Gentrification Process Research Articles

Using Strategic Foresight to Lead in a Gentrifying Business Culture

Data has demonstrated that affluent suburban whites are returning to inner cities, which low-income minorities have occupied for decades. This return is increasing investment and development by small and large businesses seeking to meet the needs of this new demographic. The data has also demonstrated the conflict that these businesses are experiencing from long-time residents, community leaders, and activists. This article will give leaders a strategic approach to addressing conflict before, during, and after the gentrification process. This article will discuss the theory of strategic foresight and its importance to leaders confronting gentrification. The article will demonstrate strategic foresight’s advantages to leaders and their organizations and how predictive and adaptive leaders can better embrace the future and changes. Strategic foresight assists leaders in embracing change and contemplating the effects of developing trends so they are well-prepared for market shifts, threats, and opportunities . While research has demonstrated the adverse effects accompanying gentrification, strategic foresight can assist leaders in discovering the opportunities these shifts can bring and how to gain the support and acceptance of others effectively.

Social Justice in the Green City

The Covid-19 pandemic and energy, climate, and demographic crises have shown how cities are vulnerable to these impacts and how the access to green and blue spaces has become highly relevant to people. One strategy that we can observe is the strong focus on the resilience discourse, meaning implementing more green and blue spaces in urban areas, such as at previous brownfield quarters. However, social justice implications of urban greening have been overlooked for a long time. The implementation of strategies to improve the quality and availability of the green and blue infrastructures may indeed have negative outcomes as far as housing accessibility is concerned by trigging gentrification processes. Issues related to environmental justice and socio-spatial justice are increasing in contemporary cities and call for a better understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities. This thematic issue includes eleven articles with different methodologies, with examples from Europe and North America as well as different lenses of green gentrification. Some articles focus more on the question of costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of various infrastructural options for urban greening. Others, instead, discuss how the strategic urban planning tools and policy processes take into account distributional consequences, with specific attention on participatory processes.

The role of the state in the touristification of Lisbon

The explanation regarding the recent touristification of cities has significantly focused on the ability of platforms such as Airbnb to offer millions of tourist beds in areas that were not planned for tourism use. Exploring Lisbon, we offer instead a political economic explanation where touristification is the result of the active intervention of the neoliberal state. Lisbon moved from a phase of abandonment to be gentrified by tourism in a very short period. To explain this, we examine how the state absorbed the cost of redevelopment, thus ensuring that private capital could extract profits from rehabilitation, and allowed developers to build the most profitable product with no limitations, which to a great extent are short-term rentals, hotels, and luxury housing for transnational users. By examining how the central city has been re-invented to serve the needs of private capital, we develop a dialogue between this general process of gentrification and how it is experienced in Southern Europe as a wave of intense touristification. We contextualize this within the historical political economic process in which the European South has progressively become a space of vacation for transient populations who are presented as the new class to be served.

Identifying Neighbourhood Change Using a Data Primitive Approach: the Example of Gentrification

Data primitives are the fundamental measurements or variables that capture the process under investigation. In this study annual data for small areas were collated and used to identify and characterise gentrification. Such data-driven approaches are possible because of the increased availability of data over small areas for fine spatial and temporal resolutions. They overcome limitations of traditional approaches to quantifying geodemographic change. This study uses annual data for 2010–2019 of House Price, Professional Occupation, Residential Mobility (in and out flows) and Ethnicity over small areas, Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs). Areas of potential gentrification were identified from directional changes found in all of these variables, across combinations of start and end time periods. The initial set of areas were further processed and filtered to select robust gentrification cycles with minimum duration, and to determine start, peak and end years. Some 123 neighbourhoods in a regional case study area were found to have undergone some form of potential gentrification. These were examined further to characterise their spatial context and nature of the gentrification present, and specific types of gentrification were found to have specific periodicities. For example short-length durations (three to four years) were typically located in rural and suburban areas, associated with transit-induced cycles of gentrification, and greenification. Seven neighbourhoods were validated in detail, confirming the gentrification process and its type and their multivariate change vectors were examined. These showed that vector angle reflects the main data primitive driving the cycle of gentrification, which could aid with future prediction of gentrification cycles. A number of areas of further work are discussed.

