About This Unit

A neighborhood is never just housing stock. This unit examines the neighborhood as a made place — produced by investment and disinvestment, defended and remade by the people who live there — and takes gentrification as the process through which those forces become visible. The unit's scholarship comes largely from Black geographies, the field that asks how Black people have created, kept, and lost place under conditions designed to deny them both. Brandi Thompson Summers's study of Washington, D.C.'s H Street corridor shows gentrification's newest twist: "black aesthetic emplacement," in which blackness itself — murals, music, heritage branding — is marketed to sell a neighborhood even as Black residents are priced out of it. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza's history of the same city traces what came first: the century of redlining, disinvestment, and drug-war policing that devalued Black neighborhoods and prepared them for profitable reinvestment.

Against displacement, the unit sets placemaking: the deliberate work of creating and protecting Black space. The BlackSpace Urbanist Collective's manifesto — fourteen principles for planning and design rooted in Black liberation, from "move at the speed of trust" to "reckon with the past to build the future" — gives learners a practitioner's answer to the question the scholarship raises: if neighborhoods are made, who gets to make them? The unit's concepts are anchored in the framework of racial capitalism, Cedric Robinson's argument that capitalism has never operated apart from racial hierarchy — that the devaluation and revaluation of Black places is not a market accident but the market working.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Define gentrification, displacement, and placemaking, and explain how the Black geographies tradition reframes each as a question of power over place.
• Explain racial capitalism and apply it to the cycle of neighborhood disinvestment and reinvestment.
• Analyze "black aesthetic emplacement": how blackness can be aestheticized and marketed in a gentrifying neighborhood while Black residents are displaced.
• Evaluate a placemaking practice or principle — community land trust, cultural district, the BlackSpace Manifesto — for what it can and cannot protect against market-driven displacement.

Keywords

• Black geographies
• Racial capitalism
• Gentrification
• Displacement
• Placemaking
• Black aesthetic emplacement

Open Educational Resources

• "Gentrifying Blackness with Dr. Brandi Summers." 1919Radio Black Geographies podcast series, episode 2, 2021. Listen to the episode.

Podcast episode (~60 min) · Open access.

Summers in conversation about Black in Place: defining gentrification and neoliberalism in plain terms and tracing how they bear on Black life from Washington, D.C. to Toronto. The episode belongs to 1919Radio's four-part Black Geographies series, created explicitly to bring the field "out of academia and into our community and streets through an engaging and open access medium" — making the series itself an example of the public-facing scholarship this project practices. The natural first stop in the unit; the other three episodes are linked from the same page for learners who want the field in full.

• The BlackSpace Manifesto. BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, 2019–present. Read the manifesto.

Manifesto / practice framework · Open access.

Fourteen working principles from a collective of Black planners, architects, artists, and designers founded in New York in 2015 — among them "move at the speed of trust," "create circles, not lines," "plan with, design with," and "reckon with the past to build the future." The manifesto functions as a "gut check" for anyone shaping the built environment, and has been adopted in city agencies and neighborhood projects nationwide. For learners it converts the unit's critique into a usable instrument: a standard against which any planning process — including ones in their own neighborhoods — can be tested.

• Kelley, Robin D. G. "What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?" Boston Review, January 2017. Read the essay.

Essay · Open access.

The standard accessible introduction to the concept in this module's title. Kelley reconstructs Robinson's argument from Black Marxism: capitalism did not break with feudalism's hierarchies but grew through them, so that capitalism and racism developed together — there has been no capitalism that was not racial. Written on Robinson's passing, the essay also recovers the intellectual biography of a thinker whose terms — racial capitalism, the Black radical tradition — now organize movements he did not live to see. Equips learners to use the unit's framing concept precisely rather than as a slogan.

• Urban Displacement Project. University of California, Berkeley. Explore the project.

Research project with interactive maps · Open access.

A research center that maps neighborhood change, classifying census tracts by stage — from "at risk of gentrification" through "advanced gentrification" and "exclusion" — with public interactive maps and plain-language explainers on what gentrification is and how displacement is measured. Gives learners the empirical instrument the unit's case study uses: they can locate any neighborhood they know on the typology and interrogate what the classification captures and misses.

Key Scholarship

• Golash-Boza, Tanya Maria. Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Publisher page.

Book.

