Gentrification Studies Research Articles

Promoting Health Equity Through Preventing or Mitigating the Effects of Gentrification: A Theoretical and Methodological Guide.

Public health researchers are increasingly questioning the consequences of gentrification for population health and health equity, as witnessed in the rapid increase in public health publications on the health (equity) effects of gentrification. Despite methodological challenges, and mixed results from existing quantitative research, qualitative evidence to date points to the role of gentrification processes in exacerbating health inequities. Here we discuss past methodological and theoretical challenges in integrating the study of gentrification with public health research. We suggest taking an interdisciplinary approach, considering the conceptualization of gentrification in measurement techniques and conceiving this process as a direct exposure or as a part of broader neighborhood changes. Finally, we discuss existingpolicy approaches to mitigating and preventing gentrification and how these could be evaluated for effectiveness and as public health promotion and specifically as interventions to promote health equity.

Responsibilizing renovation: governing strategies and resistance in the context of the transformation of Swedish housing policy

This article contributes to the emerging body of literature in the field of urban studies that addresses the classical ‘division of labour’ between analyses of the workings of urban power at the macro- and micro-levels. Our theoretical framework aims to capture how processes of power are exercised in processes of urban restructuring. In the field of gentrification studies there have been calls for theoretical developments based on analyses of various local contexts in which rent gaps may be exploited in similar yet varied ways. We contribute to this discussion through an analysis of governing strategies and protests linked to urban restructuring in the context of the so-called Million Programme in Sweden’s two largest cities. In particular, we address the consequences of public housing companies being forced to operate according to ‘business principles’. Importantly, we demonstrate how advanced liberal government, under the influence of neoliberal ideology, has largely worked through a process of responsibilization. We discern a chain of responsibilization leading from the macro-, via the meso-, to the micro-level – ultimately involving the individual tenant; and highlight how a struggle that we call a politics of responsibility has taken place around each link in the chain.

Gentrification studies and cultural colonialism: Discussing connections between historic city centers of Mexico and Spain

ABSTRACT In the last 2 decades, gentrification has emerged in Spanish-speaking urban studies as a powerful and controversial concept that revitalizes the debate on urbanization processes. However, some scholars have opposed gentrification as an alien notion and a spurious generalization from the experience of cities in the Global North, useless for urban studies in the Global South. In this context, the aim of the article is to defend current scientific work on gentrification that bridges diverse urban geographies. We also challenge a rigid and reductionist division of the urban world into a few homogeneous regions by engaging with current debates on comparative studies. We propose a dialogue between the Mexican and Spanish cases of gentrification, connecting these processes in distant urban regions. The main finding is that, despite enormous contextual differences, there is common ground for gentrification studies in Mexico and Spain in the recent historical processes of urban renewal of historic centers for touristic exploitation.

At Home: Black Women’s Collective Claims to Environmentally Just Rental Housing

Environmental injustices have shaped how urban communities of color access, interact with, and are affected by indoor and outdoor environments in their daily lives. This includes access to and control of outdoor spaces, such as gardens, vacant neighborhood lots, and green spaces for growing food and plants and for coming together. For tenants in rented homes, it too often includes exposure to harmful indoor environments, such as toxic molds, rodent infestations, lead paint, broken heaters, and other unsafe and uncomfortable living conditions. Although geographers of race, nature, and environment have attended to rental housing through studies of green gentrification and racialized displacement, they have paid less attention to homes themselves and the survivability of Black women through everyday practices of resistance and placemaking. This community coauthored article focuses on Dubuque, Iowa—a predominately White, small Midwestern U.S. city with a growing Black population—and examines the cooperative practices of Black women tenants and community activists in pressing the municipal government to hold landlords responsible for living conditions in private rental homes. Together, they are working through institutional policy and procedural hurdles to confront anti-Blackness, cocreate livable urban environments, and “stay put” in the midst of gentrifying neighborhood revitalization plans.

Beyond displacement: the co-existence of newcomers and local residents in the process of rural tourism gentrification in China

The arrival of an increasing number of newcomers to rural areas has contributed to rural tourism gentrification, the sustainable development of which requires the co-existence of gentrifiers and local residents. While current research in gentrification and tourism studies highlights one-way power relations – highlighting the privileged position of either newcomers or local residents, few scholars have explored the more complex power relations between them. To address that gap, this study explores how Rural Tourism Makers (RTMs), a group of middle-class urbanites who lead the process of rural tourism gentrification in China, negotiate to co-exist with local residents. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, the study captures a holistic picture of the relationships between RTMs and local residents in the Chinese context, which goes beyond direct displacement. Although RTMs have brought indirect displacement to local residents, local people have not become victims of rural tourism gentrification. Instead, they benefit from rural tourism development opportunities. Meanwhile, RTMs have compromised to adapt to the Renqing society in rural China, in which local residents are supported by a strong social network. The findings demonstrate new forms of indirect displacement and respond to the specifics of rural places in tourism gentrification studies in rural China.

