Multicultural city branding can repeat the exclusionary logic of old urban renewal

Evidence

Across the city4 the rhetoric of globalization has created for the twenty-first century a celebration of cultural diversity. The “regeneration” of cultural quarters and “ethnic enclaves” has become part of the mainstream rhetoric of projects promoting urban transformation. At first glance this may appear a welcome change from the whitening waves of gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s property booms on both sides of the Atlantic. But it was not for nothing that black civil rights groups in 1960s America proclaimed that “urban renewal equals nigger removal” and so it is perhaps important to greet the meeting of global capitalism with niche-marketed multiculturalism with a degree of caution as this particular postcolonial encounter begins to reshape the cities of the twenty-first century. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2253

Categorization

• SEED: Strong angle: tracing how ‘urban renewal equals nigger removal’ of the 1960s maps onto today’s ethnic-enclave regeneration branding — who gets displaced by the celebration of diversity.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s theme of how urban infrastructure projects encode who is considered part of the city — here through marketing discourse rather than trees.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern urban redevelopment coincides with deepened inequality and infrastructural decline — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 581; Commodified ethnic quarters veil rather than reveal real urban geography — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 546