Matt Hern – författare

An investigation into gentrification and displacement, focusing on the case of Portland, Oregon''s systematic dispersal of black residents from its Albina neighborhood.

Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space—not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina—the one major Black neighborhood in Portland—has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and then contained there through exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and racist real estate practices. Since the 1990s, they''ve been aggressively displaced—by rising housing costs, developers eager to get rid of low-income residents, and overt city policies of gentrification.

Displacement and dispossessions are convulsing cities across the globe, becoming the dominant urban narratives of our time. In What a City Is For, Matt Hern uses the case of Albina, as well as similar instances in New Orleans and Vancouver, to investigate gentrification in the twenty-first century. In an engaging narrative, effortlessly mixing anecdote and theory, Hern questions the notions of development, private property, and ownership. Arguing that home ownership drives inequality, he wants us to disown ownership. How can we reimagine the city as a post-ownership, post-sovereign space? Drawing on solidarity economics, cooperative movements, community land trusts, indigenous conceptions of alternative sovereignty, the global commons movement, and much else, Hern suggests repudiating development in favor of an incrementalist, non-market-driven unfolding of the city.

It ain''t easy being a kid these days. For the first time in generations, today''s teens have worse prospects ahead of them than their parents did, and the pressure to toe the line and be a success is heavier than ever . . . and so is the temptation to just give up. But there are things in the world worth fighting for!

This scrapbook-style collection of essays, excerpts, explanations, and images pushes back against a culture that relentlessly demands that kids give up their best ideals, abandon their hopes, forget their ethical objections to dominant life, soothe their rage, and accept their fates. From dealing with the cops to dealing with your peers, from school and community to drugs and sex, from race and class to money and mental health, Stay Solid! provides essential support for radically inclined teens who believe that it''s possible for all of us to hang on to our values and build a life we believe in.

Compiled and edited by radical urbanist and educator Matt Hern, with the assistance of the youth community at Vancouver''s Purple Thistle Center, Stay Solid! is for kids everywhere, and for anyone who considers themselves an ally—parents, teachers, neighbors, friends, relatives, and beyond.

Contributors include Noam Chomsky, Patricia Hill Collins, The Guerilla Girls, Derrick Jensen, Grace Llewellyn, Margaret Killjoy, Dan Savage, Astra Taylor, and more.

We need to take sports seriously. Football, baseball, mixed martial arts, hockey, and beyond: these are arenas of immense power, with a mass appeal. Yet intellectuals have long since abandoned the sporting world as a legitimate site of contestation and innovation. Why? What do we gain by handing over the persuasive power of sports to the worst elements of our culture, by allowing sports to become plagued by hyper-consumption, militarism, violence, sexism, and homophobia? According to Matt Hern, not a whole lot.

In a series of interconnected narratives from his forty-plus years of sports fanaticism, Hern makes an impassioned and entertaining plea for a more active engagement with sports, physically and intellectually. Hern''s eye is critical and his analysis sharp, but this book is more than a critique—it''s a celebration of what sports have taught us, and a suggestion of how much more we still have to learn.

Fun, engaging, and fast-paced, One Game at a Time is for anyone willing to get their head into the game.

Matt Hern lives and works in east Vancouver, where he founded the Purple Thistle Center and Car-Free Vancouver Day. A former sportswriter and a radical urbanist whose writing has been published on six continents and in ten languages, he is the author of Common Ground in a Liquid City (AK Press, 2010), which was shortlisted for the Vancouver Book Award.