Gabriella’s Reviews > Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State > Status Update

“The pivot towards socialized planning can begin on multiple fronts...Long before structural transformations take hold, radical planners and social movements can pursue demonstration projects—small-scale programs that model alternative modes of development and alter people’s consciousness about what is possible, and even what is preferable.”

"This requires democratic and responsive planning at all levels: not a privileged professional class of experts overseeing an otherwise egalitarian state, but a society in which people plan and control their spaces at all scales...The only way to really plan, then, is through popular control: of workplaces and buildings, as well as of cities and regions."

“...[planners should work towards] changing the default actions for city agencies from their current objectives of raising property values and selling off land and buildings to another program altogether: disincentivizing evictions and decommodifying land. It should be city policy to protect tenants’ right to stay put over landlords’ right to extract rents...”

Excited for Chapter 5, which is titled (and subtitled) Unmaking the Real Estate State: What more can we imagine? What is to be done?

“Taking a closer look at the Trumps allows us to see the flip side of planners’ strategies in a private land market—the landowners who keep the public benefits that planners create, manage, and distribute. In this sense, the Trumps are not just a real estate family, but emblems of the private side of US planning history.”

"These narratives--highest/best use, value recapture, competitive advantage, creative class, livability, & neighborhood effects--represent some of the most potent ways planners legitimate displacement. They help reframe dispossession as development & popularize the notion that gentrification is something to be desired, not disparaged...according to these theories, gentrification is the outcome of good city planning."

Already SO USEFUL. Central question of ch. 1:

"Most planners do not seek to line the pockets of wealthy elites or displace the poor. And yet that is exactly what has happened, again and again...If the personal motivations of planners cannot explain this dynamic, how do we account for it? What is urban planning's role in the maintenance of capitalism, and the exploitation and appropriation that system engenders?"