Abstract
It is not uncommon for activists to use the language of colonization or occupation to describe the social dynamics at work in cities undergoing gentrification. Should these claims be regarded as outrageously exaggerated if not outright false? Or are they apt descriptions of the conditions on the ground in countless cities undergoing profound economic, political and demographic changes? In what follows, I argue that these claims are both legible and persuasive when viewed against the backdrop of racialized urban space.
Introduction
It is not uncommon for activists to use the language of colonization or occupation to describe the social dynamics at work in cities undergoing gentrification. 1 Should these claims be regarded as outrageously exaggerated if not outright false? Or are they apt descriptions of the conditions on the ground in countless cities undergoing profound economic, political and demographic changes? In what follows, I argue that these claims are both legible and persuasive when viewed against the backdrop of racialized urban space.
The idea that persons can be ‘racialized’ is a familiar one, but the idea that geographical spaces, too, might be imbued with racialized meaning is perhaps not as well known. I follow Charles Mills in understanding the ‘racialization of space’ to refer to ‘the depiction of space as dominated by individuals (whether persons or sub-persons) of a certain race’. 2 As Mills notes, spaces racialized as non-White are often depicted as ‘needing to be tamed…mapped and subordinated’. Indeed, if not characterized as totally unpopulated and barren – ‘terra nullius, vacuum domicilium’ – non-White spaces are often demonized and invested with moral qualities such as vice, ‘darkness’, superstition and evil – and this, in turn, ‘implies the need for Europeanization if moral redemption is to be possible’. 3 In what follows, I apply this analysis of spatial racialization to recent normative debates about gentrification in large cities in the United States. More specifically, I argue that it is fruitful to view certain dimensions of gentrification as neocolonial practices which are fundamentally at odds with the equal moral worth of persons. To make my case, I consider several concrete aspects of gentrification that support the neocolonial ascription. Some of those practices are linguistic, for example, describing new White residents in a majority non-White neighbourhood as ‘pioneers’ or ‘settlers’, whereas others are non-linguistic, for example, aggressive policing, marginalization and forced displacement. The wrong, in each case, derives from a failure to respect people as moral equals – but this wrong, I claim, only comes clearly into focus if we view it through the neocolonial lens of spatial racialization. In order to advance this argument, however, I must first set some key conceptual background in place.
Preliminaries: What is gentrification?
Although the term ‘gentrification’ is becoming more and more widespread, rarely is it given a precise definition. Though its definition is a matter of dispute, most users of the word take it to refer to an influx of relatively wealthy people – residential and commercial tenants, property owners of various sorts and so on – into an urban district where there were previously few (if any) of such people. 4 This process need not, in principle, involve the displacement of existing residents, so long as space is plentiful and protections are in place to prevent costs from soaring higher than current residents can afford. But in many cases, however, these conditions are not met. As Samuel Stein emphasizes, ‘real estate speculators choose to invest in a particular location because they identify a gap between the rents that land currently offers and the potential future rents it might command if some action were taken, such as evicting long-term tenants, renovating neglected or unstylish properties, or demolishing and reconstructing buildings’. 5 Though there is no a priori connection between displacement and flipping old buildings or building new ones, displacement is an inevitable result if these actions significantly drive up housing costs and the incomes of existing residents do not grow at a comparable rate. Moreover, displacement in its own right is often a significant source of profit for speculators and landowners: it is entirely rational for these actors to seek to reap large returns from displacing low-income residents and repopulating neighbourhoods with groups who can afford to pay much more for, in some cases, the very same housing stock. As Neil Smith has argued, this gap between low actual rents and much higher potential rents is key factor motivating investors in urban housing markets. 6 And generational shifts in attitudes towards urban living combined with massive flows of capital into urban real estate markets have created a situation in which this gap is growing at a rapid pace, making the prospects of displacement more and more profitable. As Margaret Kohn has put it, the end result of this process is that entire districts are transformed into ‘de facto gated communities’ for the wealthy. 7
Those who rent their homes in uncontrolled 8 markets are most vulnerable to being displaced, but even some property owners are vulnerable to being pushed out by soaring property taxes – particularly when they are tethered to rising property values – or by speculators wielding state power through eminent domain. For these reasons, many activists use the contested word ‘gentrification’ to refer not to new investment or to an influx of new residents per se but to a process whereby existing residents of a particular urban area are involuntarily displaced – sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually – so that new, more affluent residents can take their place. It is this narrower way of understanding gentrification as displacement that concerns me in this article.
