Defying Displacement: Book Talk and Conversation with Andrew Lee

Cities around the world are in the midst of a profound transformation as the wealthy price out the remnants of the urban working class, especially people of color. Displacement is neither accidental or inevitable. It happens because a whole range of people and institutions profit handsomely. Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War, focused on the US but informed by global examples, investigates gentrification from the perspective of the people fighting it, members of communities whose survival is threatened by some of the most powerful institutions on the planet.

Join the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Weitzman School’s Department of City and Regional Planning for this book talk and conversation on Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War, a new book by AK Press. The book highlights activists and residents in struggle against displacement and how they are charting the way forward to affordable and sustainable cities run by the people who inhabit them.

Andrew Lee, author and activist, will be joined in conversation with Akira Drake Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning.

Andrew Lee has been involved with grassroots anti-displacement campaigns in San José, California. He currently lives in Philadelphia, where he continues to work on similar issues. He has written for Yes! Magazine, Teen Vogue, and The Progressive and serves as Managing Editor for The Anti-Racism Daily.

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing (UGA Press, 2021), which explores how both the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within public housing developments.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.