Cause

Gregory Smithsimon is professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and the Graduate Center. He is the author of Cause: And How It Doesn’t Always Equal Effect, as well as September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero (NYU Press), about the role of public space in redevelopment conflicts in Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001. He is also author, with Benjamin Shepard, of The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces (SUNY Press), on protest movements and New York’s privately owned public spaces. He is currently completing Liberty Road: African American Middle-Class Suburbs Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism, a study of how suburban space reframes political conflicts for middle-class African Americans. He is an editor of the interdisciplinary urban journal Metropolitics, and has written for the Village Voice, Dissent, In These Times, the Daily News, and the Wall Street Journal online. He lives in Brooklyn.