Allure in the uninhabitable: on affect,space,and Blackness in gentrifying Philadelphia

Affect, Gentrification, and Blackness

This article draws on affect theory as articulated by Ahmed and other theorists who view emotion and affect interchangeably. By theorizing how history shapes meaning in the present, affect theory offers a lens through which to understand how we imbue people, places, and things with meaning. Ahmed theorizes how affects circulate and attach meaning, shape, and resonance to bodies and objects. ¹¹ Ahmed rejects conceptions of affect as distinct from emotion and refers to emotion and affect interchangeably as both existing across different levels of signification informed by history. She contends that bodies and objects do not inherently contain meaning or resonance and that affects ‘create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds’. ¹² Ahmed’s theorization of affective economies offers a frame through which to understand the link between affect and history, stating, ‘the movement between signs does not have its origin in the psyche but is a trace of how histories remain alive in the present’. ¹³ Affects slide across and stick to objects, creating associations, feelings, sensations, and linking histories. ‘In such affective economies, emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments’. ¹⁴ As I highlight in what follows, antiblackness is a powerful ongoing history that sticks to and creates bodies, spaces, and objects, racializing them and imbuing them with negative associations. These emotions and affect produce meaning and shape our interactions with and perceptions of the material world.

Although few practitioners of affect theory have engaged with ontological Blackness, I argue that an engagement with both ontological Blackness and affect theory is possible and generative, particularly when applied to space, urban geography, and gentrification. Alexander Weheliye, in his consideration of race as foundational to Man, the liberal subject, advances Black feminist interrogations of the human as critical to humanist and post-humanist inquiry. ¹⁵ Relatedly, Tyrone Palmer advances that while some affect scholars have similarly centered affect as a critical component of post-human relationality, few texts engaging with affect and race attend to the particularities of ontological Blackness. While the body of affect theory that both Palmer and I engage rejects notions of a universal human experience, Palmer posits that these challenges to humanism interpret racialization broadly while neglecting to consider Blackness as an ontological position. ¹⁶ Although I echo Palmer’s assessment of affect theory as lacking consideration of ontological Blackness, I argue that Ahmed’s framing of affective economies is reconcilable with Black feminist interrogations of the human. Ahmed asserts that affects are generative in their ability to not only stick to but also ‘create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds’. ¹⁷ I link this framing of affect to a consideration of antiblackness as a historically situated schema that renders worlds and bodies.

While this article primarily engages with the circulation of affects through space and objects, Black feminist analyses of antiblackness as rendering and de-rendering the Black body inform my analysis of physical space. Hortense Spillers’ theorization of the flesh demonstrates how violence perpetrated during the transatlantic slave trade un-gendered and dehumanized enslaved African women’s bodies, marking them as flesh. She contends that before the body, there is the flesh, ‘that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography’. ¹⁸ Spillers conceptualizes the violence of chattel slavery as altering the boundaries of material bodies. Affect theory offers a reading of the mechanism by which this legacy of antiblackness shapes racialized meaning, bodies, and space in the present. Ahmed’s analysis of affects as circulating across history and time elucidates the process by which the violence borne from colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade contemporarily sticks to and renders bodies – marking some as flesh and abject of humanity. These circulating affects link Blackness with fungibility and decay, and whiteness with life, virility, and capacity. ¹⁹ This legacy of antiblackness and white supremacy loom in the present and provoke associations that animate life and make meaning through ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’. ²⁰

I engage with affect theory to interpret the process by which antiblackness coheres public sentiments on gentrification. Engagement with emotionality and antiblackness uncovers the robust role disgust and fear play in motivating the confinement of Black people and Black space. ²¹ As with other affect centered analyses of gentrification, this attention to the emotional implications of gentrification enriches rather than replaces an engagement with political economy. ²² Existing works have found that gentrification provokes feelings of loss, turmoil, and displacement for original residents. ²³ On the other hand, incoming gentry are often found to express a dialectical fear and fascination for gentrifying neighborhoods and their original inhabitants. ²⁴ The histories, look, sounds, and smells of a space that prompt these varied emotional responses are laden with racialized meaning. ²⁵ For example, white gentrifiers often experience pleasure from the consumption of Blackness as an esthetic good despite gentrification’s active displacement of Black people. ²⁶ I link such emotions to the legacies of antiblack place-based violence that shape Philadelphia and similarly situated cities.

