ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the inextricable relationship between three infrastructural categories – slum clearance, freeway construction, and urban redevelopment – in the film Motherless Brooklyn (2019), which was written, directed by, and stars Edward Norton. I examine what Eric Avila has referred to as America’s “chocolate cities” in relation to its “vanilla suburbs,” to demonstrate how the re-imaginings of white masculinist masterplanners such as Norman Bel Geddes and Roberts Moses (through the film’s doppelganger Moses Randolph) were undergirded by racialized notions of bodies and real estate. The film indicts such masterplanning as a criminal enterprise bent on resegregating American cities through its corrupt and racist practices of investment and disinvestment, ensuring a renewed racial apartheid that resulted in entrenched Black and brown poverty and precarity while advantaging white middle-class urban dwellers. I argue that Motherless Brooklyn also gives voice to the long-repressed story of the antiracist resistance of the female members of civil rights organizations to urban redevelopment schemes, who resisted the latter’s modernist incursions by fighting for neighborhood preservation and fair housing legislation before the urban activism of Jane Jacobs. Through Norton’s use of a neo-noir style and his valorization of historic Harlem, the film further creates a sense of Black community that serves as both a bulwark and a plea for neighborhood preservation and community.