Urban densification and exclusionary pressure: emerging patterns of gentrification in Oslo

ABSTRACT Urban densification is often advocated as one of the most desirable ways to develop sustainable communities. However, gentrification scholars have criticized densification, linking it to housing inequalities and displacement. As conceptualized by Peter Marcuse in 1985, displacement can occur through various forms. Some are more evident than others and have received greater attention in gentrification studies (e.g. direct displacement). Others (e.g. displacement pressure and exclusionary displacement) are more subtle and under-researched, both empirically and theoretically. Yet, a nuanced view of displacement is of great relevance, enabling better engagement with contextual diversity when dealing with gentrification-like dynamics. Through this article, I place critical attention on this matter. Drawing upon Peter Marcuse’s definition of exclusionary displacement, I elaborate the concept of exclusionary pressure – a process involving exclusionary housing markets and social and spatial filtering up within a neighborhood – and I use it as an indicator of possible emerging processes of gentrification around recently densified areas in Oslo.

Tracing the path to retail gentrification: Insights from Marvila, Lisbon

Retail gentrification is a rising field of research within the wider field of gentrification studies. In this paper we use the old neighbourhood of Marvila in Lisbon as a case study. The information collected from the fieldwork demonstrates the depth of transformations occurring in the commercial fabric of Marvila, which is having a detrimental effect on old stores and the local population. Moreover, it reveals that the current process was triggered by a group of independent investors, whose success is placing them at risk of being displaced. These findings reinforce the existent body of literature on the subject of retail gentrification.

Before displacement: studentification, campus-led gentrification and rental market transformation in a multiethnic neighborhood (Parc-Extension, Montréal)

ABSTRACT This article explores a case of campus-led neighborhood change that weaves together an analysis of gentrification, studentification and displacement. Contributing to the understanding of displacement pressure, this empirical study employs a temporal perspective and an innovative mixed method that captures the shifting state of the rental market and the perceptions of neighborhood change as understood by immigrant and low-income residents of Parc-Extension. We analyze how studentification is promoted in a campus-led gentrification case study, showing how both gentrification and studentification participate in the rise of evictions and displacement pressures for long term residents. By documenting the residential experience in rental housing through semi-structured interviews and data mining of rental listings on a popular platform in Canada (Kijiji), we propose an empirical perspective on displacement pressure and contribute to the development of this concept in gentrification and studentification studies. The article begins by reviewing the literature on gentrification-induced displacement, displacement pressure, state-led gentrification and studentification. This is followed by contextualizing our Montréal case study. We then outline our mixed methodologies and explain our data collection by web-scraping and fieldwork modalities. Finally, we discuss our results showing how the mechanism of displacement pressure can be linked with studentification and new-build, campus-led gentrification.

Postscript

This postscript to the Special Feature describes the explicit and implicit temporalities of gentrification in gentrification theory. It asks whether the papers in this collection affirm or disrupt the accepted understanding of gentrification as a phenomenon that emerged in the postwar years in the context of urban deindustrialization. It argues that a robust definition of gentrification, which identifies the historicity of the phenomenon and its temporal boundaries, is required in order to avoid the co-optation of gentrification definitions and theories and the ‘naturalization’ of gentrification. And, lastly, it suggests that critical history writing and historiography can contribute to gentrification studies’ project of denaturalizing the process by grounding it in long-term processes with a historical dimension.

Can gentrification theory learn from Airbnb? Airbnbfication and the asset economy in Reykjavík

Urban studies have predominantly analysed the impact of short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb on cities through the lens of gentrification. However, the concept of gentrification has been applied to this platform-based urban change without considering how platform economy might alter the way scholars think about gentrification. First, this paper shows that short-term rental platforms build on the increasing use of housing by ordinary people to generate income. Second, it explores what this entails for gentrification studies. Contrary to the classical pattern of gentrification, suppliers of short-term rental platforms are not necessarily external investors but may be local homeowners in an area that is appealing to tourists. This puts local homeowners in an ambiguous position regarding gentrification patterns. On the one hand, as stakeholders providing the accommodation supply, they can theoretically benefit from short-term rental platforms by generating income from their housing. On the other hand, as long-term inhabitants, their housing trajectory can also be disrupted by the consequences of Airbnb-driven gentrification that they enable. This paper aims to disentangle the role of local homeowners in Airbnb-driven gentrification by answering the three following questions. (1) Who are the Airbnb hosts? Are they external newcomers or local homeowners? (2) Which host strategies lead to the displacement of long-term inhabitants? (3) What lines of inquiry does the ambiguous position of local hosts (as both driver and victim of Airbnbfication) open for gentrification studies?

