Gentrification Studies Research Articles

Food and White Multiculturalism: Racial Aesthetics of Commercial Gentrification in Amsterdam’s Javastraat

In this article, we use Hage’s (2000) critique of White multiculturalism’s orientalizing logic of ethnic enrichment as a lens to analyze the multicultural valorization through ethnic food of the Javastraat, the commercial artery of Amsterdam’s Indische Buurt district. Stemming from a larger ethnographic study of gentrification in the area, the article provides evidence of how racial aesthetics have served as the central guiding principle in the transformation of the neighborhood from a dark space of grime, crime, and decay to the current space of hipness, coolness, and global culture. While being celebrated as a living example of multicultural society in the inner city, we argue that the area embodies a multicultural reality in which White, middle-class residents, and visitors are the prime occupiers of space and aesthetic organizing principle of the neighborhood’s landscape.

From “Big Small Town” to “Small Big City”: Resident Experiences of Gentrification along Waterloo Region’s LRT Corridor

Most studies of transit-induced gentrification rely on statistical analysis that measures the extent to which gentrification is occurring. To extend and enhance our knowledge of its impact, we conducted sixty-five interviews with residents living along the light rail transit (LRT) corridor in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada, shortly before the system opened. There was already strong evidence of gentrification, with more than $3 billion (Canadian dollars) worth of investment, largely in condominiums, before a single passenger was carried. In line with contemporary critical conceptualizations of gentrification, our interviews identified new and complex psychological, phenomenological, and experiential aspects of gentrification, in addition to economic- or class-based changes.

Discursive Approaches to Gentrification Studies: Excavating the Market-Led Paradigm

Discursive Approaches to Gentrification Studies: Excavating the Market-Led Paradigm

Reproducing race in the gentrifying city: A critical analysis of race in gentrification scholarship

ABSTRACT While the term gentrification in an American context often incorporates racial turnover, the role of race in gentrification remains undertheorized. Employing a critical race lens, this study explores the historical relationship between race and gentrification in academic studies. I conduct a systematic review and a discourse analysis of 331 empirical studies of gentrification from 1970–2019. Findings show that although studies frequently employ racial categories, they do so in imprecise ways, subsuming race under class. Race-based theory is rare; race is primarily used as a variable of measure to examine conflict-oriented outcomes, such as displacement. This creates oppositional and homogenizing racialized typologies of “poor minority incumbents” and “wealthy White newcomers,” which remain steady despite an increasingly complex urban landscape. I argue that this limits our ability to understand how race, class, and power operate in space and underscores the need for a more clearly defined role of race within gentrification that focuses on positionality and power in lieu of a groupist emphasis on antagonistic racial categorization.

Re-placing displacement in gentrification studies: Temporality and multi-dimensionality in rural gentrification displacement

This paper explores how conceptions of displacement have been challenged and adapted as the study of gentrification has expanded to encompass a series of new contexts, including post-industrial conversions and new-build urban developments within and beyond the Global North. Attention is draw to Peter Marcuse's work on displacement, and how some of his conceptualisations of different forms of displacement have been significant in cross-contextual discussions of gentrification, although other aspects of his work, such as his discussions of the relationship between abandonment and displacement have received less attention. Drawing on work of Marcuse, the earlier work of George and Eustice Grier, and a series of more contemporary studies, the paper argues for the adoption of more multi-dimensional and temporally sensitive conceptualisations of gentrification displacement. It then seeks to illustrate the value of this conceptualisation in the study of a further context of gentrification, namely the study of rural gentrification. The paper highlights recent debates over the significance of displacement, and thereby gentrification, to the study of demographic change in rural areas of the UK. Attention is drawn to studies that have made reference to displacement impacts of rural gentrification, before drawing on research conducted by the authors in nine villages located in six districts of England. The paper highlights evidence of 'disinvestment displacement' occurring prior to the major onset of gentrification in these villages, through 'reinvestment displacement' and 'direct displacement' at the point of gentrification, 'chain displacement' occurring both before and after the point of property gentrification, and 'exclusionary displacement', and material and experiential 'displacement pressures', operating once gentrification had started to take hold in these locations. Displacement is further shown to involve not only housing but also employment conditions, access to services, and the symbolism, practices and affective relations that people have with human and more-than-human constituents of space.

