DC hardcore, gentrification and punk urbanism

Abstract

This article examines the narratives that enabled and legitimized the gentrification of several neighbourhoods of Washington DC during the 1980s. What links each of the neighbourhoods (Georgetown, Mt. Pleasant, Adams Morgan, sections of the U Street/Shaw neighbourhood and parts of Penn Quarter) is that all experienced gentrification after the arrival of punk communities to their spaces in the early 1980s. I argue that DC punk urbanism is tied to a process through which middle- and upper-class suburban youth valorize neighbourhoods marked by urban decay and disinvestment, occupy those spaces without putting themselves into relation with already existing subaltern urbanisms and subsequently replace the neighbourhood fabrics of the residents who formerly lived there with their own.