Although gentrification, at least as I define it here, does not essentially involve racism, in many real-world cases racial oppression is often a key part of the process. This is especially true in the United States, which will be my sole focus in this article. Indeed, given the US’s pervasive history of racial hierarchy and racial segregation in housing, it is relatively rare to find examples of gentrification that are not racialized in significant respects. 9 It remains true, however, that the basic driving force behind gentrification in virtually all cases is economic: those who presently occupy some space are seen as obstacles to wealth accumulation by those who desire to acquire the land where they reside. 10 Existing racial hierarchies and entrenched racist ideologies are then seized upon and sometimes deepened by the groups – for example, landlords, developers, real estate speculators and financial institutions – who stand to benefit most from gentrification. 11
Ought we to regard gentrification as unjust even in cases in which it has no bearing on questions of racism? The argument in this article does not depend on an answer to this question: my thesis here is that there are distinctive forms of injustice that arise specifically when gentrification proceeds against the backdrop of racialized geography, not that gentrification as such is unjust. 12 If successful, the case advanced below will have shown – even in the eyes of those who have no particular moral complaint against gentrification per se – that specific wrongs result when gentrification unfolds amidst racialized urban geography – and the nature of those wrongs will derive from their inconsistency with the moral equality of persons. 13 More specifically, the argument aims to show that common racialized modes of gentrification have a neocolonial character that involve expressive forms of disrespect. Following Deborah Hellman, I understand the wrongness of these expressive forms of disrespect to derive from the way in which they mark out groups of people as less morally worthy than others. 14
This wrong, I claim, is easily unseen unless we make use of the critical resources supplied by philosophical frameworks that examine the racialization of space. My argument can thus be understood as an exercise in Ideologiekritik, as an attempt to make visible certain ‘ideological illusions’, as Tommie Shelby has put it, that ‘contribute to social stability and integration by misleading social actors about the social structure within which they live and work’. 15 As Mills points out, ‘an oppressive polity characterized by group domination distorts our cognizing in ways that themselves need to be theorized about’. More specifically, constructing and sustaining a White supremacist polity requires ‘a certain cognitive and moral economy…a certain schedule of structured blindness and opacities’ on the part of White agents especially. Indeed, all else equal, Whites in such a society will be taught to ‘misinterpret the world, to see the world wrongly [on matters related to race]’, to internalize ‘white mythologies, invented Orients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people that never were – Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos – but who attain a virtual reality through their existence in travelers’ tales, folk myths, popular and highbrow fiction, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema’ and so on. The result, then, is that many will be ‘blinded to realities that we should see, taking for granted as natural what are in fact human-created structures. So we need to see differently…coming to recognize as political what we had previously thought of as apolitical or personal, doing conceptual innovation, reconceiving the familiar, looking with new eyes at the old world around us’ (Mills 1997, 123). My goal in what follows, then, is to make visible as political certain racialized features of gentrification – features which, I claim, are correctly regarded as neocolonial – so as to reveal the ways in which they are at odds with the value of moral equality.
