Ttesting

by Abdelbaseer Mohamed

Greater Cairo, which includes the city of Giza, is spatially fragmented and heavily oriented toward private transit. Low-income residents are disproportionately isolated from essential infrastructure, services and job opportunities. Segregation is especially acute on Gezirat Al Warraq and Gezirat Al Dahab, large islands several kilometers from central Cairo. Efforts to solve this problem have encountered resistance from proponents of sustainable development.


Dahab Island. Image source: Fouad GM


Warraq Island. Image source: Ester Meerman

The islands’ fertile land and rare bird species coexist with informal settlements, where thousands of people have lived since the construction of Aswan Low Dam in 1902. Links to the mainland are starkly insufficient. To access Cairo and Giza on old ferries, many residents leave home before dawn and return late at night. Lack of transit infrastructure has effectively barred them from economic opportunities as well as quality healthcare, education and law enforcement.


Spatial accessibility map showing the extent to which large river islands Warraq (top) and Dahab (bottom) are isolated from the rest of Cairo and Giza. Red indicates higher transit connectivity; blue indicates lower connectivity. Image source: Abdelbaseer Mohamed

In a recent Al Kahera Walnas news feature, island dwellers expressed frustration with the lack of infrastructure and services. Sanitation and crime were especially urgent concerns. “I have to use the river’s contaminated water to wash my dishes,” said a Warraq resident. “Liver disease and kidney failure are normal.” Another woman reported, “drug trafficking and thugs are overwhelming.”

So why not build bridges linking Dahab and Warraq to the mainland? Based on a 1996 decree, these islands are “natural protectorates” that must be cleared of informal settlements. Municipal officials argue that bridges threaten biodiversity by encouraging more unplanned development. According to one local official, since the islands are natural protectorates, higher authorization is needed for the city to provide more than basic administrative services. Island residents, many of whom live in communities established by their ancestors, remain despite government neglect and exclusion from decision-making processes.

Ironically, the Cairo 2050 and Giza 2030 master plans envision high-end residential and recreational development for the islands. Planners hope to resolve chronic traffic problems by adding 15 metro lines and 1,000 streets by 2050, but these projects wouldn’t meet the needs of people now living on Warraq and Dahab. The plans focus on attracting tourists and wealthy citizens, along with eliminating informal settlements.




Plans for new development on the Nile islands. Image source: Giza 2030 Master Plan (pp. 145)

In a 2009 survey for Cairo 2050, over 60 percent of island residents voiced discontent with the development plan. One man reported to Al Kahera Walnas that “the governor of Giza doesn’t care about us.” Instead of helping to solve the problems of isolated communities, policymakers are making these problems more difficult.

Master plans without resident input are problematic, to say the least. Island dwellers should be able to reach the mainland safely and efficiently. Their present segregation contradicts visions of social justice that inspired the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

Responsible management of island ecosystems is needed to avert the harmful consequences of new development. To this end, it’s important to reject exclusivity. A more equitable approach would assure that islanders have the right to contribute meaningfully to new plans while sharing land ownership with the municipal government. Deep concern for the places where they live makes them natural partners in sustainable development.

Abdelbaseer Mohamed is a visiting scholar at American University in Washington, D.C. He recently completed a doctorate in urban design at Ain Shams University and Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

+ share

by Patrick Sykes


Source: DNA

The dust is settling on Shura City, yet not a single brick has been laid. Since this proposal for a drone-proof city emerged, its creator, Asher Kohn, has attracted the unexpected attention of architects, allies and antagonists alike. I spoke with Asher and Hiba Ali — the visual artist who created a virtual model of the city — as they developed plans for Shura's interior spaces.

The original proposal is a semi-ironic architectural response to drone warfare. It details materials and design features meant to obscure the information that a drone operator uses to identify targets — colored glass to alter skin tones, paneled roofing to cast shadows, and windows coated in QR codes to "act as guard dogs, letting the machines outside know that they are not welcome." The plan draws upon traditional architectural elements found across the Middle East and the Maghreb; badgirs (windcatchers) minimize human heat signatures, and mashrabiyas (projecting windows fronted with intricate latticework) hide Shura's several hundred residents from view.

