Gentrification Research Articles

Securing hipster leisure: park policy in gentrifying neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT In this research note, we situate the policy response of park circles enacted by the City of Toronto at Trinity Bellwoods Park in the context of urban gentrification. Rather than a public health measure, we argue that the enactment of park circles as a response to park crowding during the COVID-19 pandemic is reflective of broader processes of gentrification and operates to secure the park as a space for ‘hipster leisure.’ In so doing, park circles represent an extension of neo-liberal policy rhetoric whereby the privatization of public space and the displacement of certain populations are naturalized. Our analysis invites future critical scholarship on parks, leisure, public health, and gentrification as well as the transformations occurring within these intersections.

The Gentrification of Airbnb: Closing Rent Gaps Through the Professionalization of Hosting

In this article, we argue that it is analytically productive to think about the professionalization of hosting on Airbnb in terms of (commercial) gentrification. More precisely, we believe that rent gap theory is helpful to advance our understanding of why and how professionalized hosting has become an increasingly salient phenomenon and for centering the active role of Airbnb as a platform operator. We develop the notion of platform-scale rent gaps to explain the economic logic that drives Airbnb to professionalize its hosts and gentrify its platform. We then discuss Airbnb’s professionalization programs and tools, showing how some of its most substantial resources primarily cater to large-scale property managers who, like Airbnb itself, seek to identify and close rent gaps on the platform. This consequently creates the conditions for uneven business development opportunities among hosts, which we illustrate by focusing on how two different types of hosts have sought to professionalize their business in Berlin. Finally, we conclude by speculating on the relationship between the gentrification of the Airbnb platform and urban gentrification.

From hippies to yuppies: marginal gentrification in Amsterdam’s Jordaan and De Pijp neighbourhoods 1960–1990*

Challenging the prevailing assumption that gentrification is a recent development, this contribution explores the (re)discovery of central urban living in Amsterdam by using the concept of marginal gentrification. Two inner-city neighbourhoods that have experienced the influx of marginal and middle-class gentrifiers, the Jordaan and de Pijp, will serve as case studies. In historiography, the transformation of both areas is portrayed as an unexpected and sudden development kickstarted by neoliberal housing policies in the early 1990s. However, historical research on Anglophone case studies has demonstrated that gentrification should be understood as a long-term process of social, cultural and economic change, already beginning in the 1960s. Through the use of newspaper articles and policy documents from the period under research, this contribution will reveal how the changing living preferences and consumer cultures of ‘urban pioneers’ can be understood as a case of marginal gentrification. Thus, this contribution will offer a deeper understanding of the ways in which structural changes in Amsterdam’s urban society shaped the everyday life of its citizens, and identify some of the inequalities in which these changes resulted for specific social strata.

Measuring the process of urban gentrification: A composite measure of the gentrification process in Toronto

Gentrification is being experienced by cities around the world. Its drivers and characteristic features are complex and diverse, ranging from the displacement of low-income households to the redevelopment of commercial districts. This paper combines multiple data sources to explore the coevolution of gentrification in the residential market and developments in non-residential sectors in the Canadian city of Toronto. Analysis starts from a max-p-regions clustering based on a composite measure of the gentrification process, which includes measures of household income, educational attainment, building permits, and the composition of establishments. The variables that describe each region are examined for patterns of gentrification. We then develop a Bayesian hierarchical spatial (BHS) model to describe the change in residential property prices over the five-year period between 2011 and 2016. The results show that establishment entropy and composition are found to influence residential property prices, with significant spatial variation in its effect. The combination of endogenous region definitions and hierarchical modeling is strongly supported by model results.