Golash-Boza draws a single line from redlining through disinvestment and the War on Drugs to gentrification, arguing that the choice to answer Black communities' twentieth-century problems with prisons and policing — instead of schools, services, and investment — is precisely what made twenty-first-century gentrification possible: devaluation prepared the ground for profitable return. Tracking displaced residents' own stories in Washington, D.C., the book names the pattern racial capitalism at city scale. The unit's most recent anchor and its clearest demonstration that gentrification has a prehistory.

• Summers, Brandi Thompson. Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Summers charts Washington, D.C.'s H Street corridor to develop "black aesthetic emplacement": the process by which blackness becomes a prized, lucrative aesthetic — heritage murals, go-go nostalgia, "diversity" as brand — deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital, often while excluding the city's actual Black residents. The book gives the unit its sharpest paradox: a gentrification that celebrates blackness as it displaces Black people, and a framework for reading the aesthetics of any changing neighborhood.

• Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Zandria F. Robinson. Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Publisher page.

Book.

Hunter and Robinson redraw the American map from the perspective of Black life — a country of "chocolate cities" connected by migration, music, and kinship, in which the South extends wherever Black people have carried it. Blending sociology, history, and popular culture, the book supplies the unit's affirmative geography: before neighborhoods are sites of displacement they are achievements of placemaking, and the authors give learners a vocabulary ("the Black map") for seeing what is at stake when a chocolate city is unmade.

• Hyra, Derek S. Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Hyra's ethnography of D.C.'s Shaw/U Street examines what happens inside a gentrifying neighborhood: newcomers consuming Black history as amenity ("living the wire"), "diversity segregation" in which mixed neighborhoods contain parallel, non-intersecting social worlds, and political displacement that precedes the residential kind — long-time residents losing control of institutions while still living beside them. Complements Summers with interaction-level detail and gives learners concepts for gentrification's social texture, not just its economics.

• McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Publisher page.

Book.

The foundational theoretical text of Black geographies. McKittrick argues that geography is not a neutral backdrop but a system through which domination is organized — and that Black women, positioned as "ungeographic" by that system, have produced their own knowledge of space, from the slave ship's hold and the auction block to the garret where Harriet Jacobs hid for seven years. Demanding but field-defining: the book establishes that struggles over place are struggles over whose sense of place counts as knowledge.

Case Studies

• Mapping Gentrification in Your Own Backyard: Reading the New York Typology Against Lived Experience

Urban Displacement Project New York typology map and a documentary on New York gentrification · Map-and-documentary analysis (2025).

A map-and-documentary analysis in which learners pair the Urban Displacement Project's New York typology with a documentary on the city's hyper-gentrification and then locate a neighborhood they know on the typology, tracing how its investment, marketing language, and displacement match or complicate the patterns the sources describe. The case study reads neighborhood change through racial capitalism, treating devaluation and reinvestment as the market working rather than malfunctioning.

• The Manifesto as Instrument: Auditing and Reimagining a Plan with BlackSpace

The BlackSpace Manifesto and a learner-selected planning document · Applied-framework activity.

An applied-framework activity in which learners audit a real public planning document — a rezoning proposal, neighborhood plan, or developer's community-benefits presentation — against the BlackSpace Manifesto's fourteen principles, then choose three principles and use them to reimagine the same site for a community-centered outcome. The case study treats the manifesto as an instrument for both evaluating existing plans and envisioning placemaking against displacement.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Golash-Boza: "Before gentrification" names a prehistory: devaluation through redlining, disinvestment, and policing made later reinvestment profitable. Pick a neighborhood you know that is described as "up and coming" and sketch its prehistory. What was done to it — and not for it — before the investment arrived?
2. On Summers: Black aesthetic emplacement describes blackness marketed as atmosphere while Black residents are displaced. Find one example — a mural, a venue, a real-estate listing, a "heritage district" — and analyze who produces the aesthetic, who consumes it, and who profits from it.
3. On Hunter and Robinson: The "chocolate city" names a Black achievement of placemaking, not merely a demographic fact. Describe one institution — a church, shop, block association, park, sound — that anchors a place you know as somebody's place. What would its loss take with it that a housing statistic would not record?
4. On racial capitalism: Robinson's claim is that racial devaluation is not a market distortion but a market mechanism. Test the claim against gentrification: walk through how racial meanings enter at each step — appraisal, lending, marketing, policing — of a neighborhood's revaluation.
5. On the BlackSpace Manifesto: Choose two of the fourteen principles and apply them to a planning conflict in the news or in your own area. What would each principle require that current practice does not? Where might the principles themselves be in tension?
6. Synthesis across the unit: The unit sets two movements against each other — the devaluation and revaluation of Black neighborhoods (Golash-Boza, Summers, and the framework of racial capitalism) and the deliberate making and defense of Black place (Hunter and Robinson, the BlackSpace Manifesto). Drawing on at least two of the unit's readings, one from each movement, explain how a single neighborhood can be at once a site of displacement and an achievement of placemaking. Which framework do you find more useful for a place you know — the one that explains how a neighborhood is unmade, or the one that names what makes it somebody's place — and why?

