Super-Gentrification Downtown Brooklyn

Loretta Lees coined the term “Super-gentrification.” This latest wave beginning in the 1990’s, focuses on “a new amalgam of corporate and state powers and practices forged in a much more ambitious effort” as Neil Smith states in his article, “New Globalism, New Urbanism.” State, city and private corporate financing are engaging in partnerships to create “new landscape complexes” that “integrate housing with shopping, restaurants, cultural facilities, open spaces” and more. Such edifices, are developing all over the place in Downtown Brooklyn (Smith 442, 443).

Long time resident and author Steve Ettlinger states, “The gentrification foisted on the area by Bruce Ratner and Atlantic Yards project…building these towers that are totally out of scale with the neighborhood, financed by public money at large…is wrong, everything about the process was forced” (Ettlinger, Personal interview).

Works Cited

Ettlinger, Steve. Personal Interview. 28 April 2013.

Smith, Neil. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 2002: 24. Web. 15 April 2013.

 

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