Fortified cities, of course, are nothing new. The pentagonal walls of Palmanova and the octagonals of Neuf-Brisach are among the most prominent of many historic designs for residential war machines. Yet drone warfare necessitates a different approach. When the asymmetry between parties is so great, the targeted community is unable to simply increase defense in proportion to escalating danger. Shura City is based on the notion that creative use of space may succeed where other forms of intervention fail. Its purpose is to spur debate.

One might argue that any fortified settlement normalizes fear of the world outside. Stephen Graham and Anna Minton, for example, have written about gated communities and their propensity to instill a sense of vulnerability as much as security. Asher contends that fear of drone attacks is already present, and can only be reduced by preventing civilian casualties.

It is essential that security measures do not reduce the quality of life for city residents. "An architectural solution to perpetual defense must bring people out of a siege mentality," Hiba explains. "If the city's exterior is experienced as protective, it should not be a cage, and its interiors should be comfortable, adaptable. This also subconsciously influences how one navigates through private and communal space."

Asher emphasizes the city's open plan, which allows people to "create spaces that work for them." This would include rearranging interior walls and opening roofs. "Giving people the opportunity to make the most of the city, giving them a safe place to create their own city, that was the goal more than creating a utopian city," he says. An open plan may also bypass the authoritarian streak that infuses top-down urban design, setting this project apart from those of "planners who create places that no one actually lives in or enjoys living in." Empowering residents to organize — both politically and architecturally — is one of Shura City's most widely praised features. The word shura means "consultation" in Arabic, representing a form of direct democracy envisioned for the city.

Unlike other fortified cities, Shura isn't equipped for residents to fight back. I asked Asher how he reconciles that with the promise of empowerment. "It puts the aggressor (the human operating the drone) in a position where, knowing that there will be no retaliation, they have to still make the conscious decision to attack," he explains. The city's defensive system involves a similar principle, targeting the drone's ability to process information so that operators must pause and reconsider the potential for unintended consequences.

Given the complex imbalance of drone warfare, a fortified pacifism may be the only hope of effective resistance. From an operator's perspective, Asher concludes, "if someone is a drone target, they must present themselves as a target — 'being with your family' is putting innocence in the crosshairs of a drone, instead of just 'being with your family.' You're never allowed to not be on the battlefield. More than anything else, we're trying to make a space that is not the battlefield."

Patrick Sykes is a writer, editor and radio producer based in Istanbul.

+ share

by Cristiana Strava

London's East End needs little introduction. Though nestled between the largest financial hubs in Europe (Central London to the west and Canary Wharf to the south), it has traditionally been one of the city's least affluent areas.


Central London viewed from Clichy Estate in the East End. Image source: Will Faichney



The East End is home to places like the recently refurbished Ocean Estate in Stepney, known for many years as one of Europe's largest and most deprived housing developments. It is also home to vibrant Brick Lane and Whitechapel Road, the East London Mosque and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.





There have been many waves of migration to the East End since the 17th century — including French Huguenots, Ashkenazi Jews, Irish Catholics and Bangladeshi Muslims. The northwestern zone is now gentrifying into a habitat of hipsters, yuppies and "yummy-mummies."



Imran Jamal, an ethnographer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, has worked in the East End's Bangladeshi community for many years. He gave an unorthodox tour of the area in November 2012, which I attended and Thalia Gigerenzer recorded for CoLab Radio. The audio track is embedded below.



+ share

by Wangũi Kamonji

An innovative urban development program is activating positive change in low-income neighborhoods across Mexico City. Despite winning the World Habitat Award in 2011, the city government's Programa Comunitario de Mejoramiento Barrial (Community Program for Neighborhood Improvement, or PCMB) is surprisingly little-known outside Mexico.

Socioeconomic inequality is deeply engrained in Mexico City's spatial structure, and neighborhood wealth generally corresponds with the quality of public services. The PCMB addresses this problem by funding revitalization projects in economically depressed areas. While living in one such area, El Pedregal de Santo Domingo, I noticed the program's impact on freshly painted buildings that were formerly concrete gray.



Inspired to learn more about the PCMB, I met with economist Manuel Luis Labra Illanes, a member of the Malacate Civic Association who has been actively involved in developing the program. Our conversation is transcribed below.