In the section that follows, I employ the afforested merging of affect theory and Black feminist interrogations of the human to examine the allure provoked by Le Bok fin. I advance that the marketability and affective power of this space are inseverable from the racial capitalism that contributed to the closing and decline of Bok High School. The subsequent section explores the community uproar provoked by a project to develop Philadelphia’s 52nd St. corridor. The suspicion of longtime 52nd St. residents and broader public reaction to this project reveal how affects circulate to tie those considered lesser and less than human to the uninhabitable. I then discuss how Black community members affectively engage with the 52nd St. corridor. I note that these engagements transcend antiblack logics and reflect alternate modes of place-making and resistance.

Allure

Edward Bok Vocational school was funded by FDR’s Public Works Administration and built in South-Philadelphia in 1938 to prepare Philadelphia youth to enter the workforce. The school taught vocations such as bricklaying, machine building, tailoring, and cosmetology to the many students in the surrounding Italian American neighborhood. By the 1950s, Bok functioned as a charter school with a more than seventy percent Black student body primarily made up of students who commuted from North and West Philadelphia. Although Bok school offered an attractive vocational curriculum, most white nearby residents instead sent their children to the predominantly white school half a mile up the road. This racial mismatch between Bok school and the surrounding neighborhood stirred persistent tension in the surrounding area. These tensions came to a head in 1968 when white neighborhood members attacked Black Bok students who had staged a sit-in to protest the regular harassment they experienced from white neighborhood residents and police. ²⁷ Notwithstanding these persistent tensions, Edward Bok Vocational Highschool continued to enroll majority Black students until its closing in 2013.

Despite community efforts to preserve Edward Bok Vocational high school, the school’s former building has been repurposed into a commercial space. School closures such as those that enabled the conversion of Edward Bok Vocational High School into Le Bok fin are a part of a broader wave of school turnaround policies that employ market-based logics to public education. ²⁸ By obfuscating the place-based racial inequality embedded within urban public school systems, these policies routinely disregard schools’ function as community centers and fail to adequately address the public disinvestment that produces the conditions leveraged to justify school closure. ²⁹ Such closures are often met with substantial community pushback. ³⁰ In Philadelphia, local organizations such as the Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools, Philadelphia Student Union, and Youth United For Change contested neoliberal justifications for school closure and privatization with claims based in the value of public schools as community places. ³¹ Notwithstanding these efforts, Bok is now a popular commercial space even amidst controversy and pushback from local advocates. Philadelphia Magazine’s coverage of Le Bok fin and the surrounding controversy leads with the headline ‘On the bleeding edge of Center City, young, privileged, and plugged-in New Philadelphians have grown tired of apologizing for their presence’ and describes Le Bok fin as a ‘voyeuristic adventure with unrivaled selfie settings: the dusty lockers, the old gymnasium, the “Do Not Drink From Sinks” signs in the bathrooms’. ³² What attracts middle-class patrons to Le Bok fin over other spaces in Philadelphia? What do we make of the voyeurism Le Bok fin patrons experience while sipping artisan cocktails?

I contend that the affective resonance of Le Bok fin’s symbolic nods to urban blight and danger are no less racialized than the impact of neoliberal school closure and urban renewal policies in Philadelphia. This is not to suggest that all those who live in blighted neighborhoods are Black or that all those who gentrify these neighborhoods are white. Rather, in cities like Philadelphia, where public disinvestment, redlining, and gentrification are historically inextricable from antiblackness, classed and raced orientations toward space too become tangled. Through the stickiness of association, class borrows emotional resonance from Blackness, thereby enhancing the contradictions and allure of Le Bok fin. The clash between the esthetics of old and new, dirty and clean, rich and poor, Black and white, animate patrons’ experiences of Le Bok fin. Although not universally enjoyable, many patrons are drawn in by this incongruity and view it as an asset to the space.

