BZQM

Speaker:
Waverly Duck

Combining stakeholder interviews, ethnographic observations and GIS mapping, Waverly Duck explains the formation of a “food oasis,” a concentration of seven supermarkets within a quarter-mile radius in East Liberty, a former poor and working-class Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He will show that the creation of the food oasis has produced gentrification and destabilized the local interaction order, displacing local Black residents. Duck argues that the food oasis in East Liberty is not only the result of gentrification, rather than a genuine response to neighborhood needs, but that its orientation toward the preferences of customers drawn primarily from more affluent surrounding communities is contributing to further gentrification at the expense of the original neighborhood residents whom it has displaced. Rather than giving poor Black residents better access to food, the new upscale supermarkets actually exclude them and attempts to make the middle-class outsiders who shop there feel safe actually place longtime residents in danger.