ДЖЕНТРИФИКАЦИЯ В СФЕРЕ РАЗВИТИЯ НЕБЛАГОПРИЯТНЫХ ГОРОДСКИХ ТЕРРИТОРИЙ

In the past half century, the concept of regeneration or gentrification is reinforced when the development of urban areas. Regeneration is the transforming of degraded urban areas. The main methods and techniques of solving the research problem are the analysis of modern urban areas subjected to gentrification.
 The deindustrialization, starting from the 1970-1980s, is typical for the cities of Western Europe and the United States of America. This phenomenon was initiated by economic globalization; the national industrial system based on competitiveness is degraded; a new model of economic development is oriented on the financial and credit industry and the service sector. 
 The term «gentrification» can be translated as a "refinement", i.e. increasing the level of attractiveness of area for rent and accommodation. 
 This is applicable for different objects: from individual buildings to the regions of city, those are unfavourable or degraded due to socio-economic and natural factors. 
 In this article is devoted to the processes of transformation of urban industrial zones; the possibility of reformation of the territories of former industrial enterprises for the nowadays needs of the city.
 The detailed study of gentrification is accomplished for the High Line Park and conclusions on a benefit of this process are shown.

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.

The racial and colonial dimensions of gentrification

AbstractIn recent years, studies of gentrification have added a deeper political economic, political, and cultural understanding to this process by demonstrating how it can be understood as not only driven by the physical displacement of working‐class residents but also by the political, cultural, and physical displacement of poor and working‐class Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous populations. In this study, I review these recent key works in urban sociology, geography, and urban history which examine the specifically racial and colonial dimensions of gentrification. These works provide invaluable insights to the political economic, political, and cultural dimensions of gentrification, but are still constrained by not developing a deeper historical analytics of the racial and colonial structures which shape gentrification. Because of this, the foundations of anti‐Black and anti‐Indigenous racism which make possible the commodification of space and devaluation and dispossession of people that gentrification requires, remain obscured. I argue the alternative frameworks of settler colonialism, internal colonialism, and coloniality—developed largely separate from urban sociology—can provide a sharper analysis to the study of gentrification by helping to more explicitly name and explain the racial and colonial structures, logics, and subjectivities which shape gentrification.

Gentrification-Induced Displacement in Detroit, Michigan: An Analysis of Evictions

ABSTRACT A growing number of studies have used evictions data as a way to address the methodological challenges to measuring gentrification-induced displacement. The spatial and temporal dimensions of evictions data enable researchers to potentially trace the movement of tenants over time. This article explores the role of evictions in gentrification-led displacement in Detroit, Michigan, by conducting a spatiotemporal analysis of eviction filings in the city between 2009 and 2015, and by addressing the question Where do displaced households go? This is a question that often goes unanswered in gentrification studies. Using a mixed-methods approach, this article documents the relocation of tenants from a project-based Section 8 building and traces the movement of tenant households out of a gentrifying downtown to the periphery of the city.

Symbols of Gentrification? Narrating Displacement in Los Angeles Chinatown

Los Angeles Chinatown is one of the oldest North American urban Chinatowns and experiencing changes that are redefining the neighborhood. Yet, not all community leaders label these changes as gentrification that directly displaces the community. This article examines how community leaders representing business, residential, and cultural interests engage in the politics of placemaking through their narratives of a new development, Blossom Plaza. Community leaders do not always view gentrification as a primary direct displacement, and instead emphasize how a secondary and symbolic displacement is happening historically, physically, economically, and politically in Chinatown. However, they also vary in whether they see these changes as ultimately reshaping the neighborhood to maintain its unique identity, which is linked to how they envision Chinatown as an ethnic space. The findings highlight the importance of considering symbolic displacement in gentrification studies about historic ethnic enclaves.

Developing and Ground-Truthing Multi-Scalar Approaches to Mapping Gentrification

Gentrification scholars have produced one of the most dynamic literatures in geography. Yet, an underexplored feature is the different outcomes that arise based on the spatial scale and index variables employed. A disconnect also exists between qualitative and quantitative gentrification studies, with qualitative studies viewing gentrification as more dire, suggesting it is experienced differently by individuals ‘on the ground’ than quantitative data show. Responding to a demand for gentrification analysis at a smaller spatial scale, our mixed-methods study compares gentrification measures using demographic data mapped at the census tract level and physical building data mapped at the tax parcel scale. Secondly, using a ground-truthing approach, local experts offered feedback on which approach is better at pinpointing the location of gentrification trends on the ground and how the maps could inform policy and planning. Results reveal that a more complex index at a finer spatial scale are deemed more reflective of the on-the-ground reality according to local stakeholders. Findings also demonstrate that mapping gentrification at a finer spatial resolution removes the arbitrary nature of boundaries imposed by census tracts. Our results contribute to discussions about which variables to use in a gentrification index, as experts stressed combining demographic and physical factors.