The incongruity of Le Bok fin contributes to the allure and pleasure many patrons derive from being in the space. The conflict between the space’s function as an artisan cocktail bar and hints at the buildings’ less glossy past thrills patrons. One Yelp reviewer of Le Bok fin describes the pleasure derived from navigating through Le Bok fin:

Five stars for the view and the experience- walking up to an abandoned school, signing a waiver due to the condition of the building, getting into the elevator which you hope you do not get stuck in, and then when you get to the top, you get an awesome view of the Philly skyline. It’s kinda fun to watch people walk off the elevator and then see their face when they walk in. ³³

This Yelp reviewer notes the safety waiver, shoddy elevator, and overall poor condition of the building as exciting, distinct, and delightful. This space is unique from other bars that embody less contradiction. Visitors do not expect to find beauty, excitement, and life in a space that, through a lens of racial capitalism, should be decaying or dead. Although five-star reviewers of Le Bok fin regularly describe the food and drinks served as overpriced and unexceptional, Le Bok fin provokes feelings of amazement and wonder for its target audience through a space concept that would not be possible without the inequities that lead to Bok High School’s closure.

Racialized assumptions about urban blight and danger color the allure of Le Bok fin. This is not to suggest that the racial implications of these reviews are more important than those more explicitly related to class; rather, that poverty and Blackness provoke similar associations that stick to space and slide into one another, even when this slippage is not fully concordant with the particular history of a space. For example, patrons express racialized sentiments about Le Bok fin that do not reflect the building’s location in a historically working-class Italian neighborhood.

Bok’s location in a predominantly white gentrified neighborhood that has long been predominantly white does not preclude patrons from deriving racialized pleasure from the space. While critics of Bok explicitly note the racialized connotations of Bok Building’s conversion, positive reviewers discuss the pleasure they experience in Le Bok fin using implicitly racialized language. One reviewer expresses his fascination with Bok using racially coded language:

OK, I’m not just talkin’ any abandoned school. I’m pretty sure that would be trespassing, some open container violation, and third-degree hoodrattery. I’m talkin’ ‘bout Le Bok fin, the repurposed, 21st-century speakeasy-esque, rooftop oasis in South Philly. Yes, I know that combination sounds impossible, but I promise you it’s real. ³⁴

This reviewer describes Bok as an oasis distinct from what otherwise would be a location for breaking the law and ‘hoodrattery’. Notably, the author only utilizes syntax to signal African American vernacular English (bout, talkin) in this section of the review wherein they comment on Bok’s history as an abandoned school. The author utilizes the word ‘hoodratery’, a racially coded term that evokes the activities of Black and Brown youth living in poor, segregated neighborhoods, who are often pejoratively referred to as ‘hoodrats’. While Edward Bok high school once taught vocational skills to students hailing from such neighborhoods, the suggestion that an abandoned school belongs in such an area underscores how economic blight, poverty, Blackness, and danger stick to Bok. Affects circulate through the space, drawing on broader cultural narratives about America’s urban ghettos, which tie Blackness to Bok. Bok’s location in an increasingly middle-class predominantly white neighborhood does not prohibit this racialization. Bok’s legacy as a formerly underfunded high school for Black and Brown youth endures and ultimately contributes to the building’s modern, edgy esthetic.

