Unsettling gentrification: Toward a site ontology of displacement

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.