The Contested Terrain of Community-Building: A Case Study of Anti-Displacement Organizers across Three Contexts

Background and Purpose: The process of reinvestment into urban areas previously neglected by economic development, broadly defined as gentrification, has been well-documented over the years. The experiences of gentrification for historically marginalized communities are often tied to the place-based harm of displacement. These place-based harms can often take the form of the loss of social connections and the ability collectively solve problems. Understanding the ways in which collective efficacy manifests in neighborhoods is an important factor in understanding the mechanisms that residents use to respond to perceived and actual place-based harms occurring within the neighborhood. In particular, informal social control has been shown to be an important mechanism for creating and maintaining strong communities when complemented by acts of collective social cohesion.

While anti-displacement organizers have been working to combat the place-based harms of gentrification-related displacement, little research has teased out how informal social control and social cohesion function as community-building tactics by organizers. This paper explores how community organizers across three spatial and tactical contexts grapple with the ‘contested terrain’ of collective understandings of social control and social cohesion in communities.

Methods: This paper explores how community organizers understand and employ informal social control and social cohesion using three case studies: a mutual aid organization in a gentrifying Boston, MA neighborhood; a community preservation collaborative attempting to combat gentrification in Oakland, CA; and a team of researchers and environmental justice organizers developing anti-displacement tactics to resist ‘green gentrification’. Thematic analysis of the interviews (n=20) was conducted using NVivo to identify key themes and connections across contexts. Field work observations were coded alongside the interviews and used as a context to provide further insight into the results from the interviews.

Results: Informal social control and social cohesion showed up in various ways throughout each organization. Across contexts, informal social control was a collectivized act: while community organizers themselves had difficulty identifying with informal social control, they saw their work as building community power as a necessary component of building community cohesion. Across contexts, community organizers saw the challenges of balancing the slow process of building and maintaining social cohesion with the need to address and act upon immediate harms. In each case, the ability for organizers to balance these challenges was mediated by the strength of their core team and the extended network of community members affiliated with the organization.

Conclusions and Implications: Community organizers face a myriad of challenges when attempting to organize around combatting the impacts of gentrification-related displacement. Aside from the immediate challenges of displacement-related harm, building and maintaining collective efficacy in a gentrifying neighborhood means attempting to build lasting community power within the context of addressing immediate place-based harm of displacement amongst your community. In this way, building community power necessarily occurs through the process of building strong community bonds to address both the long-term and immediate place-based harms. These case studies highlight the complexities of informal social control and social cohesion in developing anti-displacement organizing tactics amongst community organizers.