Revanchism and therapeutic urbanism: Some critical reflections

Abstract

This essay reconceptualizes urban revanchism as a constituting element of the modus operandi and habitus of urban redevelopment. This reconceptualization not only helps transcend the binary distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ revanchism, which has come to dominate research on revanchist urbanism, but also extends Smith's attempts to penetrate the underlying motives and hidden logics of gentrification. Drawing on the example of urban redevelopment on Chicago's South Side around the Obama Presidential Center, we argue that revanchism today operates in the habitus and taken-for-granted processes of rolling out such infrastructure projects and other urban redevelopment policies, tools and practices. Revanchism, today, contains a deep-seated therapeutic motif of urban consumerism where residents of marginalised communities are to embrace the identity of avid consumers and display a willingness to collaborate with entrepreneurs, developers, and authorities in their redevelopment efforts. Our essay shows that the central operative practices for revanchist urbanism often remain hidden in the taken-for-granted insinuations, workings, and sensibilities of urban redevelopment centered on the idea of creating new consumption spaces in the city.

Introduction

Neil Smith's (1996) work on revanchist urbanism has profoundly shaped debates in urban geography as he revealed the startling impacts of the late 1980s recession on the consciousness and actions of urban redevelopment decision-makers and the general public. To Smith (1996, 217), the 1990s were ‘a time of economic retreat and the dismal defeat of often unrealistic aspirations’. In public and media imageries, the city once again became framed as ‘jungle and wilderness’ where youth delinquency, homeless populations and other ‘unwanted’ groups needed to be contained, policed, and ultimately banned and expulsed from urban space. In bold and provocative strokes, Smith (1996) painted a picture of the city divided between the affluent and the poor, but which also contained deep sensibilities to ensure that race-class differentiations would become a permanent, unremovable part of the production of urban space. This revanchist city, Smith (1996, 227) wrote,

is a divided city where the victors are increasingly defensive of their privilege such as it is, and increasingly vicious defending it. The revanchist city is more than the dual city, in race and class terms. The benign neglect of ‘the other half’ […] has been superseded by a more active viciousness that attempts to criminalize a whole range of ‘behavior’.

Smith (1996, 230) concluded that the revanchist city's future will be ‘a deepening villainization of working-class, minority, homeless and many immigrant residents of the city, through interlocking scripts of violence, drugs and crime’.

It is not difficult to see these developments currently unfolding in the U.S. city where the concerted assault of the Trump administration on migrants and communities of colour in the large, mostly Democratic, cities of the country dominate daily news. But Smith (1996), we believe, hinted at something deeper when he wrote these lines about the future of the revanchist city. He was not simply trying to highlight that direct and visible forms of violent assault by local law enforcement and, more recently, federal agencies would continue to accelerate in speed and intensity. Instead, and this is our central contention in this essay, revanchism needs to be conceptualized as something that is built into the very raison d'être of capitalist urbanization and city redevelopment. Revanchism today has become part of the taken-for-granted disposition of city-building efforts. It haunts and undergirds the clandestine logics and habitus of urbanization and is built into the modus operandi of the many instruments of urban redevelopment urban scholars and geographers have examined for decades but especially those recently deployed in U.S. cities, such as tax increment financing (TIF), commercial corridor development programs, the new urban renewal, refined Section 8 housing, Business Improvement Districts, smart historic preservation, city-based urban homesteading, to name a few (e.g., Hackworth, 2007, 2019; Weber, 2015).

In this essay, we reconceptualize revanchism as a constituting element of the modus operandi and habitus of urban redevelopment. We suggest that this reconceptualization not only helps transcend the binary distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ revanchism, which has come to dominate more recent research on revanchist urbanism, but also extends Smith's attempts to penetrate the underlying motives and hidden logics of gentrification. Here, we suggest that the so-called ‘soft’ revanchist rhetoric, which aims to correct some of the distributional ills and deficiencies of neoliberal urban redevelopment, conceals a punishing therapeutic discourse that nevertheless continues to pervade contemporary urban transformation and redevelopment rhetoric and practice. We further suggest that revanchism today is more than just a policy instrument designed to facilitate gentrification in the inner-city. Instead, it cuts across a range of urban transformation programs, policy initiatives and spaces. Revanchist urban policy rhetoric today subtly yet selectively seeks to rescript and civilize even the most recalcitrant urban residents into becoming worthy citizen-consumer subjects who can and should engage in new modes of urban living compatible with contemporary urban transformations. Again, we do not wish to suggest that ‘hard’ forms of revanchism, as described by Smith (1996), cease to exist. The current realities of the militarization of U.S. cities highlight that Smith's initial thesis continues to be centrally important for understanding contemporary revanchist urban realities. But equally, we argue that revanchism today is a much more complex, complicated, and multi-faceted process, and that therefore dissecting its therapeutic motifs comprises, to us, an elemental part of highlighting its complexity.

