Sung Ho Kim, MS

Professor Kim is involved in a research project using the St. Louis area as a case study to better understand the linkages between the four parallel directions that affected urban development in the 1910s: city planning, American residential zoning, increased use of automobiles, and industrial decentralization. The project is exploring and documenting how these technological and policy shifts, combined with the beginning of the Great Migration north of African-Americans seeking jobs in the context of a cut-off of mass immigration from Europe, produced the segregated and sprawling North American metropolitan environments that are now typical. These shifts were accompanied by new and increasingly institutionalized rhetoric about family order, a racialized dichotomy of suburb and city, and a legal framework centered on zoning laws intended to “protect” single family residential homes that codified and naturalized these changes.