On Gentrification and Death

• In Event: The Politics and Racial Aesthetics of Public Space

Abstract

This presentation will focus on a Latinx-majority, low-income city in northeastern NJ, located across the Hudson River from Manhattan. In the late 1990s a diminished tax base led urban elites to encourage gentrification in the city’s residential and commercial spaces. Simultaneously, public officials began a campaign to commemorate dead historic Latinx figures by naming schools, parks, and statues after them. This presentation will examine some of the aesthetic changes to the built environment of this city undergoing gentrification and how they point to an “anticipatory grief” over place. I argue that anticipatory grief describes gentrification’s later stage, when the killing of place--of the neighborhood life and culture that made it feel like home--seems inevitable. This presentation considers whether the anticipatory grief that comes with gentrification is a terminal condition or if it can serve as a cautious slowing down of our thoughts and actions to prevent the death that gentrification is thought to cause. In short, this presentation will examine how memorialization may exacerbate and challenge the gentrification-led death of community.

Author

• Johana Londono, University at Albany (SUNY)