Our essay is organized as follows. In a first step, we briefly outline the key premises of Smith's (1996) revanchist urbanism concept as well as our central contention that revanchism undergirds the underlying motives and hidden logics of urban redevelopment. Here, we briefly sketch out ways in which this conceptualization of revanchism can inform urban geographical research by focusing on the latest redevelopment efforts in marginalized communities and neighbourhoods in the City of Chicago. The second section focuses on our argument that revanchism works through therapeutizing practices of creating obedient consumer identities. In the conclusion, we briefly outline some potentially fruitful ways forward for future research into revanchist urbanism.

Revanchist urban logics revisited

Neil Smith's (1996) exploration of the revanchist city – or revanchist urbanism – is situated within the context of his wider investigations of the gentrification and de-gentrification of the U.S. inner-city over a period stretching from the 1950s through to the 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing upon the French term revanche, Smith (1996, 42–45) both deploys and situates the concept of revanchism to portray intentional efforts on the part of (white) upper and middle class residents, developers and urban growth elites to take back control of the city otherwise being ‘claimed' by the poor, the homeless, LGBTQ+, women and minorities. His entry point into this process: the unfolding of the Tompkins Square riots in New York City, which resulted in the New York Police Department (NYPD) forcibly evicting poor people and the homeless from the city's gentrification frontier.

In developing the concept of revanchism in later chapters of his book, it is clear that Smith was not satisfied with simply describing intentional acts of urban displacement at the gentrification frontier; he also sought to grasp the underlying brute motives and hidden logics pervading the gentrification of inner-city districts in New York in the 1990s. Indeed, to us, the working of revanchism, borrowing from Lefebvre (2002, 102), ‘is concealed beneath evasive behaviour patterns’ which are not always immediately visible and discernible unlike those moments of overt police violence in New York's Tompkins Square. For us, this is a crucial insight: revanchism infuses the very logic, operation and habitualized practices of urban restructuring and redevelopment. Here, we follow Terry Eagleton (1981), who noted that the likes of public policy practices are typically packed with suggestions, assertions, and beliefs that are often not directly aired or articulated. Policy practices, to Eagleton (1981), become powerfully political in their insinuations, inferences, and imputations and, therefore, do not require explicit articulation. Policies, rather, work most powerfully through clandestine, hidden, and habitualized taken-for-granted intentions and motifs. As a result, the underlying premises, goals, and aims of policies are not always immediately known or visible and therefore require a deeper analytical process of ‘looking behind’ the envisaged and publicly foregrounded purposes.

Urban transformations in the U.S. today illustrate this revanchist habitus. For instance, the City of Chicago's more recent urban redevelopment efforts have been characterized by an explicit emphasis on and foregrounding of building strong, resilient, and inclusive communities (Schwarze, 2023; Wilson, 2018). In the context of historically deprived communities of colour on Chicago's South and West Sides, Sternberg (2023) argues that Chicago's new urban governance, in public and official rhetoric, proposes to foster equitable and inclusive economic development, relying ‘on depoliticized terms and expressions such as “enhancing development without displacement” and “inclusive economic growth”’ (Sternberg, 2023, 174). In these public-facing proclamations, past injustices of racist urban planning and redevelopment are supposed to be ‘made good’ through comprehensive investment plans and strategies into disinvested communities of colour.

Notwithstanding these proclamations, the fundamentals of neoliberal urban governance and redevelopment, long ingrained in the city's revanchist dispositif of city building, are unchanged and ‘the entrenched negative race and class identities remain untouched’ (Sternberg, 2023, 119). In this respect, Schwarze (2023) finds much complexity in his analysis of urban redevelopment in and around the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago's South Side. Proclamations of inclusive growth and ‘giving back to disinvested communities’ dominate official rhetoric, marketing efforts, and public pronouncements that are ultimately misleading. More deeply, a politicized project embeds other intentions that are guided by the logics of capitalist growth imperatives meeting deep-seated cultural dispositions of key decision-makers.

