About This Case Study

Two ways of seeing neighborhood change sit side by side in this case study. The first is a map: the Urban Displacement Project, a research center at the University of California, Berkeley, classifies census tracts across the New York region by where they stand in the process of gentrification and displacement — from "at risk" through "ongoing" and "advanced" gentrification to outright "exclusion" — and publishes the result as a public, interactive map of the city. The second is a film: New York Story of Gentrification and Resistance: There Goes the Neighborhood (2025) follows what the map abstracts, documenting the communities and organizers fighting the radical transformation and displacement that the film calls the city's "hyper-gentrification." A map can look like neutral description and a documentary like advocacy, yet both are accounts of the same process — and both raise a question the surface of either one hides: how does a neighborhood come to "change" at all, and who pays for it?

This case study reads that process through the concept of racial capitalism. The term comes from Cedric Robinson, who argued that capitalism has never operated apart from racial hierarchy: the sorting of people and places into the valuable and the disposable is not a malfunction of the market but the market working as it always has. Applied to neighborhoods, racial capitalism names a cycle — the devaluation of Black and brown neighborhoods through redlining, disinvestment, and policing, followed by their profitable "rediscovery" once they can be made to yield a return. A related idea sharpens the marketing stage of that cycle: Brandi Thompson Summers's black aesthetic emplacement, in which blackness itself — murals, music, heritage branding — is sold to make a changing neighborhood desirable, often even as Black residents are priced out. The analytical move is to read a neighborhood's revaluation as an instrument: to ask what work the "change" does, whose presence it removes and whose it draws in, and how race operates through the appraisal, the listing, the rezoning, and the rebrand. You will locate a neighborhood you know on the typology, set it beside the documentary's account, and then analyze how its transformation does, and does not, fit the pattern the unit's scholarship describes.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Urban Displacement Project, New York gentrification and displacement map (University of California, Berkeley) — the main source.
• New York Story of Gentrification and Resistance: There Goes the Neighborhood (2025) — watch the documentary for the lived account behind the map.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency and access: the Urban Displacement Project's classifications are built on data from particular years and are updated periodically, so treat any label as a snapshot rather than the permanent truth of a place, and note the vintage of the data you are reading. Online video can also move; if the documentary link has changed, search the title to relocate it.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Think of a block or neighborhood you have watched change — new construction, new businesses, new neighbors, rising rents. What did you notice first, and who seemed to be arriving as others left?
• Can a single map label — "advanced gentrification," say — capture what is happening to a place where people actually live? What would it miss?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Orientation — The Map and the Film (10–12 minutes)

Begin by establishing both sources before you analyze either. On the map, find New York City and learn the typology: read what each category means — early, ongoing, and advanced gentrification; stable or exclusive areas; and the categories the project uses for low-income tracts under pressure. Zoom in and note two or three neighborhoods whose classification surprises you or that you recognize. Then watch the documentary, or the portion your group is assigned, and write a short, neutral summary of what it claims is happening to New York neighborhoods and who, in its account, is resisting. Resist, for now, the urge to take a side; the analysis comes later.

For groups: work the map and the film individually, each person writing their own summary. Do not compare yet.

Phase 2: Profile a Neighborhood You Know (12–15 minutes)

Choose one neighborhood you have a real connection to — where you live, grew up, work, or go to school. If you would like a starting point, several New York neighborhoods appear on the map and in public debate over displacement: the South Bronx and Mott Haven, marketed by developers as "the Piano District"; the 125th Street corridor in Harlem; and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Any of these, or your own, will work. Then build a profile:

1. What the data says. Locate the neighborhood on the typology. Record its classification and the classifications of the tracts around it, and note any trend the map shows. Write down exactly what the map asserts about this place.
2. What changed on the ground. From your own knowledge, and the documentary where it applies, name the concrete signs of change: new construction, business turnover, the marketing or branding language used to sell the area ("up-and-coming," "the Piano District," a "heritage" or "arts" district), shifts in who lives and shops there, and movement in rents.
3. Who is named, who is missing. Compare the two pictures. Whose displacement does the map register, and whose does it not — renters pushed out informally, small businesses, people doubled up or pushed to the margins of the data? Note where the record is partial or ambiguous; the gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: each member profiles a different neighborhood for breadth, or the same one for depth. Build your profiles individually before discussing.

Phase 3: Reading the Revaluation as Racial Capitalism (8–10 minutes)

Now bring the concept to your profile. Racial capitalism reads a neighborhood's "change" not as a natural rise in value but as a cycle in which devaluation makes later reinvestment profitable. Holding that against what you have gathered, ask:

• Walk the cycle step by step. Where do racial meanings enter at each stage of your neighborhood's revaluation — in how it was appraised and lent against, in the language used to market it, in policing and "quality of life" enforcement, in a rezoning or subsidy? What was done to the neighborhood, and not for it, before the investment arrived?
• Look for black aesthetic emplacement. Is the neighborhood's blackness, latinidad, or "diversity" and "culture" being sold — in branding, murals, nightlife, a renamed district — even as the people associated with that culture are pushed out? The rebranding of the South Bronx as "the Piano District" is one example to test the idea against.
• The strain test. Where does racial capitalism fit your neighborhood's story well, and where does it strain? Consider cases where the newcomers are themselves people of color, where long-time residents organize and stay, or where the change is driven by forces — a transit line, a disaster, a university — the frame does not fully name.

For groups: spend the first half walking the cycle together; spend the second on where the frame strains.

Phase 4: Resistance in Circulation (optional, 5–7 minutes)

The documentary foregrounds people fighting displacement, not only suffering it. Find one current example of anti-displacement organizing in or near your neighborhood — a community land trust, a tenant association, an anti-displacement coalition, a fight over a specific rezoning. Briefly: what is it trying to protect, and against what? Does the example confirm the racial-capitalism reading, or complicate it by showing that the cycle is contested rather than inevitable?

For groups: each member brings one example; the group notes whether, taken together, they suggest the cycle can be interrupted.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

In the neighborhood I profiled, the gap between what the map records and what is actually happening is __________. Reading its revaluation through racial capitalism shows __________. The part of this analysis I find hardest to hold steady is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the data captures and exactly what exceeds it.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the phases in order, keeping brief notes. The neighborhood profile from Phase 2 and the racial-capitalism reading from Phase 3 are the central artifacts; keep them for use with the unit's questions on gentrification and racial capitalism.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 can be collective or split (some on the map, some on the film); Phase 2 is individual, with members ideally profiling different neighborhoods; Phase 3 works well as discussion, with the most time on where the frame strains; Phase 4 moves quickly. If time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• The Urban Displacement Project publishes its methodology and the indicators behind each category, along with comparable maps for other U.S. regions; reading how the typology is built shows what each label counts and what it cannot.
• For the prehistory a single map cannot show — the decades of devaluation that make later reinvestment profitable — see Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap (University of California Press, 2023), in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• To follow how the cycle is contested in practice, trace one anti-displacement institution — a community land trust or a tenant organizing coalition — and ask what it can protect that the market does not price.