Those who report positive experiences at Le Bok fin specifically note how symbols of economic blight enhance the space’s otherwise hip, bourgeoise esthetic. Gentrified and gentrifying urban spaces like Bok building are not completely remodeled or refurbished and seduce newcomers by juxtaposing the new with the old, poverty with abundance, rich with poor, white with Black, and thereby life with death. Although not all patrons associate this circulation of affects with pleasure, the incongruities of the space’s past and present are palpable to patrons at all familiar with urban blight in the United States. One reviewer writes, ‘Le Bok fin gives you the chance to be the rebel you’ve always dreamed of being!’ ³⁵ Feelings of danger associated with the building’s past, made visible through strategically preserved elements such as water fountains and warning signs, circulate through the space. The juxtaposition between the building’s still visible past and artisan cocktail menus produces a tantalizing pleasure that is discrete from that associated with spaces that are uniformly presented as safe, white, and middle-class. This allure is not present within all gentrified spaces, but in the case of Le Bok fin or other buildings whose curators strategically draw on the iconography of urban blight, the juxtaposition between the space’s disparate past and present is palpable. These incongruities, ultimately contribute to the marketability of the space.

Due to the legacies of racial segregation in the United States, the pleasure elicited by Le Bok fins’ redemption from a failing minority-serving school to an artisan cocktail bar is laden with racialized meaning. Existing works have charted the pleasure that is derived from knowing and exerting power over the Black body. ³⁶ The affects that circulate to produce such a desire through the knowing and subjugation of Black bodies also work to elicit allure in Le Bok fin and other gentrified Black spaces. This pleasure exists because of rather than despite the degradation of Blackness. Proximity to and consumption of the other produces a delight that reaffirms one’s own whiteness and or relation to power. ³⁷ Brandi Summers, in her analyses of gentrification in Washington DC, uncovers how commodified esthetics of Blackness and grit draw white middle-class gentry to Black urban space. She documents how esthetics of Blackness circulate through space even without the presence of Black people, writing, ‘with the displacement of longtime Black residents, gentrifiers occupy urban spaces to reap the benefits of a constructed urban life that involves selective reflections of nostalgia, cosmetic grit, and lifestyle amenities, all the while overlooking those who were displaced’. ³⁸ Similarly, the commodification of Bok’s former status as an underfunded predominantly Black urban school contributes to this esthetic and patron’s enjoyment of the space.

Although I have explicitly focused on the allure some patrons associate with Le Bok fin in this section, the bar has also received considerable criticism. Critics frequently call attention to the class and racial makeup of the bar’s attendees, describing them as primarily white and irreflective of neither the city’s nor the school’s former population. They describe Bok’s customers as ‘privileged, lefty urbanists’ ³⁹ and ‘young, white people–the sort who build start-ups and attend expensive, pointless pop-ups’. ⁴⁰ One of the most widely circulated articles against the bar, written by a Philadelphia public school teacher, describes the bar as ‘Columbusing’ the neighborhood. ⁴¹ For many, the histories of underfunded public schools and legacies of de facto school segregation that stick to Bok building do not provoke pleasure. A former Philadelphia public school teacher writes, ‘it was hard to enjoy my craft beer after signing a waiver for my safety keeping in mind two years ago kids were sent here and expected to learn!’ ⁴² Another reviewer writes, ‘I quickly left feeling completely skeeved out by the rich whiteys who had driven into the neighborhood to gawk at our misfortune’. ⁴³ This reviewer describes the pleasure some derive from the space as a cruel celebration of the inequities borne by the Black and working-class student body that Bok once served. In the next section, I explore these themes of resentment and suspicion as expressed by critics of a revitalization project elsewhere in Philadelphia.

