The wording varies from city to city, but the meaning is clear: the house or apartment you live in is going to be taken by the government and destroyed. The government will then sell the cleared land to someone else for private development. Please move. '' Anderson (1964, page 1) The`urban renewal' provisions of the US Housing Act of 1949 (US Congress, 1949) left a legacy of neighborhood destruction and displacement, culminating in a durable consensus across the political spectrum on the injustice of forcing people from their homes and communities (Anderson, 1964;Hartman et al, 1982;Sumka, 1979). After the end of large-scale government urban renewal, however, this consensus weakened as the singular causality and clear visibility of state action were privatized, diffused, and obscured amongst the varied actors involved in private-market gentrification (Hackworth and Smith, 2001;Marcuse, 1986;Smith, 1996). In cities of the Global North, displacement became harder to measure and easier to ignore as gentrification evolved within a broader affordability crisis of debt-leveraged financialization of housing (Hackworth, 2007; Immergluck, 2009), and as analysts considered the decisively larger scale of displacement in cities of the Global South (Harris, 2008; Winkler, 2009). Recently, new evidence from the US has further undermined the consensus, casting doubt on the extent of displacement and its causal links to gentrification (

Communities on the fringes of the American metropolis have recently garnered attention as the centers of the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath. On the one hand, this attention to the urban nature of the crisis is welcome, as the metamorphosis of the mortgage fiasco into a financial crisis‐cum‐global economic meltdown turned popular attention away from the urban roots of this calamity. But this emphasis on the exurbs as the site of crisis lends itself to the misconception that they, rather than the restructuring of the metropolis as a whole, are the sole source of the crisis. This article works across multiple scales to examine how three interwoven factors — demographics, policy and capital — each reacted to the San Francisco Bay Area landscape inherited at the end of the 1970s, affecting the region in new ways, leaving some places thriving and others struggling with foreclosure, which leads to plummeting property values and the deep uncertainty of the current American metropolis. This restructuring can be seen as the convergence between the unresolved urban crisis of the postwar era and the various reactions in the neoliberal era. It demands a reimagining of both planning and geography, especially from the left. Résumé Les communautés vivant à la périphérie des métropoles américaines ont récemment suscité l’attention comme pôles de la crise des saisies hypothécaires et de ses conséquences. Cet intérêt pour la nature urbaine de la crise est opportun, car la métamorphose du fiasco immobilier en crise financière alliée à un effondrement de l’économie mondiale a détourné l’attention des racines urbaines de ce désastre. Cependant, pointer ainsi les périphéries comme sites de la crise cautionne l’idée fausse selon laquelle elles seules en sont la source, et non la restructuration urbaine dans son ensemble. Cette analyse opère à plusieurs échelons afin d’examiner comment trois facteurs entrelacés (démographie, politique et capital) ont chacun réagi au paysage de Bay Area hérité de la fin des années 1970, dans la région métropolitaine de San Francisco. Celle‐ci a été affectée de façons nouvelles, laissant certains lieux florissants et d’autres aux prises avec les saisies hypothécaires, la situation conduisant à l’effondrement de l’immobilier et à une incertitude profonde de la métropole américaine actuelle. On peut envisager cette restructuration comme la convergence de la crise urbaine non résolue de l’après‐guerre avec les diverses réponses données à l’époque néolibérale. Cela implique de réimaginer à la fois l’urbanisme et la géographie, en particulier de la part de la Gauche.

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The San Francisco Bay Area is hard to get one's head around and is frequently misunderstood. It is immense, decentered, sprawling, autotopic, multiracial, divided, and more-a crucible o f the modern suburban and exurban metropolis. It is distinctive in several regards, but illuminating o f the dynamics behind metropolitan geography. Indeed, the Bay Area has been integral to the production o f modern American suburbia and its urban system embodies many o f the contradictions o f the contemporary moment.

This paper investigates what people mean when they engage in the discourse of denigration. Building on existing literature on territorial stigmatisation that either focuses on macro-scale uses and effects of territorial stigmatisation or micro-scale ethnographic studies of effects, we develop a novel approach that captures the diverse voices that engage in the discourse of denigration by tracing the use of the word and hashtag "shithole" on the social media platform Twitter in order to examine who is engaged in the stigmatising discourse, the types of place that are stigmatised and the responses to stigmatised places. Using a robust data set, we highlight two key findings. First, the majority of tweets were aimed at places where the tweeter was not from, a form of othering consistent with how territories are stigmatised by those in positions of power such as policymakers, politicians and journalists. Second, we note that an important and gendered minority of tweets can be characterised by a "cry for help" and powerlessness, where the stigma is aimed at their own places. We offer an interpretive lens through which to understand and frame these minoritarian voices by engaging with theories of abjection that allow us to see how minoritarian voices relate to place.