Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures

Erualdo González Romero is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He is a critical urbanist and ethnic studies scholar. He focuses on gentrification, neighborhood planning, urban health, and governance and public policy, with an emphasis on Mexican immigrants and communities of color. Michelle E. Zuñiga is Assistant Professor in Urban and Community Planning at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her research focuses on resident perspectives of neighborhood change occurring in areas undergoing increased investment towards sustainable urban development. She is most interested in learning how Latinx immigrant communities experience the benefits and disruptions of neighborhood change and their implications for environmental, social, and economic justice.Ashley C. Hernandez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, where she studies and teaches on urban governance and inequality, race, and social movements. Her research investigates anti-gentrification activism and community-based organizations in East Los Angeles and beyond. Rodolfo D. Torres is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-author of The Latino Question: Politics, Laboring Classes, and the Next Left and co-author of Capitalism and Critique: Unruly Democracy and Solidarity Economics, among many other books.

• 1. Introduction. 2. Neighborhood Change in Near-Transit Latinx Communities: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development. 3. Downtown Revitalization in Tucson, Arizona: A Historical Case Study of the Menlo Park Barrio—A Case for New Realities. 4. Houses for Living, Not Profit. 5. Displacing Los Angeles Chinatown: Racialization and Development in an Asian American Space. 6. Gentrification and Resistance in the U.S. South: The Case of the Historic Third Ward Neighborhood in Houston, Texas. 7. Commercial Gentrification in a Downtown “Made in Mexico”: The Case of Santa Ana in Southern California, 1980-2011. 8.Teaching, Learning, and Relationships to Space: Toward a Spatially Engaged Pedagogy. 9. Artists as “Shock Troops” of Gentrification? 10. Gentrification in New Orleans: Global Discourses and Material Effects.

This exciting, fresh, and timely collection Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures discusses the enduring and yet changing relationship between race and class with respect to processes of gentrification and offers a welcome and distinctive Latina/o/x consideration. A key focus is the necessary confrontation between neoliberalism and racialized mobilization in resisting market and state driven gentrification. This is a book that will add much to gentrification debates and that scholars and activists alike should buy! Loretta Lees, University of LeicesterWhat does it mean to place the study of gentrification, as a necessarily racialized process of displacement and dispossession, at the very heart of critical urban theory? Here is a bold volume that does precisely this, drawing attention to the many modes of gentrification from cultural place-making to art washing to transit-oriented development. Refusing the inevitability of such spatial restructuring, the authors root their research and analysis in communities that imagine, demand, and create alternative futures. Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles