Gentrification Studies Research Articles

‘Gentrification’ as a grid of meaning

The openness of the concept of gentrification—its practical flexibility as a sign—makes it useful, and thus prominent, in everyday conversations about the socio-spatial changes affecting Oakland, CA and other US cities. Within gentrification studies, however, this openness has often been seen as a conceptual problem to be corrected. In this paper, rather than refine a categoric definition of gentrification, we focus on the contingent ways that a range of political actors articulate relational identities and claims in struggles over public space. We observe that, as a situated and unstable constellation of meanings and resonances, the talk of gentrification is central to urban cultural politics in places like Oakland. We thus argue that the ‘chaotic’ use of the term is neither a conceptual problem nor a political failure. Instead, it is in itself a rich and meaningful subject of research on urban life, pointing to a multiplicity of sites in which new and consequential formations of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and disbelonging, are forged in practice. Using six months of ethnographic fieldwork, we detail the struggle over Oakland First Fridays, a downtown street festival. In particular, we show how a diverse group of organizers drew on ‘gentrification’ as a grid of meaning to configure and reconfigure the event’s deserving public in ways that rendered commercial vendors, young people of color and political protesters increasingly out of place. We thus argue that viewing ‘gentrification’ as a grid of meaning allows us to appreciate fluctuating formations of inclusion and exclusion—formations that a too-rigid focus on gentrification as a socio-spatial and political–economic process of urban change can either naturalize or obscure.

Resisting ‘Austerity Gentrification’ and Displacement in Southern Europe

This paper discusses ‘austerity gentrification’, austerity eviction/displacement, and resistance to them in Southern Europe during the current crisis. We focus on three cities, which until recently have barely featured in gentrification studies: Athens, Madrid and Rome. We show that eviction/displacement is being framed as a collective problem by anti-eviction/gentrification movements in Southern Europe but that more inter-class solidarity will be needed in the future. Northern European cities would do well to look at the resistance practices operating in Southern European cities.

Space, gentrification and traditional open-air markets: how do vendors in the Carmel market in Tel Aviv interpret changes?

ABSTRACTSpace is often believed to lose its importance in the global era as individuals cease to interact face-to-face in favor of online communication. Studying the Carmel market located in city center Tel Aviv, Israel aims to show how space, in a global city, is constantly produced, reproduced, and transformed in reaction to the changes in the community that uses the space and remains an invaluable resource for its users. By specifying the vendors’ perspective on the changes the market undergoes, this article offers an often missing aspect of the study of space, gentrification, and human action. It argues that public spaces in gentrified areas provide the vendors with means to instill their actions, traditional values which often lose their primacy in a global era and gain social recognition. I spent two years of participant observation and detailed ethnographic interviews with vendors. These have led me to conclude that in addition to a steady income that access to space provides, the vendors claim access to space to enable them to sustain familial values and offer to members of the community the opportunity of face-to-face interaction. Also they interpret their interaction with the new clients as a means of compensating for lack of social upward mobility.

Private Rental-Led Gentrification in England: Displacement, Commodification and Dispossession

While central to early gentrification studies, the idea that social and tenure changes were inseparably linked to displacement has recently fallen out of research in the field. This has led to difficulties in the context of a recent shift in the tenure trajectory associated with gentrification. While the process has historically been linked to an increase in home ownership in the UK, the situation today is marked by the return of the private rental sector, a return associated with the rise of buy-to-let investors, the loss of social housing and quickly escalating rents. Gentrification operating in the UK today must thus be thought of as private rental-led gentrification – transitions to private rental in the context of social upscaling. This is shown through a detailed comparison of small-area social and tenure data from the 2001 and 2011 UK Censuses. While this tenure shift has been documented in gentrifying areas over the years, little is known about its impacts on local neighbourhoods. This is a dangerous blind-spot as private rental-led gentrification is more pernicious than gentrification linked to ownership: it is currently more widespread and likely to displace poorer residents, creates commodified spaces and its production dispossesses low-income owners.

ジェントリフィケーションと都市政策

Since the mid-1990s, Tokyo has been undergoing extensive reurbanization, and a lot of gentrification projects are currently being undertaken in the central area. This study aims to examine this transformation of socio-spatial structure of the Tokyo metropolitan area from the perspective of gentrification studies. Recently, urban policy has been the foundation of gentrification in gentrification studies. These studies introduced the idea that the wide variety of urban policies, which were framed according to the political situation of each county or city, affects the characteristics of gentrification. Consequently, in this study, I trace the urban policy implemented by both the national government and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) since the mid-1990s. I choose to focus on urban renaissance policy and housing policy out of the many fields of the urban policy. I find that the aim of the nation's urban renaissance policy is to escape from recession after the economic downturn, and the TMG's policy corresponds with this goal. Furthermore, I discuss the inclusion of “neoliberalism” and “entrepreneurialism” in the urban renaissance policy, with gentrification in the central Tokyo area in the early 21st century being the spatial expression of this inclusion. Moreover, I recommend that housing policy be incorporated into the overall urban renaissance policy thereby regarding as a tool for gathering the elite who are suitable for urban economic growth strategy rather than responding to residents' basic need.

