Saving The City

In 2015, when I was a Junior at Hamilton College, I received the Emerson Collaborative Research Grant to research gentrification in Washington D.C. I used those findings to develop my senior thesis and take a deeper dive into Urban Planning and migrations trends in the U.S. That research project, first titled Selling the City and later renamed to Saving the City, allowed me to better understand the origins of gentrification in order to combat it in Boston. There was so much overlap between my research and the other grant projects and creative ventures I was pursuing at the time, curating art shows for emerging artists of color in Boston. Before I wrote Saving the City, I completed the Levitt Research Center's Social Innovation Fellowship at my college where I planned and pitched the creation of a local art gallery and studio to support black and brown artists competing in the creative economy. This research has been integral to my ongoing work in the arts and the city. Saving the City challenges the prediction commonly made by early social theorists that globalization would eventually diminish the importance of place in society. I found that globalization has actually made place more valuable. My research led me to wonder how local government, entrepreneurs, and visionaries can leverage the value of place and placemaking in the 21st century to combat the gentrification and displacement of disenfranchised communities.