‘Diversity tourists’? Tracing whiteness through affective encounters with diversity in a gentrifying district in Copenhagen

ABSTRACT This article develops the diversity tourist as an analytical figure to explore how middle-class whiteness emerges through encounters with racialized diversity in gentrifying urban space. Drawing on interviews with white middle-class Danish residents in Copenhagen’s Nordvest district, I examine how whiteness takes shape through affective ambivalence and negotiations of proximity and distance. My informants live in Nordvest, but see themselves as privileged tourists. They perceive diverse Others as true locals whose presence not only stimulates and entertains them, but also facilitates self-development, increased awareness and inclusive pedagogy. Moreover, the local spaces and people of Nordvest represent a different or superior reality and promise an escape from white, gentrified Copenhagen. I collect these practices in the figure of the diversity tourist to show how a particular brand of Danish middle-class whiteness emerges through embracing diversity and reminiscing over one’s own privileges vis-à-vis racialized, less advantaged people and spaces. I examine how, despite attempts at transcendence, this whiteness feels claustrophobic, finding itself in a limbo, trapped by its own gaze. The figure of diversity tourist contributes to studies of whiteness and gentrification, capturing how whiteness and intersectional privilege are enlaced in space and fueled by affective ambivalence.

Keeping the family home: Reproducing gentrifiers in two Boston neighborhoods

ABSTRACT The migration patterns of middle-class families in urban landscapes has been a point of discussion in studies of gentrification since the 1980s; however, most studies focus on the movements of families with young children. In contrast, this paper examines the place that children continue to have in gentrifying neighborhoods, specifically as they engage in their own residential search process as adults. Identifying residents who were raised in two gentrifying areas, this paper outlines how second-generation residents move away from and back to their childhood homes and neighborhoods. Posing a challenge to models of gentrification that emphasize in-and out-migration, I find that a sub-set of second-generation residents use parental homeownership as a mechanism to come back to now further gentrified neighborhoods. I introduce the concept of “second gentrifier” to describe how such second-generation residents benefit from their parents’ participation in early gentrification, thus highlighting new mechanisms of cultural reproduction and social distinction. Ethnographic and interview data from two Boston neighborhoods is used to describe and analyze the practices and motivations of second-generation and second-gentrifier residents.

Can We Bring Culture into the Large-Scale Study of Gentrification? Assessing the Possibilities Using Geodemographic Marketing Data

Despite advances in quantitative methodology, many quantitative gentrification scholars rely on under-theorized and speculative presumptions about who gentrifiers are. This study uses Claritas Potential Rating Index for Zip Marketers (PRIZM), a geodemographic marketing data source on the lifestyles and consumer habits of U.S. households, to augment a Census-based analysis of Chicago neighborhoods that gentrified from 2000 to 2017. PRIZM data reveal that the households moving into gentrified neighborhoods represent a range of lifestyles, calling into question the attribution of “gentrifier” to any particular social group or demographic category. In some cases, despite having the same social class positions, gentrifiers pursue varying interests, suggesting they have different effects on neighborhoods. Once lifestyle is accounted for, many assumptions about gentrifiers on which quantitative studies are built become inadequate. The article’s conclusion not only proposes ways in which scholars can integrate geodemographic marketing data into future gentrification research, but it also outlines reasons to be cautious when using the data.

The fantasy of authenticity: understanding the paradox of retail gentrification in Seoul from a Lacanian perspective

Gentrification studies have well-documented how gentrifiers’ alternative consumption practices of seeking ‘authenticity’ lead to retail gentrification. However, they pay scant attention to the paradoxical subjects of gentrification who continue to take part in gentrification by consuming authenticity, even as they criticize the gentrification-driven loss of authenticity. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and ethnographic research in one of the gentrifying neighborhoods in Seoul, South Korea, this article demonstrates how the fantasy of authenticity sustains this paradox while facilitating the continuing retail gentrification. As part of the process, various subjects of gentrification name the neighborhood differently – Seochon and Sejong Village – and claim that their own name is more authentic than the other. In and beyond this toponym debate, the fantasy of authenticity allows the subjects to constantly cross the borders of authentic/inauthentic and gentrifier/gentrified, and thus, reinvest their endless desire for ‘something more authentic’. Ultimately, by bridging psychoanalysis and gentrification studies, I argue that we, as the subjects of gentrification, should bear responsibility for our compelling desire for and fantasy of authenticity to challenge the cycle of the ongoing retail gentrification.

