“Horrible” Landscapes as Spaces of Dissent: The Racial and Aesthetic Regimes of Atlanta’s Gentrifying Suburbs

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

Abstract

In this presentation, I discuss how racialized moral geographies and aesthetics are produced and negotiated in a predominantly white and affluent, but rapidly diversifying suburb of Atlanta (which I call “Hillford”). A bulwark of “grassroots” suburban conservatism, in 2005 Hillford incorporated as autonomous municipality, ending a thirty-year struggle engaged by residents and local community activists against majority-African American and Democrat-controlled Barfield County. In 2012, the new administration launched an ambitious plan to transform the sprawling, car-centric landscape of Birch Road into a “true town center” that would showcase Hillford’s new identity as a “diverse” and inclusive suburban municipality.
As redevelopment progressed, many low-income Latino and African American residents began to face rent increases, displacement, intensified police surveillance and stricter enforcement of building codes. As organized efforts to “transform an unwanted present by means of an imagined future” (Holston 1999, 158), urban redevelopment plans often evoke notions of progress predicated upon the “parallel construal of the existing as ‘outdated’ and in need of overhaul” (Abram and Weszkalnys 2013, 22). Building on this idea, I argue that these circulating representations of black and brown neighborhoods are instrumental in portraying growth and capital accumulation through the dispossession of poor minority residents as “racially innocent” projects that will benefit Hillford’s population as a whole. In this paper, I also foreground the perspectives of Latino and African American families faced with the threat of displacement.

Author

• Elisa Lanari, Northwestern University