The Gentrified City as Site of Emergence

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

In The New Urban Crisis (2017), Richard Florida describes the fundamental paradox of urban growth in the twenty-first century: in today’s hyper-competitive economic landscape, cities are forced to redevelop to compete with one another, but as they redevelop, they become more expensive and thereby become inaccessible to lower- and middle-income residents—who are disproportionately black or brown. The most affluent, productive, dense, and successful cities, and the cities that are the most liberal in their political leanings, Florida observes, are also the most segregated cities with the greatest economic inequality. Florida concedes that there is no easy fix to this dilemma, which is playing out in every major city in the U.S. here in 2018. While Florida details a number of approaches that could help to reverse these trends toward segregation and deepening inequality, he concedes that so many political, economic, and cultural obstacles stand in the way that an entire paradigm shift toward responsible urbanism will have to take place before real change is enacted in our cities.

As gentrification and its attendant modes of displacement transform American urban life and increase inequality in the ways that Florida describes, cities might be understood as sites of emergence that, for many, are the staging grounds for crisis. With the recent trend toward corporate and private interests embedding themselves in local governance, cities are increasingly emerging as spaces in which an ethos of neoliberalism and private investment supersedes what Henri Lefebvre identified as the individual’s “the right to the city.” These trends become even more troubling when considering how urban redevelopment situates the very marginalized communities it displaces as fetishized objects of authenticity. Blackness, as Sharon Zukin and others have demonstrated, functions as both an obstacle and a benefit for gentrifiers as they “sell” new visions of urban life.

Considering the factors that go into the making of the modern city, this panel interrogates the contemporary city as a site of emergence, posing questions such as:

o How do narratives about the city provide ways of confronting and understanding gentrification, urban transformation, and inequality?
o How are neighborhoods and communities affected by urban emergence, and what means exist for challenging the neoliberal restructuring of space?
o Where does the balance lie between fostering economic growth in emerging cities and providing for poor and marginalized communities?
o What are the historical foundations of gentrification and displacement in American cities?
o How may urban studies provide new opportunities for understanding race and identity?
o What forms of emergence are staged as a result of urban redevelopment?

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Matthew Dischinger, Georgia State University

Individual Presentations

• I Love Pho: Gentrification and Survival in Little Saigon - Jennifer Huynh, University of Notre Dame

• Gentrification Interrupted: The Emergence of Narratives of Loss in the New Urban Borderlands - Andrea L Glass, University of Delaware

• Emergence through Excess: Gentrification and the Assertion of Race in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout - Dale Pattison, Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi

• Neoliberal Nostalgia: Creative Destruction and White Theft in the Cinema of Hollywood South - Leigh Anne Duck, University of Mississippi