Gentrification Research Research Articles

The Changes of Gentrification Research and Its Regional Expansion

The Changes of Gentrification Research and Its Regional Expansion

Intergenerational support shaping residential trajectories: Young people leaving home in a gentrifying city

Parental support, in both financial and non-financial ways, is important in explaining the residential trajectories of young people leaving home. For instance, the influence of parental support on the ability to leave home or enter homeownership is well established. This study adds a dimension by investigating how inequalities in terms of parental background – particularly assets – are spatially articulated. More specifically, we study whether parental background influences the types of neighbourhoods young people leaving home move to. Drawing on the case of Amsterdam, we show that these ‘fledglings’, despite their generally very modest income, disproportionally move to gentrification neighbourhoods. Moreover, fledglings with wealthy parents are even more likely to move to both early gentrifying and expensive mature-gentrification neighbourhoods. Gentrification research should therefore also take into account the importance of middle class social reproduction strategies as well as the potential intergenerational transfer of (financial) resources – rather than merely personal financial situation – in shaping housing outcomes and spatial inequalities of young people leaving home. Drawing on parental support, young people may be able to outbid other households and hence exclude them from gentrifying neighbourhoods. Consequently, parental wealth and other resources can thus contribute to gentrification and exclusion.

Very particular, or rather universal? Gentrification through the lenses of Ghertner and López-Morales

With some delay ‘comparative urbanism’ has now arrived in the long-established field of gentrification research. If there is one thing the debate between Asher Ghertner and Ernesto Lopez-Morales in...

Latino Immigrants and Rural Gentrification: Race, “Illegality,” and Precarious Labor Regimes in the United States

This article examines the emergence of immigrant-based precarious labor regimes in U.S. rural areas undergoing gentrification. Drawing on field-based research in rural Georgia and Colorado, we explore how Latino and Latina immigrant workers were recruited to places that had been largely off the map of Latino immigrant settlement prior to the late 1990s to work in service and construction employment stimulated by gentrification. We trace evolving recruitment and labor practices that drew on hierarchies of race and “illegality” to fundamentally improve the productivity and profitability of gentrification-linked sectors. Key to this process was the active recruitment of Latino workers in the 1990s and early 2000s (usually recruited off subcontracted crews hired out from distant metropolitan areas) and the establishment of personal relations of loyalty and dependence between those workers and their white bosses. Over time, these personal relationships often produced informal labor brokers for business owners, brokers who facilitated access to immigrant networks necessary for further recruitment of immigrant workers and critical to producing the high degree of flexibility and discipline that began to characterize these emerging labor regimes. Our analysis makes two key theoretical contributions. First, by exploring how precarious labor regimes become instantiated into rural spaces we decenter the urban in our understanding of these regimes as theorized by Theodore and others. Second, we highlight the importance of attending to the imbrication of class, race, and “illegality” in rural gentrification research.

Newbuild gentrification, tele-urbanization and urban growth: placing the cities of the post-Communist South in the gentrification debate

This paper explores new-build developments in Tbilisi, Georgia. Based on interviews with developers and with residents and neighbours of new-build developments, we examine the burgeoning of new-build housing projects in a lower middle income post-Communist country. By doing so, we respond to Lees’ (2012) recent call for the exploration of new horizons in gentrification research, which would allow us to transcend the boundaries established by Global-North theorizations – such as those surrounding “new-build gentrification”. While theoretically tantalizing, interpreting the observed developments through this lens, which a superficial observation of the phenomenon might encourage, is not fruitful. Instead, the case of Tbilisi illustrates the need for an appropriate assessment of context: rather than representing a revanchist return to the city of the middle classes, new-builds in Tbilisi appear, largely, to accommodate demographic growth and “deposited” diaspora capital. This, in turn, leads to intense rates of construction despite high vacancy rates – a process which could be viewed as a form of remote-controlled urban growth, or tele-urbanization.

Gentrification Interrupted in Salford, UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

AbstractThis paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.

“Belonging” in the gentrified Golden Horn/Halic neighbourhoods of Istanbul

Mainstream gentrification research predominantly examines experiences and motivations of the middle-class gentrifier groups, while overlooking experiences of non-gentrifying groups including the impact of in situ local processes on gentrification itself. In this paper, I discuss gentrification, neighbourhood belonging and spatial distribution of class in Istanbul by examining patterns of belonging both of gentrifiers and non-gentrifying groups in historic neighbourhoods of the Golden Horn/Halic. I use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a methodology rarely used in gentrification research, to explore social and symbolic borders between these two groups. I show how gentrification leads to spatial clustering by creating exclusionary practices and eroding social cohesion, and illuminate divisions that are inscribed into the physical space of the neighbourhood.

The Nature of Gentrification

AbstractGentrification research provides many important insights into the transformation of contemporary urban landscapes, yet more careful attention to nature's role in this process is necessary. This essay begins by highlighting how gentrification research has traditionally overlooked the environmental factors of gentrification and continues by showing how researchers are beginning to account for the urban natural environment in gentrification processes. Such an environmentally sensitive approach to gentrification—one that accounts for nature being used by powerful groups as a tool of social power but also leaves room for it to be a dynamic material actor—can aid scholars' understanding of this important urban process.

