Gentrification Literature Research Articles

The impact of gentrification policies on urban development

This article explores the impact of gentrification policies on urban development during the period 2013-2023. A mixed documentary review methodology is used that combines bibliometric analysis with qualitative analysis. The study examines how urban policies aimed at revitalizing disadvantaged areas affect various aspects of urban development, in addition to social equity, community cohesion and sustainability. Over the past decade, gentrification has been both a catalyst for infrastructural improvements and a source of displacement and social reconfiguration, especially in Latin American contexts. This analysis provides a comprehensive view of emerging dynamics in the gentrification literature, highlighting the need for public policies that promote inclusive and equitable urban development. The research focuses on identifying best practices and challenges associated with the implementation of these policies, offering key recommendations to mitigate the negative impacts of gentrification and foster sustainable urban growth

Housing Commodification and Increasing Potential Ground Rents in Post‐Socialist Budapest

AbstractIn post‐socialist Budapest, gentrification has remained modest for decades after the regime change (1989) due to politically controlled economic relations besides marketisation. Political control was transformed but maintained after 2010 in the illiberal Orbán regime. Populist housing privatisation for tenants, insufficient regulation of rental housing, mortgage policy and urban rehabilitations with systemic corruption caused moderate level of housing market commodification. However, gentrification accelerated from 2014. Among other factors, the restriction of mortgage lending and the unplanned expansion of tourism increased the commodification of real estate market. Similar contextual issues were mentioned in the gentrification literature before; however, they remained external modifying effects of the assumed nomothetic political economic mechanisms behind rent gaps under neoliberal governance assumed everywhere. We suggest connecting institutional, social and political factors with dynamics of land rent through the concept of commodification and its effects on potential ground rent to include them within the mechanisms of gentrification.

Visualizing the Landscape of Green Gentrification: A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Directions

Green gentrification has emerged as a critical and dynamic research field in environmental justice and gentrification. Few studies have systematically reviewed the current state of green gentrification literature. This paper adopts a CiteSpace-based bibliometric approach to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze 186 publications from the Web of Science database from 2009 to 2022. The objective is to assess the fundamental characteristics, identify research hotspots, themes, frontiers, and future trends in green gentrification, and present a knowledge map. The results reveal the following: (1) Green gentrification research has moved through the preparation, primary, and prosperity stages and, since 2014, has experienced exponential growth while maintaining a robust upward trend. Knowledge of green gentrification is primarily drawn from urban studies, environmental research, geography, and interdisciplinary trends that are increasingly apparent. Although North America and Europe have produced the most research outcomes, the number of studies from South America, Asia, and Australia is rising. (2) Research hotspots initially comprised the conceptualization and theoretical framework of green gentrification and then shifted to empirical studies that identify green gentrification and its social–spatial effects. The current research focus is on the mechanisms and characteristics of green gentrification. (3) Five key themes were identified, including conceptualizing green gentrification, operationalizing green gentrification for local applicability, social–spatial effects, exploring explanatory frameworks or models, and strategic response to green gentrification. (4) Four potential future directions for green gentrification research in the context of three current research trends were proposed: broadening the scope of non-North American case studies, advancing interdisciplinary theoretical innovation, expanding the analysis of green gentrification characteristics, and exploring demand-side drivers of green gentrification. This study enhances the understanding of existing knowledge in green gentrification-related research and provides a reference for future theoretical and empirical studies.

Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

In this article, we argue for a critical gentrification studies that includes a more expansive and nuanced understanding of how displacement works, beyond the mapping and counting of dislocated bodies. As part of our argument, we introduce the concept of aversive racism to the geographical literature on displacement, pointing to this insidious mode of spatial practice that we argue is widely constitutive of place-making and place-taking processes in gentrifying areas. We do this by first providing a review and analysis of how displacement has been conceptualized and measured in existing geographical scholarship on gentrification, followed by a critical examination of the gentrification literature's engagement with race and racism, and a final argument for an affective approach within a Black geographies framing that encourages more analyses based on experiential encounters with more-than-physical displacement-by-gentrification.