Home in Vida and Gentefied

The process of gente-fication, or Latinx-led urban revitalization in workingclass barrios, has recently gained widespread attention and is at the heart of the popular US television series Vida (2018–20) and Gentefied (2020–22). Both programs serve as windows into contemporary Latinx struggles over belonging, “home,” and identity against the backdrop of multicultural neoliberalism and multicultural whiteness in the United States. We examine how change in the fictional Latinx neighborhoods in Vida and Gentefied highlights the precarity of home for Latinxs in the United States, even as Latinx representation has achieved new heights across social life. Vida and Gentefied specifically depict home as threatened by processes of gentrification and gente-fication. Even though the home is in distress, it continues to offer Latinx protagonists safety, love, and belonging through a heterogeneous network of individuals, experiences, and memories. In their attempt to stabilize home, Latinx protagonists find autonomy and a home that heals, but in contrasting the popular conceptualization of gente-fication as a gentler, more culturally sensitive form of gentrification emphasizing racial and economic uplift for barrio residents, we argue that Vida and Gentefied utilize gente-fication as a narrative tool that rests Latinx belonging on tenets of assimilation.

Urban suburbia: Gentrification and spatial inequality in workers' communities in Tokyo

Spatial inequality in Asian megacities has recently accelerated against the formation of a hybrid development-state-neoliberalism policy and the existing unique characteristics of the built environment, i.e., the coexistence of and conflicts between planned and self-shaped urban areas. This study attempts to examine the process of gentrification and spatial inequality in urban areas in Tokyo, where large-scale urban regeneration projects were promoted through the relaxation of urban planning regulations under neoliberal urban policies. First, we surveyed how the transformation of urban development policies promoted gentrification in Tokyo. Second, we conducted a statistical analysis of the unique characteristics of spatial inequality in Tokyo. Finally, we conducted a detailed case study of the gentrification process in a workers' community where large-scale urban redevelopment projects had been implemented. We conclude that spatial inequality has widened in Tokyo because of government-led gentrification since the 2000s. Particularly, gentrification rapidly increased in the eastern areas of Tokyo, developed historically as workers' communities, and spatial inequality at the local level widened. Furthermore, local characteristics were rapidly transformed by the loss of urban industries. Instead, with government-led urban regeneration, a new urban nexus so called ‘urban suburbia’ comprising elements such as high-quality condominiums, shopping malls, and franchise shops emerged.

Right to the city or environmental gentrification? A discussion about risks and potential of urban agriculture

ABSTRACT Recent literature has highlighted the role of urban agriculture (UA) in creating more sustainable and equitable cities through social participation and promotion of food and environmental justice. However, in a context of neoliberal urban development, the overall socio-spatial impact of UA remains a subject of intense debate. In particular, whilst some scholars focus on the social justice possibilities contained in UA projects, others draw attention to how UA unintentionally fosters revalorization and gentrification processes through an esthetic and environmental improvement of marginal and working-class neighborhoods and suburbs. This intervention aims to explore these contradictory interpretations of UA and offers some conceptual tools based on concrete practice and empirical evidence for clarifying and potentially also resolving them.

Geschäftliche Gentrifizierungsprozesse im Frankfurter Bahnhofsviertel

ZusammenfassungGentrifizierungsprozesse in Bezug auf die Gewerbelandschaft in einem Gebiet sind ein bislang wenig erforschter Untersuchungsgegenstand. Dabei können Gewerbe in einem aufgewerteten Quartier – besonders alteingesessene Betriebe, die vornehmlich die Bedarfe der ehemals verankerten Bewohnerinnen und Bewohner bedienten – von Verdrängung betroffen sein. Modernisierungsmaßnahmen in Fassade und Bausubstanz, daraus resultierende Steigerungen in Miete und Pacht sowie die Abnahme der ursprünglichen Kundschaft sind dabei regulative Elemente einer Verdrängung. Anhand einer Bestandsaufnahme, basierend auf Google Street View, sowie einer zehn Jahre später stattfindenden Begehung im Frankfurter Bahnhofsviertel, werden die Veränderungen vor Ort kartiert und hinsichtlich einer gewerblichen Gentrifizierung erfasst. Erste Erkenntnisse zeigen, dass sich in Leerständen von verdrängten oder aufgegebenen Traditionsbetrieben hochwertige Gastronomiebetriebe niederlassen, die als Indikator-Betriebe für eine Gewerbegentrifizierung angesehen werden können. Daher sind verschiedene, an die Stadt gerichtete, Handlungsempfehlungen für Viertel, die einen solchen Wandel durchlaufen, wie eine finanzielle Förderung von Traditionsbetrieben, eine frühzeitige Erfassung der Veränderung einer Gewerbelandschaft, Verlängerung von Mindestlaufzeiten gewerblicher Mieten oder eine gesonderte Aufnahme in eine Milieuschutzsatzung, zu bedenken.