The racialization of space – The ‘classical’ phase
I turn now to the elucidation of the racialization of space generally, so that we can apply this framework to cities and to gentrification in particular. 16 The racialization of space is in the first instance a process whereby a given geographical area is imbued with a specific kind of meaning. More precisely, as Mills puts it, it involves ‘the depiction of space as dominated by individuals (whether persons or sub-persons) of a certain race’. The origin of the process Mills describes has a precise political and historical context: the early modern period in which major European imperial powers invest themselves in colonial conquest, settlement and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. On the eve of World War I, a handful of European empires ‘held a grand total of roughly 85% of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and commonwealths’ – world-historic projects of conquest such as these require ideological justifications, and it is here that the idea of ‘raced’ geographical spaces becomes salient. 17
A brief digression on the racialization of persons is necessary before we delve into the details of how space becomes racialized. 18 As Naomi Zack has put it: ‘the modern concept of race emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries as a rationalization for actions of enslavement and other forms of colonial exploitation that contradicted political theories premised upon universal human rights. Without the concept of race, the enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the colonial exploitation of Native populations in the Americas, which included genocide, would have been recognized for the crimes they were’. 19 Thus, the architects of modern European imperialism bifurcated humanity into two groups, White and non-White, and designated the latter as sub-persons of various sorts who lacked the standard schedule of rights ascribed to persons simpliciter (whom they assumed to be coextensive with ‘the white race’). In Mills’s words, this amounts to ‘a partitioned social ontology…a universe divided between persons and racial subpersons, Untermenschen, who may variously be black, red, brown, yellow – slaves, aborigines, colonial populations – but who are collectively appropriately known as “subject races”…biologically destined never to penetrate the normative rights ceiling established for them below white persons’. 20
The social construction of race necessarily involves the racialization of persons, but so, too, is it a process that racializes geographical space. 21 Space, according to Mills, can be racialized in at least two ways: epistemologically and morally. As Mills puts it, the ‘epistemological dimension is the corollary of the preemptive restriction of knowledge to European cognizers, which implies that in certain spaces real knowledge (knowledge of science, universals) is not possible’. In other words, ‘significant cultural achievement, intellectual progress, is thus denied to those spaces, which are deemed (failing European intervention) to be permanently locked into a cognitive state of superstition and ignorance’. 22 It is hardly difficult to see how these epistemic assumptions can readily be put to use to justify colonial rule on the part of supposedly enlightened and ‘civilized’ empires who alone possess the cognitive capacities to acquire genuine knowledge. So, too, is this epistemic backdrop necessary to make sense of the language of ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’ so central to the self-understanding of those most invested in colonial projects. As the French theorist Jules Harland put it in 1910: ‘The European conqueror brings order, foresight, and security to a human society which, though ardently aspiring for these fundamental values without which no community can make progress, still lacks the aptitude to achieve them from within itself’. Hence, ‘it is necessary to accept as a principle and point of departure that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations…and the conquest over native peoples is [legitimated by] our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic and military superiority, but our moral superiority’. 23 And, of course, the point of this whole constellation of ideas was to grease the axles of imperial conquest, expropriation and, therefore, the accumulation of wealth by colonial elites.
The specifically moral aspects of the racialization of space are connected to these epistemic dimensions. As we have already seen, if not characterized as totally unpopulated and barren, non-White spaces are often demonized and invested with moral qualities such as vice, superstition and evil. As we will see in the next section, the language of criminality supplies the functional equivalent where ‘inner city’ neighbourhoods in the United States are concerned. In both cases, the key consequence of this moralized racing of space is to render these areas ‘morally open for seizure, expropriation, settlement, development – in a word, peopling’. 24
In the case of most of the White settler states in particular, space marked out as non-White is, as Mills notes, often depicted as ‘literally empty and unoccupied, void, wasteland, “virgin territory” – there is just no one there’. In Australia, for example, ‘at the time of first settlement…all lands were deemed to be wastelands and the property of the crown’. 25 Contrast this with the image of non-White space as ‘dark’, dangerous, full of vice and moral turpitude. VY Mudimbe is correct to describe this manoeuvre as a ‘geography of monstrosity’ – within this conceptual universe, the world is sharply divided between ‘civilized’, morally sanitary spaces of light, on the one hand, and ‘dark’ bestial spaces ‘Where There Be Dragons’, on the other.
The racialization of space in US cities
The analysis above enables us to better grasp how imperial powers understood and attempted to justify practices of domination that were central to the making of the modern world. But does the discussion above shed light on the complex interplay between power, race and urban geography in large cities in the United States? 26 Though Mills himself does not pursue this question at length, he does remark that, ‘[o]ne might argue that in the United States the growing postwar popularity of the locution of the “urban jungle” reflects a subtextual (and not very sub-) reference to the increasing non-whiteness of the residence of inner cities, and the corresponding pattern of “white flight” to suburban vanilla sanctuary: our space/home space/civilized space’. This racializing of urban space, in turn, manifests ‘in the presumption that certain spaces (e.g. those of the inner city) are intrinsically doomed to welfare dependency, high street crime, underclass status, because of the characteristics of its inhabitants, so that the larger economic system has no role in creating these problems’. 27
Mills’s remarks, now more than two decades old, are very suggestive when applied to the present state of urban life in the United States. If the post-World War II landscape of urban dynamics were marked by ‘white flight’ to racially homogenous suburbs combined with cataclysmic disinvestment in largely non-White ‘inner cities’, the last two decades have witnessed the beginning of a dramatic reversal of these trends. Whereas as late as the 1980s and 1990s the very idea of ‘city life’ or ‘urban living’ was racialized as non-White in Mills’s sense, a countervailing ‘whitening’ process is proceeding at breakneck speed in large American cities such as New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles. Many neighbourhoods and districts long-since abandoned and left for dead by government and business investors are experiencing massive inflows of speculative investment, construction booms and soaring rents and property values. And, what’s more, this process of appropriating, populating and redeveloping hitherto non-White spaces bears many similarities to the projects of conquest and exploitation that defined the epoch of high imperialism discussed above.
