What a City Is For

Remaking the Politics of Displacement

Matt Hern

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English

MIT Press
01 September 2017

Urban communities; Housing law; Urban & municipal planning

Series: What a City Is For

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.

By: Matt Hern
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 16mm
ISBN: 9780262534420
ISBN 10: 0262534428
Series: What a City Is For
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 01 September 2017
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.