Lynette rises each morning before sunrise to juggle multiple jobs -not all of them are on the level – while also caring for her mother Doreen and developmentally disabled older brother Kenny. Lynette has been hardened by her hardscrabble life; her bedroom houses the washer-dryer, an oil furnace and a utility sink. There’s little or no money for new clothes or for treats. Lynette has gone without so she can save cash to purchase the ramshackle home her family has rented for decades in an area where the 'G' word – gentrification – has left a bitter taste; the working classes are being pushed outta town. A plan had been in place to raise a mortgage on the property, but when that’s derailed she’s forced to undertake a desperate odyssey in a city of greed. Lynette has to confront dangerous people who owe her money.
A taxi drives through the city of Berlin. Its driver is a punk, left and a well-known figure in the autonomous scene. The stations of his trip are the most important places of the autonomous scene: all in the struggle for survival. The last evictions have not yet been processed and the next ones are coming right up.
Diosdado spends his time debating with customers, particularly with his boss, who holds strong opinions about the financial aspects of the convenience store where he works.
Sitting at the intersection of two main arteries of traffic on Melbournes Northside is a giant yellow rat that is pointing, with a long gnarled claw, to its explicitly large bottom. This yellow rat is the mascot for the small business Glenlyon Motors. This unusual mascot and the absence of an explanation for its existence has many residents of Melbournes north side puzzled. 'A Rats Arse' finally answers the question on every Northside residents lips - “Why?!” - and along the way reveals something about identity, values, community, and the people who exist within them.
The Domino Effect is a feature length documentary film that explores the origins and impacts of gentrification and luxury redevelopment in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn under the Bloomberg administration. The film follows the rezoning of the Domino Sugar Factory on the East River waterfront and delves deep into the politics and economics of urban development on the frontier of Brooklyn’s gentrification. Told through the voices of longtime residents, the film conveys the personal impact of gentrification while shedding light on the struggles faced by communities across the nation. Will your neighborhood be the next to fall?
After moving to a small mountain community, a troubled writer entangles himself in a new neighbor's abusive family situation.
The Oven Sky (2011) is set in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood where newcomers pressure a longtime resident to turn her yard filled with lawn ornaments into a dog park. This animation features music by Rachel Mason.
A short documentary about gentrification and tenant activism in one Toronto neighbourhood, "This House Is Not A Home" presents a poignant and informative look into resident experiences in Parkdale.
Residents struggle to pay their rapidly rising rents on Wellington Street in Montreal.
In 1959 New York City announced a "slum clearance plan" by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state's first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the "real estate capital of the world."
Jose Rivera is a lifelong resident of Spanish Harlem (El Barrio) but is afraid that gentrification will force him out. James Garcia has just bought an apartment across the street from public housing and wonders why locals resist his moving into the neighborhood. James Barrow worries that a construction project in an empty lot behind his building will threaten his apartment. Oscar Dominguez and Movement for Justice in El Barrio protests against gentrification. A town hall meeting pits community members against a City Councilwoman who supports a massive development project in East Harlem.
Arriving in the US with a background in abstract art, opera, and film—including work with German director Werner Schroeter—Vogl began making Super8 films in New York that stripped away the stylistic markers of Hollywood, New Wave cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, and classic avant-garde film, leaving only traces of their generic conventions. For the first hour of OK Today Tomorrow, he stages a series of fraught encounters around the city between four gentrified New Yorkers before abandoning his vague narrative of youthful angst altogether in favor of documenting the urban landscape itself. The dusk-to-dawn “city symphony” that ends the film resembles similar Super8 social studies by Vogl’s uptown contemporary John Ahearn; both recorded the daily lives of working-class black and immigrant communities on the streets of a city on the verge of the corporate takeover and sweeping gentrification that followed in the 1980s and ’90s. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The first in depth analysis of the unspoken ethnic component behind the most devastating socio-economic movement in America today.
A film about the cross coalition of communities that stopped a planned network of freeways from being built in Seattle in the late 60s and early 70s. It weaves together archival material with the filmmaker's personal narrative about living next to freeways, and features interviews with participants from the freeway revolt.
In the 1950s, Seattle had plans to build one of the densest networks of freeways in the world. It would have displaced thousands, especially the poor and people of color. Over the next two decades, a broad coalition of communities came together and halted these plans. Testimonies from that era are juxtaposed with interviews of activists who participated in the revolt, giving a picture of what Seattle could have been had the people not stood up to the highway lobby and their representatives.
On the occasion of his last regulars’ table in his old neighbourhood of Schwabing, the laconic pensioner Schorsch gets paid a cab drive to his new home in Neuperlach in the outskirts of the city by his pals. But Schorsch rather wants to take one last look at his old downtown apartment which he had renovated himself after the war, and where he had lived for almost forty years until his landlord bullied him out of there as the latter wanted to use the space for expensive luxury apartments. Because Schorsch’s wife wanted to move to “the countryside”, they thereupon moved to the Neuperlach development site in the outskirts of Munich. But amongst the uniformly looking housing blocks, Schorsch can’t even find his new apartment, and so, the grumpy cabdriver Gustl becomes his companion on a nightly odyssey.
The twelfth edition of the International Meeting of Collective Architectures was held in Palma de Mallorca, in the neighborhoods of La Soledat, Nou Llevant and Es Molinar, at the end of September 2019. The meeting focused on the imposition of false paradises and the description of the current mechanisms of urban transformation that expel people from their neighborhoods.