Gathering Spaces When No One Can Gather: Art and Community Third Places in the Age of Covid-19

What do art and community spaces look like when no one can use them to gather? Academic research into neighbourhoods and urban art scenes have focused on the power of such spaces to bring people together. Using the framework of Oldenburg's notion of 'third places', sociologists have recognized the importance of places like art galleries, bars, restaurants, coff ee shops, and anywhere else people gather in providing a physical site of orientation outside work and the home for people to be together and communities to amalgamate. While there have always been critiques of such places and their role in urban space, e.g.their part in gentri fication and potential displacement, positive accounts of their role in neighbourhood life have typically focused on their ability to draw people together, so a situation like the current pandemic – when such gatherings are forestalled – raises an obvious question about their current utility. Using two case studies on the South Side of Chicago, this paper leverages interview data with merchants involved with sociallyengaged commercial spaces to examine some of the ways that community spaces in Chicago shifted in light of the pandemic. The article concludes with policy and theoretical considerations based on these case studies, extrapolating lessons beyond the South Side of Chicago. Speci fically, it suggests that in addition to off ering limited versions of their traditional facilitation of physical co-presence, art and community third places can also leverage their importance in social networks to help distribute information and resources.

Postindustrial Futures and the Edge of the Frontier

Port Covington is a 260-acre development underway in South Baltimore City, featuring a multibillion-dollar campus for the popular sportswear brand Under Armour. It promises to transform a "vacant" and degraded former railyard into a "city within a city" and to catalyze Baltimore's comeback. It also promises to cost a lot. In 2016, after tense public debate, developers secured a $660 million tax increment financing (TIF) deal to begin work, committing taxpayers to decades of debt on the company's behalf. Eligibility for that deal hinged on making the site's industrial history visible as an obstacle to profit. The dominant spatial tropes that scholars use to understand dispossession make it hard to appreciate this instrumentalization of the past, as well as developers' savvy appeals to industrial nostalgia. In this article, I pay particular attention to the blind spots of the frontier concept. Arguments that foreground frontier motifs emphasize erasure as a primary technique of dispossession: by covering up past and present lifeways, "urban pioneers" legitimate land seizure as benign discovery. But in Port Covington's case, developers dramatized a history of municipal neglect. Far from concealed, this history became a key ingredient in developers' claims to the land and a mechanism structuring their access to financial options. In the process of exploring these dynamics, I query whether frontier concepts may reach the limits of their usefulness in the postindustrial city. Here, land's not-so-distant past provides both the template for development dreams and the justification for dispossession by private actors who (the story goes) are best equipped to manage reconstruction. Besides TIF, the range of development incentives available for improving "blighted" spaces—and activists' studied responses to those incentives—suggest that postindustrial futures are rarely conceived on a blank slate. Instead, historicity drives debates about who the city is for and what it can become.

Reconfiguring the Chronotope

Abstract This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer 老炮兒 (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu 管虎 and starring Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares Mr. Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Six's exposé of China's social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.

Anchored Yet Displaced: Affordable Housing and Aging in a Gentrifying Place

AbstractIn an era of urban gentrification and rising economic inequality, how can policies better address the needs of older city residents who wish to age in place? Drawing on qualitative data from in‐depth interviews and participant observation, as well as US census data from 2010 to 2020, this study explores the perceptions and experiences of older adult residents of two affordable housing complexes in the Manhattan borough of New York City. These residents have aged in place while their surrounding community has grown wealthier and, in some respects, younger. While benefiting from housing security and numerous on‐site services targeting the aged‐in population, the residents nonetheless experience feelings of alienation and estrangement as their surrounding community undergoes physical, social, and cultural changes. This paper theorizes aging in place as an ongoing process of social integration and meaning making to explore issues of identity, housing, and community and to consider how policy can better address the needs of older adults aging within rapidly gentrifying urban contexts.

