Unsettling Senses of Place: Displacement and the (re)Making of Home in a Rapidly Changing City

Lynne C. Manzo (University of Washington)
Richard Desanto (University of Washington)

Cities are sites of continual processes of settlement and unsettlement. They are, at once, places of belonging, diversity, and inclusion, and places of alienation, displacement, and exclusion. Compounding this, the start of the 21 st century has bourne witness to unprecedented degrees of mobility and urban change. New forms and patterns of spatial circulations have emerged from a host of phenomena including war and refugee crises, urban redevelopment and gentrification pressures, and new forms of work-related mobility. These new realities of uncertainty and disturbance require new ways of understanding how people “settle into place” in a context of change. This paper examines the dynamic processes of settlement and unsettlement in the city of Seattle, one of the most rapidly- and dramatically changing cities in the US, as a way to understand emerging and negotiated senses of place among city dwellers. We will examine several catalysts of change and unsettlement: first, the transformation of the South Lake Union neighborhood into a hi-tech hub with the establishment of Amazon’s world headquarters; and second, the demolition of local public housing developments and the affordability and homeless crisis. Using discursive and interpretive approaches we examine archival (secondary) and original (primary) empirical data to understand the dialectic relationship between macrostructural forces and rhetoric of urban change on the one hand, and the lived experience and interpretations of that change on the other. In examining these particular catalysts of change, this paper will consider the various potentialities and challenges offered by the dialectic of “unsettled- unsettled” as a framework for understanding the everyday struggles forbelonging that emerge from economic and population growth, shifting migration patterns, and urban restructuring programs in this city.