The Violent Remaking of Urban Space
Gentrification is not mere neighborhood change; it is the domestic face of settler colonialism, a process Mamdani would recognize as the violent remaking of urban space to serve a new “civilizing” mission. The “pioneering” class of affluent professionals acts as the vanguard for capital, systematically displacing the “native” population through economic and legal force. This is accumulation by dispossession, where community, history, and culture are stripped from the land to make it legible and profitable for the settler economy. The coffee shops and dog parks are the new outposts of the empire. A Marxist-feminist analysis sees how this disrupts intricate networks of social reproduction, severing ties between extended families and community support systems. The solution is not affordable housing set-asides within the development project, as this merely legitimizes the process. The only solution is militant resistance: eviction blockades, community land trusts that de-commodify territory, and the building of power to assert that our neighborhoods are not frontiers for colonization.
Originally posted 2025-10-21 15:57:13.