Conceptualizing Gentrification-Induced Social and Cultural Displacement and Place Identity Among Longstanding Black Residents

Scholars have increasingly recognized the sociocultural impacts of gentrification on Black residents. However, the gentrification literature lacks a theoretical model on the nuanced ways gentrification socially and culturally displaces longstanding Black residents. Limited attention has been given to factors that moderate social and cultural displacement. This article introduces a Theoretical Model of Gentrification-Induced Social and Cultural Displacement and Place Identity among longstanding Black residents based on extant theories and literature. Black neighborhoods’ changing character was theorized as a precipitating factor leading to residents’ negative experiences. Five types of experiences were theorized as contributing to social and cultural displacement: (1) confronting changing neighborhood norms, (2) “othering,” (3) losing social connections, (4) encroaching, and (5) witnessing the erasure of what was. The theoretical model further advances knowledge by explicating how place identity may moderate longstanding Black residents’ social and cultural displacement experiences. Implications for future research and equitable development for historically Black communities are provided.

Grassroots mobilization for a just, green urban future: Building community infrastructure against green gentrification and displacement

ABSTRACT Municipal climate resiliency and re-naturing plans are promoting greening and green (re)development, such as the inclusion of new parks, greenways, or rehabilitated shorelines, frequently as a-political, win-win solutions for all residents. Greenwashing and (re)development of green amenities in vulnerable neighborhoods—those often most in need of support toward resilience and adaptation—expose residents to the impacts of green gentrification, such as the pricing-out and physical displacement from housing, socio-cultural displacement from public space, and associated personal and community traumas. This paper explores an under-researched avenue in the green gentrification literature: How do grassroots community activists organize to address housing and greening simultaneously and how do they operate to achieve justice in greening neighborhoods? We examined the strategies and tools used by community groups in 10 cities in the United States facing green gentrification. We find that justice-driven strategies and tools are supported by the formation of multi-sectoral coalitions which strengthen what we define as “community infrastructures”—social, economic, and political capacities—against exclusive green-washing. We argue that each of the three capacities must be built amongst residents in order to fortify the material and immaterial components of community infrastructure.

Fiduciary Activism From Below: Green Gentrification, Pension Finance, and the Possibility of Just Urban Futures

This article investigates the evolving concept of fiduciary duty and its role in Canadian public sector pension funds’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices. It contributes to the literature in the distinct but related fields of environmental gentrification and urban climate finance by bringing fiduciary debates into sharper focus. Engagement with issues surrounding investors’ legal and ethical duties to invest responsibly can contribute to an enhanced understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities, as well as strategies for creating more than just urban futures. ESG, a calculative and modelling technique used to manage investment risks, overwhelmingly focuses on physical and financial climate risks (e.g., infrastructure assets and risks associated with regulatory change). This privileges the instrumental, Cartesian view of the environment as severed from its social, historical, and relational character, a perspective that has been thoroughly critiqued in the environmental/ecological gentrification literature. However, ESG investing has also introduced a potentially productive uncertainty in the realm of financial expertise; it forces questions about what it means to invest deferred compensation in the “best interests” of workers and retirees. This article has three interrelated aims. First, it reviews recent trends in environmental gentrification and urban climate finance literature to highlight an emerging but underdeveloped engagement with ESG and fiduciary duty. Second, it shows how the rise of ESG has revealed a vulnerability in the hegemonic profit maximization interpretation of fiduciary duty and invited further, open-ended, critical-theoretical engagements with the concept of the fiduciary and their responsibilities. Finally, it offers the concept of “fiduciary activism from below” to explore how grassroots agency increasingly stages a direct confrontation with corporations, institutional investors, and shareholders in the struggles over urban space and resistance to environmental and infrastructural violence.

Shifting terrains of risk: A history of natural hazards and displacement in three historic black communities of Central Austin, Texas

An urban environmental history, this paper traces the histories of three historic black communities of Central Austin, Texas. It focuses on the interplay between two hazards – natural hazards and the hazard of displacement – and the changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions that altered the communities’ susceptibility to both. In the process, it brings a historic lens to bear on double exposure and environmental gentrification literature while also building upon research into the ways that human manipulations of natural topography and hydrology have shaped the social landscapes of US cities. • Human manipulations of natural hydrology shaped Austin's social landscape. • Greening projects and hazard mitigation works in Austin were often designed to displace black people. • Double exposure literature is a useful framework with which to engage with the history of Austin's racial geographies.