Further Readings and Resources

• McKittrick, Katherine. "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place." Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947–963. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

An article-length entry into McKittrick's geographic thinking, for learners who want the argument of Demonic Grounds without the full book. McKittrick develops the idea of "a black sense of place" — the meaning, memory, and orientation Black communities have produced in spaces shaped by slavery and its afterlives, from the plantation to the prison. She argues that these sites share a spatial logic of domination, and that a black sense of place persists within and against it.

• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3rd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021 [1983]. Publisher page.

Book.

The source text behind the module's framing concept, for learners ready to work from the original. Robinson argues that capitalism did not break from feudal Europe's racial and ethnic hierarchies but developed through them, so that race and class have been entangled from the start — what he names racial capitalism. The book also reconstructs the Black radical tradition as a distinct current of resistance and thought. Dense and wide-ranging; the third edition adds new prefatory material.

• 1919Radio Black Geographies podcast series (all four episodes), 2021. Browse the series.

Podcast series · Open access.

The full four-part series from which the unit's first podcast episode is drawn, gathering scholars working in Black geographies for accessible conversations on how race shapes space and how Black communities make and hold place. Across the episodes the series moves from foundational concepts to specific sites and struggles, and was produced explicitly to carry the field beyond the academy. A way for learners to hear several voices in the tradition rather than reading a single text.

• Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain. Special exhibition, Oakland Museum of California. View the exhibition.

Museum exhibition.

An exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California tracing histories of displacement, resistance, and resilience in Black communities of Oakland and the East Bay. Through new commissions in art, architecture, and archival research, it documents how these communities have resisted dispossession and reimagined spaces of home and belonging, and its online presentation links related readings. The exhibition offers a West Coast counterpart to the unit's largely D.C.- and New York–centered material, and a model of placemaking staged as public history.

• Moskowitz, P. E. How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. New York: Nation Books, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

A journalistic survey of gentrification across four U.S. cities — New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York — written for a general audience. Moskowitz argues that gentrification is not a natural or accidental process but one produced by policy, capital, and government decisions, and traces how each city's displacement followed from specific choices. Concrete and accessible, it is a useful entry point for learners newer to the topic before they turn to the unit's scholarly accounts.

• Pattillo, Mary. Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Publisher page.

Book.

A study of Black middle-class gentrification in Chicago's North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood, where the newcomers buying and renovating homes were largely Black professionals rather than white outsiders. Pattillo examines the ambivalent position of these "middlemen" residents — drawn to the neighborhood yet implicated in the displacement of poorer Black neighbors — and the conflicts over schools, development, and respectability that follow. The book complicates any account of gentrification that assumes the displacing party is always white.

• New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI) and the community land trust model. Visit the site.

Organization / community land trust model.

A coalition advancing community land trusts across New York City — one of the unit's named anti-displacement tools. In a community land trust, a nonprofit owns the land beneath homes and leases it on terms that keep the housing permanently affordable, removing it from the speculative market. NYCCLI organizes residents, supports new trusts, and advocates for city policy, making it a practical companion to the unit's case studies on neighborhood change and resident organizing.

• "Residue: What Is Lost to Gentrification?" Al Jazeera The Stream (with Brandi Summers), 2020. Watch the conversation.

Broadcast conversation (video).

A short television conversation, featuring Brandi Summers, on what gentrification removes that does not appear in housing data — the relationships, institutions, cultural life, and sense of belonging that make a neighborhood more than its building stock. Running well under an hour, it makes a compact in-class clip for learners who will not work through the full podcast, and pairs directly with the unit's questions on what displacement costs.

• "What Is ULURP?" New York City Department of City Planning. Read about the process.

City planning process (reference).

The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure is New York City's standardized public-review process for changes to land use, mandated by the City Charter. Rezonings, large developments, and other major land-use actions pass through a fixed sequence of community-board, borough-president, City Planning Commission, and City Council review, with formal points for public comment. It is where many of the real planning documents a learner might audit — rezoning applications, environmental reviews, community-benefits agreements — are generated and recorded, a practical companion to the unit's second case study.