My Brooklyn: Demystifying Gentrification
My Brooklyn is a documentary about Director Kelly Anderson’s personal journey, as a Brooklyn “gentrifier,” to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood along lines of race and class.
Two screenings – FREE
Wednesday evening, February 17 at 6:00pm at the Champaign Public Library
followed by a community panel to discuss recent development trends in C-U.
Thursday, February 18th at 7:30 p.m. in Plym Auditorium, Temple Buell Hall
followed by Q&A with film director.
Find out more about the film here.
My Brooklyn is a documentary about Director Kelly 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.
Meanwhile, development officials announce a controversial plan to tear down and remake the Fulton Mall, a popular and bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district just blocks from Anderson’s apartment. She discovers that the Mall, despite its run-down image, is the third most profitable shopping area in New York City with a rich social and cultural history. As the local debate over the Mall’s future intensifies, deep racial divides in the way people view neighborhood change become apparent. All of this pushes Anderson to confront her own role in the process of gentrification, and to investigate the forces behind it more deeply.
She meets with government officials, urban planners, developers, advocates, academics, and others who both champion and criticize the plans for Fulton Mall. Only when Anderson meets Brooklyn-born and raised scholar Craig Wilder, though, who explains his family’s experiences of neighborhood change over generations, does Anderson come to understand that what is happening in her neighborhoods today is actually a new chapter in an old American story. The film’s ultimate questions become how to heal the deep racial wounds embedded in our urban development patterns, and how citizens can become active in fixing a broken planning process.
Sponsored by Department of Urban & Regional Planning, Center for Advanced Study, 5th & Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign, Champaign Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice, City of Urbana, Champaign County Habitat for Humanity, Champaign Country Health Care Consumers, Champaign Country Regional Planning Commission, Channing Murray Foundation, College of Law Community Preservation Clinic, Education, Latina/o Studies, Bruce D. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center, Anthropology, Krannert Center for Performing Arts, Theater, History, Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign, Planners Network, Student Planning Organization