Can you tell us about how the PCMB came about?

The PCMB came out of the Programa de Mejoramiento de Vivienda (Home Improvement Program, or PMV), which the Mexico City government started in 2000. The PMV helped improve people's houses through loans repayable over eight years, but it didn't address public spaces and other shared resources. So we began planning the PCMB, which launched officially in 2007.

So the main difference between the two programs is that the PMV is for homes and the PCMB is for broader neighborhood projects?

Yes, and the PMV is a credit system while the PCMB is a public benefit program.

What are the core elements of the PCMB? How does it actually work?

The guiding principle is that neighborhood residents decide what to do, how to do it and who will do the work. They administer the government funding. That's what makes the program unique.

Another essential component is that it's a competition — community groups compete for available funds. In 2015, for example, there were 677 entries and roughly 200 projects funded.



Does the amount of funding vary each year?

The city government's Social Development Secretariat (SDS), which is responsible for the program, allocates funds that vary slightly from year to year and average around 100 million pesos. We carried out a study and found that, for a program of this kind in a city like ours, the base budget should be about 300 million pesos.

How many times can a neighborhood group secure funding?

Up to five. Applicants can receive a maximum of 500,000 pesos in the first year and a million pesos after that.

How do you evaluate applications, distribute funds and prevent irregularities?

There's a program committee made up of five civil servants and five civil society members who decide which applications to fund. The most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods take precedence.

The program committee releases funds to a neighborhood representative, and that person has to be on a project committee. Local assemblies elect the members of these committees. If there are no project committees in a given neighborhood, residents have to establish them in order to receive funding. Each project has an administrative committee that monitors project spending and other implementation requirements to prevent irregularities.

What specific issues do funded projects address?

There are three main focal points: public space, infrastructure and neighborhood image. Projects can, for example, establish open squares, community gardens and needed infrastructure. They can also attend to neglected parts of the urban fabric through maintenance and beautification.



Can you share your thoughts on the program's results so far?

About 1,000 projects have been funded, covering each of the neighborhoods most in need and improving government services after decades of neglect. We're especially proud of reaching communities like Tepito, which are known for severe blight and violence.

The Legislative Assembly of Mexico City recently approved a law through which the program budget is set each year and protected against rising inflation. This law also protects against threats to the PCMB's existence under new administrations. You see, there are politicians who don't like the program because grassroots administration makes it hard to control from above.

What's in store for the PCMB in coming years?

A few things. One is a problem with the current model: we have to figure out what happens when neighborhoods reach their funding limit. This is a discussion we're currently having.

We're also discussing ways to fund larger projects — libraries, cultural centers, schools — with broader impact on neighborhood identity. This has real potential for reversing cycles of marginality. Opportunities are often closed to people from high-poverty areas, but social stigma declines with visible signs of progress. So neighborhood improvement signifies many things. We'd like to fund 30 medium-to-large projects a year through the PCMB or create a parallel program for this purpose.

Another thing I'd like to see is a process for building relationships between neighborhoods with similar issues in different cities. There are nation-to-nation links and city-to-city links but I don't know if there are neighborhood-to-neighborhood links.

Do you have any advice for people who are interested in starting a similar program?

It's important to design the program with local communities instead of trying to impose a prefabricated model. The process has to be participatory, emerging through strong relationships with neighborhood residents.

The original vision may be different from the way it develops in practice, and adaptability is key. When we began, we didn't imagine that we'd be attending to basic sanitation infrastructure, because that's the work of the central government. We were very theoretical in our conception of public space, viewing it as a kind of panacea for all the city's problems. When I visited Colonia La Cruz, part of the Gustavo A. Madero borough, I was surprised to see how residents adapted the program to their infrastructural needs.



It's really important to begin where you know people are interested — where there are community leaders and responsible participants. If you start out in a place where residents are apathetic, or where there are extreme social conflicts, the chances of failing increase exponentially. Start with a promising location, ensure the effectiveness of the program, and then you can move to more challenging situations. If not, funders will lose confidence in the project. Social programs come under a lot of fire, so it's critical to build a reputation for successful work.

Wangũi Kamonji is a recent graduate of Wellesley College who researches urban socio-environmental issues in countries worldwide, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Vietnam. She blogs about her experience at Sustainability from the Roots.