To see how this process is unfolding today, it is useful to analyse the dramatic reversal cultural representations of dense, urban areas in the United States have undergone in the last 40 years. Consider, for instance, what we might call the ‘typical’ portrayal of ‘inner city’ life in Hollywood films from the 1980s and 1990s such as The Warriors (1979), Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), Escape from New York (1981), Bad Boys (1982), Risky Business (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), Crocodile Dundee (1986), Colors (1988), Coming to America (1988), Ghost (1990), Candyman (1992) and Cop Land (1997). 28 What all of these films share is a racialized image of American cities as filthy dens of iniquity, crime, vice and violence – and, in the case of Fort Apache, there is an explicit nod to the analogy between racialized urban geography and settler colonialism. Set in the Bronx in the early 1980s, ‘Fort Apache’ refers to a police station staffed almost entirely by White cops in a neighbourhood that is overwhelmingly Puerto Rican (and which the film depicts as a chaotic, crime-infested wasteland). The film’s name implies that the police station represents an outpost of ‘civilization’ in the same way that US military outposts on the Western frontier served to contain and control the violent threat posed by indigenous people to the project of White settlement. Escape from New York, though ostensibly set in a science-fiction scenario in the future, supplies one of the clearest examples of this trend: in the reality of the film the ‘inner city’ is, quite literally, a lawless, amoral ‘state of nature’ where cultural progress, learning and cooperation are impossible. The city is therefore completely abandoned by the authorities – why try to ‘improve’ something that is inherently incapable of being improved? – and walled off to contain its dangerous, unruly energy.
These pervasive images of city life, of course, can and often have served as powerful ideological justifications for disinvestment from, neglect of and indifference towards urban spaces populated almost entirely by Black people. But in the present period, there are contexts in which these same ideological patterns of meaning seem to play a related but slightly different function: that of rendering certain urban spaces ‘morally open for seizure, expropriation, settlement, development’ just as racialized geographical areas outside of Europe were rendered morally open to colonial conquest in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed, if there is one thing we can learn from the period of classical imperialism that applies to urban politics today, it is that these two separate orientations – viewing a space as deserving of marginalization and neglect, on the one hand, versus being coveted as a source of potential wealth to be acquired through coercion and dispossession, on the other – are in fact two sides of the same coin. Put simply, these two orientations both make sense from the perspective of racialized geography mapped according to the coordinates of White supremacy.
Race, space and gentrification
Our topic in this article, however, is not the racialization of urban space in general – we are interested in seeing how this framework sheds light on certain problematic dimensions of gentrification in US cities today. With the foregoing reflections on the racialization of urban space in mind, then, let us analyse a few concrete cases. What we will see is that the cases tend to involve certain neocolonial linguistic practices which, on the one hand, serve as powerful rationalizations for profit-driven projects of displacement and repopulation, while, on the other hand, disparage and marginalize non-White residents by representing them as less than the moral equals of those who will replace them once gentrification is complete. So, too, will many of the cases we examine involve non-linguistic practices – for example, aggressive policing, forced removal, expropriation, and so on – that also parallel the wrongs associated with classic forms of colonialism.
Let us begin with some of the linguistic practices hinted at above. In the United States, it is common to find restaurants, bars and other businesses in gentrifying areas with names such as ‘frontier’, ‘the outpost’, ‘hinterlands’, ‘the colony’, and so on. It is also common for those who write about real estate to speak of ‘urban pioneers’ or new influxes of ‘settlers’. To see how this works in detail, it is worth considering a few specific examples. In 1983, a full-page spread in The New York Times lauded the opening of a new apartment building on the (then ungentrified) west side of Times Square as ‘the taming of the wild, wild West’, where ‘the trailblazers have done their work’. 29 On 3 November 1988, The Los Angeles Times ran a piece that said the following: ‘For some, it’s a dream community…exposure to a diverse group of people…for others…it’s a nightmarish zone of drugs, crime, fear apprehension…That two families might see one LA neighborhood so differently…they are vital players in the sizzling speculative real-estate market…they are urban pioneers’.
