Dr Madeleine Pill presents her research on the governance of Baltimore, undertaken over a two-year period following the city uprising in April 2015. Identification of elite, middle and marginal governance actors, the strategies of development (gentrification) and demolition (displacement) adopted, and their spatial manifestation, shows how neighbourhood governance is characterised by the local state’s absence except for its basic function of (over) policing of the marginalised. Citizens are excluded from governance arrangements. Despite persistent local activism protesting injustice and inequity, activist espousal of an alternative ideology with regard to the city’s development politics struggles to disrupt the logic and practices of austerity governance.