Tag: Housing
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How the liberal city paved the way to neoliberalism
In 1979, a few years after New York’s fiscal crisis, New York City mayor Ed Koch posed for a photograph alongside Donald Trump. Mayor Koch despised the welfare state and cut it severely during his tenure. He also partnered with developers like Trump to promote real estate growth, in the hope that it would prevent…
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Cross-pollinating resistance to the tech economy – an excerpt from Defying Displacement
The following is an excerpt adapted from Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War (IAS/AK Press, 2024). Appropriating the planet In a fragment by Jorge Luis Borges, successive generations of cartographers create increasingly exacting maps of China. Their maps grow steadily larger to incorporate more and more minute details until “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of…
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How tourism kills communities – an excerpt from Defying Displacement
The following is an excerpt adapted from Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War (IAS/AK Press, 2024). Holiday in the sun The politics of place and displacement follow gentrifiers on holiday. Depending on the balance of class interests and power, the unique character of a place can attract gentrification as much as it can be wielded as…
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The school of gentrification – an excerpt from Defying Displacement
The following is an excerpt adapted from Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War (IAS/AK Press, 2024). Universities as gentrifiers “These super-men and world-mastering demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay.” —W.E.B. Du Bois The workers and capitalists who profit most from the…
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Housing justice beyond consumerism – an excerpt from Defying Displacement
The following is an excerpt adapted from Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War (IAS/AK Press, 2024). Defining displacement Gentrification is commonly understood as consumption: who chooses to rent or purchase which housing unit. From this perspective we can ask many questions: why white people wish to live in “gritty” neighborhoods, or why they have…