Event

Right to the City Film Screenings: My Brooklyn

Tue, Feb 17, 2015

7:00 PM

The Right to the City Film Series features five films based on changing urban landscapes near and far: in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Newark, Detroit and Istanbul. The films focus on issues of processes of urban development defined by inequality—expulsions, redevelopment, and gentrification—and their results. The screening will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with filmmaker Kelly Anderson and Sociology Professor Sharon Zukin (The Graduate Center) and moderated by CUNY scholar Sara Martucci.

My Brooklyn, a documentary by Allison Lirish Dean and Kelly Anderson, follows Anderson’s personal journey, as a Brooklyn “gentrifier,” to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood along lines of race and class. The story begins when Anderson moves to Brooklyn in 1988, lured by cheap rents and bohemian culture. By Michael Bloomberg’s election as mayor in 2001, a massive speculative real estate boom is rapidly altering the neighborhoods she has come to call home. She watches as an explosion of luxury housing and chain store development spurs bitter conflict over who has a right to live in the city and to determine its future. While some people view these development patterns as ultimately revitalizing the city, to others, they are erasing the eclectic urban fabric, economic and racial diversity, creative alternative culture, and unique local economies that drew them to Brooklyn in the first place. It seems that no less than the city’s soul is at stake.

Cosponsored by the Sociology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Critical Psychology Departments; the Center for Place, Culture and Politics; the Center for Urban Research; the Gotham Center for New York City History; the Center for Human Environments; and The Public Science Projectthe Narrating Change Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.