The Rising Value of Time and the Origin of Urban Gentrification

In recent decades, gentrification has transformed American central city neighborhoods. I estimate a spatial equilibrium model to show that the rising value of high-skilled workers’ time contributes to the gentrification of American central cities. I show that the increasing value of time raises the cost of commuting and exogenously increases the demand for central locations by high-skilled workers. While change in the value of time has a modest direct effect on gentrification of central cities, the effect is substantially magnified by endogenous amenity change driven by the changes in local skill mix. (JEL J22, J24, R21, R23)

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Urban gentrification, social vulnerability, and environmental (in) justice: Perspectives from gentrifying metropolitan cities in Korea

By integrating urban gentrification dynamics with nexus of social vulnerability and environmental (in)justice, this study explores gentrification processes and community perceptions of gentrification outcomes across gentrifying areas within metropolitan areas corresponding to seven selected cities within South Korea. Combined with redefined urban gentrification drivers, mediators (or control variables), and outcomes, correlation analysis was undertaken using longitudinal secondary data and cross-sectional survey data. Such case study-based empirical approaches in a non-western context were applied to measure social vulnerability and environmental (in)justice index, map spatial distribution of the index, and address the relationships among the gentrification processes in the context of social vulnerability and environmental (in)justice. Our results suggest that a positive correlation between social vulnerability to gentrification and environmental (in)justice exists particularly in urban core areas. Gentrification outcomes by community perceptions exhibited increases in house sale price and household displacement. Our attempts can provide policymakers, planners, practitioners, and residents with a better understanding of social and environmental constraints or benefits of gentrification along with the important concepts of social vulnerability and environmental justice as solutions to urban regeneration challenges.

Irish overseers in the antebellum U.S. South

AbstractThis article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish overseers on southern plantations. The Irish relationship with U.S. slavery varied according to circumstances. However, as foreign-born outsiders, Irish immigrants in the South had to accommodate the region's slaveholding culture. This article takes the story of the Irish as urban pioneers of the antebellum South out into the southern countryside. Those who sought employment as overseers had no qualms about profiting from racial slavery, and the nationality of a successful overseer was immaterial to planters. Irish overseers were not categorically different from native-born southern overseers. Indeed, Irish overseers had to be as ruthless as their American counterparts if they hoped to be successful. The expansion of the southern economy in accordance with the rise of the ‘second slavery’ created more significant opportunities for Irish immigrants to become overseers and demonstrates the essential whiteness of the Irish in the South.

Remote Sensing of Urban Poverty and Gentrification

In the past few decades, most urban areas in the world have been facing the pressure of an increasing population living in poverty. A recent study has shown that up to 80% of the population of some cities in Africa fall under the poverty line. Other studies have shown that poverty is one of the main contributors to residents’ poor health and social conflict. Reducing the number of people living in poverty and improving their living conditions have become some of the main tasks for many nations and international organizations. On the other hand, urban gentrification has been taking place in the poor neighborhoods of all major cities in the world. Although gentrification can reduce the poverty rate and increase the GDP and tax revenue of cities and potentially bring opportunities for poor communities, it displaces the original residents of the neighborhoods, negatively impacting their living and access to social services. In order to support the sustainable development of cities and communities and improve residents’ welfare, it is essential to identify the location, scale, and dynamics of urban poverty and gentrification, and remote sensing can play a key role in this. This paper reviews, summarizes, and evaluates state-of-the-art approaches for identifying and mapping urban poverty and gentrification with remote sensing, GIS, and machine learning techniques. It also discusses the pros and cons of remote sensing approaches in comparison with traditional approaches. With remote sensing approaches, both spatial and temporal resolutions for the identification of poverty and gentrification have been dramatically increased, while the economic cost is significantly reduced.

Women, Art, and Hope in Black Lives Matter

Abstract Black women, LGBTQ folx, and artists in Louisville, Kentucky, played key roles in bringing attention to the police killing of Breonna Taylor and ensuring that Breonna became a focus of the Black Lives Matter movement. In this oral history interview, one of the organizers of protest actions in Louisville, Talesha Wilson, remembers how she became involved again in Black Lives Matter in 2020. She discusses the need to address sexism, homophobia, and transphobia while seeking racial justice and describes an action that she organized in an area of the city called NuLu. The action highlighted how the organization of urban space and gentrification have disempowered Black people and forced them to live in areas where they are more likely to be the victims of police violence.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Body politics and the politics of technology: technological experiences among street-based sex workers in Bangalore

