Spatial Justice: Resource Site for Gentrification of Highland Park

Chance Ward

By analyzing the evolution of Highland park within the context of social justice, this class opened up my eyes to the many ways in which people resist gentrification. Prior to this class, my exposure to such resistance was always centered around academia. While this class used an academic channel, the actual focus was very much so on resisting gentrification outside the walls of the classroom. What we learned was largely based on the yields of the community-based research performed in the course. By expanding our research into the community to learn about gentrification through art, theatre, photography, and personal narratives, we were able to analyze gentrification in a way maintains the integrity of how people resist against it. Within the confines of a textbook, analyses of urban development almost always exclude real narratives of gentrification. Seeking out these narratives in the ways mentioned earlier taught me very valuable things about gentrification, and even specifically about Highland Park.

Highland Park is very special to me now because this course taught me that as a student at Occidental, I am actively contributing towards the gentrification of Highland Park. Even though we live in the Highland Park Community, most of us spend our entire time here ignorant to the fact that what we know as Berry Bowl and Scoops displaced what used to be locally owned business of significant historical and cultural value. With that being said, it is easy to see how being an Occidental College student inherently links us to gentrification when our Marketplace buys Berry Bowls in mass every week.

This class more than anything else taught me that this displacement is a crime, an inherent injustice against people. The lengths that these landlords, realtors, and business have gone to in displacing residents in highland park breaks both legal and moral laws. During one of the discussions we had with a photographer in this class, I remember hearing that gentrification does more than displace people, it banishes them. That banishment manifests itself not only in the ways they banish their physical bodies, but in the way gentrifiers assert their presence, businesses, foods, musics, religions, etc. so much that they literally fill up the space. Fill up the space so much that it costs to much to live there, to have your music played there, to worship your God there, to ever exist there as your whole self. 

In the data and mapping portions of this class, however, I learned to have hope that the resistance against gentrification against Highland Park will see success. In learning of the resources available to us during this course and in reflecting on the potential of the resources we offer to future activists and organizations here, I simply learned to have hope.

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Bio

Chance Ward is a Sophomore Critical Theory & Social Justice major and Interdisciplinary Writing minor. While he only works part time for the Center for Gender Equity, he has a lifetime commitment to gender abolition. Beyond his studies, he spends a moderately concerning amount of time seeing to it that his people find liberation. This class has prompted him to be a more cognizant resident of Highland Park and he now knows that a Taco Tuesday should never be celebrated in a Chipotle.