+ share

by Min Li Chan

In a radio interview with Eleanor Wachtel of Writers & Company, Gail Jones reflects upon urban experience and its centrality to her novel Five Bells. The conversation is insightful and eminently quotable, with many passages that threw new light on my old urbanist ways. Jones urges us to be aware not only of a city's physicality, but also of its intangible atmospheres:

I'm very interested in psychogeography, and the idea that we must walk around our own place with an active intelligence and a degree of radical attention to what is there. ... We ought not be the flaneur who is idly and languidly consuming the sights of the city, we must look at its shapes, at its motions, attend to its sounds, corridors between spaces, the unexpected things looming up or falling away as we turn a corner.

A painted alley in Sydney, Australia. Source: Zijun Roger Qian

Psychogeography is a balm for the jaded local, a way of revitalizing everyday urban experience. In Five Bells, Jones returns to Sydney's Circular Quay in an attempt to "defamiliarize a place that seems exhausted," one that is "eroded by tourism, evacuated of its wonder."


"Lighting of the Sails" at the Sydney Opera House near Circular Quay. Source: Dahlia Bock

As I grow accustomed to living in San Francisco, I fear getting desensitized to the city's quintessential sights and experiences. The heady discombobulation of travel and the novelty of distant places can evoke a sense of wonder that is easily overlooked in the cities we call home. Yet it's also possible to experience familiar places in new ways. In San Francisco there are events — from talks and walks to bicycle tours and treasure hunts — that delve into public art, food politics, vernacular history and other fascinating aspects of the city. This groundswell of hyperlocal resources from fellow urban dwellers helps to defamiliarize and rediscover everyday settings.


The Social Justice Mural Tour in San Francisco. Source: Thinkwalks

Jones also discusses Sydney's Demolition Books, an archival collection of "ghostly buildings that are no longer there, which you can look at and place with absolute precision where they were, where they sort of spoke from." She engages memorably with the roles of urban history in understanding and experiencing places:

There is both the vertical and the horizontal history, as it were, that we might attach ourselves to when we start to meditate on a city. ... There's the history that seems to be unfolding and moving forward, and there's the plunging down into the interiority of the place, into its lost histories.

Jones inspired me to contemplate how visual technologies might heighten the experience of historical artifacts like Sydney's Demolition Books. Imagine putting on a pair of augmented reality glasses to compare present cityscapes with detailed recreations in the same field of view. This brought to mind a recent brush with urban psychogeography in virtual reality. Outfitted with a Vive headset and handheld controllers, I suddenly found myself transported to my former neighborhood in Manhattan. Taking a few steps forward, I gazed up at skyscrapers rendered by Google Earth. Pixelated walls betrayed their virtuality, but the experience was nonetheless breathtaking. I zoomed out and looked down at the tops of buildings — feeling a bit like King Kong, perhaps — until they faded into a swath of planetary blue and green. In our near future, could virtual reality accentuate the wonders to be found in actual city streets?

+ share

by Jordi Sánchez-Cuenca

In 2007, Siddharth Varadarajan described the city of Naypyidaw (Abode of Kings) as "the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative 'colour revolution' — not by tanks and water cannons, but by geometry and cartography." Less than two years prior, this brand-new outpost became the capital of Myanmar through a process shrouded in mystery.

Based on astrological counsel, as the story goes, a convoy of 1,100 military vehicles carrying 11 battalions and 11 ministries left Yangon for Naypyidaw on November 11, 2005, at 11 a.m. General Than Shwe, leader of the junta in power at the time, justified this move as a solution to expanding government facilities without exacerbating congestion in Yangon. Information Minister Kyaw Hsan added that the government sought to place the capital in a strategically central location. Military planners rapidly developed Naypyidaw with little if any input from civil society.

Following the release of pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi from twenty years of house arrest, in 2010, a series of political reforms took effect in Myanmar. A civilian government succeeded the military regime in 2011, and Suu Kyi's party — the National League for Democracy — won 43 of 45 seats in the Lower House of Parliament a year later. It is unclear whether the former leaders, who have retained substantial influence, built the new capital in preparation for these changes.

