douglas and the California Coastal Commission, 1972–2011,” Southern California Quarterly 96, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 433-464. Bess Williamson also notes the proximity of the People’s Park activism and disabled activism in Berkeley, in Williamson, Accessible America.
This is a feature of the scholarship of Aimi Hamraie and Bess Williamson, see Hamraie, Building Access; and Williamson, Accessible America.
See the 1992 US Government report, “Wilderness accessibility for people with disabilities…,” National Council on Disability, December 1, 1992, ➝.
For more on this tension, see the chapter “Of a Weaker Nature: Wilderness, Urban Landscapes, and Biocapacity” in David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities and Landscapes Beyond Access (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 25-44.
For more on tensions between access, disability rights, and indigenous rights, see Jess L. Cowing, "Occupied land is an access issue: Interventions in feminist disability studies and narratives of Indigenous activism," Journal of Feminist Scholarship 17, no. 17 (2020): 9-25.
The idea of “disabled communalism” was developed in the context of Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton’s exhibition “Reset: Towards a New Commons,” at the Center for Architecture in New York City. See Irene Cheng, David Gissen, Brett Snyder, et al., Block Party: From Independent Living to Disabled Communalism, ➝. Mia Mingus developed the concept of “access intimacy” in the statement “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice,” ➝.
Berkeley was the first city in the United States to implement single-family zoning. See Marc Weiss, “Urban Land Developers and the Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of Berkeley,” Berkeley Planning Journal 3, no. 1 (1986): 7-25.
Examples of these latter practices include the creation of Ohlone Park in North Berkeley in the 1970s, the 2021 vote at the Berkeley City Council to end single family zoning, and the work of organizations like the East Bay Permanent Housing Cooperative (East Bay “PREC”).
On Ridgewood, see Allie Griffin, “Ridgewood Civic Group Protests 17-Story Luxury Tower Outside Developer’s Home Early Sunday,” Ridgewood Post, September 16, 2020; and Angelica Acevedo, “Ridgewood Tenants Union rallies against planned luxury apartment tower,” QNS.com, October 15, 2019.
In the nineteenth century, representations of “squatters” emphasized their frailty (see George Caleb Bingham’s The Squatters, 1850). In the postwar era the squatter took on far more athletic qualities in literature, film, and photographic representations. This was inspired by Situationist writing that also emphasized the transgressive act of trespass. In terms of “curb smashing,” there is one known event, in Denver in 1978, and several urban legends of this happening in Ann Arbor and Berkeley in the late 1970s.