Miriam Greenberg

Films on Gentrification

For City & Community’s second review of urban documentaries, I focus on a genre that has exploded on the scene during the last decade: documentaries on gentrification. From independent films to oral history projects, digital shorts to photo documentaries, gentrification is fast becoming one of the most prevalent and relevant topics in urban nonfiction. (For a partial listing of projects by city, see the end of this article.) The current focus on gentrification extends themes of neighborhood change and territorial conflict long present, if not dominant in urban documentaries and community and urban sociology generally. Earlier processes of urban restructuring—from suburbanization and urban renewal to fiscal crisis and planned shrinkage—were powerfully portrayed in films like “Crisis in Levittown” (1957), “Metropolitan Avenue” (1966), and “Style Wars” (1979), to choose just three prominent U.S. examples of documentaries made over successive decades. Today, across much of the Global North and South, gentrification is an increasingly powerful force of neighborhood change and source of territorial conflict. Not surprisingly, documentarians are again picking up their cameras. As in earlier generations, these visual accounts do more than text alone to capture the emotional and experiential nuances of reactions to large-scale urban change and to make sense of the complex and often opaque social and political forces behind it. But of course gentrification documentaries, like gentrification itself, are not simply a modern iteration of an earlier form. They require that we get to know a different cast of characters and a new plot line, as distinct from common narratives—whether those involving top–down urban renewal driven by overzealous urban planners, or bottom up, quasiecological neighborhood change driven by cyclical in-migration and out-migration. While its pioneers may have had other ideas, gentrification has always been the quintessential story of urban exchange value trumping urban use value. Especially in its current

Documentary Film Review Essay

This is the first annual review of documentary films for City & Community. Documentaries can enrich our work as urban sociologists in three basic ways. For our teaching, they offer a vital complement to texts and lecture, helping bring the theory, methods, and history of urban sociology to life for our students. For our research, they provide an important source of primary data—archival, ethnographic, visual—as well as secondary analysis informed by sociologists’ own original research and scholarly interviews. And, finally, for those seeking to explore new methodologies and bring their research to new audiences, documentaries are something we might imagine creating ourselves—as quite a few CUSS members have done already.1 These important links between urban documentary and urban scholarship, while long apparent, have grown even stronger today. Hence, our decision to include this new feature in the journal. The sociological—and specifically urban sociological—significance of documentaries has evolved since their birth with the invention of the motion picture medium. In the 1920s, “actualities” of city life shot with wooden, hand-held cameras were screened in town squares around the world, from New York to Mexico City, Cairo to Bangalore, planting the seeds of urban-based film industries and an emergent ethnographic consciousness. In the 1930s, avant-garde “city symphony” films, experimenting with montage and camera technique, brought to life the complexity, poetry, and contradictions of a day in the life of the modern, industrial city. Meanwhile, documentarians hired by the Works Progress Administration, using all manner of media, memorialized the popular experience of the Great Depression in cities and communities across the United States. By the 1940s, sober reportage contrasted the dire social conditions in slums and rural towns with the rationalism and idealism of post-WWII public housing, capturing the welfare state ethos on celluloid. By the late 1960s, advances in television broadcasting enabled

Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York edited by Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher Klemek

Martin J. Murray began conducting sociological fieldwork in South Africa during the 1970s. His books on the popular struggle against apartheid and on the transition to democracy are essential reading for students of contemporary South Africa. He therefore brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the study of urban restructuring in post-apartheid Johannesburg. In Taming the Disorderly City, Murray sets out to explain the fragmentation of Johannesburg into a constellation of fortified enclaves for the elite and zones of abandonment for the poor. The book provides a revealing analysis of the marginalization and struggles of the urban poor under the rule of real estate capitalism and “postliberal” modes of urban governance. Murray’s analysis of urban restructuring concentrates on the interaction of three principal actors: city officials, real estate capitalists, and the urban poor. City officials attempting to redress the iniquities of apartheid confront an impossible dilemma. On one hand, the elimination of apartheid-era pass laws and residential restrictions unleashed a wave of African urbanization that has generated a severe housing crisis. Government efforts to construct social housing simply cannot keep pace with the rising demand. On the other hand, the adoption of a “postliberal” framework of urban governance constrains the ability of city officials to actively redistribute scarce resources. Intended to create a favorable business environment that will attract profit-oriented investment, the postliberal framework requires the municipality to ensure a stable regime of property rights, to privatize the provision of basic services, and to decentralize governance by promoting self-managed business and residential districts. Drawing on the work of David Harvey, Neil Smith, and David Scobey, Murray’s analysis of real estate capitalism highlights the unevenness of investment in the built environment. As Africans moved into downtown Johannesburg, real estate capital withdrew from the inner city to invest in new business districts and residential enclaves in the northern suburbs. Inner city landowners allowed their buildings to decay, creating a “slumlord economy” that continues to squeeze profits out of desperate tenants. Now, after years of declining property value, developers are returning to the inner city to build condos and loft apartments for the elite. For the poor, the revitalization of downtown Johannesburg means the resumption of forced removals.