Unlike the famous modernist plans for Brasilia and Chandigarh, Naypyidaw lacks a clearly articulated form. Its structures are idiosyncratically arranged in low-density clusters linked by giant roadways. Architectural monotony is evident from above in the shapes and colors of residential development.










Housing in Naypyidaw.

The capital's public buildings include a central parliamentary complex, an international airport and a massive pagoda. Their designs tend to feature grandiose symmetry around a central axis. Most are located far from residential areas, in keeping with the general scarcity of mixed-use development in Naypyidaw.


Uppatasanti Pagoda (Peace Pagoda), at left, is Naypyidaw's largest monument.


Rare mixed-use development around the Gems Museum.

The town of Pyinmana, about two miles from Naypyidaw, exemplifies the organic density of most settlements in Myanmar. By contrast, the new capital is a luxurious sprawling garrison. Its costly architecture and amenities underscore longstanding deprivation that still plagues the country in spite of government reforms.


The town of Pyinmana, located a few miles from Naypyidaw.





Naypyidaw does not reflect an explicit social model or policy aimed at improving the lives of Myanmar residents as a whole. Still, it is growing haphazardly with the arrival of migrants in search of employment. Such opportunities are extremely limited in other areas due to inadequate public and private investment. As a result, informal settlements will likely expand around Naypyidaw as persistently as they have around Brasilia and Chandigarh.

Myanmar's capital is oriented, above all, toward the interests of a small group of military leaders. Government reforms may eventually improve conditions for the broader populace, but a vital question remains: will current leaders allow people outside their ranks to play a meaningful role in urban planning?

Credits: Satellite images captured from Google Earth.

+ share

by Javier Arbona

Gentrification doesn't need to be something that one group inflicts on another; often it's the result of aspirations everybody shares. All over the city, a small army of the earnest toils away, patiently trying to sluice some of the elitist taint off neighborhoods as they grow richer. When you're trying to make a poor neighborhood into a nicer place to live, the prospect of turning it into a racially and economically mixed area with ­thriving stores is not a threat but a fantasy. As the cost of basic city life keeps rising, it's more important than ever to reclaim a form of urban improvement from its malignant offshoots. A nice neighborhood should be not a luxury but an urban right. – Justin Davidson, 2014

An aura of fascination suffuses all of these accounts. The adulatory tone was engendered by a group of writers who continue to build their careers on regular updates of East Village art developments. These "East Village critics" — who are, in fact, not critics but apologists — celebrate the scene with an inflated and aggressive rhetoric of "liberation," "renewal," "ecstasy." – Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, 1987

According to recent literature, the word "gentrification" appeared fifty years ago in 1964. It describes a historical shift after World War II — the unmaking and remaking of cities along new class lines, although it has previous historical precedents, of course. Scholars attribute its coinage to British sociologist Ruth Glass. Its everyday use could predate her writing and Glass herself may have used it in an unpublished draft before the 1960s.

Working on research about London, Glass wrote: "One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class — upper and lower." She then adds, "Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed."

At the initial moment of introducing this concept into the research on cities, Glass shows its inherent critical charge. Note the kind of language she uses (emphasis added): "working class quarters have been invaded," "working class occupiers are displaced," "whole social character of the district is changed." Invaded. Displaced. Changed.



Some years after the concept appeared, the first attempts to divorce it of its critical tone came along. In the early 1970s, architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt introduced the term in the pages of the Washington Post for the first time, according to an analysis by Rob Godspeed. Von Eckardt described gentrification as "the best thing that has happened to American cities since ditches were turned into sewers." Addressing these very sorts of revisions of the word, Neil Smith once remarked, “Precisely because the language of gentrification tells the truth about the class shift involved in the 'regeneration' of the city, it has become a dirty word to developers, politicians and financiers." But because the word seems resistant to being swept up with other taboos, then, gentrification periodically has advocates like Von Eckardt who attempt to retake it and absolve the very same unjust processes originally labeled with it.

Can gentrification refer to something opposite to its coinage (while cognizant of the numerous academic variations on the theme)? In other words, can it be divorced from its initial charges of spatial colonization and class segregation? To hear some recent voices in the media, it can.



