Ruth Glass Research Articles

Capturing Gentrification: The Roles of Charles Marville and Eugène Atget in Capturing the Transformation of Paris in the Nineteenth Century

Between 1853 and 1914, Paris (France), ‘the city of art’, underwent enormous changes due to the urban development plans of Baron Georges Haussmann. Although gentrification was coined in the 1960s by Ruth Glass, this Haussmannization’ of Paris shows multiple convincing similarities with contemporary forms of gentrification. Artists have been ascribed a rather ambivalent role in the gentrification process, as their presence in old, decayed, abandoned, or low-income neighborhoods was and is often seen as the first step towards gentrification. However, artists have also used their art to reflect on or even question gentrification. Especially photographers, whose discipline allows them to consciously curate and depict real life situations, have played an important role in capturing gentrification and its ramifications. Photographer Charles Marville (1813-1879) was commissioned by the state to document the neighborhoods that were demolished during the ‘Haussmannization’. Some forty years later, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) began photographing Parisian quarters that would be lost in urban planning. In this visual essay, the agency of photographers in (de)constructing gentrification is researched through an analysis of the work of Marville and Atget, discussing their objectives and styles and how these reflect the radical changes in Paris. The motivation of photographers seems to determine in what way their works represent gentrifying processes.

Expanded narratives of gentrification: Mobility, infrastructure and urban change in 1970s London literature

This article revisits Ruth Glass’s essay ‘Aspects of change’ (1964), in which the urban sociologist reputedly coins the term gentrification. Whereas other readers are content merely to quote Glass’s description of gentrification, I consider how she situates the phenomenon within a broader complex of urban change. Doing so, I suggest, provides a useful optic for considering later literary engagements with gentrification in London. I examine two fictional texts – Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) and Maureen Duffy’s Capital (1975) – and argue that they follow Glass by providing ‘expanded narratives’ of gentrification. This narrative mode is distinctive for the way that it frames highly visible and seemingly localized phenomena, such as gentrification, within broader cultural, geographical and historical contexts, in order to ask larger questions about the nature of urbanity. A concern with mobility and infrastructure defines these expanded narratives, which illuminate how these aspects of the city shape perceptions of urban change. I conclude by outlining how expanded narratives might also provide the basis for a useful reading strategy which contrasts with the extractive procedures that characterize readings of Glass and certain scholarly approaches to urban literature.

Why can’t we grasp gentrification? Or: Gentrification as a moving target

Since the term “gentrification” was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964, this concept and the phenomenon it referred to have been subject to change. This paper reviews the literature and employs Ian Hacking’s work to investigate how two types of changes—that is, changes of the concept and of the phenomenon—are implicated by each other. By investigating the interaction between a classification and its class, it becomes possible to understand gentrification as, in Hacking’s terms, a “moving target.” This paper argues that gentrification can be conceptualized as such and explores the consequences of this for gentrification research.

GENTRIFICATION AS A PERSPECTIVE WAY TO RENEW INDUSTRIAL AND HISTORICAL AREAS OF THE CITY

The article provides a definition of the term "gentrification", explains its meaning and origin. It is determined that the founder of gentrification is the British social scientist Ruth Glass, who first described the process of gentrification in her book «London: Aspects of Change» in 1964. The paper analyzes and defines the main features and goals of gentrification. The concepts of "revitalization" and "gentrification" are compared and their common and individual features are highlighted. It is noted that the main goal of both processes, both gentrification and revitalization, is the renewal of the degrading historical former industrial areas of the city, with full or partial refunctionalization and adaptation to the modern needs of residents.
 The paper analyzes the current state and current problems of the industrial and historical territories of Kyiv. As a result, several main zones were identified, where old non-functioning industrial facilities are located. It has been found that over time, the "industrial model" of Kyiv city, formed in the industrial age, gradually turns into unprofitable, inefficient and neglected, which often leads to the degradation of city blocks and even entire districts. The author of the article proposes gentrification as a promising way to restore non-functioning industrial areas and abandoned industrial facilities.
 As an example of gentrification, author show the project of a new residential complex "Richert Park" in the Podolsky historical district of Kyiv. The article reveals the main aspects of the project and its main ideas. Based on the residential complex "Richert Park", an analysis was made of the revitalization of a historical heritage of architecture (Richert's factory). According to the technique that has been determined, the historical heritage is harmoniously combined with modern new buildings.

