Displacement and affective economies in gentrification research

In advocating for an affective understanding of displacement, we are wary of what Wacquant (2008, 198) once identified as “the gentrification of gentrification research” whereby critical approaches to this process get displaced by studies that focus on the practices and aspirations of gentrifiers themselves and consequently celebrate the erasure of working-class life. While we depart from Wacquant and indeed many other critical scholars of gentrification in our insistence that displacement occurs beyond the dimension of spatial dislocation, and that race functions alongside class as an integral technology structuring the process, we do so with the explicit aim of expanding and sharpening the methodological and theoretical tools available for critical scholarship and political practice. The generative responses to our paper collected in this issue speak to the urgency of that aim, as well as to the possibilities it enables for recognizing and envisioning spatial imaginaries beyond displacement in all its forms.

The argument we develop in our initial paper is that while displacement remains a prevailing feature of gentrification, it is a process that functions through diverse rearticulations of people's embodied capacity to make place, only some of which manifest in physical mobility (Bloch and Meyer, 2023). We therefore contend that to limit our critical focus to observable, measurable dislocation – whether in the past, present, or future – is to oversimplify the process of displacement. However, attending to the dimension of affect does not merely add another layer to our existing analytical frameworks. Rather, an affective understanding of displacement can help us to more fully account for how power operates in urban space more broadly.

As Anderson and Holden (2008: 147) explain through the concept of assemblage, affects and emotions are unevenly distributed in space, and these uneven distributions – what we have referred to as “affective economies” – “fold into provisional, and spatially nuanced, topologies of power” that disrupt overly simplistic conceptions of power as something that some have and others lack, or that is concentrated in some places and decentered from others. It is exactly this kind of oversimplification that we argued in our paper is reproduced throughout much of the existing scholarship on gentrification (including the work of Atkinson (2000) and other gentrification scholars), which still almost invariably adopts a one-dimensional understanding of displacement as a phenomenon primarily defined and measured through the movement of bodies across a threshold from visibility to invisibility, presence to absence.

Again, our intention in offering this critique is not to turn away from analyses of power in gentrification research, but rather to expand and reinvigorate them. Consequently, the affective approach we are advocating does not suggest that we surrender our attention to other modalities and structures of power, whether it be white supremacy, settler colonialism, the “real estate state” (Stein, 2019), or popular formations of resistance and evasion. Instead, we contend that this approach better sensitizes us as researchers to how embodied capacities for making place are themselves unevenly distributed “in between, within, and alongside the other distantiated flows and events that make up cities” (Anderson and Holden, 2008: 148). This perspective is thus one that recognizes power as at once pervasive and partial, potentially deadly, and sometimes, well, just potential.

We see in each of the responses to our paper a recognition of this complexity and an appreciation for the stakes of these methodological and theoretical issues in academic work on displacement. Guma (2023), Lennon (2023), and White (2023) each address the place-making capacities of those who, despite facing the effects of aversive racism and other displacement pressures, continue to produce place relations in creative, contestative, and collaborative ways. As Guma (2023) writes, those in the throes of displacement pressure, particularly in urban environments of the global South, “resist in ways that are elusive, employing ordinary and mundane modalities, materialities, and architectural forms and aesthetics.” Their method of resistance to displacement, he asserts, constitutes “forms of hustling in fringe positions.” As scholars and, in the case of one of us (Bloch), a past member of a criminalized urban community and subculture in the global North, we recognize the value of this formulation and hope to see more research inspired by it. Put simply, this is research conducted on and at the “fringes,” particularly by insider scholars and autoethnographers employing experiential perspectives that have the potential to reveal far more about how displacement works and, more importantly, often fails to work as a place-taking process when it comes up against everyday forms of survival and expression (Bloch, 2022a).

Lennon (2023) likewise hones in on practices and aesthetics that are often subject to displacement, including displacement through erasure as well as reappropriation: namely graffiti and street art. Lennon's focus on the writing on walls reveals how the study of displacement can be practiced through an engagement with the disembodied aesthetic landscapes that are produced through processes of gentrification. Becoming attuned to the ways that graffiti endures, and more explicitly what it says, is part of the process of, as he puts it, sifting through the “messiness of lived, embodied displacement.”

In her piece, White (2023) brings conversations on displacement to bear on the sonic landscape, revealing yet another dimension of place-making and the practice of “divergent spatialities.” Such an auditory and multisensory perspective is crucial for understanding how gentrification unfolds in her own case study site of London's Newham borough. We also found her work particularly generative for thinking about how we might apply some of these approaches to our own research on how displacement works vis-a-vis policing and the enforcement of nuisance laws in so-called “gang territories” (Bloch, 2022b; Bloch and Meyer, 2019; Meyer, 2021).

One of the most generative engagements with our work in these responses focused on how the framework of Black geographies might be productively deployed given the approach to displacement that we are advocating for. We drew on a Black geographies methodology because we understand this tradition to be particularly interested in how people – particularly but not exclusively Black people – continuously produce and reproduce place in the face of historical spatial contexts structured by racial logic. According to Guma (2023), “Black geographies offers a language that acknowledges experimental, ingrained, and incarnate realities, contexts, and expressions of urbanization that surpass materiality.” Summers (2023) similarly noted that Black geographic work is particularly inspired by the reality, long overlooked in geography, of how “black people find meaning in life and place in spite of precarious conditions and the structures that have made a black sense of place seemingly impossible.” And Dantzler and Peron (2023) look to this dynamic aspect of the tradition as an invitation and a demand, particularly for urban researchers, “to dream – to manifest urban imaginaries for which we can collectively strive to bring to fruition.”

These scholars, in both their responses here and in their own respective bodies of work outside of this forum, all speak to the vital capacity to continuously make and take place. This is because urban space is never fully structured, but is instead produced as a multi-dimensional and unfinished process in which dispossession and solidarity, joy and pain, place-taking and place-making exist together in contingent geometries that frustrate traditional methodological frameworks. Our call for a more affective understanding of displacement is a way of urging our fellow urban researchers to attend to these other dimensions so that we may better recognize and, following Dantzler and Peron (2023), contribute to the constant and just remaking of present and future worlds.