AR Reading List 042: displacement

This week’s reading list looks at an apparent inevitability in the life of any city: displacement. Gentrification’s mechanisms of improvement and erasure fill the coffers of the wealthiest around the globe, supported by policies of demolition and rehousing that push people out of their homes and out of their communities, set adrift at the edges of the cities they once sustained.

We look to Brazil, South Africa, Portgual and Belgium for stories each inflicted by the specific conditions of the place. Jaffa’s story is one turned on its head: once a bustling merchant hub, its architecture is now ‘typified by unadorned signs of decay’, as Nadi Abusaada wrote in our AR October 2020 issue on Land. Palestinian residents are pushed out nonetheless, the city’s logic of improvement ‘imbued within a wider Israeli settler colonial logic of erasure.’

Drawn to the scents of culture and burgeoning community, capital crawls hungrily from district to district, its gaze draining the last drops of life from each corner upon which it alights. Always impacting the poorest communities in any given area, and often resting upon the back of colonial legacies, the process of regeneration and displacement is an intrinsically racialised one – the cruel demands of constant growth leaning upon those who will profit least.

Pushed to the periphery: Lisbon’s rehousing policies lose the life of the neighbourhoods they demolish, AR December 2020/January 2021, Ana Naomi de Sousa and António Brito Guterres
‘The overarching aim of Portugal’s rehousing programme was “to eradicate the shanty towns” and the “social evil” they represented. Hundreds of neighbourhoods were earmarked for destruction, to be replaced with purpose-built housing estates, where all of their residents would be moved’

Neighbourhood botch: the real-estate state and the empire of finance, AR September 2019, Owen Hatherley
‘The destruction of social housing forms is followed by one of expansion, where finance moved into the places it hadn’t previously gone, linking apparently disparate phenomena like the sub-prime crisis in the US with the moves to offer micro-finance and formal title to slum dwellers in Latin America and the Indian subcontinent’

Beauty and the Beast: capital forces and cultural production, AR April 2014, Alberto Duman
‘Some call it “creative economy”, others “the spectacle of capital”. Such relentless production of urban narratives centred on manufactured atmospheres of “urban vitality” can lead to the bankruptcy of the very economy that underwrites the much-promoted alliance between culture and capital in its current state’

A new threat to favelas: gentrification, AR June 2015, Theresa Williamson
‘Land regularisation is growing across Latin America. But this movement could make things worse, especially now, because a new threat is emerging in Rio: gentrification. Also called “white removal” or “market removal” by locals, gentrification is only made possible through land regularisation’

Gentrifying Jo’burg, Guy Trangoš, AR December 2014
‘Though developers often favour building on green-field sites and urban expansion, investors often also turn to existing urban areas as prime sites of reinvestment. Herein lies capitalism’s “creative destruction” where urban assets are destroyed to create space for new − often more consumption-oriented − investment’

True grit: Cadix docklands regeneration in Antwerp, AR September 2018, Anna Winston
‘The old Cadix, where cafés and small amounts of terraced housing were generally relegated to the edges of blocks of warehouses and workshops, was dangerous and dirty, residents say, but maybe the improvements have gone too far the other way. The area is becoming “snobbish”, says one man working on a new primary school building. It’s become a place for the rich’

Invisible terrains: Jaffa’s obscured history, AR October 2020, Nadi Abusaada
‘It is a blatant visualisation of an ongoing systematic process of urban depopulation: Israel’s policies pushing Jaffa’s remaining Palestinian residents out of the city through its encouragement of state- and private-led gentrification. All under the pretence of urban regeneration and improvement’