ABSTRACT This article builds on scholarship about gentrifying foodscapes by exploring public debates around a grocery store that opened in the Junction Triangle, a predominately white, mixed income neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. Shortly after the completion of a new condominium development, Metro Inc. decided to open their discount chain, Food Basics, instead of their mid‐tier grocery store, Metro, as originally announced. In response, the new condominium owners started a petition demanding the company reverse their decision. This petition led to discussions in the local news and online forums regarding the neighborhood's status. Blending archival and digital ethnographic methods, this article thus conducts a discursive analysis of the petition and its surrounding commentary. I demonstrate how the new, higher‐income residents sought to represent the Junction Triangle as an ‘up‐and‐coming’ neighborhood, separated from its historical associations with industrial pollution, poverty, and crime. They also drew on notions of ‘quality’ to present themselves as the ‘real’ residents to which Metro Inc. should cater. Detractors challenged those articulated identities, often mobilizing satirical tropes of gentrifiers to reject both the rehistoricization of the neighborhood and the gentrifiers' claimed class positions. Through this analysis, I expose how these debates centered around the exclusionary use‐value that the petition supporters understood the Metro to have: a use‐value produced through the store's capacity to make food economically inaccessible for lower‐income residents, therefore hastening their displacement and increasing the newer residents' property values. This case study thereby highlights the contested co‐productions of neighborhood and community identities in transitional neighborhoods.
ABSTRACT In this article, I draw on multi‐sited and remote ethnography in the cities of Munich in Germany and Hanoi in Vietnam to analyze how young hip hop artists transform cities as sensory contact zones through rap and dance. I show how young Vietnamese‐Germans amplify sensory contact zones in the diasporic city of Munich through the sounds, visuals, and wordplay of Viet rap. In the rap track “Viet World Wide,” three rappers negotiate their dual modes of belonging and their “diasporic citizenship” while performing in the city where they live. I examine the sensations and affective resonances produced by dancing together in the cipher, a circular dance formation that is characteristic of diverse hip hop dance styles, such as breaking, popping, locking, waacking, or hip hop dance. By joining in and dancing together, young women in Hanoi generate feelings of joy and safety in an otherwise anonymous urban environment. By examining the city through the lens of sensory contact zones, I show how sounds and rhythms affect and animate urbanites' sense of place and belonging in the city.
ABSTRACT Urban security interventions often seek legitimacy by changing how places associated with violence are publicly represented. Less attention has been paid to how grassroots organizations navigate these representational pressures as they pursue everyday peace. This article examines that problem in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro, where the Pacifying Police Unit programme combined militarized policing with broader promises of social integration and urban renewal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2015, the article develops the concept of the dilemma of representation to analyze how grassroots actors navigate competing pressures over what aspects of favela life should be made visible. It compares one organization that documented police abuse and ongoing insecurity to contest official narratives of pacification with another that foregrounded culture, exchange, and everyday life to challenge stigma and build relationships beyond the favela. The article argues that representational decisions are themselves a key component of everyday peace practice, and that highly visible interventions can sharpen disagreements over what should be made visible and to what ends.
ABSTRACT Urban scholarship increasingly recognizes that processes such as gentrification unfold not only through spatial transformations, but through shifts in sensory environments and everyday rhythms. In this paper, drawing on twenty‐three months of fieldwork in Belgrade, I examine how urban redevelopment (re)organizes time for middle‐class people aged 25–45 through the regulation of nightlife, whereby noise ordinances prioritize quiet nights for newly affluent residents. To describe the displacement of nocturnal social life from the city center, I develop the concept of the sanitization of the night . Using sonic methods, interviews, and focus groups, I trace how gentrification reshapes Belgrade's soundscape as nightlife moves toward the suburbs. For urbanites who anchored their social lives in central districts, this shift produces a temporal disorientation embodied in insomnia. Finally, I argue that gentrification in Belgrade operates through a temporal displacement, where the governance of sound reorganizes when and how the city can be inhabited.