The gentrification of a post-industrial English rural village: Querying urban planetary perspectives

Recent years have seen the growth of planetary perspectives related to urbanisation and gentrification that have challenged the significance of differentiations of rural and urban space. This paper explores the arguments advanced in these perspectives, highlighting claims that they are based on a critique of methodological territorialism that has long been employed in rural and urban studies, as well as exhibiting an urbanormativity that was arguably absent from some earlier critiques of people such as Ray Pahl. This paper seeks to develop a study of rural gentrification that avoids urbanormativity and methodological territorialism. After reviewing debates related to academic and lay conceptions of the urban and rural, the paper highlights how territorial representations may warrant investigation even when social practices may be seen to routinely traverse boundaries of, for example, the rural. The relevance of these ideas to gentrification is then explored through an investigation of the gentrification of a village, which like many ‘urban’ settlements, has experienced both industrialisation and de-industrialisation. Drawing on the results of a ‘mixed-method questionnaire’ conducted in this village in Calderdale, England, the paper explores how the lives of residents are connected into more and less distant urban spaces through an analysis of migrational movements and employment relations, including commuting patterns. It is argued that, in line with arguments advanced within studies of planetary urbanisation/gentrification, there is considerable interconnection between the village and areas that have been classified as urban. However, it is also shown that neither this interconnection, nor the areas industrial past, means that symbolic and affective senses of rurality are insignificant to village residents, or to the practices of gentrification that have emerged. This did not mean that representations of rurality were unimpacted by industry and urban connectivity, with the paper detailing that whilst the village was widely seen as rural, it was also often seen as exhibiting significant unconformity from expectations of rurality. The paper ends by considering how senses of separation and connectivity to urban and industrial spaces link to different types of gentrifiers colonising the village.

Walking and Talking: Recommendations for Doing Mobile Interviews with Older Adults

Mobile methods, including walking interviews, have rarely been used in research with older adults. We compare and contrast two studies that engaged older adults in walking interviews conducted by the coauthors. The first study examined the meaning of food access with residents of publicly-subsidized housing, and the second involved Black Americans in a study of brain health and gentrification. Older adults, including those with physical and mild cognitive impairment, can participate in walking interviews. Key decisions and advice for researchers interested in using mobile methods with this population, including participant safety, comfort abilities, and technology use, are provided.

Before BBQ Becky

In 2018, a White woman called the police on two Black men who were holding a cookout on the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA. Branded “BBQ Becky” by Black Twitter, this incident ricocheted around the digital mediascape, contributing to a national debate about racist policing and the dangers of “living while Black.” Many commentators interpreted the struggle over Black cultural practices at Lake Merritt in terms of the now common, even generic, narrative of tech-induced gentrification in the Bay Area. But this elided the fact that the violence of BBQ Becky reproduced an enduring drive to regulate Black geographies and sounds as a means to control the post-emancipation social order. This article argues that scholars and activists need to attune to the “racial reverberations” that continue to loop in contemporary spatial struggles, especially ones involving sound. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic materials, it provides a recursive account of struggles over Black public cultures in Oakland from World War II until the present, thus suggesting that the racial/spatial control embodied in BBQ Becky can’t be reduced to the gentrification narrative alone. Ultimately, this article centers the temporalities of African American epistemologies and musics to realign U.S. gentrification studies with the haunting rhythms of geographic harm and repair experienced by those most impacted by urban dispossession.

Introduction

Introduction

Beverley’s Story

This article considers the different dimensions of an individual’s attempt to survive gentrification. The focus is on Beverley Robinson, a displacee from the Aylesbury Estate in London, who has experienced the slow violence of gentrification and displacement over an extended period of time. We argue that her ‘survivability’ has been, and indeed continues to be, key in her resistance to gentrification. Few academic studies of gentrification have focused in depth on an individual’s everyday fight for survival in the face of gentrification; this article zooms in on the experience of one displacee. The individual displaced by gentrification, Beverley Robinson, interrogates her own experience, and in so doing she shares her autobiography with us; and this is interlocked, dovetailed, with an ethnographic biography undertaken by Loretta Lees, a scholar-activist who has worked with and fought with her.