A National Public Radio (NPR) journalist tweets that "yuppies can stop feeling guilty" because —based on a cursory glance — gentrification also benefits longtime residents. NPR ran her story with a URL extension that gives away the slant: "long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma." Another reporter — looking at the same neighborhood as NPR — asks rhetorically, "is bemoaning the gentrification of Washington, DC, a genre past its prime?" (File this one under: Writing by the Victims of Moaning About Gentrification.)

And in the latest salvo from the world of architecture criticism ("Is Gentrification All Bad?") Justin Davidson ventures: "gentrification can be either a toxin or a balm." It's vital to recall, for context's sake, that Davidson recently invested time and energy defending Michael Bloomberg's mayorship as a virtuous period for public spaces — with no mention of the mayor's dismal record on homelessness, free speech and civil rights. Davidson comments in a radio interview, "We need to define gentrification as separate from the process of displacement." Nevertheless, Bloomberg's tenure itself might indicate that the two (the word and the displacement) can't be as separate as Davidson would like. All in all, these reports, and more appearing almost every day, start to resemble the writing of The San Francisco Chronicle's sports-turned-law-and-order-disciplinarian columnist, C.W. Nevius, which is cause for great concern — for writing and for cities both.

One government study cited by NPR said, "while [gentrification] does not have a precise definition, it is commonly associated with an increase in income, rising home prices or rents and sometimes with changes in the occupational mix and educational level of neighborhood residents." But gentrification does have a precise definition that goes back to its roots. (Invaded, Displaced, Changed). Whether or not the word applies to a specific case could be quibbled over, but its linguistic precision shouldn't be obfuscated. More importantly, "In any area where residents feel under attack they will be using a word like gentrification, it is not the job of a researcher or anyone else for that matter, to impose a formal definition of what gentrification means on a neighborhood," as Sam Barton cogently argues. He adds, "If we are not to dispose of the word in its entirety, we should adopt its colloquial usage." I agree.

Federal Reserve economist Daniel Hartley (author of the study cited in the paragraph above) concludes that, when gentrification occurs, all residents benefit from — unsurprisingly — a higher credit score associated with their zipcode. This is a mixed blessing, to say the least, when issues like steady employment, health care, food or stable housing probably take a higher priority, but I digress. Another article mentioned in the NPR piece — missing exact dates to situate the economic effects — "found that low-income residents were no more likely to move out of their homes when a neighborhood gentrifies than when it doesn't."

Is gentrification happening without gentrifiers and without the gentrified? Apparently, yes. No one loses. Everyone wins. Gentrification. Just. Happens.

But gentrification, as a word, is incapable of projecting the benign "balm" that some in the media and academia make it out to be. Does anyone identify as gentry? Hardly anybody (though some people do, certainly). But do any of the gentrification-friendly journalists self-identify as gentry? The gentry are generally understood to be an over-advantaged lot. In the history of literature and art, the gentry hoard property and privilege as much as they can, yet they obsess over their manners and style in order to disguise their rapacity. These are the basic reasons why gentrification carries with it the power of biting satire. Glass (a Marxist) was well aware of this. It's precisely because no one likes to reveal themselves as such shameless climbers that periodic efforts emerge to revise the definition of the word and deaden its force. In reality, using the word without its satirical edge is a surefire recipe for sounding like a member of the gentry oneself.

Indeed, urban dwellers (or their scribes) are free to identify as the entitled members of a rigid caste system if they like, but that doesn't mean they can salvage the term gentrification for the better. One can't have it both ways. Either there is gentrification or there isn't. Period. And recalling Barton, I'd venture to say that the locals experiencing it have a better sense of what's going on. To give it any positive spin implies denial of the stratifying wave the process begets. In short, gentrification doesn't just happen.



One must be equally alert to replacement words spoken to camouflage gentrification — and sometimes to advance its course in the very same breath. Neighborhoods don't "evolve," passively "change," or get "discovered." "Transition" and "transformation" can also be added to the pile of evasive vocabularies. David Madden points out how these kinds of words, in effect, stigmatize and denigrate past neighborhood history as a primitive state before the gentrifiers. In a demagogic offshoot of the same revisionist-colonialist vocabulary, Jerry Brown once asserted, as mayor of Oakland, that staving off gentrification was to invite "slumification."

