Cultural Variations or Socioeconomic Positions: The Gentrification Debate Continues

Abstract

Specifically, she suggests that tastes invested with capital affluent residents' appreciation for certain restaurants and boutiques, and tourist throngs at a farmers' market booth are of greatest consequence for the city's public life and therefore most worthy of analytic attention. Naked City argues that the cultural tastes of the upper and upper-middle classes drive consumption practices and that such consumption benefits developers and investors, those with least regard for the city's soul, by providing investment and marketing opportunities geared toward affluent residents and tourists. She proposes that some New Yorkers, particularly members of the upper-middle class, are complicit in this destructive transformation even as they seek authenticity. For instance, she writes: Our pursuit of authenticity our accumulation of this kind of cultural capital fuels rising estate values; our rhetoric of authenticity implicitly endorses the new, postJacobs rhetoric of upscale growth (p. 18). In so doing, Zukin aptly notes that it is not gentrification alone that drives the transformation of so many contemporary cities. Instead, gentrification is part and parcel of a broader shift, namely, the transformation of cities like New York into sites of cultural consumption. For this reason, it is the relationship between tastes and consumption to which she is most attentive. In sum, Naked City ought to be read much as we approach Jane Jacobs's classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Both are calls for the preservation of authentic place and community an authenticity that both authors locate in the sustained presence of certain longtime residents and their institutions and communities. Neither book fully reveals why many long for this version of authenticity or correlate it with real community, but Zukin's book, unlike Jacobs's, is notably cautious about the potential consequence of her appreciation for New York's soul. Like Jacobs's book, Naked City should and, I predict will, be remembered for richly capturing a pivotal moment in New York's development, as well as widespread anxiety about its future. It remains to be seen whether we heed its call.