In this study, I deploy an ethnographic approach to analyze the detrimental effects of gentrification on longstanding residents in New Orleans' Tremé neighborhood. I focus on conflicts between long-established residents and gentrifiers over the use of neighborhood space on a day-to-day basis as a means for examining the consequent changes in neighborhood life. As their neighborhood gentrifies, long-term residents of Tremé must contend with greater policing, the erosion of place-based knowledge, practices, and cultural traditions, the loss of social networks, and the closure of vital neighborhood institutions. These changes in neighborhood life provide a starting point from which to begin to understand the broader effects (beyond displacement) that longstanding residents experience as a result of gentrification.

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the March, we situate the procession less as a discrete ceremonial event to re-inscribe collective memories in urban space or to lay claims to a right to urban territory, than as a momentary effort to work out and through the ongoing, shared feelings of loss in an increasingly unlivable city. By attending to the felt conditions of urban development, we argue for foregrounding shared sentiments as a viable pathway to opening up relief from, if not alternatives to, the ongoing displacements and dispossessions of the neoliberal city.

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This paper examines the emerging trend for city governments to declare themselves compassionate. Opening up the 'compassionate city' as an object of critical scrutiny, we outline some of the key ways that compassion has been approached in critical scholarship before turning our attention to the politics of these urban commitments to compassion as they are enacted in practice. Focusing on the city of Louisville, where the 'compassionate city' imaginary has been taken on both by politicians and by economic, migrant and racial justice activists, we examine the potential of compassion as and in relation to other political grammars, and consider the polyvalent nature of the compassionate city as it has shaped public debate and political struggle in the city. We argue that this turn toward compassion should be evaluated and understood neither in terms of the good intentions of compassion proponents nor exclusively through analyses that reduce compassion to a single logic to be critiqued, but, instead, in terms of its contingent politics. In doing so, we respond to recent debates about the specificity of the political by emphasizing that the meaning of politics and the political grammars through which we understand urban problems are never the province of critical scholarship alone, and we highlight the value of approaches that can sensitize us to the ways that politics-and its meaning-can itself become a problem as the political nature of the compassionate city is called into question.

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