21.6. 'Greening' the Big Apple: Environmental Gentrification and the Ethics of Urban Sustainability
Melissa Checker (New York)
Di, 21.6.2016, 18:00, Oettingenstraße 67, Raum L 155, München
This talk draws on Melissa Checker’s ongoing ethnographic research in New York City to discuss the ethics of urban sustainability. She focuses on environmental gentrification, or the idea that environmentally-minded neighborhood improvements tend to accompany a rise in property values, rents and neighborhood services. This, of course, leads to the displacement of low income people and people of color. Even more disturbingly, her findings show that environmental gentrification was a dialogic process – the greening of certain areas led to the increased degradation of others.
Melissa Checker is the Hagedorn Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College (New York) and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center.