Willow Lung-Amam

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Somos de Langley Park: The Fight for Fair Redevelopment along Maryland’s Purple Line.

Lecture by Willow Lung-Amam, Associate Professor, Urban Studies and Planning and Director of Community Development, National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, College Park

This talk will focus on the concerns raised by two intersecting trends affecting U.S. metropolitan areas today—rising suburban poverty and redevelopment. In a case study of Langley Park, Maryland, a low-income, predominantly Latino immigrant inner-ring suburb that is home to the future Purple Line light rail, it explores the community’s fight against transit-induced gentrification and displacement. It will highlight how place matters to how equitable development strategies are pursued and achieved in increasingly diverse and disadvantaged suburban communities. The case study is part of a larger book project on equitable development politics in the Washington, DC suburbs, tentatively titled, The Right to Suburbia: Redevelopment and Resistance on the Urban Edge.

Willow Lung-Amam, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her scholarship focuses on how urban and suburban policies and plans contribute to and can address social inequality, particularly in neighborhoods undergoing rapid racial and economic change. She has written extensively on suburban poverty, racial segregation, immigration, gentrification, redevelopment politics, and neighborhood opportunity. Her research has appeared in various journals, such as Journal of Urban Affairs and Journal of Planning, Education and Research, books, and popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, National Public Radio, New Republic, Bloomberg’s CityLab, and Al Jazeera. She is the author of Trespassers? Asian American and the Battle for Suburbia, and a forthcoming book on redevelopment politics and equitable development organizing in the Washington, DC suburbs. Dr. Lung-Amam is also a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and a nonresident senior follow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program.

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