This article critically interrogates the conceptual coherence of “gentrification” in urban research, arguing instead for centering displacement within studies of place making and place taking. Weaving together personal experiences of serial eviction in Los Angeles and a review of the literature, I argue that “gentrification” has lost its relevance, having become a catch-all term burdened with socio-political baggage and contested meaning. In making this case for abandoning “gentrification,” I argue for advancing displacement in terms of how it plays out in sites, relationally, contingently, and affectively among agents, objects, and atmospheres. By foregrounding displacement as social, material, and affective, this approach challenges structuralist accounts that reduce neighborhoods to containers and residents to abstractions. Using the Echo Park neighborhood as a specific site of contested belonging and continuous place-making, I argue that a site ontology of displacement informs epistemological and methodological approaches to urban scholarship that are politically consistent, intellectually grounded, and empirically nuanced.

This paper centers Arizona as a critical site in the racialized criminalization of immigrants—a practice known as “crimmigration”—and the associated adaptive reuse of prison infrastructure. Focusing on a closed prison facility in the Town of Marana that is slated to reopen as an immigration detention center, we propose the concept of a “carceral fix,” wherein declining incarceration rates are offset by expanded civil immigration detention. Expanding Gilmore's theory of the “prison fix,” we show how political and legal adaptations enable private and public actors to repurpose existing prison space for immigrant confinement amid unprecedented federal investment and intensified racialized enforcement. “Carcerality” names this expansive system of cordoning, confinement, control of which immigrant detention is part. In doing so, we situate Marana within Southern Arizona's long history of punitive prison politics and anti-Mexican social and legal sentiment, demonstrating how criminalization, racialization, and gang labeling continue to generate and profit from imprisoned populations in a state that has long served as a model for punishment.

I call on geographers and other social scientists, including critical criminologists, to continue theorizing crime as a relational concept shaped by political narratives and politicized perceptions of place. Building on the literature in geography, I propose a relational ontology of crime—viewing it not as a fixed set of illicit acts, incidents of victimization, or violations of legal code, but as a political concept that influences how people and places are imagined. By shifting focus from crime as events to crime as an ontological category, scholars can better understand its role in advancing ideological perceptions of place, the incitement of fear, and uninformed calls for social control and increased criminalization.

Stefano Bloch on Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics and The Marvelous Ones.

In this paper, we offer the examples of “banging out” and “quieting the run” to the prison and carceral geographies literature, highlighting the place-making capacities and material effect of sound within state-sanctioned and austere spaces of captivity. We argue that it is sound, as just one component of the affective atmosphere of prison, that allows prisoners to exert agentic control and traverse spatial and social distance through coordinated sonic attacks and forced silence orchestrated from the bottom up.

This paper examines the racialization processes within the US prison system through the lens of site ontology. We argue that racial formation in prison cannot be understood through universalizing or structuralist notions of race alone. Rather, the prison as a site of racialization demonstrates that such processes are spatially contingent and actively negotiated. Drawing in part on personal experience, we reveal how prisoners engage in “running” race; that is, opting into specific racial affiliations as social and existential survival strategies that reflect both individual agency and site-specific prison “politics.” In elucidating this process, we contend that hierarchical conceptualizations and structuralist theories do not sufficiently account for spatially contingent racial categorization experienced by prisoners. We instead advance an ontologically flat, theoretically grounded, and relational understanding of racialization that is informed by experiential data and agentic discourse. Beyond this present paper, we argue that this ontological approach can also be applied to understanding processes of racialization and other forms of identity construction in sites far afield from the prison.

As scholars apply the concept of "the carceral" to more and increasingly diffuse spaces of containment, displacement, and cordoning across free society, I call for a means by which "carcerality" is measured and understood as a productive force in the denial of constitutional rights and protections. I therefore provide a legal reading of carcerality, which establishes prisons as the sine qua non of the carceral landscape, preceded by an analysis of how the reliance on civil law, nuisance ordinances, and other methods of constitutional circumvention in the absence of criminal procedure works within the public sphere to punish residents residing within what Foucault called the carceral archipelago. Along the way I provide vignettes about my own experience with the legal and insidious forms of criminalisation and non-criminal punishment that comprise the carceral continuum.

AbstractResearch on place-making and place-taking coming out of the discipline of geography remains an untapped intellectual resource for research on gangs. Part of the reason for this is that geographers have not sufficiently included gangs and gang members in their theories of space and place. This may be surprising given what is known about gangs and their place-oriented penchant for territoriality and neighborhood demarcation as part of their expressed raison d’être. This chapter brings geography further into the conversation on gangs that criminologists and sociologists have been having for decades, concluding with personal reflection and a discussion about how to make geography a home for gang studies.

Motivated by a critical concern for state-sanctioned coercion, control, and containment across "free society," geographers have extended Foucault's concept of "the carceral" to more and increasingly diffuse spaces and processes. In this paper, however, we aim to re-center the prison in the carceral geographies literature, reasserting it as the sine qua non of the subfield. In doing so, we organize geographers' analysis of prisons into nine conceptual categories based on this journal's areas of geographical exploration: cultural, development, economic, environment, geographic information systems & quantitative, historical, political, social, and urban. In addition to providing a review of existing prison research in geography, we illustrate the diversity of disciplinary approaches to that most "complete and austere" of institutions.

Prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) coordinate to circumvent full racial housing integration, revealing how "race" and adherence to the "racial code" is used as an organizing concept in carceral settings that is distinct from conceptualizations of race and politics of identity within free society. In addition to providing a review of the literature on the complexity of prison racialization, we base our discussion of racialization and adherence to the racial code on our combined experience as formerly racialized and gang-affiliated inmates, as well as on insights from informal and semi-structured interviews with prisoners who have navigated attempts at racial integration as part of the ADCRR's recently adopted Integrated Housing Program.