Thus, the refusal of the Obama Foundation to sign a community benefits agreement demanded by community organizations to mitigate and minimize negative effects of the OPC on local housing markets is revealing. It illuminates that demands from working-class and less affluent residents fearful of gentrification and displacement are brushed aside as disturbances in efforts to bring the OPC to the South Side (Schwarze and Wilson, 2022). What has characterized the Obama Foundation's response to critical and concerned voices from community groups is the strategic invalidation of these voices, most notably by President Obama himself, who declared in a public speech in 2017 that the least of the South Side's problems has been gentrification (see Schwarze and Wilson, 2022, 7).

This discussion highlights that revanchism today operates in the habitus and taken-for-granted processes of rolling out infrastructure projects, public investment programs, commercial corridor initiatives, rezoning practices, and other urban redevelopment policies, tools and practices. Here, one can turn to Du Boi's (2007) seminal observation of the relations between black and white people in the Southern United States to explicate this dispositif and habitus of revanchism. Du Bois (2007, 122) writes that ‘there still remains a part essential to a proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little actions which go to make up life’. To us, revanchism, too, is reliant on the complex constellation of various actors, processes, institutions, rhythms, practices, and strategies built into the modus operandi and the accompanying atmospheres of urban redevelopment. Revanchism, in this understanding, does not necessarily require brute force and direct violence as described by Smith (1996). Instead, revanchism, crucially, works through sensibilities, institutions, intuitions, and practices deeply ingrained into the very foundations of urban redevelopment projects.

In the OPC case and countless others, a beneath-the-surface, alive-and-well revanchist sensibility is ultimately given life in an intricate stroke: by blending this punishing ethos into a bland functionality to render its existence shadowy but powerful. Common planning conduct, in its unbroken flow, embodies a human-destructive assertion – to punish the poor – that imperceptibly entangles with planning normalcy and planning design. As a result, cultural and human difference, celebrated and glorified by programmatic boosters of the likes of the OPC (one city planner terms this project ‘an effort to bring sane diversity to Chicago's South Side’ (personal interview, September 2025), is not to be realized, but rather to be obliterated. A core programmatic truth always hides in the shadows: human diversity is a utopian ideal that should not obstruct the need to spatially manage and contain the racialized poor.

Revanchism as therapeutic urbanism

Conceptualizing revanchism as a constituting element of the modus operandi and habitus of urban redevelopment extends existing debates on revanchist urbanism within urban geography in important ways. Notably, it disrupts received binary divisions between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ revanchism, which, as mentioned above, have come to dominate more recent geographical research on revanchist urbanism. In attempts to take Smith's (1996) notion of revanchism outside its North American context of origin and to see whether it has analytical value elsewhere, mostly notably, European cities, urban geographers have remarked that the hard revanchism Smith (1996) had described does not adequately reflect the realities of urbanization in Europe. Revanchism in the context of European cities, rather, is characterized by ‘softer’ forms and measures, or a combination of both (Aalbers, 2011; DeVerteuil, 2006).

For example, Uitermark and Duyvendak (2008), in the context of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, have proposed that revanchist urbanism in Rotterdam is characterized more by ‘a fusion of repressive and integrative policies that might be described as a civilising offensive’ (Uitermark and Duyvendak, 2008, 1499). While the notion of soft revanchism hints at some of the points we raised above about the habitus and taken-for-granted modus operandi of revanchist urbanism, it does not fully grasp the intrinsic logic of revanchism as a constituting element of the very operations of urbanization processes today. Soft revanchism continues to assume that only certain urban policies and practices reproduce revanchist sensibilities and mechanisms which, as the word ‘soft’ implicates, are less harsh, less violent. We argue that such conceptualization of revanchism misses the point of how logics of capitalist urbanization cannot exist without revanchist sensitivities because the punishment of urban citizens based on race, class, gender and intersecting identities is an integral part of capitalist logics and urban redevelopment.

We can return to our example of the OPC to illustrate the therapeutic character of revanchist urbanism. As discussed above, the OPC operates through a very specific and strategic set of redevelopment tools, practices and approaches which, at its core, seeks to discipline residents into behaviours and routines which conform with the overarching capitalist agenda of this urban infrastructure project. In official proclamations, marketing rhetoric, and redevelopment discourse, residents concerned over gentrification and displacement are supposed to shake off their fears and worries and embrace the possibilities and opportunities which, it seems, shall inevitably arise from this large-scale infrastructure project. Here, pro-growth narratives are suggestive of the spatially redistributive capitalist ethos of this urban redevelopment project, where growth is framed as universally beneficial to all South Side residents (see Schwarze, 2023; Jonas and Wilson, 1999).

