The psychic life of gentrification: mapping desire and resentment in the gentrifying city

Abstract

Following the lead of artists and scholars in Black, feminist, psychoanalytic, and queer studies and geographies, this special issue and editorial call for greater scholarly attention to the conscious and unconscious emotional, psychic, and affective dimensions of urban gentrification. While geographical scholarship frequently gestures to gentrification as an affective scene, these connections are generally suggested rather than developed. We argue that psychoanalytic and affect theories have richly developed conceptual and explanatory paradigms that can help scholars make sense of the sometimes granular, mundane ways gentrification is both facilitated and contested. Our aim here is not to displace Marxist political economies of gentrification that support a right to the city, a body of work with political stakes that we also claim. Rather, our goal is to supplement political economy’s rather focused inquiry into gentrification’s ‘proper’ political-economic dimensions, in the hopes of offering further insight into gentrification’s libidinal economies, which are conditioned by racial capitalist social relations but also exceed them.