Farmers vs middle class. Social structure in peri-urban areas

The main subject of the article is process of rural gentrification. It shapes the rural social structure, and thus causes social, economic and cultural changes. Recent analyses conducted in Poland (based on the index of rural gentrification) indicate that this process is most advanced in rural peri-metropolitan areas. They are the optimal place to observe the transformations taking place as a result of rural gentrification process. In the article special attention will be paid precisely to farmers as a segment of the social structure. Their characteristics resulting from demographic and socio-professional differentiation in two types of counties (intensively gentrified and those in which the process of rural gentrification does not occur) will be discussed. The objective of this research is to elucidate the dynamics of agriculture and the farming community within the framework of the rural gentrification phenomenon. The analysis will be based on existing data (publicly available databases in, among others, the Central Statistical Office and the database of the “Social Diagnosis 2015” survey).

The actions of key agents in facilitating rural super-gentrification: Evidence from the English countryside

Whilst the process of gentrification in rural spaces is widely recognised, there has been less focus to date on the emergence of rural super-gentrification - defined as the displacement of the wealthy from rural communities by the super-wealthy. Of the limited work which has been conducted on super-gentrification, this has focused on the nature and outcomes of displacement taking place in different rural settings without considering the actions of key agents, such as planners and estate agents. Consequently, this paper explores the role of gentrifying agents - namely planners and estate agents - in shaping processes of rural super-gentrification in the English countryside. The paper highlights how restrictive planning regimes, including constraints on higher plot densities, contribute to ‘rural exclusivity’ and rural super-gentrification. Within such contexts, the promotional and steering strategies of estate agents - based upon incomers perceived economic and cultural capital - also facilitate rural super-gentrification. In such a way, the paper advances existing consumption-side theories of gentrification by highlighting desires by super-wealthy incomers for consuming rural village locations with local services, a slower pace of life and a ‘sense of community’. In addition, the importance of privacy and seclusion, urban proximity and connectivity and access to educational circuits by incomers also shape the promotional and steering strategies of estate agents. Consequently, the paper highlights how more localised ‘micro-geographies’ of rural super-gentrification are of relevance to rural areas in comparison to urban contexts, where super-gentrification is argued to be a neighbourhood-level phenomenon.

QUANTO VALE UM SAMBA? GENTRIFICAÇÃO E ESPECULAÇÃO IMOBILIÁRIA EM UM BAIRRO DO RIO DE JANEIRO

This article analyzes the entrepreneurship and gentrification process of urban areas under the logic of the city as a commodity, taking the neighborhood of Vila Isabel, Rio de Janeiro-RJ, as an investigative parameter. Despite the rhetoric that justifies large public and private projects, anchored in socioeconomic development and promoting the well-being of the local population, the negative social impact of these projects will be considered. In this way, we are interested in both the more objective aspects, such as the process that unites the authoritarian requalification of cultural assets with real estate speculation, and its impact on the neighborhood's sociability, considering, above all, the repositioning of local identity in the face of the interpellations of the logic of gentrification and the entrepreneurial valorization of urban space.

Gentrification in the Command Economy: A Story of Pyongyang Metropolitan Area in North Korea

Background and objective: Gentrification generally refers to changes in residents or operators in neighborhoods by investment in capital, a phenomenon in which wealthy or young professionals replace existing residents or operators in socioeconomic terms. Although conducted mainly in capitalist cities, some studies dealt with socialist systems or state-led gentrification. We intended to demonstrate the gentrification in North Korean by examining the cases of the socialist system and state-led gentrification and looking at urban development and urban space restructuring in Pyongyang Metropolitan Area in North Korea.Methods: To build up methodological framework of the study, we reviewed previous literature that deals with gentrification in capitalist cities, socialist systems, and state-led planning. About the gentrification phenomenon in North Korea, we examined secondary data of North Korea refugee interviews with North Korea government documents and research papers about Pyongyang's building and real estate development. Then, we compared gentrification in capitalist cities, socialist systems (or state-led planning), and North Korea.Results: Gentrification in capitalist cities, socialist system and North Korea differs in their enabling conditions, gentrifying agents, gentrifiers, and processes. National and local governments, usually with the North Korea communist party, play a leading role as gentrifying agents through their public policy. In the gentrification processes, there is an increasing gap between rich and poor and spatial separation between them, especially when displaced households being pushed out of town in North Korea.Conclusion: Urban development and apartment construction in Pyongyang shows the possibility of developing into existing gentrification, and if the private sector that leads gentrification occurs and at the same time, spatial replacement by privileged or upper classes appears, it will be clear that it is a kind of gentrification under the command economy.