Nonetheless, undergirding this firm belief in the power of economic growth is the therapeutic motif of urban consumerism, where the South Side, after decades of economic neglect and stalling growth projections of Chicago's Central Business District, is framed by city authorities and developers as the next space for city building and consumption (Wilson, 2018). Residents of the South Side, long stigmatized and marginalized as the racialized urban poor (Schwarze, 2022; Wacquant, 2008), play a crucial role in this economic endeavour, for they are to embrace the role of the new productive consumer group in the city. This consumer identity is infused with hegemonic imageries of affluent middle-class living alongside rhetoric insinuations of the South Side's history and heritage of black life and culture. The OPC is a case in point where this history and heritage, personified in the Obamas, is strategically activated to frame the project as race-authentic and as serving less affluent and historically marginalized black residents (Schwarze, 2023), even though housing data suggest that the OPC is driving up housing prices and cost in adjacent communities, thereby displacing the very residents for whom this infrastructure was supposed to be built in the first place (The Nathalie P. Voorhees Center, 2019; Wilson et al., 2026).

This therapeutic motif of consumerism evades current conceptualizations of revanchist urbanism because it works in the taken-for-granted logic and modus operandi of capitalist urbanization. City authorities, planners, and private developers merely insinuate, never explicitly state, these underlying logics of consumerism in public rhetoric. Yet, it is unmistakably clear that adjacent South Side communities are to adhere to the therapeutic sensibilities of consumerism, even when signs of gentrification and displacement have already started to surface and even though a significant proportion of South Side residents do not have the means to participate in this economic imagery. Notwithstanding, residents are to embrace this identity of avid consumers and display a willingness to collaborate with entrepreneurs, developers, and authorities, such as The Obama Foundation, in their redevelopment efforts.

Conclusions

Neil Smith's (1996) work on urban revanchism has proven to be a timely contribution to critical urban research concerned with gentrification and the restructuring of the U.S. city. It was, in its day, a powerful conceptual tool to make sense of the vastly and rapidly changing U.S. city in the 1980s and early 1990s and to contextualize this change within the economic realities of U.S. urbanization more broadly. Yet, to remain relevant and a key concept in urban geographical research, his notion of revanchism needs update to reflect the ever-changing realities of urbanization and urban restructuring in the U.S. city (and elsewhere) today. With our brief intervention, we have sought to excavate the underlying logic and working of revanchist urbanism today. Instead of merely focusing on the obvious and immediately visible forms of urban revanchism through, for instance, police violence and the militarization of urban space, we have anchored the operation of revanchism within the underlying logic and modus operandi of urban infrastructure and redevelopment tools, practices and strategies. Doing so has allowed us to not only highlight that revanchism is very much alive in the U.S. city today, but, crucially, that its central operative practices often remain hidden in the taken-for-granted insinuations, workings, and sensibilities of urban redevelopment projects centred on the idea of creating new consumption spaces in the city. A key to this, we suggest, is designing urban redevelopment programs that have a strong therapeutic message, which is not only deeply ingrained within the governance fabric of such programs but also can select urban spaces, places and people likely to be receptive to this new mode of urban transformation.

Further research is needed to explore how far the therapeutic motif undergirding contemporary urban redevelopment in the U.S. today transcends gentrifying inner-city neighbourhoods, such as Tompkins Square in New York. One possibility is that it is part of a wider re-demographizing project that now permeates the city at large (Wilson and Wyly, 2026), whereby all sorts of new redevelopment initiatives strive to cultivate ideal civic-minded citizen-consumers and avoid – if not in fact evict – more intransigent populations (especially elements of the black and Latin poor) deemed non-receptive to this new therapeutic urbanity. In this respect, urban geographers should view revanchism as a key underlying premise and modus operandi of contemporary redevelopment processes by extending its analytical applicability and usefulness beyond those moments and spaces of blatant violent assault against the urban poor by engaging more critically with how revanchism undergirds and informs the day-to-day, taken-for-granted operational practices of city-wide redevelopment projects as well as new forms and spaces of urban dissent, struggle and resistance emerging from enactments of such practices.