Conceptualising gentrification: relevance of gentrification research in the Indian context

The concept of gentrification, originally proposed by Ruth Glass on the basis of her observations of neighbourhood change in London, has been reconceptualised as well as criticised by scholars over the years. Though the concept has travelled over time and space, it still remains a very anglophone concept, and the extent of its applicability in the global South has been questioned. Especially in a country like India, where urban development takes place in an uneven way, it may not always be sufficient in itself to understand these urban changes and the dispossessions they lead to. This article aims to throw light on the main gentrification theories and debates and engage with the issue of differences over conceptualisation of the term itself. It then evaluates the relevance of the concept of gentrification in India by examining the restricted use of the term by Indian academics and Indian print media, and explores alternate/complementary frameworks to capture diverse instances of urban dispossession.

Gentrification in the Global South: new insights from Chinese Studies

Following the introduction of the “gentrification” concept by Ruth Glass in 1964, Anglo-Saxon urban geographers have extensively studied the process and phenomenon of gentrification. In recent years, gentrification studies have moved beyond the Anglo-Saxon academic field. This paper aims to review the current stage of English-Language gentrification studies about China. Using the case of China, the paper argues that gentrification can be generalized to a universally applied paradigm. However, the challenges of studying gentrification in any country are to transfer and adapt the broad paradigm that could capture the complexities of local conditions. Scholars studying gentrification in China have recognized the local and national differences that are specific to China and have worked out to establish their own theories.

Tourism Gentrification

This article intent is to analyse the recent phenomenon of tourism gentrification in the city of Lisbon, Portugal. This reality has been affecting some European cities and, in recent years, has gradually become more present in Lisbon’s historic neighbourhoods. Gentrification is a phenomenon that has been identified more than half a century ago. This denomination arose in 1964, when sociologist Ruth Glass, while analysing some of London’s neighbourhoods, identified an influx of a population segment, descendants of the rural aristocracy, who bought and renovated old buildings. Although initially this has been almost exclusively a social phenomenon, it has recently included the physical transformation of certain areas through its urban rehabilitation. This phenomenon has therefore undergone an evolution, and although it retains many identical social characteristics, it has, nowadays, different contours in some cases. This is the case of tourism gentrification. Lisbon has progressively been receiving more and more tourists, and the sought for accommodation has been increasingly diversified, requiring a market’s adaptation in order to respond to this reality. As a result of this demand, there is an increase in the offer of local lodging in the city of Lisbon. This type of accommodation presents its very own challenges, assuming clear advantages and disadvantages for both the neighbourhoods and cities. Gentrification can be seen as one of its disadvantages. A study carried out in Portugal in 2016 regarding the Lisbon region revealed that, before being converted into local lodging establishments, 59% of the properties were vacant. Although this is a significant value, it also indicates that about 40% of the remaining properties were destined for housing, thus suggesting a significant loss of local population, in favour of tourist occupation. This implies a loss of the neighbourhood’s identity leading to the loss of their characteristics, also devaluing them at a cultural level. Such condition may even become detrimental to tourism itself, since tourists who usually look for local lodging seek an immersive experience, meaning they want to live like the locals. Local lodging has strengthened the tourism sector by generating significant revenues and has also boosted rehabilitation works in the city of Lisbon. However, it is necessary to define specific regulations, in order to keep the residents in their historic neighbourhoods, while making sure the local tourist carrying capacity is not exceeded. Local lodging can generate important benefits for cities, but it is necessary to ensure that the negative externalities generated are minimalized. This article is intended as a contribution to the discussion of the consequences of tourism gentrification, but also of the possible strategies that the city of Lisbon could implement, in the future, in order to minimize its disadvantages.