Right to the City, Desire for the Suburb?

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective”. This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity”

Skewed Riskscapes and Gentrified Inequities: Environmental Exposure Disparities in Seattle, Washington

Few studies have considered the sociohistorical intersection of environmental injustice and gentrification; a gap addressed by this case study of Seattle, Washington. This study explored the advantages of integrating air toxic risk screening with gentrification research to enhance proximity and health equity analysis methodologies. It was hypothesized that Seattle's industrial air toxic exposure risk was unevenly dispersed, that gentrification stratified the city's neighborhoods, and that the inequities of both converged. Spatial characterizations of air toxic pollution risk exposures from 1990 to 2007 were combined with longitudinal cluster analysis of census block groups in Seattle, Washington, from 1990 to 2000. A cluster of air toxic exposure inequality and socioeconomic inequity converged in 1 area of south central Seattle. Minority and working class residents were more concentrated in the same neighborhoods near Seattle's worst industrial pollution risks. Not all pollution was distributed equally in a dynamic urban landscape. Using techniques to examine skewed riskscapes and socioeconomic urban geographies provided a foundation for future research on the connections among environmental health hazard sources, socially vulnerable neighborhoods, and health inequity.

Contextual Diversity in Gentrification Research

This article argues against the allegedly inter-contextual character of gentrification within the new gentrification research agenda. The main argument is that gentrification is a concept highly dependent on contextual causality and its generalized use will not remove its contextual attachment to the Anglo-American metropolis. The second argument is that looking for gentrification in increasingly varied contexts displaces emphasis from causal mechanisms to similarities in outcomes across contexts, and leads to a loss of analytical rigour. The third argument refers to the ideological and political impact of equating ‘gentrification’ with, and projecting its neoliberal frame on, the different forms of urban regeneration across various geographical and historical contexts. As gentrification becomes quasi synonymous with urban regeneration, it becomes less useful to the analysis of urban socio-spatial change and, since the use of this term seems no longer avoidable in academic and broader discourse, its implicit contextual assumptions should be constantly exposed.

Connecting embodiment, emotion and gentrification: An exploration through the practice of yoga in Toronto

Emotion and embodiment have rarely been identified as dimensions of gentrification processes, despite greater attention to the role of emotions in urbanization and to the mutual constitution of bodies and cities in geographic literature. This paper has two aims: to chart the ways that emotion and embodiment have been considered in gentrification research and theory to date, and to suggest further theoretical strategies for attending to the role that embodied practices and emotions play in marking, reproducing and consolidating gentrification. The latter aim is pursued through a personal reflection on the experience of yoga – as a practice that calls explicit attention to the body and its feelings in place – in Toronto, a city that is no stranger to gentrification. While this paper will not attempt to document in general how yoga and gentrification may be linked in Toronto or other places experiencing gentrification, it will suggest that as an increasingly popular embodied practice tied into middle-class consumption patterns and present in landscapes of urban revitalization, yoga practice affords relevant moments of reflection through which the embodied and emotional dimensions of gentrification can be clarified and/or problematized. My argument is that the body and its emotions are critical sites for the study of gentrification as a complex social and economic process. Embodied practices define the landscape of reproduction; bodies form a symbolic terrain over which struggles for urban space are fought; and the dynamics of emotional, embodied contact produce geographies of social and spatial exclusion.

Neoliberalization of Housing in Sweden: Gentrification, Filtering, and Social Polarization

During the last twenty-five years, housing policy in Sweden has radically changed. Once forming a pillar of the comprehensive welfare system, abbreviated the “Swedish model,” neoliberal housing politics have established market-governed housing provision with a minimum of state engagement. This shift has had consequences on the social geography of housing conditions. The research reported here analyzes social geographic change in Sweden's three largest cities—Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö—between 1986 and 2001, relating observed patterns of gentrification and filtering to cycles of accumulation and to neoliberalization of housing policies. First, we outline the neoliberalization of Swedish housing policies. We then present an empirical analysis of gentrification and filtering in the three cities, spanning two boom periods (1986–1991, 1996–2001) and a bust period (1991–1996). The data reveal social geographic polarization manifested in the growth of supergentrification and low-income filtering. The analysis also introduces the concept of ordinary gentrification, supporting the move in gentrification research toward a broad generic conception of the process. Political reforms after 2001 are summarized and we argue that these underlie the continued increase in inequality and that the social geographic polarization mapped between 1986 and 2001 has probably intensified during this decade.

