Residents’ Spatial Practices in the Gentrified Context: Race, Class, Gender and the Constitution of Exclusive Space

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. RGC, Culture, and Space

Abstract

The historically black Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, DC has been the site of significant gentrification and demographic change over the past 15 years, making it part of a zip-coded among the “most whitened” in the nation as of the most recent 2010 census. This paper—based on an analysis of 15 months of ethnographic field observations, in-depth interviews, cognitive mapping, and detailed “transect walks”—investigates the neighborhood terrain of those demographic changes and the socio-cultural processes of exclusion that prevent racial integration and inclusion in the gentrified context. I employ an intersectional reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space to identify how white gentry residents’ spatial practices produce a context in which African American residents—both those who have lived in the neighborhood for decades, as well as those who have moved to the neighborhood as part of the gentry group—experience exclusion from public space. This paper focuses particularly on the interracial interactions in public places—such as restaurants, community meetings, and sidewalks—that are characterized by social friction, and in turn produce mobile “junction points” where race and gender collude to connect residents into networks of exclusion. I ultimately argue that space is a social structure that is mutually constituted with race, class, and gender. Residents’ perceptions of race, class, and gender inform their spatial practices and produce sites of exclusion; and in turn, these spaces of exclusion reciprocally constitute new raced, classed, and gendered archetypes.

Author

• Allison Suppan Helmuth, University of Illinois-Chicago