What would Ruth Glass do?

This article is a contribution to debates in this journal surrounding the politics of urban epistemology. It uses a close reading of Ruth Glass’ introduction to London: Aspects of Change (1964) to advance a critique of urban knowledge production that suggests urban studies ought better to strive to accommodate the complex and often contradictory qualities of cities rather than seeking to tidy up these phenomena in exchange for clean terms of analysis. The example given in this paper is gentrification studies, which in some ways, fails to learn from the epistemic qualities of Ruth Glass’ essay, in which the term is coined. There is a risk that where academic taxonomy becomes too reified and too mobile it becomes a commodity itself which operates in an epistemology which reproduces the logic of capital. How might urban studies further strive to not only critically engage with cities but to produce ‘emancipatory’ knowledges which work to undermine the dominating logics which produce urban space?

The Evolving State of Gentrification

AbstractHackworth and Smith’s ‘Changing State of Gentrification’, published in 2001 and focused on New York City, is a definitive landmark. As you read these words, ‘New York City 2001’ might seem distant coordinates in the accelerating time‐space of knowledge production, but it’s not very far when understood in the time horizon of humanity’s urban evolution. Hackworth and Smith’s work helps us rethink today’s theoretical frontiers (especially postcolonial attacks on gentrification theory as a neocolonial imposition on the Global South) as well as long‐forgotten traditions. Ruth Glass’s critique of gentrification in 1964 was already a global, postcolonial challenge to the imperial epistemic violence that consolidated the West – neoliberal doctrines of human competition premised in nineteenth‐century social Darwinism and eugenics. Understanding the changing state of gentrification today requires confronting the planetary politics of urbanised human competition and hijacked theories of human evolution, and deciding what kinds of humans we wish to become.

Hurricane Katrina and the Effects of Gentrification on African American Communities

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans area and entire gulf coast. Although the storm was horrific, that aftermath of the storm was catastrophic. The levee system in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana failed causing widespread destruction of the communities and the displacement of thousands of residents. As a result, many residents were displaced and were unable to return to their communities. British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification to describe the displacement of lower income class residents by people of higher incomes who come into urban areas and restore the housing and businesses within that community (Aka, Jr.). The purpose of this research is to study the affect of gentrification on African Americans communities, such those in New Orleans ruined by Hurricane Katrina. According to previous studies conducted, deteriorated communities like those in New Orleans after Katrina once reinvested and gentrified displace older residents permanently, but also changes the heritage and culture that once filled their community.

Gentrification on the planetary urban frontier: The evolution of Turner’s noösphere

