Critical Gentrification Studies in US Cities: A Book Symposium
Date & Time: Friday, November 1st, 11 AM – 3 PM ET
Location: Rajen Kilachand Center Colloquium Room, 1st Floor (610 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215)
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This symposium will feature three new books by leaders in the field of gentrification: Tanya Golash-Boza’s Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC’s Racial Wealth Gap, Richard Ocejo’s Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, and Derek Hyra’s Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur. Critically, all three books dig deep into race and inequality in relation to gentrification in US cities. Where Golash-Boza and Hyra focus on the role of the state and its apparatus, Ocejo focuses on the role of gentrifiers, which we hope will generate new discussion on the production versus consumption arguments in gentrification studies but especially as they relate to race and racism in US cities.
Each author will present their books, followed by a critical discussion with key Boston University (Jessica Simes, Japonica Brown-Saracino) and wider Massachusetts (Mark Davidson) urbanists with expertise in these particular areas. This will be followed by a panel discussion with the authors on Crosscutting Themes: Critical Gentrification Studies Going Forwards, led by BU urbanist Darien Williams and MIT urbanist devin michelle bunten. The Chair/Moderator is Loretta Lees. Lunch will be provided.
About the Sessions & Authors
Session 1 - Tanya Golash-Boza: Before Gentrification
Discussant: Jessica Simes,
Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston University
In Before Gentrification, Tanya Golash-Boza (University of California, Merced) tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city of Washington DC, revealing how policies and policing have worked to displace and decimate the Black middle class. She shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, Golash-Boza explores how DC came to be the nation’s ‘murder capital’ and incarceration capital, and why it is now a haven for wealthy White people. This troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities.
Session 2 - Richard Ocejo: Sixty Miles Upriver
Discussant: Japonica Brown-Saracino,
Professor of Sociology, Boston University
In Sixty Miles Upriver,
Richard Ocejo (John Jay College, CUNY) explores how race, culture, and rising housing costs combine to shape gentrification in Newburgh, a small, postindustrial, majority Black and Latino city in the Hudson River Valley sixty miles from NYC. Like many other small cities across the US, Newburgh was beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Ojeco tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in the US in places where it unfolds in new ways. Ocejo takes readers into the lives of these newcomers, examining the different ways they navigate racial difference and inequality among Newburgh’s much less privileged local residents, and showing how stakeholders in the city’s revitalization reframe themselves and gentrification to cast the displacement they cause to minority groups in a positive light. This is an intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification that explains how progressive White gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color.
Session 3 - Derek Hyra: Slow and Sudden Violence
Discussant: Mark Davidson,
Professor of Geography, Clark University
In Slow and Sudden Violence,
Derek Hyra (American University) weaves together a persuasive narrative of unrest, linking police aggression to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate history of the St. Louis region and Baltimore, Hyra shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities. Despite moments of racial political representation, repeated decisions to ‘upgrade’ the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations have resulted in pockets of poverty inhabited by people experiencing chronic displacement trauma and unrelenting police surveillance. These interconnected sets of divestments and accumulated frustrations have erupted in response to tragic, unjust police killings. To confront the core components of US unrest, Hyra urges that we must end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality.
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