52nd St. Project

West of Bok, the debate over plans for an area on 52nd St. stirs controversy with racial overtones. The intersection between 52nd and Market St. is in West Philadelphia, one of the city’s most racially segregated areas. ⁴⁴ Local newspaper articles about 52nd St. frame this area as uninhabitable, focusing on themes commonplace in public discourse about concentrated poverty – high unemployment rates, white flight, gun violence, drug activity, and urban blight. The intersection between Market and 52nd St. was once home to many more thriving businesses, but since population decline and a disruptive metro-line construction project in the early 2000s, many consider this area to be past its heyday. In April of 2007, the Philadelphia Daily newspaper referred to the intersection between 52nd and Market St. as the most dangerous corner in the city. ⁴⁵ Long-term residents have seen this block and surrounding neighborhood change from a predominantly middle-class Black neighborhood with white-owned shops, into one known as the city’s most dangerous with markers of the informal economy, and then again to a place that is somewhere in-between these two poles with scattered subsections representing both scenes. Today, many functioning businesses operate on 52nd St., even next to abandoned storefronts. Although there has been an increase in the number of businesses, particularly Black-owned businesses, and a decrease in the overall unemployment rate since the early 2000s, the area continues to report unemployment and vacant structure rates above the city average. ⁴⁶

In February 2020, a Philly Inquirer reporter covered a meeting between neighborhood community members and a new city-contracted urban designer entitled, ‘In a plan for a safer, vibrant 52nd St. worried West Philly neighbors see gentrification looming’. This article details the cities’ proposals to incentivize economic development on the block and community members’ reactions, juxtaposing the city’s plan to renew the 52nd and Market St. area with community ambivalence. In the following section, I elaborate on the construct of habitability and use this frame to analyze the sentiments expressed by those featured in this article and its associated comments. Through an analysis of this public forum, I explore how long-term residents of gentrifiable areas relate to their environments despite their supposed uninhabitability and how affects circulate between commercially desolated areas and those who call them home. Then, I explore how residents’ utilization of the corridor contests renderings of 52nd St. as uninhabitable, thereby illuminating affective engagements with space beyond the imposition of antiblackness.

Habitability

Beyond body and flesh, Black feminist theorists have also attended to how affects pull histories through time and imbue space with racialized meaning. Sylvia Wynter offers a compelling analysis of the relationship between colonial understandings of man, race, and geography. European colonizers and explorers considered the regions they regarded as uninhabitable to be inhabited only by those considered lesser and less than human. ⁴⁷ Katherine McKittrick expands on this argument, charting how these categories of the uninhabitable and habitable are traceable today; McKittrick writes, ‘those who have lived outside what is considered normal and those who continue to inhabit the uninhabitable are so perversely outside the Western bourgeois conception of what it means to be human that their geographies are rendered—or come to be—inhuman, dead, and dying’. ⁴⁸ Ghettos, slums, the global south, etc., are all spaces thought by some to be uninhabitable, dangerous, dying, or dead and filled with those who are also tied to this meaning.

Gentrification is often thought to improve neighborhoods by making them better fit for human life. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, the increased ‘habitability’ of majority Black gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods does not necessarily make these neighborhoods more livable for low-income Black residents and former residents. For example, gentrification has been found to increase the number of proactive police arrests in newly gentrifying neighborhoods, disproportionally exposing Black and Latine people to more police harassment on the street. ⁴⁹ Consideration of the neighborhood ‘improvements’ brought on by gentrification as inextricable from the harm and displacement borne to longtime residents complicates commonplace notions of what makes a neighborhood appealing, safe, and habitable. ⁵⁰

Attention to antiblackness as an affect circulating through and rendering space calls for a critical examination of whose lives are thought to benefit from gentrification. As a component of gentrification, local governments and other entities proliferate life into formerly disinvested areas through projects such as installing surveillance devices, increasing regulation of public space, creating bike lanes, and improving trash clean-up services. This expansion of services reflects an expansion of services aimed at the proliferation of life for some and frequently greater exposure to death for others. Achille Mbembe’s discussion of necropolitics contends that modern power exposes particular individuals and populations to death and social death as a primary function. ⁵¹ Jasbir Puar expands on Mbembe’s necropolitics, charting how sexuality, race, life, and death motivate the symbiotic relationship between state powers’ simultaneous proliferation of life and death. ⁵² These tensions actuate the proliferation of life for gentrifiers that simultaneously exposes those deemed worthy of uninhabitable space to disinvestment, containment, displacement, and death.

