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Classifying Black Suburbs: A Racial Spatial Orders Approach

Kimberley Johnson

Urban Affairs Review2026https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874261423175article
ABDC B
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

By 2020, 54% of Black Americans in the nation's largest metropolitan areas lived in suburbs, reflecting the ongoing “third Great Migration” and a profound restructuring of metropolitan space. This study develops a novel political development framework, racial spatial orders (RSO), which conceptualizes metropolitan and Black suburban development as the result of historically contingent configurations of institutions, policies, and racial ideologies that (re-) produce metropolitan inequalities and spatial differentiation. Through mechanisms of intercurrence, path dependency, and layering, RSOs explain the persistence of racialized spatial governance while illuminating the adaptive strategies of Black spatial agency, including incorporation, political mobilization, and placemaking. Using qualitative process tracing, the study identifies five RSOs to analyze the formation and differentiation of Black suburbs in Cook County, Illinois, from 1900 to 2020, and develops a socio-spatial typology that captures variation among Black suburbs, offering a comparative lens for analyzing racialized political development across metropolitan contexts.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874261423175

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@article{kimberley2026,
  title        = {{Classifying Black Suburbs: A Racial Spatial Orders Approach}},
  author       = {Kimberley Johnson},
  journal      = {Urban Affairs Review},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874261423175},
}

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Classifying Black Suburbs: A Racial Spatial Orders Approach

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.