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Quote by Sharon Zukin

“When new businesses open that are trying to attract people with cultural capital or cultural ambitions, they are often more expensive than traditional neighborhood stores and cafés, they offer different products, and they have a different atmosphere. Longtime residents may feel uncomfortable there. Structurally, as a group of gentrifiers gets bigger, there is less room for longtime residents. When it becomes a pattern and you can see the effects, we call that displacement.”

Quote by Sharon Zukin

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Sharon Zukin

Sharon Zukin is a renowned sociologist specializing in urban sociology and cultural sociology. Her research focuses on urban life, consumer culture, and social inequality. Details of her biography and contributions are limited. more

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“The existing American laws we use in a pinch just do not adequately protect artists or any other group of rental tenants. For example, artist certification. You can always get around that. Every society that does not want to really protect tenants' rights tries historic preservation. But that says nothing about the right of people to stay in their homes. It says that the building cannot be demolished. But it does not say who is allowed to live in the building.”

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“A lot of us New Yorkers have bought apartments or bought lofts or are struggling to do it because at least that gives you some respite from the inexorable tightening of the screw every year - rent. But that puts you on this treadmill where you are constantly thinking, "Should I sell this place and move somewhere cheaper?" Artists have migrated across the East River and eastward in Brooklyn - as have non-artist populations, apparently going back to the Lenape Indians. There's been a migration to New Jersey, to Philadelphia, and farther afield.”

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“There are masses of people who need affordable housing in New York. I think that, politically, it is very difficult to give preference to artists over another group. Now, could there be an impressive envisioning process where developers would be asked to collaborate with urban designers? Maybe envision a large-scale development with local shops, dense housing, maybe a few towers, maybe a few mid-rise buildings, and art workshops in the mix? That would be great. I don't see a call for those proposals. But I think that it would not be outrageous to propose that kind of vision.”

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“I think that there is a middle-class desire, and maybe an almost universal desire, among many human beings to live in clean neighborhoods, among people like themselves, around people with whom they feel comfortable. That can be exclusive, it could be exclusionary. It could be racist, classist, genocidal, and so on. Most people like comfort. Now what provides a sense of comfort varies. I do think that people who like living in cities like small-scale human interaction and they like the social dimensions of aesthetic diversity that Jane Jacobs wrote about.”

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“I think people like difference. When you walk out the door in New York City, in a mixed-use neighborhood like the Village, you see exciting things! "Oh, this store is closing, that store is opening." And especially if it's not a chain store, then it is interesting because it is unique in some way. The small-scale familiar is also very comforting. Especially in the twenty-first century, when the world is rapidly changing and there are many risky situations, I think we need to build on and protect the comfort that we have in our neighborhoods in a way that does not exclude others.”

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“I'm interested in representation that falls outside of what would be socially appropriate, or acceptable, or beautiful. The world is going through a very fundamentalist moment. You have right-wing politics and misogyny and religion employed together everywhere - here in the US, with issues like abortion. Religion is a very fraught and complicated topic, but at the same time, like all grand historical narratives, there is a potential for challenging, or rethinking the kinds of subjectivities that these meta-narratives produce.”

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“I think that in the diaspora, and among immigrants, religion becomes a vehicle for the transmission of cultural information, and cultural codes, and this does end up re-inscribing certain things about the religion - like caste. Caste discrimination and hierarchy are still a very fundamental and violent part of Hinduism. My family was upper caste, and that was very clear. I feel like caste and religious practice are inextricable, actually.”

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“I feel a disparity between my life in India within the home and my life outside the home - my life within public and private space. In terms of here and there, there were some differences, but New York and India were very different when I was growing up in the '80s. Definitely in terms of the visual and popular culture I encountered within my home - that was very different from the complete lack of representation I saw of South Asian culture outside of that space.”

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