Putting research and reflection on prison experience into conversation with the subfields of carceral and health geography, we discuss the "somatic carceral condition" as a viseral, bodily effect of prisonization. In doing so, we call for increased reliance on data derived from somatic experience as well as autoethnographic insight on imprisonment. More broadly, we argue, an embrace of somatic data used to tell the story of marginalization and captivity experienced in prison and across the carceral continuum can help advance the discipline of geography theoretically, methodologically, and in terms of contributing to praxis-based interventions.

In our initial paper calling for a more affective understanding of displacement in gentrification studies, we argued that displacement is a process that functions through diverse rearticulations of people's embodied capacity to make place, only some of which take the form of physical or social dislocation. Our intervention was intended to reignite this already existing argument by drawing attention to the embodied, affective, and emotional dimensions of displacement with a critical consideration of the role race/racism plays within this process today. We argue that such a perspective offers gentrification researchers a more critically incisive methodological and theoretical toolkit for grasping how power operates in urban space, particularly in dimensions commonly overlooked by traditional critical scholarship. We are excited and grateful to the editors of Dialogues in Urban Research for making space for this conversation, and to the scholars – Prince K. Guma, John Lennon, Joy White, Brandi T. Summers, Prentiss Dantzler, and Maria-Aminata Peron – who offered insightful responses to our paper. These responses both clarified and extended our own perspective, particularly in terms of demonstrating how the agential, creative, and collaborative efforts of urban residents to make and remake place can both bring into focus the affective dimensions of urban space and open up possibilities for imagining new urban imaginaries.

In this article, we argue for a critical gentrification studies that includes a more expansive and nuanced understanding of how displacement works, beyond the mapping and counting of dislocated bodies. As part of our argument, we introduce the concept of aversive racism to the geographical literature on displacement, pointing to this insidious mode of spatial practice that we argue is widely constitutive of place-making and place-taking processes in gentrifying areas. We do this by first providing a review and analysis of how displacement has been conceptualized and measured in existing geographical scholarship on gentrification, followed by a critical examination of the gentrification literature's engagement with race and racism, and a final argument for an affective approach within a Black geographies framing that encourages more analyses based on experiential encounters with more-than-physical displacement-by-gentrification.

Edward W. Soja saw early in his career that “it is now space more than time, geography more than history, that hides consequences from us.” His life-long scholarly project centered around this contention, inspiring his advocacy of a socio-spatial dialectic, his contribution to the so-called “spatial turn,” and his fervent belief that all matters of justice are matters of geography, necessitating the “reassertion of space in critical social theory.” In his decidedly interdisciplinary and agenda-setting work, he became associated with several schools of thought, from Marxism and cultural studies, to postmodernism and critical theory. But his defining feature remained his radical approach to the study of cities and regions vis-à-vis an investigation of Los Angeles informed by the work of Henri Lefebvre. In doing his decades of investigation of urbanization, restructuring, and political struggle writ large, he developed a lexicon that helped identify, problematize, and speak to an array of otherwise aspatial ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological scholarly positions, always placing space at the center. This paper discusses Soja's personal and intellectual advocacy of a radical spatial perspective, arguing that his neat categorization as a “postmodern geographer” is one that is both real and imagined—as limiting as it is liberating.

Within DeVerteuil's lopsided city are spaces in which creative and combative place-making persist. Guma most recently and within the pages of this very issue of Dialogues in Urban Research identifies such spaces as those produced by “urban populations, in situ,” noting their “forms of hustling in fringe positions” as they fight against displacement by gentrification in the global South, as well as against the dizzying effect of the lopsided city wrought by neoliberal exploits. However, such spaces get obscured within the metaphorical imbalance of the lopsided city, where the nooks, crannies, cuts, and fringes that house everyday life can otherwise be revealed through up-close and personal urban analysis.

Gangs are geographically oriented social entities as evidenced by the display of cardinal points in their graffiti, the use of neighborhood namesakes, a focus on territoriality as their raison d'etre, as well as in the way they are policed and legally cordoned. Despite gang members' real and imagined penchant for transgressive place-making and demarcation, it has been sociologists and criminologists, not geographers, who have produced the lion's share of spatially nuanced research on gangs. In this article, I provide a review of the social scientific literature on gangs, concluding with a call for how to make the discipline of geography more inclusive for gang researchers who possess real-world experience with assertive place-making practices.

I bring an understanding of the concept and practice of “aversive racism” to scholarly thinking about community formation. I argue that the exclusionary contours of community are in part a product of racialized in- and outgrouping from which people’s capacities for place-making are judged and localized policing is instigated. In bringing these concepts, formations, and practices together, this paper contributes to how urbanists might continue to think about the role of race in displacement, particularly as it plays out in the context of neighborhood change and gentrification more broadly. In the penultimate section I provide a discussion of the popular Nextdoor app as a means of illustrating a contemporary example of community-instigated policing and platform for what Dána-Ain Davis calls “muted racism.”

Motivated by my own experiences with serial eviction, I argue for increased reliance on the body as archive and memory as data to be used in the storytelling process about displacement and unhoming. Increased inclusion of personal reflection in the literature on displacement has the potential to further humanize a discipline that is already well-steeped in utilizing qualitative methods, abstract theorization, and quantification to reveal other people’s experiences of loss, longing, and belonging. I argue that increased reliance on autoethnographic approaches used to reflect on and write about deeply stored, somatic experiences of displacement beyond gentrification has the power to transform not just how we, as geographers, talk about displacement but who it is we invite to do the talking.