Those who understand gentrification as primarily a reinvigorating infusion of resources and capital are at odds with those who contest the promises of gentrification. This conflict is not unique to the residents of 52nd St. In her analysis of the gentrification of the Washington D.C. H-St. Corridor, Summers finds that new middle-class, white residents’ desire for lifestyle amenities and esthetic changes such as hip storefronts, bike lanes, and dog parks often clash with long-term residents’ prioritization of access to economic and social opportunities. ⁵³ In the most polarized cases, onlookers and newcomers lament that long-term residents of gentrifying neighborhoods are incapable or unwilling to improve their communities – accordingly, the reader comments on the local newspaper article that details 52nd. St. residents’ reactions to the city’s plans disparage the perceived ungratefulness and failings of the area’s long-term residents. One commenter writes, ‘Why bother? They will just trash it anyway’. Another commenter describes residents of the corridor as incapable of sustaining and occupying habitable space:

The current residents prefer their crappy, run-down, crime infested neighborhood over the possibility of improvement? Do I have that right? I guess when educated, motivated people gentrify (read: clean up and improve) a neighborhood, it makes the woe is me whining of the long-term residents (who trashed it in the first place) look that much more pathetic. ⁵⁴

Responses such as those noted above illuminate how those seen as lesser or less than human are tied to the uninhabitable. This portrayal of long-term residents as ungrateful or undeserving requires a negation of the history of redlining, underfunded social services, and discrimination that have shaped life on 52nd St. and beyond.

Binary frameworks of the human/nonhuman and the habitable/uninhabitable motivate the racialization of peoples and the space that they occupy. The circulation of affects that stick to the urban ghetto and those who reside there reflects this process. Those who come to dwell in the uninhabitable are otherwise marginalized, and the areas in which they reside face subsequent disinvestment. Simultaneously, those who dwell in the uninhabitable are rendered less than human by virtue of their association with uninhabitable space. Black people were sequestered to the 52nd St. area because they were thought to be inferior by broader society; parallelly, those sequestered to the 52nd St. area are thought inferior due to their proximity to 52nd St. Thus, residents who remain or seek to remain in formerly underfunded neighborhoods are materially and affectively positioned as incapable or undeserving of maintaining and residing in habitable spaces.

The logics of habitability that often animate public sentiments on gentrification cannot attend to the place-making and emotions forged by those regularly violated by necropolitical power. The increase in amenities and commercial viability that accompany gentrification is often thought to make neighborhoods more habitable; however, residents of 52nd St. and the surrounding area express anxiety over the neighborhood changes outlined in the city’s urban renewal plans. One resident remarks, ‘that’s what gentrification means to me. . . move the Black folks out, and get the new people to move in’. ⁵⁵ A neighborhood business owner states his hesitation about the future change, ‘It’s tricky when you’re talking about bringing [in] new businesses. You don’t want people to think they’re being priced out of their neighborhood with a $5 cup of coffee’. ⁵⁶ Residents are suspicious of neighborhood improvements not necessarily because they involve change but because residents sense that they will not be the ones to reap the benefits of this change. Another area resident laments, ‘They salivate over our homes. . .They just want to use our property and they don’t want to help make our community better’. ⁵⁷ Although these projects are thought to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood, residents reject the idea that this improvement of life is for them. Histories of mistreatment and neglect from the state and social service organizations stick to propositions for bike lanes and newly widened sidewalks. Residents flag the city’s new heightened interest as an impending threat.

Long-term residents’ suspicion and ambivalence toward revitalization projects suggest valuing life and space beyond commercial viability. The aforementioned gun violence rates, drug activity, and hyper-policing situate 52nd St. within McKittrick’s uninhabitable. Although many long-term residents acknowledge the condition of the 52nd St. area, they also fear that removing these conditions will also result in the removal of all they find familiar and vibrant within the space. Regardless of broader conceptions about 52nd St., long-term residents do not readily accept all plans proposed by the city as positive or necessary. In reference to the meeting between community members and an urban city planner, one resident criticizes the new improvements proposed for the neighborhood, stating that ‘it just seems that when white people decide to come back to a certain neighborhood, they want it a certain way’. ⁵⁸ Residents maintain that the way they live and make meaning on 52nd St. is valid beyond commercial viability and claim their humanity through affectively engaging with space.

