Defensive Development: The Role of Racial Conflict in Gentrification

This article expands the standard consumption versus production debate in the gentrification literature by examining the role of racial conflict in neigh-borhood change. Drawing from historical and ethnographic research, it ana-lyzes gentrification in Douglas/Grand Boulevard, a Black community on Chicago’s South Side. It argues that although capital movements and middle-class consumption patterns created opportunities for gentrification, racial ordering politicized it, prompting Blacks to engage in what the author terms defensive development. This strategy aims to protect Black neighborhoods from control by White elites. Yet it ultimately promotes gentrification by politically and physically marginalizing the neighborhood’s most economi-cally vulnerable residents