Kirsteen Paton: Gentrification: a working-class perspective

Abstract

Among urban scholars there is much debate about the consequences of gentrification, in particular about the question whether gentrification displaces the original and less affluent residents. Kirsteen Paton’s book Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective critically engages with this debate, arguing that displacement has been too narrowly focused on eviction and forced physical movement. Reworking Hackworth’s definition of gentrification as the creation of urban space for the more affluent user, she aims to show how gentrification also seeks to create the affluent user and thus results in cultural displacement as well as various types of physical displacement. Gentrification is a way to manage and discipline rather than displace low-income residents, Paton argues. The book is ambitious in promising nothing less than ‘a new sociological perspective on gentrification’ (p. 5). Paton weaves together literatures on hegemony, class analysis, gentrification and neoliberal economic restructuring. Through an empirical investigation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Paton aims to demonstrate how gentrification is as much a consensual strategy as it is coercive. The book offers stimulating critiques of various literatures and is rich in ideas. Her empirical work is a case study of the regeneration of Partick, Glasgow, which is a ‘predominantly ‘‘white’’ working-class’ and now gentrifying neighbourhood with the motto Industria dilat or ‘we are enriched by industry’ (p. 61). Paton gathered the ‘locational narratives’ that describe ‘people’s residential biographical stories of how and where they live’ (p. 54) of 49 people (previously) living in Partick. In four chapters, which are preceded by an elaborate theoretical chapter, she stages her interviewees in an exploration of various themes among which class and place, consumer citizenship, othering and displacement. Paton’s most thought-provoking conclusion, in my reading, is that ‘gentrification is not always a zero-sum game for working-class residents, who at times rework gentrification processes, on their own terms for their own gains’ (blurb). This insight is detailed in a