It is not difficult to find more recent examples. In 2017, The Los Angeles Times published a piece on real estate in Manhattan Beach that begins by describing what the area must have been like ‘long before Europeans’ set foot on the West Coast, giving a nod to the ‘hardy pioneers’ who settled the ‘windswept’ coasts. It then proceeds from this nostalgic description of European settlement to discuss the contemporary real estate prospects in the area.
In the last decade, the city of Detroit, once infamous for the extent of deindustrialization and disinvestment it suffered in the second half of the 20th century, has become something of a focal point for this neocolonial mode of racialized spatial reasoning. For example, a headline in a 2011 article in Yes! magazine bills Detroit as ‘The New American Frontier’. Its author, a self-described ‘urban success strategist’, asserts that ‘there is free and open space available in Detroit…and that message is attracting people, many of them creative and entrepreneurial’. The author continues: ‘Detroit, for all its problems – or perhaps because of them – has become nothing less than a new American frontier. Once, easterners heeded the call to “Go West, young man,” to leave behind the comforts and sophistication of the established citadels in search of adventure and fortune and to tame this great continent. Now, that same whisper is starting to build around Detroit’. Similarly, a recent article in The New York Times described the city in the following way: ‘Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished’. The image of a canvas, of course, is one of blank, emptiness just waiting to be painted upon by an artist – and, of course, this is precisely the sort of image we should expect in a context in which urban space is thoroughly saturated with racialized meaning.
These are not simply examples 30 in which speculators, real estate brokers, new residents and journalists make use of racialized geography to interpret the world in which they live. Here are cases in which that geography appears to supply a moral argument in favour of dispossession and conquest – here, quite literally, are cases in which the racialization of urban space appears to render these districts morally open for appropriation and settlement. To see more clearly how these neocolonial practices – linguistic as well as non-linguistic – function, consider three concrete aspects of gentrification: policing, cultural marginalization and forced displacement. In all three cases, I argue, we find practices at odds with the moral equality of persons.
Policing
Policing may not seem to be obviously connected to gentrification as we have defined it, but it is in fact a key aspect of the process – and, as we will see, it is also intimately connected to the racialization of space. One need not adopt a radical analysis of the function of policing in modern capitalist societies in order to grasp that one of their central purposes is to enforce the property holdings of the relatively well-off, especially in the face of real or perceived threats to those holdings. Thus, insofar as gentrification is a process of displacement of people, police will often be asked by gentrifying forces – real estate speculators, pro-gentrification government officials, landlords, new homeowners keen to drive up property values and so on – to play a leading role in entrenching new formal and informal norms about which groups are permitted to be where, what they are permitted to do and so on. So, too, will they be called upon to do things aimed at managing anxieties new property owners may have about moving into a district with a large population of residents who are significantly less affluent.
All of this takes on a more insidious character when it unfolds in a context of racialized urban space. Consider, then, that speculators keen on ‘flipping’ a neighbourhood and reaping enormous profits from buying cheap and selling dear face an obvious obstacle in a context in which the space they aim to gentrify has been racialized as non-White in the ways we have described above. Their dilemma is that they will need to be able to persuade potential investors and new residents that the neighbourhood is, or at least will become in the not so distant future, a White space. Thus far we have said little about spaces racialized as White, but their epistemic and moral properties more or less follow directly from a simple negation of the characteristics standardly ascribed to non-White spaces: they are represented as clean, ‘civilized’, safe places with strong moral fibre, where development, industry, innovation and progress are most likely to occur. Now, insofar as non-White spaces are generally associated with either criminality or barrenness, policing often plays a central role in assuring developers and new, more affluent residents that they will be insulated from ‘undesirable’ residents and that their investments and personal property will be protected.
