Making Homes Unhomely: The Politics of Displacement in a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Chicago

Abstract

Scholars have long debated the causes, processes, and effects of displacement by gentrification in global north cities and more recently around the world. Based on an ethnographic study in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, this article shows how limited liability corporations use discrete and accretive violence in the early stages of gentrification. We also document how tenants contest harassment and neglect by carrying out “limit–acts” to make visible everyday invisible practices of intimidation and coercion and to cope with the private forces that displace them.

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