Super-Gentrification und metropolitaner Habitus: eine Kritik jüngerer Entwicklungen in der britischen Gentrificationforschung


 
 
 the paper discusses the two theoretical concepts super-gentrification and metropolitan habitus established by British gentrification research. Both concepts are more or less unknown in German urban geography. Super-gentrification is looking at the gentrification of already gentrified urban neighbourhoods. Metropolitan habitus explains the affinity of specific social groups for very specific neighbourhoods in big cities. the paper starts with criticising both concepts for their missing explanation of influences of the qualities of urban space on habitus and super-gentrification. Secondly,the paper introduces the concept of residential capital, be un- derstood as inclusion of spatial qualities in social practices. in doing so, the theoretical gap of metropolitan habitus and super-gentrification can be bridged. In conclusion, the paper identifies some research questions for German urban geo- graphy that might be answered with the help of metropoli- tan habitus, super-gentrification and embedded residential capital.
 
 

Housing Market Renewal in Liverpool: Locating the Gentrification Debate in History, Context and Evidence

This paper places the Housing Market Renewal programme in Liverpool in its historical context, highlighting a mismatch between the supply and demand for housing which has existed for four decades. This disequilibrium produced an environment where successive waves of neighbourhood abandonment occurred from the late 1970s despite significant public policy interventions. The implementation of the Housing Market Renewal programme has stimulated a debate about the extent to which the public sector interventions are leading to the gentrification of poor neighbourhoods. The paper finds that there is no evidence of gentrification in older neighbourhoods, however, inflows of capital rather than middle-class residents have altered the physical development of the city to an extent that the housing choices of all income groups have been affected. The paper concludes that critical gentrification research should take account of historical development and wider housing market change to remain relevant to the debate about the changing social and economic structure of cities.

New‐build gentrification in Central Shanghai: demographic changes and socioeconomic implications

AbstractIn Shanghai, globalised urban images and a well‐functioning accumulation regime are enthusiastically sought after by urban policy, and explicitly promoted as a blueprint for a civilised city life. The city is celebrating its thriving neo‐liberal urbanism by implementing enormous new‐build gentrification, mostly in the form of demolition–rebuild development involving direct displacement of residents and landscapes. This study aims to understand demographic changes and the socioeconomic consequences of new‐build gentrification in central Shanghai. The paper first examines demographic changes between 1990 and 2000 in central Shanghai, i.e. the changing distribution of potential gentrifiers and displacees. It then looks into two cases of new‐build gentrification projects in central Shanghai, to compare residents' socioeconomic profiles in old neighbourhoods and new‐build areas. This study also examines the impacts of gentrification on displacees' quality of life and socioeconomic prospects. Because the enlarging middle class and the pursuit of wealth‐induced growth by the municipal government are turning the central city into a hotspot of gentrification, inequalities in housing and socioeconomic prospects are being produced and intensified in the metropolitan area. This study thus emphasises that critical perspectives in gentrification research are valuable and indispensable. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done About It

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done About It

Political Ecologies of Gentrification

This article explores the possibilities for a political ecology of gentrification. Gentrification research, while firmly rooted in materialist social science, has not yet broadened its interests to consider ecological aspects of, or the role in gentrification of, discourses, social movements, and state policies of the environment. Understanding the political ecologies of gentrification involves recognizing the ways in which material relations and uneven resource consumption, concepts of nature, and the politics of urban environmental management affect gentrification processes. By synthesizing diverse literatures in urban studies, political ecology, urban environmental governance, consumption studies, and gentrification, this study argues that Vancouver, British Columbia represents a well-developed urban crucible for the new political ecologies of gentrification in North America. New developments in Vancouver increasingly contribute to gentrification using languages of sustainability and green consumption in a process of ecological gentrification.

Walking Backwards to the Future—Waking Up to Class and Gentrification in London

In this article, we consider briefly some of the arguments advanced by Tom Slater and others about the direction taken by gentrification research and, in particular, the arguments that the working class has been evicted from such research in favour of a perspective that is overly sympathetic to a middle-class view of the city. Whilst accepting some of the critique advanced by Slater and others, we refute his arguments about the nature of class and class change in contemporary cities. In particular, we argue that gentrification research needs to come to terms with a new urban class map in which the largest occupational grouping, by some distance, is the middle class and that the next largest group is often the economically inactive.

Missing Marcuse: On gentrification and displacement

Peter Marcuse's contributions to the study of gentrification and displacement are immense, not just when measured in theoretical development, but in analytical rigour, methodological influence, cross‐disciplinary relevance and intellectual–political commitment to social justice. However, his contributions have been conveniently missed in the disturbing 21st‐century scholarly, journalistic, policy and planning rescripting of gentrification as a collective urban good. This paper charts and exposes the politics of knowledge production on this pivotal urban process by critically engaging with recent arguments that celebrate gentrification and/or deny displacement. I explain that these arguments not only strip gentrification of its historical meaning as the neighbourhood expression of class inequality; they are also analytically defective when considered alongside Marcuse's conceptual clarity on the various forms of displacement in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Understanding and absorbing Marcuse's crucial arguments could help critical urbanists breach the defensive wall of mainstream urban studies, and reinstate a sense of social justice in gentrification research.