Urban geography II

Abstract

In August 2014, a white police officer shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, USA, fueling the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. The following March, the US Department of Justice produced a report showing that the police department of Ferguson had been explicitly tasked by city officials with using nuisance laws and traffic violations to raise revenue for the municipal coffers. In this second of three progress reports I consider both the empirical evidence and analytical tools urban geographers and those in cognate disciplines have produced that can assist in our analysis of the Age of Ferguson. I conclude by considering what the Age of Ferguson demands from urban geographers, and how we might produce anti-racist scholarship from a ‘white discipline’.