Good Neighbors

Good Neighbors:Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End

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What we talk about when we talk about gentrification

Does gentrification destroy diversity? Or does it thrive on it? Boston’s South End, a legendary working-class neighborhood with the largest Victorian brick row house district in the United States and a celebrated reputation for diversity, has become in recent years a flashpoint for the problems of gentrification. It has born witness to the kind of rapid transformation leading to pitched battles over the class and race politics throughout the country and indeed the contemporary world.

This subtle study of a storied urban neighborhood reveals the way that upper-middle-class newcomers have positioned themselves as champions of diversity, and how their mobilization around this key concept has reordered class divisions rather than abolished them.

Reviews

  • You don’t have to share Tissot’s politics to worry about the underlying dynamic she describes: Under almost any rules for civic engagement, people with resources and connections can steer the process to their own advantage. Even liberal values can disguise a form of control.

    Boston Globe
  • Sylvie Tissot—a hip, brilliant, de Tocqueville of the post-’68 left—casts a fair but jaundiced eye on America’s plump underbelly of tolerant privilege and its flattened idea of diversity. A truly memorable account of gentrification and its discontents.

    Michael Sorkin
  • Good Neighbors powerfully demonstrates how gentrifiers often fixate on the old (homes) and the marginally political (greenmarkets) so that they do not have to think about the displacement involved in neighborhood change and their own role in it.

    Public Books