Or take, for example, the following: “What will this transformation mean for Oakland? [Gentrification] should produce a bigger tax base that can help improve city services and maybe even create a more effective police force." These are the words of Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times Magazine — while conceding that gentrification produces few jobs (except for police, apparently) in the very same article. He concludes: "The utopian vision for a post-capitalist Oakland clung to by (rapper and activist) Boots Riley and the rest of the city’s revolutionaries will soon be dead." ... Dead? Due to what cause of death? A vision killed by some divine plague — the wafting, mysterious airs of gentrification? All of these twists reveal the bizarre contortions of turning a charged word into a bland euphemism.

Here is another way to look at it: for these studies and articles to be on the mark, their authors must unfortunately be using gentrification wrong. If everyone's lot is improving, then we're not speaking of gentrification, or are we? Perhaps this is the case and the word has been poorly chosen. But NPR's Laura Sullivan and the scholars she cites do stress gentrification time and time again. They seem to celebrate what they see changing. She writes, "every other shop is a new restaurant, high-end salon or bar. The neighborhood is gentrifying." Whether this cohort realizes it or not, it takes gentrification to usher in the gentry, and vice versa. And even if some legacy residents stick it out, that is not evidence of gentrification's benevolent gifts trickling down to these folks.

To be fair, a short piece on the radio or in a magazine hardly has the room to tease out the effects of gentrification — although the NPR reporter should have sought out at least one countervailing study. Likewise, one of the two NPR citations forms the bedrock of Davidson's New York Magazine piece. (Is the evidence so slim that they all call the same scholar? Did they realize his study has also been retorted? And that, in addition, "The unfortunate paradox is that studies showing low mobility rates among the poor are being used to vindicate gentrification and to dismantle precisely those policies that help to cushion its worst impacts.")

My aim here isn't to directly agree or disagree with these writers, even though I nevertheless suspect that these pieces are inaccurate and take a very short view of urban history. (It's easy to deny displacement as part of gentrification when it happened in "the past.") For an example of much deeper journalism, see a recent story by Rania Khalek examining the longer historical pattern of neighborhood neglect, displacement and elimination of public housing in Washington, DC. But more to the point at hand, the re-branders of gentrification are blinded by their operating theory of "gentrification without gentrifiers" — and blinding others along with them. And that's a larger issue with the discourse: a colonization of language itself.

Gentrification, at its root, refers to something different from the commonplace assumptions I have mentioned here. If one is writing articles, one can do better than to leave the word itself unexamined in plain sight. (Besides, how many of these writers can claim to know gentrification from the perspective of those who have experienced urban disenfranchisement?) Countless vernacular opinions mirror the same assumption in the media of "gentrification without gentrifiers." But the suffix "-ation" implies that someone is doing something, that is: gentrifying.

The core problem with these stories reflects a turning away from what gentrification precisely means, perhaps out of fear that one is, or could be, complicit in the process. And yet, at the same time, the classist anxieties over gentrification's Other — Brown's "slumification" comment, for example — show how phobias of the poor and "other" rank higher than a concern over one's own role in the process. This hardly makes for good research or journalism.

I, for one, would be thrilled to read that gentrification is not happening — that we all misidentified one of the most significant urban restructuring processes of the past half-century. But if gentrification is taking place — and it certainly is (and has) — someone must be practicing it. Moreover, even among studies that acknowledge the detrimental effects of gentrification, there is a pattern of focusing on the seemingly independent decisions made by individual homebuyers (and, sometimes, renters). These housing consumers are in a putative "market" devoid of actual power brokers. Realtor groups, homeowners associations, business improvement districts, employers, public and private police forces, government policymakers, planning consultants, politicians, marketing agencies, banking and insurance firms, and the news media all cooperate, in different ways, to gentrify.

So the constant focus on the homebuyer/renter as the sole gentrifier can have a detrimental effect on anti-gentrification efforts. The consumer doesn't act alone. The usual hero or villain central to gentrification narratives — the consumer (if such an abstraction has any meaning) — is more likely to be the last ingredient in the mix. Therefore, the concerted pressure of gentrification suggests that communities should not cede possession of the term itself.

Javier Arbona, geographer and founding member of the Demilit collective, gathers gentrification links here. He can also be found on Twitter: @AlJavieera.

+ share