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This chapter focuses upon community responses to dispossession and displacement as a result of (re)development. Having summarised varying definitions and approaches the chapter moves on to explore case studies from different international contexts. There have been powerful illustrations of community resistance to displacement as a result of the Narmada big dam project in India, for example, as well as illustrations of alternative approaches in other Indian contexts. Brazil has provided its own examples of community based alternatives, including those developed by displaced peoples, the Landless People’s Movement. And there have been illustrations of community based resistance to displacement/ social cleansing as a result of urban redevelopment processes in contemporary Britain.

This chapter considers the structural factors and life dilemmas upwardly mobile black Clevelanders faced even after achieving geographic mobility, and explicates the dynamic whereby less-affluent African American families steadily moved into new, outlying black middle-class neighbourhoods. Topics discussed include lending discrimination, the unfavourable financing arrangements available to African American homebuyers and the associated economic setbacks they experienced, the role of black professional real estate brokerage associations, the phenomenon of isolated white families remaining in post-transitional neighbourhoods, and the forces driving lower-income African American families into outlying neighbourhoods, mainly downtown redevelopment and ongoing migration from the American South. It also investigates black middle class notions of status and the intra-racial, cross-class frictions that ensued around issues of property upkeep, personal comportment, child rearing, and leisure-time practices.

In addition to wrapping up the central themes covered in this book, the conclusion details the fate of Miami’s Central Negro District, also known as Overtown, shortly after the building of Interstate-95 and mass black suburbanization. It contends that present day recollections of Overtown’s apparent demise remain linked to black frustrations about the failures of suburbanization to provide greater racial and economic equality.

Chapter One examines pastiche in the shopping mall and cultural heritage site Xintiandi, before discussing the site’s buried modern art histories marred by cross-cultural conflicts. Xintiandi physically surrounds China’s first communist meeting site of 1921, today memorialized as a museum. The complex was designed with reference to the vernacular homes of its formerly foreign occupied French Concession setting, and is officially celebrated for its “East-meets-West” and “Old-meets-New” architecture, even while the construction demolished most of the site’s existing homes and dislocated thousands of working class residents. This chapter analyzes how Xintiandi’s seemingly benign East-meets-West façades mask collusions between the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic state power and capitalist development, while romanticizing Shanghai’s modern cosmopolitan legacy. The chapter analyzes examples of Xintiandi’s repressed cultural histories, including the revolutionary art and design experiments of Pang Xunqin, founder of the 1930s avant-garde collective, The Storm Society, leftist writings and art promoted by Lu Xun, and the major Cultural Revolution Era debate sparked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary, Chung Kuo Cina. The chapter argues that the official admonishment of Shanghai-based cultural projects by Pang and Antonioni speak to collisions between Shanghai’s semi-colonial past, Maoist socialism, and Cultural Revolution Era totalitarianism that still resonate in Shanghai today.

Moving forward, this chapter explores ways of sharing learning, as the basis for building solidarity across time and space. The first example comes from India, as workers and communities shared their research on industrial malpractices, leading to the human and environmental disaster, when more than 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Research findings and experiences were shared across the globe, supporting Indian communities in their struggles for justice and a safer environment. The second example comes from London’s Docklands where communities and local workforces shared their learning over the years, developing the case for alternative approaches to planning, sharing ideas about redevelopment to meet people’s needs rather than to promote private profitability.