As the online comment threads about Spike Lee lengthened, growing more contentious, the conversation began to crack. The neoliberal façade that hides the true face of today’s brand of gentrification fell away like a veil. Several people began to make statements like (I’m paraphrasing here): Im white and I helped make the neighborhood nicer, and White people were here first, and “Black people pushed out the white people and now the whites are just coming back,” as well as, Im white and Ill live wherever I want. Said another (not paraphrasing), “Making a neighborhood that was once nice, nice again is not gentrification. Its restoration.” These statements, and so many others like them, reveal the hidden heart of what urban studies scholar and gentrification expert Neil Smith called the revanchist city. Revanche is French for revenge. In an interview I did with Smith in 2011, just before his untimely death, he explained what he called the “third wave” of gentrification, or “gentrification generalized,” which is nothing like gentrification of the past. Starting in the 1990s, he said, “Gentrification became a systematic attempt to remake the central city, to take it back from the working class, from minorities, from homeless people, from immigrants who, in the minds of those who decamped to the suburbs, had stolen the city from its rightful white middle-class owners. What began as a seemingly quaint rediscovery of the drama and edginess of the new urban ‘frontier’ became in the 1990s broad-based market driven policy.”
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:16:42 +0000
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