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What a City Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement (The MIT Press)
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About What A City Is For: Remaking The Politics Of
Product Description An investigation into gentrification and displacement, focusing on the case of Portland, Oregon's systematic dispersal of black residents from its Albina neighborhood. Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space—not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina—the one major Black neighborhood in Portland—has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and then contained there through exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and racist real estate practices. Since the 1990s, they've been aggressively displaced—by rising housing costs, developers eager to get rid of low-income residents, and overt city policies of gentrification. Displacement and dispossessions are convulsing cities across the globe, becoming the dominant urban narratives of our time. In What a City Is For, Matt Hern uses the case of Albina, as well as similar instances in New Orleans and Vancouver, to investigate gentrification in the twenty-first century. In an engaging narrative, effortlessly mixing anecdote and theory, Hern questions the notions of development, private property, and ownership. Arguing that home ownership drives inequality, he wants us to disown ownership. How can we reimagine the city as a post-ownership, post-sovereign space? Drawing on solidarity economics, cooperative movements, community land trusts, indigenous conceptions of alternative sovereignty, the global commons movement, and much else, Hern suggests repudiating development in favor of an incrementalist, non-market-driven unfolding of the city. Review His study of the cleansing of [Portland's] black-majority Albina neighbourhood makes for a thoughtful, first-person book...— Times Higher Education— Review This book is a timely and critical study of the devastating consequences of unbridled speculative real estate forces and their disproportionate impact on the lives and livelihoods of the African American community in Portland, Oregon. It offers a shocking portrayal of the deliberate process of displacement and subsequent impoverishment of the black communities. What a City Is For is an eloquent cry for the de-commodification of housing and land as perhaps the only way to truly build cities where all the residents have equal rights to everything that cities have to offer.― Miloon Kothari, former Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, United Nations Human Rights Council About the Author Matt Hern is a founder of Solid State Industries, teaches at multiple universities, and lectures widely. He is the author of What a City Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement (MIT Press) among many other books.