Producing an ideal village: Imagined rurality, tourism and rural gentrification in China

As with its urban counterpart, rural gentrification has been identified in different countries and is argued to have gone global. This study focuses on rural gentrification in China and proposes a more comprehensive and context-specific “imagined rurality” to explain the motivation of gentrifiers and the government's involvement in the processes of rural gentrification. The imagined rurality is shaped by the popular discourse and the governments' vision of the rural and may be different in different contexts. Through scrutinizing the process of rural gentrification in Mingyue Village, China, this research finds that gentrifiers' relocation and investments to materialize and commodify their imagined rurality have triggered the development of tourism and rural gentrification. Besides the often-underscored land ownership, local governments have also played a key role as a gentrifying agent in advancing rural gentrification and rural tourism under the background of rural revitalization. It also reveals that the process of rural gentrification is not just influenced by urbanites' imagined rurality but also conditioned by the intertwined process of tourism development. This research contributes to both the rural gentrification literature and to the literature on rural restructuring and the notions of rurality in contemporary China.

Placing the more‐than‐human in environmental gentrification

AbstractThis paper considers the more‐than‐human implications of environmental gentrification in cities. Through a synthesis of existing environmental gentrification literature, we highlight gentrification scholarship that has emphasised natural ecologies, animals, or other non‐human actors in its processes. We propose the concept of (un)commons as a conceptual basis that offers generative pathways forward for centring a more‐than‐human politics in environmental gentrification scholarship as well as ways to interpret the everyday impacts of environmental gentrification on more‐than‐human beings and spaces in cities.

Public transport and gentrification. Evidence from São Paulo metro new stations

AbstractStudies in regional science show the influence of public transport on gentrification. However, the vast majority of published works deal with cases in developed countries and do not account for selection bias or endogeneity. This work uses a difference‐in‐differences model, combined with a propensity score matching, to analyze the effects of new metro stations between 2000 and 2010 in São Paulo, Brazil. The analysis relies on outcome variables typically used in the gentrification literature. The results indicate a positive and significant effect of new metro stations on income and the ratio of apartments to total dwellings. There was no effect on the proportion of young adults, rented apartments, or single owners. We argue that our findings provide partial evidence of transit‐induced gentrification related to the new metro stations in São Paulo.

Stomping Ground: Living Against Gentrification in Humboldt Park

Abstract: This ethnographic portrait, rather than covering debates from the voluminous gentrification literature, centers two Puerto Rican residents who are experiencing the threat of erasure as everyday life. The lives of Rosalyn Velásquez and Rafael Lugo span the struggles of early migration, racial segregation, intense poverty, gang violence, the drug economy, and legacies of community building in the aftermath, as outsider investment and white newcomer buyers transform their blocks. Although they do not see themselves as heroes, victims, or full-time activists, they deliver—without academic jargon—personally and historically informed analyses of their neighborhood, revealing economic survival strategies, self-affirmations of dignity, and profound local knowledge. They describe sights, sounds, smells, and conversations out in the streets, but also webs of reciprocity and mutual aid that link them to multigenerational extended family and to grassroots community agencies and education programs, whose efforts signify safety, uplift, and improvement. They reveal the welcomes they have themselves extended toward white newcomers—despite knowing their effect on local property values and taxes—whose racialized fears and isolation from the Latino community mean they rarely reciprocate. These two life course interviews counter multiple myths upon which gentrification depends and affirm the critical consciousness of so many people across the United States today who are living against gentrification.

Producing gentrifiable neighborhoods: race, stigma and struggle in Berlin-Neukölln

Through a case study of an immigrant dense working-class neighborhood in Berlin, this article asks how racial and territorial stigmatization figure into state-enabled financialized gentrification and resistance against it. While there is a discussion on territorial stigmatization in the gentrification literature, this debate remains understated in the emerging financialized gentrification literature and rarely connects to race. Debates on resistance to financialization, in turn, while being attuned to the detrimental effects of stigmatization on struggle, pay little attention to the role of the local state as a producer of stigma. In this article I draw together debates on financialization, state-enabled gentrification and racial and territorial stigma to suggest that the local state, through its oppressive classifications and racialized representations of urban space, contributes to preparing the symbolic and material structures on which finance capital is able to flourish, not only by normalizing displacement, but by hampering resistance and demobilizing local working-class communities.