Horsification: Embodied gentrification in rural landscapes

In this paper, I consider the role of animals in gentrification processes, developing a conceptualisation of ‘horsification’: the proliferation of horses within a locale, resulting directly from (human) residential migration. Horses are a highly charismatic species. Practices of horse keeping offer rich opportunities for encounter, shaping the bodies and knowledge of both horses and their keepers. Utilising examples from a case study in rural Scotland, I describe the affective logics of residential horse keeping and how these logics play out in specific types of economic investment and social interaction. I demonstrate how the materialities of horse bodies are embodied in specific landscape changes: qualities of pasture, styles of fencing and stables, and new sanded manèges, and lead to the territorialisation and contestation of broader rural landscapes. Consideration of animal-human relationships de-centres human agency in gentrification studies, drawing attention to the affective and relational processes of gentrification, and how gentrification is performed and territorialised on an ongoing basis. In conceptualising horsification, I draw attention to the agency of more-than-human actors and the role of land in gentrification processes.

Using Google Street View to Examine Urban Context and Green Amenities in the Global South: The Chilean Experience

This study evaluates the use of virtual, human-interpreted, field observations using Google Street View (GSV) to examine the presence of conditions that may be used to analyze green gentrification in the Global South. We propose that green gentrification is characterized by the introduction or improvement of green amenities (such as parks) as well as corresponding changes to the urban context (such as facade materials). While virtual field observations have been used to examine neighborhood context for other applications, this method has not yet been applied to the study of green gentrification, nor in the Global South. Using one urban park located in Talca, Chile, and in three urban parks located in Santiago, Chile, we sought to address the following research questions: (1) How do in situ and virtual field observations compare as methods of evaluating green amenities and urban context? (2) What characteristics of green amenities and urban context must be addressed to investigate green gentrification in the Global South? (3) How do indicators of green amenities and urban context observed via virtual field observations indicate the potential for green gentrification? In order to observe the streetside conditions of the neighborhoods surrounding established, improved, and new parks, we utilize the ground-level 360° imagery through GSV as an alternative to in situ studies, which can be time-consuming, expensive, and logistically challenging. Features related to the land use composition, building materials used, and the presence of aesthetic improvements and pedestrian amenities were noted as potential indicators of gentrification, and the correspondence between the two methods of observation were evaluated. Results indicate that virtual field observations can provide a promising method that may facilitate the identification and investigation of the effects of green gentrification in the Global South, broadening the scope and application of this research. This comparison offers insight into the use and comparison of virtual and in situ observations for identifying green gentrification in the Global South and for the applicability of the virtual observation method in this heterogeneous urban landscape, especially in cases with unreliable or unavailable data.

The agencies of landscape in rural gentrification: Impressions from the wood, the village and the moortop

AbstractThis paper brings together research on rural gentrification with emerging work on lived landscapes that has emphasized the intertwining of the human and more‐than‐human with the performance of activities of everyday living and their affective significance. It draws on research examining rural gentrification in three contrasting landscapes, termed ‘the wood’, ‘the village’ and ‘the moortop’. These landscapes connect to earlier studies of rural social change and gentrification in England, with ‘the wood’ and ‘the village’ being sites research by Ray Pahl and the ‘moortop’ one of the landscapes identified in Darren Smith and Deborah Phillips' examination of the role of representations of rurality in processes of rural gentrification. The paper draws on research that returned to the locations of this earlier research, and seeks to re‐examine arguments advanced by these studies about the formation of socially differentiated worlds and representations of rurality through a lived‐landscape perspective.

The ‘hidden’ sides of transit-induced gentrification and displacement along Waterloo Region’s LRT corridor

Displacement is generally studied using either using statistical analysis, or lived experiences. Both require different definitions, methods and conceptualisations. As cities across North America invest in higher-order transit such as light rail (LRT), there is a need for a holistic assessment of displacement. However, to date, most studies of transit-induced gentrification rely on statistics. This is problematic because this approach underestimates the scale of direct displacement and is unable to capture indirect or experiential forms. This article uses a variety of qualitative methods to present a detailed examination of displacement along one of North America’s newest LRT lines in Canada’s Waterloo Region. While official statistics indicate little evidence of displacement, field observations and direct engagement with key stakeholders and marginalised residents, renders visible four different types of displacement that are neither evident in official statistics nor central to planning and policy debates. Importantly, these forms of displacement include both spatial and non-spatial forms, which critical scholarship is increasingly conceptualising as part of the displacement and dispossession associated with contemporary gentrification. These findings suggest a need to broaden how transit-induced displacement is defined, measured and analysed, centring lived experiences of displacement within planning and policymaking.

Sandra, her research and “doing together”

The contribution aims at presenting the publication “Staying put! An anti-gentrification handbook for Southern European cities”, as one of the latest output of the work of Sandra Annunziata. Sandra was a an Italian researcher in the field of urban studies, who left us in January 2019 after completing a large research project on housing rights in Madrid, Athens and Rome, which had international relevance in the field of gentrification studies. The paper illustrate Sandra’s work and research approach, defined as “doing together”, from the viewpoint of ETICity the association who Sandra contributed to found in 2012.