Revisiting the Citadel and the Ghetto

Abstract

The author examines the relevance of racial discourses to neoliberal urban development occurring in older, former industrial cities in the United States. Rather than treating the production of new development spaces as separate from the adjacent inner-city neighborhoods, the author focuses on the significance of race to “making sense of,” and, in turn, legitimizing the stark contrasts between revitalized enclaves and the inner city as a central component of contemporary neoliberal urban development. The concept of legibility is introduced and developed to demonstrate how ideological and discursive strategies simultaneously promote middle-class urban development enclaves and strategically account for—or make legible—the presence of minority, poor communities adjacent to them. The process of legibility is explored in waterfront developments in Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania. The methods involved extensive fieldwork and semistructured interviews with city officials, employees of economic development authorities and public-private partnerships, leaders of community development organizations, and local residents from each city, conducted between 2009 and 2015. The study’s key findings incorporate an ideological dimension of race into an analysis of uneven urban development.

Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

“…Similar forms of ambivalence have been noted by scholars elsewhere, such as in the cases of gentrifiers who blithely self-identify as non-racist “diversity seekers” in the Netherlands (Blokland and Van Eijk, 2010), self-proclaimed anti-racist “white liberal” placemakers in Los Angeles (Bloch and Meyer, 2019), and others (see Gotham, 2014; Ley, 2003; Mele, 2013, 2016; Rhodes, 2010; Zukin, 2010). Such work has added to our understanding of how neoliberal urbanism relies on the ideology of colorblindness to obscure the centrality of race and racism within gentrification processes.…”

“…And it is the ideology of colorblindness that provides justification for this erasure. In a move that resonates more than a little with tendencies in the gentrification scholarship that we identified above, powerful urban actors in governmental and private development roles routinely deny the enduring significance of race as an ordering technology and instead redefine it as merely a matter of individual identity (Mele, 2016). In this sense, the so-called race-neutral urbanism—like colorblind ideology broadly—does not so much ignore race as render it depoliticized, individualized, merely cultural (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Forman, 2004; Omi and Winant, 2014).…”

Navigating danger through nuisance: Racialized urban fears, gentrification, and sensory enskilment in Amsterdam

“…In this excerpt, Jeroen relates his own feeling of insecurity to his inability “to read” the context of a square with a lot of immigrant residents and immigrant‐owned businesses—a clear manifestation of implicit racial bias. To tackle the square's reputation as a crime‐ridden area and reduce fear by White middle‐class newcomers, local authorities imposed what Torin Monahan (2010, p. 10) has termed a “marginalizing surveillance” specifically targeting “populations considered to be risky, dangerous, or untrustworthy thereby reifying identities of suspicion and legitimizing the ongoing selective deployment of surveillance.” Media coverage of the raid provided further direction on how to read racialized spaces during the redevelopment process (see Mele, 2016). This interview thus shows how, in the time when this coherent read was still in the making, White middle‐class residents like Jeroen felt unsafe for fear of overstepping racial boundaries that would put them at risk of victimization.…”