Gentrification as (settler) colonialism? Moving beyond metaphorical linkages

AbstractEmerging discussions on the “settler colonial city” present a new agenda for gentrification research in settler colonial contexts. Accordingly, this paper examines the extent to which the gentrification literature engages with settler colonial dynamics, identifying three overarching approaches. While a small but growing body of literature frames gentrification as a contemporary mechanism of Indigenous erasure, other approaches engage with concepts of settler colonialism in abstraction from contemporary Indigenous life and claims to urban space. The paper argues the persistence of these abstractions undermines the recognition of settler colonial gentrification as Indigenous erasure and limits the current potential for the gentrification literature to contribute to the disruption of settler colonial relations. In response, there is a need for further empirical and theoretical work that attends to the impulse for Indigenous elimination as a unique dimension of gentrification in settler colonial contexts. Insight from literature on the “settler colonial city” underlines the particular importance of extending conceptions of anti‐gentrification resistance to emphasize Indigenous refusal of gentrified futures and examine how (settler‐led) anti‐gentrification responses disrupt or sustain settler colonial relations. These directions provide opportunities to (re)conceptualize gentrification and its responses in ways that address the reproduction of (dis)possessory settler colonial relations while recognizing “the flourishing of Indigenous life” (Dorries, 2019, p. 27).

Rural gentrification, touristification, and displacement: Analysing evidence from Mexico

The phenomenon of displacement has been at the centre of fierce debates in the literature on urban gentrification. On one side, a group of authors has argued that residential displacement is not always a key component of gentrification. On the other side, another group of researchers has defended the centrality of gentrification-induced displacement by explaining that it is embodied in different forms, including direct residential displacement, displacement pressures, exclusionary displacement, socio-cultural displacement, and commercial displacement. This paper builds on those debates in the urban gentrification literature by incorporating evidence from studies on rural gentrification. I summarize various case studies from the United Kingdom, North America, and Latin America, before turning to my own work on rural gentrification and touristification in the Mexican state of Morelos. A central argument is that direct residential displacement is not a predominant impact of rural gentrification, although it is closely connected to other forms of displacement, including exclusionary displacement, socio-cultural displacement, commercial displacement, and the displacement of other animal and plant species. The article concludes with a reflection on how research on rural gentrification contributes to the wider literature and discussion on gentrification and displacement by offering a more nuanced and complex vision of the link between these phenomena, which is important for the very definition of gentrification.

Gentrification in large Canadian cities: tenure, age, and exclusionary displacement 1991-2011

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the gentrification literature by asking how tenure changes, housing stock changes, and generational shifts might be related to gentrification as identified by household income growth in the inner cities of Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas. We use a modified shift-share analysis of changes in tenure, housing stock, and age-tenure cohorts between 1991 and 2011 to examine these questions in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, Canada’s largest metropolitan areas. We find that in each case, gentrification is associated with an absolute decline in non-condo private-sector rental units, and that construction of non-market/social housing units has not been sufficient to compensate for the private-sector units lost to gentrification. Our analysis demonstrates that changes in the class structure of households, more than generational or age-cohort composition shifts, are at the heart of inner-city transformations in tenure and income among households. The big story is the absolute loss of affordable rental units in each inner city, and the concomitant exclusionary displacement of lower-income households that has resulted.