Because gentrification often proceeds in an uneven, block-by-block manner, it is often in the interest of gentrifying forces to establish and enforce boundaries between White and non-White spaces. Enforcement, then, is often largely accomplished through policing tactics that make older residents feel out of place and unwelcome, the better to displace them and reassure newer residents that the neighbourhood is on the road from ‘up and coming’ to ‘safe’. This is arguably the function of ‘broken windows policing’, also known as ‘order-maintenance policing’, which, as Christina Hanhardt describes it, is ‘focused less on the immediate reduction of crime per se than on the perception of safety, under the assumption that certain environments cultivate future criminal activity’. 31
In contexts such as these, the mere presence of people of colour – whether as residents or simply as passers-by or customers at local businesses – is liable to be perceived as a threat to the project of gentrification. As Tommie Shelby puts it, ‘If blacks as a group are stigmatized as inferior, then a black-majority neighborhood will also be stigmatized, “tainted” by the debasing black presence…in this status hierarchy, the blacker the neighborhood (all else equal), the lower its social status’. 32 Police, then, will be called upon by politicians, developers and pro-gentrification residents of urban spaces to contain the ‘debasing’ presence of Black people, to make them feel unwelcome and unsafe in spaces now designated as White and, when necessary, to play a role in removing and displacing them in order to open up space for profitable investment and speculation. 33 Informal social norms that may have prevailed for decades in majority-Black neighbourhoods – congregating in public spaces to socialize, play games, listen to music, debate politics and so on – may now be the subject of draconian clampdowns by police. 34
Is what I have just described unjust? Defenders of gentrification might point out that changing demographics and shifting norms within a neighbourhood, as such, hardly amount to injustice. So, too, might they stress that there is nothing generally unjust with demanding full compliance with the law, which seems to require coercive enforcement. But seen through the lens of spatial racialization, such as we have defined it here, this situation looks far less benign. The terrain on which these policing strategies are enacted is already saturated with racialized meaning: majority-Black neighbourhoods are represented as barren, dangerous, infested with criminality and unsuitable for investment and economic development. This throws up obstacles to the project of gentrification, of profiting from a substantial gap between actual returns on real estate capital and the potential returns that could be secured if the neighbourhood could be sufficiently ‘whitened’. It then appears reasonable to see aggressive policing as a way to contain the criminality and lawlessness of these spaces and transform them into economically thriving, safe spaces suitable for repopulation by wealthier residents who will overwhelmingly be White.
As many theorists have pointed out, this situation produces a context in which the police behave more like an occupying army than a force dedicated to ‘serving and protecting’ the community. As Alex Vitale points out in his recent study of policing, ‘police often adopt a “warrior mentality”…and think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety’. Indeed, as he emphasizes, it hardly helps that ‘they are provided with tanks and other military-grade weapons, that many are military veterans, and that militarized units like Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) proliferated during the 1980s War on Drugs and post-9/11 War on Terror…[all of which] only fuels this [warrior mentality], as well as a belief that entire communities are disorderly, dangerous, suspicious, and ultimately criminal’. It hardly needs to be stated that this dynamic bears many similarities to classic methods of colonial control involving profiling, harassment, humiliating and arbitrary searches, checkpoints restricting movement and so forth. So, apart from involving a variety of wrongs in itself – from denial of due process to violence and even murder – this form of policing also constitutes an expressive form of disrespect, a profound public denial of the equal moral worth of the aggrieved population. And, as with classic colonial practices, the raison d’être of this network of wrongs is to facilitate material advantage on the part of dominant groups. This hardly comes into focus, however, unless we peel away the layers of ideology which obscure the racialized dimensions of gentrification.
Cultural marginalization
Another dimension of gentrification that warrants our attention here is what we might call ‘cultural marginalization’. One way in which this process unfolds has to do with sudden shifts in the commercial corridors and ‘high streets’ in urban areas. For example, when a neighbourhood begins to gentrify existing residents often find that their consumer preferences carry less and less weight when it comes to the goods and services current businesses offer and, more importantly, to what newer, incoming businesses are trying to sell. 35 In short order, a long-standing web of shops, bookstores, hair salons, restaurants, churches and neighbourhood institutions are shoved aside to make room for businesses aiming to cash in on the purchasing power of the newer arrivals that come with gentrification. When this happens, those accustomed to the area before gentrification will suddenly feel out of place, no longer at home, no longer welcome as full members and participants in the commercial and cultural life of the neighbourhood. 36 Indeed, long-standing residents will find that their preferences are regarded as at best irrelevant or unimportant by newer businesses and, second, many of the businesses betting on future gentrification will often only sell goods and services at a price point few in the neighbourhood can afford. The message this sends need never be stated explicitly, but it is clear enough: ‘we don’t want or need your business, this newer commercial corridor is not intended for you but for those who will replace you once you’ve been forced out of your community’. It is often not lost on older residents that these new establishments are, in effect, saying to them that ‘this place isn’t for you, and the sooner you’re gone from the area the better’. Indeed, this sense that one’s mere presence is a problem is a well-known feature of how settler-colonial projects tend to represent those who must be removed in order to make way for settlement.