Habeas viscus and Black life

Just as legacies of antiblackness circulate through emotional environments to shape affective engagement with gentrifying space, histories of Black resistance provoke powerful attachments and associations. These alternative valuations of space transcend habitability and shape community members’ affective engagement with space. The racialization of Black space cannot be fully understood without an analysis of the people who negotiate racial violence in their everyday lives. ⁵⁹ The affective attachments they forge through Black place-making contest the circulation of fear and disgust that marks Black urban neighborhoods. This is not to suggest that Black people do not reproduce or accept antiblackness that circulates through the broader affective environment, but that the legacy of antiblackness does not have the last word. In the section that follows, I demonstrate that despite dominant renderings of the 52nd St. corridor as uninhabitable, individuals and communities form attachments to this space based in resistance, healing, mundanity, and play.

Those who are linked to the uninhabitable space make meaning and relate to place in ways that challenge antiblack logics of habitability and humanity. Weheliye’s theorization of habeas viscus seeks to fully account for the lives and experiences of those whom the state exploits to proliferate life elsewhere. Habeas viscus questions the classifying category of human, underscoring the inability of racialized and gendered violence to fully encapsulate, destroy, radicalize, or define the oppressed. ⁶⁰ Affects that circulate to mark space uninhabitable are socially resonant but do not preclude habeas viscus or the existence of Black life and place-making. Black place-making refers to how Black people interact with ‘otherwise oppressive geographies of a city to provide sites of play, pleasure, celebration, and politics’. ⁶¹ As written by Margaret Ramírez, ‘the borderlands of the gentrifying city produce ambivalence, violence, and unrest, yet the precarity of this space also demands creative modes of survival and resistance’. ⁶² To recognize the liberatory power harnessed in such places, we must put aside the ‘normative presumption that territory and liberation are at once alienable and exclusive’. ⁶³

The activism and resistance that occurs along the corridor contends with antiblack renderings of the 52nd St. corridor as uninhabitable and thereby unproductive space. Malcolm X Park, a park located along the 52nd St. corridor, exemplifies how one space can be deeply impacted by place-based racial violence, all while serving as a grounds for organized struggle, intentional recharge, and everyday recreation. During the spring of 2020, hundreds of organizers marched down 52nd St. to protest unarmed police killings. Philadelphia police responded to these protests by tear-gassing entire residential blocks along the 52nd St. corridor. One year later, protesters and community members gather at Malcolm X Park in remembrance of the Philadelphia Police Department’s use of teargas, 2020 murder of Walter Wallace Jr, and brutal 1985 bombing of the Black liberation group MOVE, which destroyed more than 50 homes and resulted in the death of eleven people, including five children. ⁶⁴ Demonstrators’ linking of these events more than thirty years after the MOVE bombing reflects just one way that resistance along the corridor today is shaped by the longstanding legacy of organizing for Black Power in Philadelphia. The park, located less than 1.5 miles away from the aforestated incidents, is a nexus of community action on the corridor. Demonstrations such as the gathering on May 31st, 2021, are common to the grassy park that spans 6 acres between 51st and Pine and 52nd and Larchwood. The Philadelphia Student Union, a leadership development organization that organizes Philadelphia youth against school closures and educational inequity, buttresses the parks’ southern boundary. Hakims Bookstore, Philadelphia’s oldest Black-owned bookstore, which specializes in African American history and Black political education, is located on 52nd St., just a 5-minute walk from the park’s northern boundary. Readings of the 52nd St. corridor as solely marked by racialized violence rather than these testaments to Black life and place-making negates the corridor’s function as an important site of resistance.

