Forced evictions have created unprecedented trauma and damage across communities with the commodification of housing, the financialization of cities, and the continuous economic crises. This panel explores the anti-gentrification efforts of residents and neighborhood groups in the South Bronx, the immigrant activism that led to the most significant anti-eviction movement in Spain, and the power of critical cartographies, storytelling, and other creative tools documenting dispossession and resistance in gentrifying landscapes in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City.

PANELISTS

Terra Graziani is a researcher and tenants’ rights activist based in New York. She founded the Los Angeles chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance in solidarity with gentrifying communities through research, oral history, and data work. Before this, she organized with AEMP in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked in the tenant movement at the Eviction Defense Collaborative and Tenants Together. She is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Terra earned her Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning at UCLA and her Bachelor’s degree in Social and Cultural Geography at UC Berkeley.

Monxo López is a museum curator, urban thinker, educator, cartographer, and South Bronx-based environmental and urban justice activist. He is an associate curator at the Museum of the City of New York and was a Mapping Fellow at the Design Trust for Public Spaces. Monxo is a founding member of South Bronx Unite, founding member and board member of the Mott Haven/Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the local Community Land Trust. He also currently serves as a board member of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust in the Lower East Side. Monxo holds a Ph.D. in political science from CUNY’s Graduate Center, and an MA from Université Laval in Québec, Canada. His academic research revolves around spatiality, mapping, social justice, political theory, and Latinx communities. His writings have been published in Salon.com, LatinoRebels, and NACLA, among other media outlets; and his activist work has been profiled by The New York Times, UrbanOmnibus, and Corriere della Sera.

Sophie Gonick is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and author of Dispossession and Dissent: Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid. Her work emerges at the intersection of planning history, critical race and gender studies, and debates on migration, integration, and inclusion, particularly within the context of Southern Europe. Most recently, she has considered housing mobilizations in contemporary Madrid against two interlocking histories: the Spanish experience with urbanization and Europeanization across the last century, and the more immediate story of South American migration in the wake of the crises of the 1990s. Revealing the links between rural indigenous protest and Europe’s urban social movements, she has sought to destabilize hegemonic epistemologies of urban scholarship and pedagogy beyond dichotomies of Global South and North Atlantic. Additional work has focused on the endurance and evolution of needs-based squatting, property regimes, and the institutionalization of protest and contestation. She is currently developing a new project on municipalism and urban protest across the North Atlantic in the age of right-wing populism. Gonick was educated at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned both a Master’s in City Planning (2010) and a Ph.D. (2015). 
 

MODERATOR

Gabriela Rendón is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development at The New School and director of the Housing Justice Lab. 

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