The Environmentalization of Desirability: Linking Ecological Upgrading and Social Displacement in the Capitalist City

• In Event: 417 - Regular Session. Urban Sociology: Perspectives on Urban Change

Abstract

One of the most pressing issues for contemporary urban scholars and practitioners is to understand the link between urban environmental upgrading and displacement in order to address it. Again and again critical scholars have pointed to the seemingly unbreakable connection between the environmental improvement of an area and the subsequent displacement of former residents who can no longer afford to live there. A number of disparate frameworks in geography, anthropology, and urban studies have sought to understand it through the lenses of “environmental gentrification,” “luxury environmentalism” and “eco-gentrification.” While recognizing the value of these interventions, here we wish to shift the discussion by developing a framework that focuses on the uneven production of urban desirability as the principal link between upgrading and displacement. By drawing specifically on insights from relational and material sociologies, our framework is attentive to the intertwined ecological, normative, and political dimensions of the production of urban desirability. We then offer a rereading of the case of New York City (an exemplar case of the link) before closing with some reflections about what our framework implies about breaking the link.

Authors

• Daniel Aldana Cohen, New York University

• Hillary Angelo, New York University

• Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University