Antiblackness circulates through affective economies, marking Malcolm X Park as placeless, desolate, and fungible. Nevertheless, local activists, residents, and advocates for Black life identify this park as a place to recharge and recuperate. The discordance between the park’s function as a site of racial violence and respite exemplifies the dynamic tension between antiblackness and a Black sense of place. ⁶⁵ Spirits Up, a yoga and meditation group that convenes in Malcolm X Park, calls for Black people to seek solace, rest, and heal in a space along the corridor. The group’s mission statement reads, ‘the Black community and allies must protect themselves with healing tools and have a safe space to soothe their mind, bodies and souls so the fight can continue constructively, productively and to reduce the trauma suffered by activists and freedom fighters throughout time’. ⁶⁶ Their engagements with the park affirm the community’s attachment to Black space. Sudan Green, a local Philadelphian, and founder of Spirits Up states, ‘My intention was only to provide a space of healing. I made it for the protesters because I am a protester. I was standing right here watching people get beat. Watching people get maced. I needed the healing’. ⁶⁷ Spirits Up utilizes this park as one of many potential safe spaces where recharge, meditation, healing, and relief are possible and already occurring. This function is not precluded by the brutality experienced by protestors who convened in the park.

The park and the corridor serve as sites where Black people live full human lives characterized by healing and resistance as well as mundanity and recreation. While Malcolm X Park serves as a site for organized healing efforts and political resistance, much more often, Malcolm X Park is a place where Black residents of the 52nd St. corridor socialize, listen to music, barbeque, and play. In centering habeas viscus and Black place-making, we can understand the 52nd St. corridor as a place where people have experienced and resisted public disinvestment but, above all, a place that many Black people call home. The mundanity and normalcy of life in the 52nd corridor are not valued by those who only seek to ‘improve’ the neighborhood and perceive it solely through the lens of habitability.

Conclusion

The theorization of affects as circulating through and across people, bodies, places, and things elucidates the process through which we draw on history and larger ideologies to make meaning in the everyday. In the case of gentrification, the affects commonly associated with a neighborhood fluctuate as the neighborhood’s cityscape, demographics, and character are warped by capital investment. My engagement with affect theory and Black feminist interrogations of the human demonstrates that these shifts in affect are no less severable from antiblackness than the policies that motivate such neighborhood changes. Associations such as economic development/life, Blackness/death, and the uninhabitable/nonhuman elicit emotional responses by sliding into one another and sticking to gentrifying space. Although gentrification exists in many forms, in Philadelphia and similarly situated American cities, instances of gentrification interact with longstanding histories of antiblack spatial inequality. The juxtaposition of these histories of urban blight and disinvestment with those related to the capital investment brought on by gentrification makes meaning in gentrifying spaces. At Le Bok fin, this juxtaposition interacts with class inequality to provoke a racialized allure that contributes to the overall marketability of the space.

Affects circulate between those considered lesser and less than human and uninhabitable geographies. This circulation incites hegemonic renderings of blighted Black spaces and those who call them home. Antiblackness motivates associations of the 52nd St. corridor and those who reside there with fear, danger, and disgust. These associations color urban renewal plans and shape public sentiments on those linked to uninhabitable space. Although devastating and powerful, these affects do not circulate uncontested. The logics of habitability do not capture all the ways individuals and communities evaluate and forge attachments to space. Just as the legacy of antiblackness and its resulting impacts engender harmful associations and conditions, alternate valuations of humanity and life motivate place-making and resistance. Attention to even the most mundane subversion of habitability affirms that the histories and actions of those who contend with racial violence too hold affective resonance. These affects circulate even as oppressive forces work to undermine their validity. Hence, many were outraged by Le Bok Fin’s nods to urban blight, and every day, 52nd St. corridor residents draw on associations shaped by resistance to rather than acceptance of antiblackness and place-based racial violence. Aims to understand and address the affects that circulate and stick to gentrifying spaces in Philadelphia and other areas that have been deeply structured by antiblack spatial discrimination must attend to these alternate associations.