This paper illustrates how body politics and the politics of technology compound one another for female street-based sex workers (FSSWs) in Bangalore city, India, in their experiences of three technologies – mobile phones, CCTV surveillance, and television media. Mobile phones have emerged as an integral part of street-based sex work in Bangalore as a result of FSSWs abstaining from public spaces that have been overwhelmingly eroded due to urban transition and gentrification over the last two decades in Bangalore, as well as due to their inherent advantages. Simultaneously, intensified CCTV surveillance of city spaces keeps watch on them, while native-language television media, a techno-cultural predator, routinely conducts self-assigned gentrification operations covertly or overtly discovering and publicly disseminating information on immorality and delinquency. All three technological experiences understandably have had complicated fallouts for FSSWs, a result of the politics of technology that are at the foundations of these experiences.

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.

A regional geography of gentrification, displacement, and the suburbanisation of poverty: Towards an extended research agenda

Gentrification is now a common feature of contemporary cities. The process has extended its spatial reach from urban cores into neighbourhoods previously deemed unlikely to gentrify. More recently, scholars have identified an intensifying suburbanisation of poverty reshaping socio‐spatial inequalities. In this paper we argue that it is increasingly urgent to integrate analyses of gentrification with those on the suburbanisation of poverty. The two processes are fundamentally related through the displacement and exclusion of disadvantaged populations. Drawing on Dutch full‐population register data for the 2005–2015 period, we empirically illustrate the existence of suburbanising poverty alongside urban gentrification in the urban regions of Amsterdam and Utrecht. We further show these are far from uniform processes, eschewing urban–suburban dichotomies. In addition, we find regional differences in the intensity and spatial reach of both gentrification and poverty suburbanisation. Spatial trends are more pronounced in the Amsterdam region, where low‐income households are pushed to the furthest parts of the region. By way of conclusion, we outline an agenda for future research.

Food Consumption in Cologne Ehrenfeld: Gentrification through Gastrofication?

Food and nutrition trends cater for many more functions than simply satisfying the physical need for food. Given the fundamental significance of everyday food it seems clear that it is also relevant in urban development processes. Nutrition trends and food outlets influence the attractiveness and quality of life of neighborhoods, and therefore also reflect the development of urban space. This article aims to bring together the topics of urban development, consumption, and current nutrition trends. Attention is focused on the role played by gastronomic landscapes in urban gentrification processes and how current nutrition trends are manifested. Empirical research was conducted between 2019 and 2020 in the case-study district of Ehrenfeld in the city of Cologne. In the past, this industrial neighborhood was affected by downgrading processes. After years of decline, rising vacancy rates, and outwards migration, there have been clear signs of upgrading in Ehrenfeld since the end of the 1990s. The neighborhood is also characterized by an extensive and continuously growing gastronomic landscape, which combines a multiplicity of national and international cuisines and food cultures. About one-third of the food outlets located on Venloer Straße were established between 2010 and 2020.

Debates sobre gentrificação através do cinema documental.

In this paper, we focus on the resource of documentary film used to analyse and discuss the urban gentrification process in a city or district. Our proposal is provoking a reflection on how the cinema can bring light to the issue as well as searching possible solutions and ideas to avoid or mitigate the impact of this process that evicts citizens from their own neighbourghood or city.At the same time, we are interested in the creative view of the filmmaker concerning this thematic and how the documentary cinema can approach aesthetically a crucial cultural and political moment of a neighbourghood. For this analysis we propose a comparison of the following documentaries that have portrayed recently processes of gentrification in European cities: “En Construcción” by José Luis Guerín (Spain, 2001), “Bye, Bye Barcelona”, by Eduardo Chibás Fernández (Spain, 2014) and “O que vai acontecer aqui?” by Left Hand Rotation (Spain/Portugal, 2019).