gentrification

Commentary, no. 2, vol. 6

“It’s not your loss. It’s San Francisco’s”: Black Movement, Displacement, Home/lessness, and Gentrification in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

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Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an elegy to the displacement of minority communities from the gentrifying city. Jacqueline Pinkowitz discusses the film’s images of movement, dislocation, and loss and the legacy of racial inequality in the Bay Area.
Inside Michigan Central Station under construction, a decaying archway is featured behind construction tape, a sign that reads "Men Working Above," and a construction worker walking in front of the archway toward a construction machine.
no. 2, Student Voices, vol. 5

Detroit and the Glorification of the Past

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Christian Golden compares the use of ruins in the documentary Detroit: Comeback City and the fiction film Gran Torino, arguing that ruins in these two films resonate with the city’s efforts to attract business and investment through imagining a nostalgic past that can be retrieved to renew Detroit’s future.
no. 4, Student Voices, vol. 2

Ruins, Representation, and the Right to the City

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In “Ruins, Representation and the Right to the City,” Spencer Cunningham provides a deft summary of the ongoing discussion surrounding the redevelopment of the City of Detroit, exploring the aesthetics (or, rather, the aestheticization) of the city’s urban ruins, and the contradictory forces of gentrification that continue into the present day.