Fullilove’s article gives urban displacement a public-health and psychosocial vocabulary through the concept of root shock. Its iconic idea is that forced community destruction damages not only housing access but the connective tissue through which individuals, institutions, memory and political capacity are sustained. The theoretical contribution is to define dispossession as social trauma: urban renewal, planned shrinkage and disinvestment are read as processes that disorganise communities and produce long-term civic paralysis. Methodologically, the article combines historical analysis, public-health reasoning and ethical critique, focusing on African American communities affected by federal urban renewal and related de-urbanising policies. Its conceptual operation is traumatic urban diagnosis: place loss becomes measurable through breakdowns in money, social organisation, collective action and psychological continuity. The bridge to the wider field connects urban planning, public health, racial justice, housing policy and trauma studies, showing that redevelopment can injure democratic capacity as well as physical settlement.