Appropriating The Neighborhood

Today I published over at the Village Voice, writing close Target, neighborhood appropriation, together with hyper-gentrification.



Excerpt:

What the colonizers want together with replicate is gritty New York without the grit. Punk together with jazz together with poesy without the enlivening daze of unpredictability. It’s a swell line a fast 1 on that industrial plant inward business office because nosotros are starving for reality together with a connecter to history. Homesick for our lost city, nosotros tin live on easily seduced past times imitations of life.

At Target’s grand-opening event, it wasn’t the pseudo-CBGB that actually got to me. I proceed thinking close that faux stoop. The stoop, therefore utterly urban, unremarkably brings the within out; facing the street, it engages residents alongside the sidewalk ballet. But inward today’s homogenized city, the novel developments plow away from the street, similar suburban developments oftentimes do, shielding their residents within controlled someone spaces that spend upward the communality together with chaos of urban essence life. Target’s faux stoop haunts me every bit a ghost of the unreal, an empty representation recalling a reality that is slipping away. As urbanist M. Christine Boyer has written, inward her attempt out “Cities for Sale,” “these tableaux are the truthful nonplaces, hollowed out urban remnants, without connecter to the residue of the urban essence or the past, waiting to live on filled alongside contemporary fantasies, colonized past times wishful projections, together with turned into glasses of consumption.”

H5N1 haunted feeling is business office of the parcel inward today’s commodified cities. Hyper-gentrification is a horror painting mash-up. An invasion of the trunk snatchers, it zombifies what went before. It kills together with therefore reanimates its victims, sanitized together with tamed, to sell itself together with expand into farther territory, all spell working to convince us that it has the best intentions together with agency no harm. It only wants to live on business office of the community. Part of the family. One of us, 1 of us. Like a vampire at the door it asks, alongside a seductive smile: Won’t nosotros delight allow it in?

Read the whole article at the Voice

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