27 January 2023. Cities | Iran
Who is to blame for gentrification. // Jafar Panahi and filming from the edge.
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I’m away next week, so unless I find a moment there’s unlikely to be any editions of Just Two Things. And—have a good weekend!
1: Who is to blame for gentrification
The Canadian urbanist and feminist Leslie Kern is one of the more interesting writers on cities. I drew on her earlier book, Feminist Cities, for my chapter on the future of cities and work. I’ve been meaning for a while now to mention here an interview in Next City on her more recent book, Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies.
Next City opened with a question about the effects of the pandemic on gentrification:
It’s brought gentrification to the doorstep of smaller cities and communities that weren’t really facing it on any large scale. Where I live in New Brunswick, it’s a place that people drive through. Nobody comes here. But since the pandemic, many people, in part because of this freedom and in part because they are being pushed out by really high prices in cities like Vancouver and Toronto, have come to the East Coast to smaller cities.
This movement of money, in effect, with new residents on higher wages, attracts property speculation:
That movement has triggered a wave of investors buying up buildings in order to renovate them and rent them out to new, higher-paying residents. The pandemic and that remote work possibility and the movement of some people is shifting the frontier of gentrification to places that had not really been grappling with it before.
One of the things that then happens is that the people who have benefitted from the first wave of gentrification then oppose developments that might benefit others, such as affordable housing, using NIMBYist arguments dressed up in the rhetoric of anti-gentrification:
Sociologist Japonica Brown Saracino writes about this , where gentrifiers come into a neighborhood but then become “preservationist.”... So even though you were a gentrifier, you now see things like tall condo towers as a threat to some aspect of neighborhood character, or the property values or some combination of those things. It can turn into this weird intersection of NIMBYism with a sheen of anti-gentrification on it... And there’s this co-optation to protect what is already a pretty middle-class or upper-class status quo.
This, of course, is worsened by lazy or casual consultation processes, which tend to get dominated by the groups in the community with the most resources and social capital:
They rely on whoever from the community shows up to talk about whatever the new development proposal is, rather than doing active outreach to make sure that folks in the neighborhood who might be more marginal or vulnerable – whether it’s seniors, single parents or racialized community members – and actually reaching out to them and getting them involved... There’s something to be said for thinking through other processes of ensuring we don’t just hear from those who have the time and energy, (and) the social networks.
Azure published an extract from the opening chapter, which makes some of the process here a bit clearer. Kern uses the example of a neighbourhood in Toronto called The Junction, where she used to live, as a sort of autobiographical story:
Was the Junction’s shift from a working-class, industrial area to a hip, wholesome neighbourhood simply a natural phase in the cycle of urban development? Is it a matter of basic economics driving an unavoidable upward swing after decades of decline? Was there something culturally desirable about the Junction that young hipsters felt inexorably drawn toward? And as gentrification rolls ever onwards, what, if any, harms have been done?
The sociologist Ruth Glass, who wrote about the gentrification of London’s Islington area in the 1960s (an area where Kern had also lived briefly) described the process like this:
Glass foregrounded displacement as a hallmark, though often debated, feature of gentrification. In her own words: “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupants are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.”... The importance of displacement and the idea that the “whole social character” of a neighbourhood could be transformed are still central to what we talk about when we talk about gentrification.
(Photo by erudint, via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0)
And part of the point here is that the enablers of gentrification represent a powerful combination of footloose finance and local politics:
Gentrification is being facilitated by forces more powerful than your average middle-class homeowner: city governments, developers, investors, speculators and distant digital platforms that create new ways to profit from urban space. The old-school gentrification of the 1960s seems almost quaint compared to the juggernaut of processes that are bearing down on our neighbourhoods right now.
The markers of gentrification are almost a global pattern now: pedestrianisation, waterfront development, new green spaces, arts and culture. And, beyond housing, there is now tourism-based gentrification, for which AirBnB is the global canary: “the sound of rolling suitcases rattling over cobblestones is an auditory trace of tourism-based gentrification”, that has now produced angry reactions in many of Europe’s great tourist cities.
The bit about “other lies” in the title may be a bit of publisher’s hyperbolae. One review characterised these more as misconceptions. No, artists and hipsters don’t gentrify a neighborhood by changing its character. No, gentrification doesn’t work to the benefit of women and LGBT+ communities. The reviewer, Scott McLemee, put it this way: “Not that the hipsters play no role, then, but their impact is infinitesimal compared to any given zoning commission.”
And there’s a clue in this to places where gentrification has been resisted more successfully. The markers of taste, such as the bijou cafe, are a distraction. They shout ‘look over there’, while City Hall changes permissions and signs off on planning deals that benefit the property sector. The property sector greases the wheels of this process with promises of investment in public goods, sometimes helped along by freebie trips and even bribes. As Joe Hill once said: don’t mourn, organise.
