Urban Renewal Archives - Public Seminar

History

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in The Tears of Other People

A conversation with author E. M. Ippolito about the settler colonialist roots of modern displacement and urban renewal

February 12, 2026 • by E. M. Ippolito and Eva Szilardi-Tierney

E. M. Ippolito’s relationship to her hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a complicated one. While Ippolito’s exploration of Portsmouth’s working-class history began when she was a college student, it was her own displacement from Portsmouth that personalized her research. Learning the story of Portsmouth’s 1960s urban renewal—a federally funded ...

Portsmouth, Displacement, and Belonging in <em>The Tears of Other People</em>

Feature

Learning to See SPURA

Reflections on urban displacement, art, and community praxis

January 30, 2019 • by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in ...

Feature

When SPURA and Visual Urbanism Meet

An interview with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

January 29, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a new book by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, charts the long, dispiriting, and complicated history of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) on the Lower East Side of New York. Over five years, Bendiner-Viani walked ...

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The Symbolic Violence of Gentrification, Part V

The neoliberal doxa of the state

February 9, 2018 • by Stefano Rumi

Below is the final segment of an essay in five parts written by University of Virginia student Stefano Rumi for Isaac Reed's Sociology of Power and Authority course. *** As discussed part I and II, third-wave gentrification can be understood of as the neoliberal state’s response to post-Fordist urban decline at the ...

The Symbolic Violence of Gentrification, Part V

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The Symbolic Violence of Gentrification, Part III

Understanding and reframing gentrification debates today

February 7, 2018 • by Stefano Rumi

Below is the third segment of an essay in five parts by University of Virginia student Stefano Rumi, written for Sociology of Power and Authority course taught by Isaac Reed. Part two discussed the nature of third-wave gentrification, and why it has evolved from a relatively small, localized phenomenon into ...

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The Symbolic Violence of Gentrification, Part II

Conceptualizing Gentrification Today

February 6, 2018 • by Stefano Rumi

In first segment in this five-part series, Stefano Rumi suggested that gentrification has mutated into a remarkably consistent and replicable phenomenon of urban development in diverse cities across the world. In the second segment, below, Rumi further explores this new form of gentrification, entitled “third-wave gentrification,” and its inequitable effects ...

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The Symbolic Violence of Gentrification, Part I

Re-contextualizing urban renewal

February 5, 2018 • by Stefano Rumi

In an essay published in five parts, Stefano Rumi, a student in Isaac Reed's Sociology of Power course at University of Virginia, will lay out a critique of gentrification, identify its ideological underpinnings, and analyze what it would take to produce an alternative. Below is the introduction. “There is no alternative.” ...