Displacement and affective economies in gentrification research

Abstract

In our initial paper calling for a more affective understanding of displacement in gentrification studies, we argued that displacement is a process that functions through diverse rearticulations of people's embodied capacity to make place, only some of which take the form of physical or social dislocation. Our intervention was intended to reignite this already existing argument by drawing attention to the embodied, affective, and emotional dimensions of displacement with a critical consideration of the role race/racism plays within this process today. We argue that such a perspective offers gentrification researchers a more critically incisive methodological and theoretical toolkit for grasping how power operates in urban space, particularly in dimensions commonly overlooked by traditional critical scholarship. We are excited and grateful to the editors of Dialogues in Urban Research for making space for this conversation, and to the scholars – Prince K. Guma, John Lennon, Joy White, Brandi T. Summers, Prentiss Dantzler, and Maria-Aminata Peron – who offered insightful responses to our paper. These responses both clarified and extended our own perspective, particularly in terms of demonstrating how the agential, creative, and collaborative efforts of urban residents to make and remake place can both bring into focus the affective dimensions of urban space and open up possibilities for imagining new urban imaginaries.