2: Filming from the edge
There’s been a wave of writing in American magazines about the Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, partly because his latest film No Bears has been released to acclaim, partly because he is currently in jail in Iran after the authorities decided to activate a six-year suspended sentence that he was given in 2010 for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic”. (His conviction was over-turned in October by the Supreme Court, but the authorities are still to decide whether to release him have not yet decided to release him pending a retrial.)
The coverage of No Bears was interesting to me as another way of looking at the workings of the Iranian state.
Mark Krotow’s article in n+1 is the fullest piece here, but there are also worthwile articles in both Vulture, currently outside of its paywall, and The Village Voice.
The Voice explained the background well:
Jafar Panahi just makes movies, but he’s also a living martyr to the medium... A sort of modern cinema’s St. Sebastian, Panahi has been arrested and censored and forbidden to continue making films — which isn’t all that unusual in itself, especially if you recall what filmmakers and other artists endured in the Eastern Bloc years. But unlike filmmakers oppressed and gagged under various Communist thumbs, Panahi never took the hint and kept making films, covertly, illegally, relentlessly, and though they are not shown in Iran, they sneak out for the world to see.
When he was sentenced in 2010, he was also placed under house arrest and banned from making films. No Bears is the fifth film he has made since then, always working covertly. The first of the five, The is Not a Film, documented
his life of confinement with a camcorder and an iPhone. Famously, the movie was smuggled out of Iran on a thumb drive hidden inside a cake, and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
In Mark Krotow’s piece, which looks at No Bears in the context of Panahi’s other work, and reviews a book of interviews with the director, he talks about the director’s history since then. The films all include Panahi himself, playing a character called ‘Jafar’:
Panahi himself—Jafar—has been a tricky presence in his post-ban films, a gradually evolving character. Wandering through the mournful abstraction of Closed Curtain (2013) Jafar was inscrutable, in Taxi (2015) he was notably smiley (for a somewhat schlubby man in late middle age, Panahi has a megawatt smile), and in Three Faces he was at once conciliatory and evasive, reluctant to cast judgment or act decisively despite the strong possibility of misogynistic violence. So it is all the more striking when, late in Three Faces, after Jafar politely declines the invitation of three village elders to sleep indoors instead of in his car, he hears them badmouth him as they walk away, thinking they’re out of earshot.
In one of the interviews with Panahi, recorded in 2018, he says of his circumstances since his house arrest:
I am not a part of society. That obviously affects me and is something that I reflect on. My personal experiences now play a much greater role in my work than society does. In other words, my inspiration comes from my present circumstances and is then transferred into society, rather than being the other way around. It is almost as if an entire society exists within me.
Krotow plays with this a little in discussing No Bears, noticing that plethora of technologies seen in the film, some of which cause conflict in the story:
In No Bears we see flash drives, hard disks, memory cards, iPhones, laptops, numerous digital film and photo cameras, wireless extenders, teleconferencing software, Bluetooth headphones, and car rearview cameras. In a film shot digitally, made by a director who relies on digital technology for his films’ distribution, all this hardware is a useful reminder of the footage’s ultimate materiality: though it is saved in the cloud, we’re keenly aware of how the film is produced. Yet with the exception of the rearview camera... the technology in the film is worse than useless, less an instrument of art than of the surveillance state.
I’m reminded in all of this of one of the rules of thumb of narrative, that sometimes the audience is ahead of the characters, knowing more than they do, sometimes in the same state of knowledge, sometimes behind them. Knowing what we know about Jafar Panahi’s actual history and present situation, these seem to play out simultaneously in No Bears, as Vulture sort of suggests:
On one side of the camera, we have two lovers ready to escape their land. On the other side, we have two lovers who have escaped but haven’t found freedom and are still on the run. And then, behind the camera, we have the director who remains behind and has become the frustrated protagonist of his own tangled, nightmarish drama. As No Bears proceeds, it becomes increasingly hard to tell what we’re watching: a fiction Panahi has scripted, the documentary reality behind that fiction, or another level of truth that has taken over and now threatens to derail his project. And now, by imprisoning this artist who refused to flee, the Iranian authorities have added one final, monstrous layer of meaning to Panahi’s masterpiece.
The trailer is here:
Notes from readers: Doomsday Clock
Thanks to Jason Dinsdale, who responded to my piece on resetting the Doomsday Clock by alerting me to the fact that there was at least one more song about the Doomsday Clock—by Iron Maiden, at the rather scarier Two Minutes To Midnight.
Meanwhile, he also spotted that Pete Wylie, who pretty much was Wah!, in its several incarnations, was interviewed earlier this month in the Guardian talking about his other ‘big’ song ‘The Story of the Blues’, and, briefly, the influential futurist Alvin Toffler. Incidentally, one of my miniscule claims to fame is that I was fleetingly introduced to Wylie in a club in Liverpool where Echo and the Bunnymen were performing.
Here’s Iron Maiden. If you’re a metalhead, play loud:
j2t#420
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