Deracialized Nostalgia, reracialized community, and truncated gentrification: capital and cultural flows in Richmond, Virginia and Durban, South Africa

ABSTRACT

Gentrification literature often focuses on frictions between gentrifiers (often white) and those being displaced by the process (often low-income people of color). Far less attention is paid to a revealing place-marketing strategy that papers over race politics. Businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods appeal to their customers’ sense of nostalgia for a vanished way of life, while eliding racial injustices prevalent in the times they evoke. The process entails re-racialization of such sites without reference to the segregatory politics central to their creation: a mode of remaking history, without memory. In larger cities this may not be so evident, since gentrification dynamics are driven by both a sufficiently large share of the population with high disposable incomes, and a well-developed property redevelopment industry with the capacity to unleash real estate speculation. In contrast, smaller cities that have partially gentrified still exhibit incomplete erasure of the past. They provide a valuable window into this process of historical de- and re-racialization. Two such secondary cities are Richmond, Virginia, and Durban, South Africa. Both have histories of legally-enshrined racial segregation, and both are attempting, with varying degrees of success, to recast inner-city neighborhoods as cool, creative places for middle-class residents to live, consume, and produce.

KEYWORDS:

• Gentrification
• racial segregation
• memory
• Richmond
• Virginia
• Durban
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Patrick Bond http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6657-7898

Notes on contributors

Patrick Bond is Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand, but did his doctorate in geography at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of more than a dozen books on South Africa, Zimbabwe and Africa, including on urbanization processes.

Laura Browder is the Tyler and Alice Haynes Professor of American Studies at the University of Richmond. Her books range across socio-cultural and political history. She was recipient of a Fulbright Specialists Program fellowship which funded this research.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Controversy has risen over such renaming in Harlem as “SoHa”, South Bronx as “Piano District,” South Philadelphia as “Newbold,” Washington DC north of Massachusetts Avenue as “NoMa”, North Nashville as “City Heights,” Denver’s Northside as “Highlands”, and South Central as “South Los Angeles” (Hwang 2016). As David Madden (2017) notes, such “names are being created to legitimize and naturalize displacement, gentrification, privatization, and recommodification.”

2 The struggles were, essentially, over what Henri Lefebvre (1968, 158) termed the “Right to the City”: a fight by lower-income residents over “the surprising detours of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city … ” As predicted by the woman who coined the term gentrification, Ruth Glass (1964, xx), her case study site of London “was faced with an embarrass de richesse in her central area – and this will prove to be a problem, too,” once the stark inequality generated displacement and social unrest.

3 The highest-ranked 2010 cities on this measure (and their percentage increases in gentrifiers from 1980-2010) were New York (56 to 76), Chicago (28 to 70) and Portland (27 to 60). Four southern cities – Charleston (35 to 53), Orlando (30 to 49), Charlotte (19 to 47) and Atlanta (10 to 47) – ranked fourth to seventh in the Cleveland Fed index.

Thus, even within its peer group of cities, Richmond’s gentry have not become nearly as influential a force in reshaping urban space as they have in other cities. An internet blog commentary (Bullwinkie 2010) makes this frustration evident: “To keep the momentum going, we need a real commitment from the city to continue aggressively fighting crime and blight in and around its historic areas, and to take a strong pro-business approach in order to boost the local economy and create jobs. It’s going to be tough going no matter what, and what we can’t afford is to get bogged down (as Richmond in the past has been wont to do) in the back and forth over ‘gentrification,’ etc. The city may have to actually find the guts to take sides in some instances.”

There are no comparative data for Durban. However, at least until the 2018 property market downturn, gentrification processes succeeded in the two slightly larger but economically much more prosperous South African cities – Johannesburg (especially Maboneng and Braamfontein) and Cape Town (Woodstock and Bo-Kaap) – while in comparison, there is a much smaller share of gentrified sites within Durban’s central zone.

4 Church Hill’s boundaries are Main Street on the south west, Chimbarazo Park and Oakwood Cemetery on the south east, and highways 64 and 95 on the north and west sides. The U.S. Census 2017 population estimates correspond to a a more restricted zone established by the Historic Richmond Foundation in 1956, in the area around St John’s Church, whose population is 59 percent white, 30 percent black and 11 percent mixed, Asian and Hispanic. The broader Zip Code 23223, corresponding to the broader boundaries, has only 17 percent white population, and 77 percent black. In the smaller delineated area (Statistical Atlas 2018), of all 65–74 year olds whites are 64 percent of the cohort, but above age 75 they drop to only 8 percent. In the 30–34 year old cohort, 80 percent are white and 13 percent are black; their children in the 5–9 year range are 57 percent white but by the time they reach 10–14 years, the white childrens’ proportion falls to 16 percent and 15–17 year olds are fewer than 5 percent white. These data suggest ongoing white flight for schooling purposes.