Doctoral Dissertation Research: Contested Renewal: The Rebuilding of the South Bronx

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In the last thirty years, the South Bronx has transformed from a national symbol of urban crisis and dystopia to a model for new forms of urban redevelopment. But the nature of this renewal, and who it benefits, is deeply contested. Capital is returning to the South Bronx, and some claim that community-driven "renewal without displacement" is producing a new, economically diverse South Bronx. But critics point to the area's continuing poverty and racialization, and some residents fear that renewal will lead to gentrification and displacement. This complexity poses challenging questions to the existing literature on gentrification and urban renewal. Accounts that rely on a dichotomy of gentrification and resistance to it cannot explain how reinvestment has emerged from simultaneously collaborative and conflictive efforts to fight disinvestment and displacement. Also largely unaddressed are the practices involved in transforming the spatialized racial and class difference of stigmatized areas to enable reinvestment. This research examines three field sites in the South Bronx to address the following questions: 1) How did reinvestment and renewal emerge out of the collapse of the 1970s and 1980s? 2) How has reinvestment been shaped by tensions and collaborations among developers, community organizations, and the local state? 3) How are processes of reinvestment shifting how race and class are lived, thought, and managed in the South Bronx? 4) What new spatial orders of ghettoization and/or gentrification have emerged out of processes of reinvestment in the South Bronx? In-depth interviews, participant observation, archival research, and "biographies" of buildings will provide data on the complex, contested processes of reinvestment shaping both the South Bronx and the production of raced, classed, and spaced identities. The investigators expect to demonstrate 1) that processes of reinvestment are continuously contested and this has produced a form of urban renewal that remedies some forms of inequality while reinforcing others, and 2) that an emphasis on class and economic diversity is used to rework spatialized racial, ethnic, and class difference. The research analyzes the implications of urban renewal policies and practices, adopted in the aftermath of the urban crisis of the 1970s, and how this renewal is related to gentrification and displacement. This study will contribute to a simultaneously nuanced and critical view of redevelopment and gentrification by showing how collaboration and conflict among community groups, real estate investors, and local government have created a particular form of urban renewal in the South Bronx. Exploring these issues in the South Bronx is especially important because the South Bronx is increasingly emerging as a national model for urban recovery and life-among-the-ruins, despite the fact that New York City differs from many other cities in that its wealth and growth fuels a seemingly inexorable process of gentrification. By looking at how renewal in the South Bronx challenges inequality in some ways at the same time that it perpetuates it in others, this project has the potential to inform efforts to reduce urban inequality and poverty and produce more just renewal efforts. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will also provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.