The intertwined dynamics of urban “revitalization” and the displacement and destabilization of African Americans in US cities is not a phenomenon new to twenty-first century New York City. Amanda Boston’s examination of the “redevelopment” of Downtown Brooklyn exposes the changing roles of government and the market in the erasure and destabilization of long-standing communities of color. As municipal government has moved from market regulator to market facilitator—inviting the influx of global capital and gentrification into majority-minority neighborhoods—the impact on the space has benefited the affluent (often white) residents and consumers of the city to the detriment of minority communities. A consideration of the construction of the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn provides a close-to-home lens on the role of race and profit in the organization of urban space.
Amanda Boston
Amanda Boston is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University. She earned her PhD in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century African American urban history, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the politics and culture of race in the post-civil rights era. Her current projects explore gentrification’s racial operations in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and their role in the making and unmaking of the borough’s Black communities. Boston has received research funding and support from the Social Science Research Council, as well as the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Program, and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.