Hist American Gentrification

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will introduce you to the idea of gentrification and its evolving history in the United States. Gentrification can be considered a process by which urban space is reorganized along an uneven socioeconomic and racial axis to privilege and serve the needs of the most advantageous class. Understanding this process requires the firm grasp of two important fields: (1). 20th century urban and suburban history and (2). American cultural and intellectual history. Gentrification or what some might call “back to the city” movements, has a long history since the founding of the earliest American cities. However, during the second half of the twentieth century, this term came into prominence when in the absence of industrial mass production and in the aftermath of deindustrialization, cities and neighborhoods underwent a re-branding as consumable experiences ripe with “authenticity.” The former central city districts that long sheltered communities of color and poor migrants after World War II became sites of failed federal policies during the 1950s and 1960s that further produced more, rather than less, segregation. The fiscal crisis of the 1970s generated new urban policies that effectively curtailed services to the inner city and created subsidies for gentrification and redevelopment in hopes of altering shifts in population that would bring to the city a new class of urban consumers. In this class, students will explore the long history of American gentrification, the political economy that shaped it, the voices and memories of those displaced, and the romance of authenticity that supplanted poverty. Students will also learn to interpret primary sources in this subject through written assignments and consider the historiographical debates about retelling this aspect of a seemingly recent American history.