예술가의 활동과 도시 젠트리피케이션과의 관계 고찰

It is time for academic research on how artistic elements change regions and societies, their roles and types, and the action process and meaning analysis of social perception, and various policy measures according to types in the process of gentrification. Various social, cultural, and economic problems are revealed in the general process of gentrification, such as urban fallout, the emergence of artists and gentrifires, revitalizing people's interests and commercial districts, and revitalizing the city, such as local renovation and reconstruction. In this study, we studied and analyzed how these artists' activities affect gentrification, perceptions of social members, related systems and administrative plans and support systems of governments and local governments, and various cases of gentrification. According to the results of the study, a topic on how artistic elements affect the gentrification of the city was derived. The final goal of this study is to induce the search for policy alternatives for sustainable gentrification through academic research on artist activities and gentrification and various case analysis.

Globalization and Redevelopment: The Crux of Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower

The metro cities of India are under the influence of the real estate business. Mumbai, the center of India's commerce, is not exempt from the gentrification process. Mumbai is a city of new money and rising real estate in the twenty-first century. The novel Last Man in Tower raises the issues of globalization and redevelopment in Mumbai in the last few years. Further, Globalization has widely affected the morals of the social and cultural arena too. The novel also examines how English literature is affected by the ever-evolving current trends in the postcolonial age by globalisation, which is a sort of neo-colonialism. Like his debut novel The White Tiger, this novel also, Adiga has become the voice of the marginalized section by exposing the pitfall of urban development. This propulsive, explosive, insightful story coming out of the signature wit and magic of Adiga presents several interlinked issues of the teeming city of Mumbai. With great courage, Aravind Adiga explores the theme of lawlessness as the protagonist, Master Yogesh Murthy fails to receive justice and support from law, order, and even from the media. The crux of the novel revolves around the duality of human existence in the modern world and raises the question of whose rights should be preserved in case of a conflict between an individual and society. There are grave consequences of the redevelopment of societies which include not the only issue of compensation but also the larger issue of the acquisition of land, resettlement, rehabilitation, and participation in negotiation which can mitigate the darker side of redevelopment. The novel may be acclaimed as an example of post-modernist ethos seeking to explore the modern way of life. The present paper attempts to throw light on redevelopment and its social, economic, and political impact on society.

Adaptive urbanism in ordinary cities: Gentrification and temporalities in Turin (1993–2021)

The aim of this paper is to ground gentrification processes within a broader urban transformation pattern and within a deeper historical account, taking an ordinary city into consideration: Turin, in the North West of Italy. The paper elaborates on qualitative data collected along a twenty year span, allowing reflection on different phases and dynamics of capital extraction across time. We will show that, problematically, gentrification was considered as a positive model by local authorities and that it was adopted as a reference by both private and public actors to generate local growth and to react to economic crises.

Multilevel analysis of a gentrification process in a spanish medium-sized city: the case of A Coruña

This article has deconstructed the general phenomenon of gentrification in the historic centre of A Coruña in two models. On the one hand, a model based on social class promotion, symbolic capital and economic status in the Cidade Vella. On the other hand, the neighbourhood of Orzán as a transformation process resulting from a phenomenon of commercial gentrification based on two interrelated processes: first, the demand for new places of consumption and entertainment and second, the material devaluation of the neighbourhood. In this regard, this work brings a new dimension to the global debate around commercial gentrification.

