By Sasa Ramos
On Wednesday, February 4, the Initiative on Cities launched the Gentrification & Urban Displacement Lab (GUDL) – a new hub bringing together faculty, students, practitioners, and community partners committed to understanding urban change, culture, and inequality. At the center of this launch was Professor Japonica Brown-Saracino’s new book, The Death and Life of Gentrification. Stephanie Ternullo (Harvard), Karilyn Crockett (MIT), and Lawrence Vale (MIT) joined Brown-Saracino in conversation on her book and its implications. Following the discussion, Loretta Lees, Josh Lown, and Danielle Mulligan delivered lightning talks that showcased their recent research on gentrification and displacement and outlined next steps for GUDL.
“Part of why so many rely on gentrification is because they yearn for language that captures their sense of deepening inequalities and of how the decks are stacked against those with fewer resources.”
— Japonica Brown-Saracino
Japonica Brown-Saracino is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Boston University. She is an ethnographer whose work spans community, cultural sociology, and social preservation. In her new book The Death and Life of Gentrification, Brown-Saracino explores how the term “gentrification” has evolved far beyond Ruth Glass’s original meaning – shifting from a description of neighborhood change to a socially charged metaphor for cultural appropriation, upscaling, and the loss of authenticity. Drawing on film, literature, journalism, and art, the book illuminates how gentrification has become a lens through which we understand transformations in everyday life and popular culture. Ultimately, the book asks what gentrification means today and calls us to consider how scholarly debate about gentrification contributed to the term’s new life as a metaphor.
In 1964, sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification to describe the influx of middle-class residents into working-class neighborhoods in London. Brown-Saracino contrasts this “brick-and-mortar” gentrification with the evolving meanings of gentrification. She observed how people now use the term gentrification to have conversations without directly addressing neighborhood change, assigning different meanings to signal their position on social issues. With the rise of “gentrified” coffee shops, yoga studios, and kale, The Death and Life of Gentrification details how this “definitional chaos” has emerged.
While curating literature for The Gentrification Debates, Brown-Saracino recognized more debate than agreement among urban scholars. Her research on queer women’s migration revealed this “discord permeating history.” This chasm reveals the causes and consequences of the definition of gentrification as it has expanded to rural contexts and across the globe. Reflecting on her years of studying neighborhood change, Brown-Saracino remarked: “There isn’t just one gentrification; there are gentrifications.”
From conducting ethnographic research on dyke bar commemorations to switching on an episode of Law and Order, Brown-Saracino has encountered talks of gentrification in the most unlikely of places: “Gentrification has a way of showing up where we least expect it to.” Describing how gentrification ruined the lesbian bar scene, she proposed that the term can be a “discursive tool” for individuals and groups to express their feelings towards urban inequalities. These conversations have aided connections across gender, race, class, and age, facilitating a sense of shared marginality. “What work does talk of gentrification accomplish?”
“My book suggests that the meaning of gentrification will continue to evolve, which is all the more reason why we ought to harness this moment when I think many are ready to engage in work to limit brick-and-mortar gentrification and displacement.”
Assistant Professor Stephanie Ternullo highlighted how gentrification is highly “recognizable and retrievable.” The resonance and multi-vocality of gentrification serve as a unifying force, connecting people from across different partisan bubbles. Discussing the evolution of the term and its politics, Professor Lawrence Vale outlined how earlier ideas of gentrification are hybridized and multiplied, observing that there is no single starting point but variants of gentrification: “I don’t see newer definitions pushing out others. We’ve got newer [forms of] gentrifications too.” Professor Karilyn Crockett expanded upon the shared experience of “hyper-extraction,” characterized by loss and longing: “How has life become precarious? Who gets to survive and benefit?” From housing to food insecurity, the cost burden of living is ever-increasing, pulling residents away from the social compact that sustains their participation in the community. Crockett argued that this sense of haunting and possibility can guide us towards a different research agenda, urging the audience to bring “our imagination and what is just” into the conversation.
Following the panel discussion and Q&A session, IOC staff presented their current research and previewed goals for GUDL. Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities, developed the Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool to address gentrification in historically Black neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky. The City of Louisville contracted Lees and Visiting Urban Scholar Kenton Card to create a first-of-its-kind planning tool to protect low-income and marginalized groups from displacement.
Through community-based participatory action research, Postdoctoral Research Associate Josh Lown examined the effects of green gentrification in East Boston. He observed how environmental efforts exacerbate or create conditions in historically oppressed communities, counter-mapping gentrification by charting individual and collective gentrification.
Using a local elementary school as a case study, Associate Director Danielle Mulligan investigated the relationship between housing and schools in East Boston. With Graduate Research Assistant Natalie Smith and former Undergraduate Research Assistant Kimberly Landaverde Guillen, she examined how the establishment of a Montessori school displaced the predominantly Latino student population, mirroring the dynamics of neighborhood change.
The Gentrification & Urban Displacement Lab aims to convene community organizations, advocates, policy actors, and researchers to advance anti-displacement policies in cities by developing new research, translating existing findings, and facilitating knowledge exchanges. After determining key themes submitted from the community, GUDL aims to provide up to $15,000 in seed funding to 16 collaborators.