Now, sudden shifts in the commerce and public life of a neighbourhood need not always be unjust. 37 But, as we will see, the situation is more complicated when it unfolds amidst racialized geography with the neocolonial features I have been describing. Indeed, I hope to show that what I am here calling ‘cultural marginalization’ rises to the level of expressive disrespect in Hellman’s sense.
Consider, then, the following example: A new, upscale bar specializing in craft cocktails opens on a corridor on the north side of Chicago where the majority of businesses include restaurants specializing in soul food and West Indian cuisine, African-American barber shops and hair care product suppliers, clothing boutiques featuring inexpensive textiles and streetwear. The new bar publicly cultivates a close relationship with the cops who patrol the street and announces on its front door that it has a strict etiquette code: no baggy pants, no baseball caps, no shouting, no white t-shirts.
In these cases, proponents of gentrification aim to devalue the preferences of existing residents and to entrench a new order in which those groups are neither welcome nor permitted to exist. This they accomplish by rebranding the area, by reinvesting the space with new racialized meaning that assures investors that the area is on pace to become White. While this has an obvious market-based, economic rationale – gentrifying a neighbourhood offers opportunities for reaping enormous profits from buying low and selling high, from attracting wealthier consumers with more purchasing power, from ensuring such groups perceive the area as ‘safe’ and so on – it cannot be fully understood unless we have a theoretical framework that can account for the complicated geographical demarcations that are drawn, and constantly redrawn, between White and non-White spaces. The issue, then, is not simply which sorts of products are bought and sold in a neighbourhood but how radical – and often sudden – transformations in the cultural and commercial life of a district can result in the devaluation or outright loss of membership and a sense of belonging on the part of long-standing residents. This is all the more nefarious when the transformation is framed in neocolonial terms whereby the presence of people of colour – and businesses and institutions associated with them – is a problem, an indication of ‘blight’, that is to be solved by radical demographic shifts and a reimagining of the space in terms of meanings associated with Whiteness.
Forced displacement
I would like to focus on one further dimension of gentrification with an eye to show how the neocolonial dynamics I have been highlighting are at work: the large-scale displacement of an existing community of people. The two dimensions we have just examined, policing and cultural marginalization, are often features of the early and middle stages of gentrification – large-scale displacement, on the other hand, is among the end results once the process is completed. It must be said at the outset that displacement is standardly regarded as a prima facie wrong. Indeed, as Michael Walzer reminds us, ‘to uproot a community, to require large-scale migration, to deprive people of homes they have lived in for many years; these are political acts, and acts of a rather extreme sort’. 41 This is not to say that such uprooting could never be justified, but it does underscore the fact that large-scale displacement is an extreme measure which, other things equal, should be viewed as a deeply coercive and troubling form of injustice. Indeed, as we will see in what follows, I will suggest that the racialization of space is part of what, to paraphrase Zack, often prevents such acts of removal from being recognized for the crimes they are.
At the very end of Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character – a poor Irish immigrant – supplies voice-over narration for a time-lapse sequence in which we get a birds-eye view of Manhattan as it rapidly changes from the 1800s through to the present. Just before the high-rise buildings of contemporary Manhattan appear on screen, DiCaprio’s character remarks that ‘for the rest of time…it will be like no one knew we was ever here’. We need not deny that the film’s historical accuracy is flimsy, at best, to find this statement both haunting and prescient. It captures something important about the contemporary experience of having built a life, rituals, traditions and community under difficult conditions, only to see it all swept away – as if it never existed in the first place – by wealthier, more powerful forces looking only to advance their own interests. When this happens, something of value is usually lost. What is especially troubling, however, is that this loss is rarely acknowledged at all – on the contrary, it is more common to hear politicians, real estate agents and those in the media laud the outcome as a triumph. 42
When triumph is claimed, the underlying assumption is that nothing of value has been lost because the space in question, pre-gentrification, was not one in which genuine value could have been produced in the first place. This conclusion will, of course, seem especially obvious to many once there is already in place a racialized urban geography with the specific moral and epistemic dimensions analysed by Mills. In this context, the actual loss of value is easily erased by the presumption that the space in question was either barren wasteland or thoroughly saturated with criminality, indolence, stagnation and vice. This mode of racializing of space rules out, a priori, the possibility of any genuine value or knowledge being produced prior to the arrival of ‘urban pioneers’. Perhaps stronger still, these racialized metaphors also give those who accept them reason to celebrate gentrification as a positive good rather than an injustice in need of remedy.