As capitalist urbanisation evolves, so too does gentrification. Theories and experiences that have anchored the reference points of gentrification in the Global North for half a century are now rapidly evolving into more cosmopolitan, dynamic world urban systems of variegated gentrifications. These trends seem to promise a long-overdue postcolonial provincialisation of the entrenched Global North bias of urban theory. Yet there is a jarring paradox between the material realities of some of the largest non-military urban displacements in human history in the Global South, alongside a growing reluctance to ‘impose’ Northern languages, theories and politics of gentrification to understand these processes. In this paper, I negotiate this paradox through an engagement of several seemingly unrelated empirical trends and theoretical debates in urban studies and gentrification. My central argument is that interdependent yet partially autonomous developments in urban entrepreneurialism and transnational markets in labour, real estate and education are transcending the dichotomy between gentrification in cities (the traditional focus of so much place-based research) versus gentrification as a dimension of planetary urbanisation. Amidst the planetary technological transformations now celebrated as ‘cognitive capitalism’ and a communications-consciousness ‘noösphere’, these developments are coalescing into a global, cosmopolitan and multicultural tapestry of explicitly evolutionary class transformations of urban space that adapt to multiply scaled contingencies of urban history, socio-cultural difference, state power and terrains of resistance. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I explain how social Darwinism was deeply embedded within conventional urban theory in the decades before Ruth Glass gave us a language for the discussion of gentrification, thus perpetuating debates over narrow empirical issues at the expense of deeper critical scrutiny of the evolutionary logics of socio-spatial classifications. Second, I examine the recent movement for a ‘cosmopolitan decolonisation’ of gentrification theory that has emerged at the precise moment when powerful alliances are consolidating the networked infrastructures of gentrification on an unprecedented scale. Third, I analyse the contemporary evolution of gentrification as a recombinant blend of old and new, as the means of class transformation of urban space are accelerated through intensified competition in work, education and housing. The built environments of planetary urbanisation provide ample opportunities not only for diverse cosmopolitan descendants of old-fashioned urban renewal in the style of Haussmann’s Paris or Moses’ New York, but also for new generations of ‘capitalists with conscience’–entrepreneurial coalitions closing ‘moral rent gaps’ by integrating the economic profits of gentrification with the discourses and practices of environmental sustainability, socially responsible development and global fields of educational opportunity. All of these escalating competitions are legitimated as inclusive multicultural meritocracies. Yet the relentless optimism of competitive innovation in the cognitive-capitalist noösphere is creating dangerous new frontiers of human ecology that reproduce the social-Darwinist ‘form of society’ that Frederick Jackson Turner envisioned in his theorisation of the ‘recurrence of the process of evolution’ in America’s colonial-settler waves of violent dispossession.

Debating urban studies in 23 steps

This year marks the 50th anniversary of gentrification as an idea (Glass 1964). The golden anniversary of Ruth Glass's observation about the shifting class geographies of a small sliver of London i...

Sometimes antagonistic, sometimes ardently sympathetic: Contradictory responses to migrants in postwar Britain

Most sociological and anthropological studies of UK race relations produced in 1950s stress the wide spectrum of British reactions to new migrants. Yet, recent historians have tended to focus on the racism and xenophobia of the research and period, on the ‘antagonisms’. The ‘ardently sympathetic’ responses referred to by Ruth Glass in 1960, which were evident also in 1950s fiction, film and radical political movements, have often been ignored or misrepresented in order to construct a more dystopian picture. This article examines the cultural and sociopolitical context of the time and argues that the mood was more critical of British insularity and more anti-racist than many recent historians of 1950s Englishness and race relations research allow. This was, in part, the influence of dislocated intellectuals from postwar continental Europe and the commonwealth, white and black, who, radicalised by anti-fascism and decolonisation, contributed to a growing cosmopolitanism.

Gentrification on the Example of Suburban Parts of the Szczecin Urban Agglomeration

Abstract Gentrification is a term first used by Ruth Glass in 1964 in reference to the process of taking over and revitalizing the degraded housing resources in the London Borough of Islington by their middle class owners. Ruth Glass discerned the impact of the improved living conditions in the gentrified area on ownership conditions, the appreciation of prices of land and houses, and changes in the social class structure. Nowadays, we can observe three types of changes taking place in gentrified parts of cities: economic, social and cultural ones. The author of this article presents the evolution of gentrification and points out the advantages and threats brought about by this process, including its effect on urban space and real property prices. She identifies the gentrification processes in Poland and their social impact, and verifies the hypothesis that contemporary gentrification, apart from being a physical process, is above all, a social and cultural one. On the example of some parts of the Szczecin urban agglomeration, she shows that gentrification, extending into the suburbs and rural areas, results in irreversible changes in land use and social structure.

Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane

Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane Sarah Brouillette In 1964 sociologist Ruth Glass used “gentrification” to describe what occurred when middle-class home buyers, landlords, and professional developers moved into parts of London that had dilapidated housing stock and blighted streets. Attracted to historic building features undervalued by existing residents, these newcomers’ mere presence and marked refurbishment efforts were often coextensive with the transformation of rented homes into owner-occupied ones, as well as with dramatic increases in housing costs and displacement of working-class tenants.1 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Neil Smith and others considerably expanded, and at times abstracted, Glass’s definition. By Smith’s account, before it had widespread currency outside academe his sense of gentrification was not unlike hers; in the mid-1970s he would tell people that “[g]entrification is the process . . . by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished via an influx of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters.”2 But since then his language has become progressively more pointed. In 1996 he states gentrification “is no longer about a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market but has become the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavor: the class remake of the central urban landscape,”3 and by 2000 his Dictionary of Human Geography definition deems it “reinvestment of capital at the urban centre, which is designed to produce space for a more affluent class of people than currently occupies that space.”4 With these terms, Smith positions gentrification as, in essence, a spatial expression of labor’s relation to capital. Working in tandem with suburbanization—as “renewed or more vigorous centralization of capital into urban areas”—it is about bringing working-class space into the ambit of controlled urbanization, and about doing so within global cities “shorn of much of the traditional protection of national state institutions and regulations.”5 Deregulation, privatization of housing and other urban [End Page 425] services, and marketization of public functions are each key to his analysis; “revanchist” city planning that uses a moralizing language of public order to control subjected populations is, as well. Gentrification is thus at once about making places safer and more livable, and about property developers and real estate companies exploiting opportunities to sell expensive new condos, which leads to existing residents, often renters, moving out of neighborhoods they’ve come to see as integral to their communities and identities. The difficulty of knowing what is fundamental and what is incidental to the process exacerbates its ambivalence. Is it refurbishment of the existing built environment or new development or both? Is it driven by home buyers, by property developers, by landlords, or by any or all of these combined? Is it only the initial phase that counts, when a blighted area is first isolated as desirable and then inhabited and fixed up, or is any kind of upmarket movement implicated? What role do artists play, given that they are often willing to live in areas others think uninhabitable, and given that, with “the surfeit of meaning in places frequented by artists,” these areas soon appeal to people too prosperous to keep rents low?6 Is the process a linear one, as poor and working-class streets are inhabited by ever wealthier occupants, or does it entail cycles of valuation and devaluation unfolding in cities whose metropolitan areas are constantly expanding? Is it always the product of outside capital moving in, or can communities undertake their own gentrification as part of the work of civic betterment? These questions have been definitive for urban geography. In what follows I suggest that literary scholars have good reason to engage with them, too. Consider the brief example of Spread the Word, one of a handful of recent organizations that have cropped up to help aspiring writers “achieve their full potential.” Funded by Arts Council England, and directed in particular at minority groups, it has just expanded into the notoriously downtrodden, but now gentrifying, East End of London. It describes its work in the area as follows: to “help create a strong cultural infrastructure . . . and support regeneration of the area”; to “promote cultural exchange and community cohesion...

Book Reviews : London's Housing Needs: Statement of Evidence to the Committee on Housing in Greater London. By RUTH GLASS and JOHN WESTERGAARD (London, University College, Centre for Urban Studies, 1965). 97 pp. 30s

Book Reviews : London's Housing Needs: Statement of Evidence to the Committee on Housing in Greater London. By RUTH GLASS and JOHN WESTERGAARD (London, University College, Centre for Urban Studies, 1965). 97 pp. 30s

Book Reviews : NEWCOMERS The West Indians in London By RUTH GLASS London, Centre for Urban Studies and Allen and Unwin, 1960. 278 pp. 21s

Book Reviews : NEWCOMERS The West Indians in London By RUTH GLASS London, Centre for Urban Studies and Allen and Unwin, 1960. 278 pp. 21s

"The Social Background of a Plan: A study of Middlesbrough," Ed. Ruth Glass (Book Review)

"The Social Background of a Plan: A study of Middlesbrough," Ed. Ruth Glass (Book Review)