Idyllic Ruralities, Displacement and Changing Forms of Gentrification in Rural Hertfordshire, England

This paper considers the significance of representations of rurality and displacement in relation to the concept of rural gentrification. Studies of rural gentrification have often drawn upon notions of the rural idyll, but have often neglected to consider the presence, or not, of displacement. It has been argued that this lack of attention reflects an absence of displacement connected with middle class in-migration, particularly in early decades of counterurbanisation. This paper aims to examine these arguments drawing on the research publications and archived materials stemming from a study by Ray Pahl of four villages in the English county of Hertfordshire in the early 1960s, alongside material generated from a questionnaire survey conducted in three of these villages. The research demonstrates continuities in processes of gentrification and displacement between the two studies, as well as the emergence of new forms of gentrification and the operation of diverse forms of displacement.

Small–City Gay Bars, Big–City Urbanism

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four “great cities.” This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small–city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small–city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red–state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small–city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big–city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally.

Evaluating the relationship between perceived value regarding tourism gentrification experience, attitude, and responsible tourism intention

ABSTRACT Tourism gentrification, or the transformation of residential areas into tourist destinations, is an important issue worldwide. It generally affects only the original residents, who often choose to leave as a result of their neighborhood’s changing character or escalating rents. This study investigates how tourists’ perceived value of the gentrification experience influences their attitudes and responsible tourism intentions, and how their attitudes mediate these intentions. The structural equation model analysis in this study utilized data from 450 surveys completed by study participants from three areas in South Korea affected by tourism gentrification – Seo-chon, the Hongik University area, and Jeju Island. This study has four main findings. First, tourists’ perceived value of the tourism gentrification experience influences their attitudes and responsible tourism intentions; both functional and conditional values impact attitudes, with the latter having a greater impact. Second, attitudes influence responsible tourism conservation and participation intentions. Third, epistemic value influences responsible tourism conservation and participation intentions, while conditional value influences responsible tourism conservation intentions. Fourth, attitude has a mediating effect on the relationship between tourists’ perceived value of the experience and their responsible tourism intentions. This paper thus expands the study of tourism gentrification.

Is Comparative Gentrification Possible? Sceptical Voices from Hong Kong

AbstractThis essay responds to a series of critical observations made in an intervention in this journal (vol. 41.3) concerning our earlier article on gentrification in Hong Kong (vol. 38.4). In the current rejoinder we bring this particular exchange to focus on the broader question of whether comparative gentrification research is even possible; a question that exemplifies the dualism in the literature between global urban theory and the emphasis inherent within comparative or regional urbanism. Our attempt to present an interpretation of urban transformation in Hong Kong that bridges this dualism was challenged by our critics on grounds that are similar to those identified by Jamie Peck in his 2015 analysis of a comparative urbanism that seeks to undercut global urban theory. We use this intervention to examine several of these arguments critically, and conclude by continuing to promote a comparative approach to the study of gentrification, dominated neither by planetary theory nor by regional specificity.

Remediating Sunset Park: Environmental Injustice, Danger, and Gentrification

This paper examines narratives from users and designers of a recently opened public park created via brownfield remediation processes on a historically industrial urban waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. Interviews reveal that designers and community members were pivotal contributors to the transformation of a site that was previously associated with danger and toxicity into something of greater ecological and social value. Designers’ visions played a key role in subsequent user experiences in the park, but community input and struggle both sparked, and drastically altered, the park’s design trajectory in an effort to claim the park as a neighborhood asset and limit the degree to which it would contribute to displacement of existing residents. This project is unique because it is a publicly funded remediation of a municipally-owned contaminated site, yet initial project designs were geared toward on-site revenue generation to fund operations. Two broad implications of this study are (a) projects of this nature can represent a paradox of activism in that it is unclear how far community activism can go to address the systemic problems associated with environmental gentrification and (b) there is a need for studies of environmental gentrification to take a granulated approach to the positive and negative aspects associated with these spaces rather than look at them as more holistically positive or negative endeavors. The multiple scales of ambiguity and ambivalence that emerged from this study are emblematic of the dynamics associated with brownfield remediation, green space creation in historically underserved communities, and environmental gentrification.