Explanation Of Gentrification Research Articles

Explanation of Gentrification in Chinese Historic Districts, with Shanghai Xintiandi as an Example

An important form of gentrification in China is the gentrification of historic districts. This gentrification has broadly undergone three stages of development in China: emergence, decline, and rapid development. The popular way of renewing historic districts in China today has a positive effect on the preservation of historical style. However, on the other hand, gentrification can intensify the division between the rich and the poor and social segregation, which is not conducive to social stability. Most importantly, the so-called preservation of historic districts is mostly just a superficial formalistic renewal. The cultural connotations and social networks of historic districts have been destroyed. In this paper, we take Xintiandi as an example to explain the gentrification characteristics and displacement of Xintiandi historic district from three aspects: physical environment, social class and functional change. David Ley’s theory is cited here to explain the characteristics and needs of gentrifiers that lead gentrification.

Gentrification and the Middle-class Remaking of Inner London, 1961-2001

This paper reviews the debates over the explanation of gentrification and argues that gentrification is best explained as the social and spatial manifestation of the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy based on financial, business and creative services, with associated changes in the nature and location of work, in the occupational class structure, earnings and incomes and the structure of the housing market. The paper sets out the links between these changes in the London context. It also examines the evidence for gentrification-induced displacement in London, arguing that it may be more appropriate to view the process partly as one of replacement.

Moving Beyond the Gentrification Gaps: Social Change, Tenure Change and Gap Theories in Stockholm

Production-side theories of gentrification are generally confined to the rent and value gaps. In Stockholm, the value gap, involving tenure conversions from rental to co-operative ownership, is usually cited as the primary gentrification mechanism. However, results described here indicate that gentrification has taken place in rental properties even prior to tenure conversion. Together with the small number of conversions taking place, this means that the value-gap mechanism is of limited importance. It is suggested that mechanisms operating within the rental sector, such as 'luxury renovations' and the housing allocation process, are more significant in Stockholm, and that gap theories are of little relevance. More generally, explanations of gentrification in a mixed economy such as that of Sweden need to look beyond traditional theories.

Still top of our agenda?: Neil Smith and the reconciliation of capital and consumer approaches to the explanation of gentrification

Abstract Neil Smith's 1987 article, ‘Of yuppies and housing, gentrification, social restructuring, and the urban dream’, has generated widespread interest because it represents one of the earliest and in some respects most sophisticated attempts to reconcile capital and consumer approaches to the explanation of gentrification. A review of this article indicates that Smith's thesis has been met with criticism in the gentrification literature both in terms of its account of the processes involved in the production of gentrifiers, and the specific relationship between investment in the built environment and consumer choice it depicts. It is concluded that perhaps the biggest legacy of the article has been the manner in which it has (re)produced a debate that assumes the possibility of producing a universal theory of gentrification. This sits in contrast with recent thinking which points to the time and place specific ways in which consumption choice and capital investment relate.

Blind Man's Buff, or Hamnett's Philosophical Individualism in Search of Gentrification

As a Scottish undergraduate from a small town in the mid 1970s, I was plied with urban land use models in which half of the ideal city seemed to be submerged under Lake Michigan. Naturally I was sceptical. Upon coming to the United States my scepticism proved well founded, for in no city I visited did I find the eastern sector submerged, and in no city either did Park's and Burgess's concentric rings apply to the western sector occupied by land lubbers. I did however come across the quite novel process of gentrification and began researching it in Philadelphia and Baltimore, intrigued by the realization that this was not at all what the models predicted. With the enthusiasm of a second year graduate student, I thought to theorize what I was looking at, and after many late nights and a very furrowed brow, I gave birth to a short paper with a tentative title: 'Toward a Theory of Gentrification'. Long after it was dispatched to an interested editor, my advisor delivered his own verdict on the paper: 'It's OK', he muttered, 'but it's so simple. Everybody knows that'. So much for nurturing one's students. Today I am certainly gratified that the hypothesis of a rent gap has been taken seriously and empirically tested by various colleagues, but I have always suspected that my advisor was not entirely wrong about its simplicity and modesty. In its content no less than its title, Chris Hamnett's 'The Blind Men and the Elephant' was a disappointingly stale intervention in ongoing gentrification debates.2 A roguish stomp through recent and not so recent writing, it is more likely to flatten the terrain than elevate the debate. His central argument is that discussions of gentrification have entertained 'two main competing sets of explanations. The first ... has stressed the production of urban space', the second 'the production of gentrifiers' (p. 175). Myself and David Ley are identified as the respective proponents of these positions the blind men while Chris plays intellectual clean-up, clearing a space for the perennial middle ground. My disappointment stems not just from the lack of anything new being said, but from the fact that I had discussed the paper extensively with Chris and I thought we had ironed out a lot of misunderstandings. On reading the published version, however, I find that too much inaccuracy has survived and his ideological assertions have become too brittle for the paper to pass without comment. We are left, I suspect, more muddled than middled. I have several objections to the way Hamnett poses the debate and to the way his analysis proceeds. First, although David Ley and I have certainly differed over explanations of gentrification and I expect still do, there is also a lot about which we agree for example about the centrality of class in any explanation of gentrification. Hamnett's dualistic depiction of the debate is much too simplistic. It excludes the very significant contributions of many other writers and perspectives, a point highlighted by the fact that Hamnett's piece was followed by Liz Bondi's much more useful, original, and critical reassessment of gender and gentrification.3 Second, the discussion is very dated. It addresses the far cruder state of debate almost ten years ago and ignores or misconstrues the evolution of different

The Blind Men and the Elephant: The Explanation of Gentrification

This paper critically reviews the major theories of gentrification which have emerged over the last 10 years and the debate which has surrounded them. It argues that the reason why the gentrification debate has attracted so much interest, and has been so hard fought, is that it is one of key theoretical battlegrounds of contemporary human geography which highlights the arguments between structure and agency, production and consumption, capital and culture, and supply and demand. It also argues that each of the two major explanations which have been advanced to account for gentrification (the rent gap and the production of gentrifiers) are partial explanations, each of which is necessary but not sufficient. Finally, it argues that an integrated explanation for gentrification must involve both explanation of the production of devalued areas and housing and the production of gentrifiers and their specific consumption and reproduction patterns.