AR Reading List 042: displacement Add to Bookmarks
The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: a collection of carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
This week’s reading list looks at an apparent inevitability in the life of any city: displacement. Gentrification’s mechanisms of improvement and erasure fill the coffers of the wealthiest around the globe, supported by policies of demolition and rehousing that push people out of their homes and out of their communities, set adrift at the edges of the cities they once sustained.
We look to Brazil, South Africa, Portgual and Belgium for stories each inflicted by the specific conditions of the place. Jaffa’s story is one turned on its head: once a bustling merchant hub, its architecture is now ‘typified by unadorned signs of decay’, as Nadi Abusaada wrote in our AR October 2020 issue on Land. Palestinian residents are pushed out nonetheless, the city’s logic of improvement ‘i