African Americans, Gentrification, and Neoliberal Urbanization: the Case of Fort Greene, Brooklyn

This article examines the gentrification of Fort Greene, which is located in the western part of black Brooklyn, one of the largest contiguous black urban areas in the USA. Between the late 1960s and 2003, gentrification in Fort Greene followed the patterns discovered by scholars of black neighborhoods; the gentrifying agents were almost exclusively black and gentrification as a process was largely bottom-up because entities interested in the production of space were mostly not involved. Since 2003, this has changed. Whites have been moving to Fort Greene in large numbers and will soon represent the numerical majority. Public and private interventions in and around Fort Greene have created a new top-down version of gentrification, which is facilitating this white influx. Existing black residential and commercial tenants are replaced and displaced in the name of urban economic development

Keeping More Than Homes: A More Than Material Framework for Understanding and Intervening in Gentrifying Neighbourhoods

Amie Thurber, a scholar-practitioner working with small-scale neighbourhood geographies in the United States, also builds on the need to understand the participation and involvement of vulnerable, low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Linking theoretical writings across disciplinary boundaries, encompassing political philosophy, geography and community psychology, Thurber analyses neighbourhood in terms of material, epistemic and affective dimensions. As well as offering a deeper understanding of the harms done by gentrification, the chapter proposes its ‘more than material’ conceptual framework as a means of imagining then enacting positive interventions to create spaces of resident representation, build relationships between neighbours and support participatory action