FINANCIALIZED GENTRIFICATION AND CLASS COMPOSITION IN THE POST‐INDUSTRIAL CITY: A Rent Strike Against a Real Estate Investment Trust in Hamilton, Ontario

Through a case study of a rent strike against a real estate investment trust in a working-class neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario, this article asks how we might understand class and class struggle against financialized gentrification in a post-industrial context. While class has been central to gentrification literature, working-class experience and struggle have often been ignored or conceptualized in a way that precludes agency. New research on financialization of housing often focuses on struggles but has so far paid limited attention to class. In this article I draw on Italian operaismo (workerism) and its concept of class composition to contribute to the current debate by suggesting that financialized gentrification and struggles against it might contribute to a recomposition of the urban working class. Through a qualitative account of the 2018 East Hamilton rent strike, I analyse this struggle as two moments of class composition in the sphere of social reproduction. First, the extraction, exploitation and displacement pressure tenants experienced is analysed through the lens of technical class composition. Second, the rent strike itself is analysed as an expression of political class composition involving a confrontation of urban capital, a politicization of housing precarity, and the building of collective, autonomous power.

"Inherited Gentrification": Changing Profiles of Gentrifiers via Inheritance, The Case of Bozcaada

PurposeRural areas have been through structural changes. The reorganisation of the rural economy from agriculture to services, in addition to improvements in transportation and infrastructures, migration patterns have started to reverse in some regions and hence to change the social composition of those regions’ rural areas. These changes and their implications have been largely debated in the rural gentrification literature, mainly by re-presenting cases from the Anglo-Saxon world. This paper contributes to the rural gentrification literature by presenting an empirical study on a socio-cultural and demographic change that, together with a local economic shift, is taking place in a location other than the Global North.Design/Methodology/Approach A qualitative case study examining the changes on the socio-spatial structure of a small Turkish island, Bozcaada, is presented through the following principal indicators of countryside gentrification: the change in the socio-economic composition of its citizens; the emphasis on cultural or national heritage and aesthetics; the emergence of new institutions leading to the closure of older ones; the diversification of products and services; and the change in properties’ value.FindingsThe first-generation newcomers were in line with the typical gentrifier’s profile of rural gentrification studies. Differently, the second-generation newcomers have shown diversity in terms of both motivation and socio-economic class. This study argues that the second-generation newcomers took part naturally in the gentrification process not because they inherited their parents’ properties, but also they play an important role in the significant socio-economic and cultural changes that are still taking place on the island.Research Limitations/Implications The fact that the research is based on a single case study is a limitation for its generalisation. However, the case examined provides a basis for future work that may validate its findings in different contexts.Originality/ValueThis paper contributes to the rural gentrification literature by introducing a new type of gentrification process, the ‘inherited gentrification’ with the identification of the second-generation gentrifiers of the island, who are the direct descendants of the first gentrifiers.

Geographic Specificity Matters: Centering the Perspectives of Community–Based Stakeholders for a Holistic Understanding of Gentrification in the Twin Cities

This paper highlights the qualitative component of a larger mixed methodological study that explores how community stakeholders, most impacted by gentrification pressures in the Twin Cities, understand neighborhood change as it impacts their daily lives. The purpose is to expand the current theorization of gentrification through examining the lived experiences of those most impacted. We illuminate where community stakeholders' experiences align with and diverge from the common narrative themes often cited in contemporary gentrification literature such as demographic change and physical displacement. Although common narrative frames emerged, narrative distinctions also materialized. This differentiation highlights how gentrification pressures not only influence the redevelopment of physical space, but also culture and belonging in ways that can be distinctly different even in neighborhoods of close proximity. The implications suggest the importance of geographic specificity in policy and program approaches based on distinct histories of neighborhoods and their residents.

A Lighter Shade of Brown? Racial Formation and Gentrification in Latino Los Angeles

AbstractConventional gentrification literature has meaningfully demonstrated how economic inequality is perpetuated in urban settings, but there has been a limited understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Drawing from participant observation, interviews, and digital ethnography in the barrio of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles that were collected over five years, this study examines how gentrification functions as a racial project and supports new forms of racialization to maintain uneven development along racial lines. Examining the ways that racial formation processes unfurl at the local scale expands conventional understanding of racial formation theory and practice while, simultaneously, illustrating the centrality of place in race-making. This study finds new race and class formations are developed by casting the barrio itself and significant portions of the Mexican American population as “honorary white.” Despite colorblind and post-racial ideologies espoused in majority-minority cities like Los Angeles, this landscape fostered emerging racial formations alongside gentrification processes which have increased racial, political, and economic inequality.