The right to the unhealthy deprived city: An exploration into the impacts of state-led redevelopment projects on the determinants of mental health

Research shows mental health is impacted by poor-quality physical and social-environmental conditions. Subsequently state-led redevelopment/regeneration schemes focus on improving the physical environment, to provide better social-environmental conditions, addressing spatial and socioeconomic inequities thus improving residents' health. However, recent research suggests that redevelopment/regeneration schemes often trigger gentrification, resulting in new spatial and socioeconomic inequalities that may worsen health outcomes, including mental health, for long-term neighborhood residents. Using the right to the city and situating this within the framework of accumulation by dispossession and capitalist hegemony, this paper explores the potential mechanisms in which poor mental health outcomes may endure in neighborhoods despite the implementation of redevelopment/regeneration projects. To do so, we explored two neighborhoods in the city of Glasgow — North Glasgow and East End – and conducted a strong qualitative study based on 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders.The results show that postindustrial vacant and derelict land spaces and socioeconomic deprivation in North and East Glasgow are potential mechanisms contributing to the poor mental health of its residents. Where redevelopment/regeneration projects prioritize economic goals, it is often at the expense of social(health) outcomes. Instead, economic investment instigates processes of gentrification, where long-term neighborhood residents are excluded from accessing collective urban life and its (health) benefits. Moreover, these residents are continually excluded from participation in decision-making and are unable to shape the urban environment. In summary, we found a number of potential mechanisms that may contribute to enduring poor mental health outcomes despite the existence of redevelopment/regeneration projects. Projects instead have negative consequences for the determinants of mental health, reinforcing existing inequalities, disempowering original long-term neighborhood residents and only providing the “right” to the unhealthy deprived city. We define this as the impossibility to benefit from material opportunities, public spaces, goods and services and the inability to shape city transformations.

Gentrified countryside and non-gentrified countryside: Spatial dimension of the rural gentrification process

Abstract The subject of the paper is the process of rural gentrification in Poland. In Poland, this process has a special character. It began later than in the West and intensified in the last decade of the twentieth century. It resulted from two parallel processes endogenous and exogenous to the countryside. The rural middle class grew due to an increase in the level of education of the rural population (resulting from the “educational boom” after 1989) since a higher level of education entitles one to occupy a higher position in the social and professional structure. It was accompanied by the settlement of the urban middle class in rural areas. The paper identifies (based on literature and earlier own research) the features of rural gentrification in Poland. Based on them, the level of gentrification of rural communities was indicated, and in turn, the spatial extent of the rural gentrification process in Poland was defined.

“Passive” Ecological Gentrification Triggered by the Covid-19 Pandemic

Urban areas can be conceptualized as large and ever-changing playgrounds in which many diverse agents (households, businesses, developers, municipalities, etc.) are active. The interactions between the playground qualities and the players’ preferences are not unidirectional. However, sometimes, external events may change the perception of the playground qualities in the player’s eyes. The recent Covid-19 pandemic and its associated precautionary measures are a clear example. During the pandemic, the value of existing urban green infrastructures has increased, as lockdowns were imposed, and distance working became widespread. The concept of “passive” ecological gentrification is developed in order to characterize this type of process. In contrast with “active” ecological gentrification, caused by purposeful intervention in the urban arena, “passive” ecological gentrification is triggered by a change of context, such as the pandemic impacts. This article focuses on the appreciation of green urban infrastructures by urbanites during the pandemic, showing that the willingness to pay to live near green and open spaces has increased in general, but with significant spatial differences. The main research questions are: (a) How does the player’s perception of the playground’s value change in times of pandemic? (b) Do these changes support the emergence of “passive” ecological gentrification? The methodology is based on the analysis of changes in property values over time as an indirect measure of a location’s appeal, looking specifically at areas near green urban infrastructures, both in the inner city and in the peripheral areas. Relatively large changes in property value over time are a possible indicator of ongoing gentrification processes: When they are observed near existing green infrastructures, and not related to redevelopment initiatives, “passive” ecological gentrification may be the result. Using detailed spatial data on land use and property prices from the Netherlands, we find evidence that supports the hypothesis of a “passive” ecological gentrification drift towards areas around urban parks and green infrastructures in general.

Language, translocality and urban change

Abstract This article addresses the role of translocal interconnectedness between offline and online spaces by examining the varied presence of language displays in such spaces. Quantitative findings on language presence in the offline public spaces of four Gothenburg neighbourhoods are contrasted with the online presence found in three Swedish search portals, and the differences are interpreted in light of the broader socioeconomic processes of gentrification and segregation. The comparison between online and offline presence allows us to give a more holistic picture of the neighbourhoods; it reveals, among other things, the presence of semi-public spaces, with a multilingual presence of commercial enterprises and civil society organizations, and points out that some super-diverse neighbourhoods have more online than offline presence on search portals. Thus, the often-stereotyped mental picture of these neighbourhoods as being passive, static, ‘segregated’ and ‘problematic’ is challenged.