Legitimising displacement: Academic discourse, territorial stigmatisation and gentrification

This article explores the territorial stigmatisation–gentrification nexus and how it is advanced by an intellectual pipeline between academics and policymakers in the USA. Despite much research revealing the pathologising narratives latent within displacement-inducing urban policies, little work has explicitly sought to underscore the influence of academic discourses in promoting these policies. Centring a triad of discourses surrounding concentrated disadvantage, social mix and neighbourhood effects – emergent namely from the academic fields of urban sociology, criminology, urban planning and urban economics – I provide an evidential linkage between academic discourse and displacement-causing US policymaking by conducting a document analysis of official reports related to two major US government programmes: the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) Demonstration programme and the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI programme. I suggest that these academic discourses operate to legitimise displacement via neighbourhood-centric framings which advance territorial stigmatisation and related gentrification. These discourses, I argue, reinforce the real estate state and the destructive capitalist force of uneven geographical development while working to facilitate the disregard of propositions that would effect structural change. I conclude with an explanation for the present configuration of the academy-to-policy pipeline and why it has failed to onboard critical, macro-structurally orientated scholarship, and issue a call for a direction forward.