Those who favour gentrification used to call the process one of ‘urban renewal’ – but today the preferred language is that of ‘regeneration’ or ‘revitalization’, as if the district in question were lifeless and festering before new investors swooped in. To be fair, gentrification does often result in major improvements to the material infrastructure of a neighbourhood: potholes are filled in, subway stations rehabbed, sidewalks repaired, housing stock renovated, green space re-landscaped and so on. But that is a fact about the physical makeup of the area – it says nothing about the lives of the people who live there, their cultural practices and traditions, their personal histories. This becomes clear the moment we ask, of a gentrified neighbourhood, ‘for whom is the new situation an improvement?’ Certainly improvements to material infrastructure mean different things to those who can afford to stay and those who have been pushed out and forced to make a home elsewhere. I suspect that this conflation of material improvement with improvement tout court is a consequence of the fact that racialized geography tends to obscure what should be obvious: namely that there are already human beings living their lives in the spaces that get pegged as barren, dangerous, wasteland.
Then there is the related error whereby proponents of gentrification make it sound as if dispossession and material improvements are the same thing – or, worse, that improvements can only come at the cost of displacement. This, of course, is not lost on those vulnerable to displacement, as I have argued elsewhere – they are well aware that they are in a paradoxical situation in which ‘too many’ improvements to their neighbourhood could mean they can no longer afford to stay. A biting headline from a satire piece in the Onion makes the point in an arresting way: ‘Neighborhood Starting to Get Too Safe for Family to Afford’. This predicament illustrates what Marilyn Frye describes as the ‘double bind’ of those who suffer oppression: ‘options are reduced to very few, and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation’.
While it is certainly true that there is a serious cost for the communities that get marginalized and forced out – it is also the case that cities as a whole typically suffer as well. To say otherwise is to deny that there is any universality or objective value in what communities of colour cultivate culturally in urban spaces. It is to say that it has nothing to offer the city more generally. That is not simply demonstrably false; it is, in fact, a pernicious and central conceit of White supremacist ideology. 43 The injustice here, as above, is both intimately connected to race and gentrification: here is a case where the much-vaunted process of ‘revitalization’ further entrenches racial subordination and erodes the basis for equal citizenship.
Conclusion: What is to be done?
If the arguments presented above are sound, we have cause to radically rethink the way that normative debates about urban development and housing have been framed. Indeed, the very terms on which the issues are being discussed must be rethought. As sociologist David Madden has urged, ‘this will require abandoning a number of pervasive myths which have helped to legitimize inequality and contribute to gentrification’s colonization of the urbanist imagination’.
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As he puts it: The leading myth is that the only possibilities for neighborhoods are gentrification or urban decay. Well-meaning liberals sometimes think cities face a choice between the bad days of the past and a gentrified future. Urban theorists invoke this same theme with the idea of the city as a ceaselessly changing organism that can either gentrify or stagnate. But these are all deeply misleading arguments, because they offer a false choice. No serious critic of gentrification wants to maintain the status quo. Instead of either gentrification or decay, cities could push for more equal distribution of resources and more democratic decision-making.
Making the concern for democratic decision-making central also sparks discussions about the institutional background conditions necessary for genuine democracy to be actualized. We are immediately forced, for example, to grapple with the way in which certain forms of policing – stop and frisk, for example – devalue the citizenship and political standing of groups that ought to be full members of the city in good standing, with all of the rights that entails. So, too, are we pushed to look for transitional reforms that stem the tide of undemocratic forces – such as the involuntary mass displacement of entire communities – through measures such as rent control and tax abatements for working-class homeowners. Indeed, this focus on democratic decision-making sets us against all social forces that throw up obstacles to the kind of egalitarian political relationships real democracy requires: income and wealth inequality, workplace power asymmetries, political disenfranchisement of immigrants without citizenship papers and so forth.
There is plenty more to say about the question of what should be done, but to succeed in addressing such practical matters we must first clarify the basic normative terrain on which such questions are posed. It is my hope that the arguments advanced above have helped to clarify this terrain, the better to grasp the real problems facing our cities in the here and now.