ジェントリフィケーション研究のフロンティア

ジェントリフィケーション研究のフロンティア

UNEVEN EFFECTS: THE MIXED STORY OF TRANSIT-ORIENTED GENTRIFICATION IN LOS ANGELES

Transit-oriented gentrification studies in Los Angeles record contrasting findings, but yield consistent implications for station area planning. As these cases demonstrates, simply building transit will not gentrify neighborhoods; a blend of built environment factors, development, and governmental support are needed to catalyze gentrification. This paper reveals the importance of government involvement as both the precursor of gentrification and protector of residents. Given this, cities should enact multi-pronged and context-sensitive policies to protect incumbent residents from gentrification’s potentially negative effects. A mix of housing policies can help residents weather rising housing costs, remain in neighborhoods, and capitalize on increased local amenities.

Gentrification as the appropriation of therapeutic ‘diversity’: A model and case study of the multicultural amenity of contemporary urban renewal

Scholarship on urban renewal readily recognises the conversion of ‘cultural diversity’ from a progressive ethic that once addressed ethnic/racial marginalisation into a trope that services early-stage gentrifiers. Through successive rearticulations of cultural diversity as a middle-class lifestyle amenity by various actors, this paper presents a model and case study of gentrification as an incremental act of cultural displacement of racial/ethnic ‘Otherness’ from the valued social ideal of the immediate post-Civil Rights era. Successive waves of new actors in the inner city can be conceptually linked by their reformulation of the amenity of cultural diversity so as to service their interests.

Entre o fundamental e o contingente: dimensões da gentrificação contemporânea nas operações urbanas em São Paulo

Opondo-se à importação direta de teorias, este artigo desenvolve um modelo analítico para o estudo da gentrificação que abarca tanto sua generalização como principal política do urbanismo neoliberal quanto sua localização em contextos urbanos específicos. O modelo analítico baseia-se em três dimensões necessárias e definidoras do processo: 1) produção do espaço gentrificável; 2) elitização social com expulsão de grupos vulneráveis; e, 3) transformação da paisagem construída. O estudo das operações urbanas em São Paulo demonstra que estas dimensões fundamentais são mediadas por estruturas locais e, nestes casos, contextualizadas em projetos urbanísticos individuais. Este artigo, portanto, explora as múltiplas escalas de promoção da gentrificação, enfatizando que formas de produção desigual do espaço e resistência às mesmas também são produzidas localmente.

Revisiting ‘social tectonics’: The middle classes and social mix in gentrifying neighbourhoods

Studies of gentrification in London have shown that some groups of middle-class people have been attracted to poor and multi-ethnic areas of inner London in part because of their social and ethnic mix. However, the attraction has often not translated into everyday interaction. In an earlier account of gentrification in Brixton this de facto social segregation was typified as a process of ‘social tectonics’. In this paper we compare two ethnically and socially mixed neighbourhoods, Peckham and Brixton, that at different times have represented the ‘front line’ of gentrification in London. We examine the extent to which the gentrification of Brixton in the late 1990s is being mirrored by the gentrification that is occurring today in Peckham – a similarly mixed and counter-cultural area of South London. Whilst we identify continuities between the gentrification process in these two areas separated by a decade of boom and recession, we suggest that the Peckham example demonstrates the need for a more developed approach to the issue of social mixing than that implied by the social tectonics metaphor. Specifically, we argue that there is a need to explain how the presence of classed and ethnic ‘others’ can be central to the formation of identities within some middle-class fractions in such enclaves in the inner city, and how attitudes and neighbourhood practices can change over time.

Awans symboliczny mimochodem

Upward mobility without moving. Polish Greenpoint Community Leaders and Gentrification of the Neighborhood The text presents an interpretation of the Greenpoint (Brooklyn, New York City) Polish immigrant community leaders’ benevolent attitude toward gentrification of the neighborhood. Referring to the evidence from the fieldwork in the neighborhood in 2006 and 2010, including 50 leaders’ oral histories, it is argued here that this benevolence can be explained by the fact that gentrification brings to the leaders – as individuals, and members of families and ethnic group – both material and symbolic upward mobility. This is ‘upward mobility without moving’, without leaders’ agency and despite the fact they have done nothing to have it happened. It is indicated that, contrary to the dominant trend in gentrification studies that expects lower class’ resistance to gentrification, the lower classes members might welcome gentrification because they perceive it as an advantage to their social status and mobility. Additionally, the article points out to immigrants – omitted in gentrification studies – as individuals who are highly achievement oriented and at the same time uncertain about their status in receiving society, and therefore perceiving gentrification as an occasion for personal, their children’s and ethnic group’s social mobility into the mainstream.

Middle‐Class Parents, Urban Schooling, and the Shift From Consumption to Production of Urban Space

Dominant approaches to the study of gentrification tend to attribute this process either to the production of urban space by elites or to the consumption of urban space by individual consumers. In this article, we take a preliminary step toward bridging this gap by illustrating how these groups may, in some cases, be the same actors. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with middle‐class parents in Boston, we explore the transitions that gentrifiers undergo as they age and have children. As young singles and childless couples, our respondents interacted with the city mainly as passive consumers. Years later, however, facing pressures to relocate in search of high‐quality educational options, these parents emerged as active producers of the urban landscape through their substantial involvement in their children's public elementary schools. This school‐based engagement reinforced their loyalties to their neighborhoods, dissuading them from moving to the suburbs. Since it is based on intense interactions with small local institutions, though, this strategy will likely be more difficult for parents to sustain in larger, less personal high schools. Thus, these parents may reconsider their dedication to city living as their children age. We discuss the implications of this research for urban theory and policy.

Governance of Relocation: An Examination of Residential Relocation Processes in Housing Market Renewal Areas in England

This paper examines governance processes shaping the experiences of neighbourhood restructuring-induced residential relocation in Housing Market Renewal (HMR) areas in England. Since the 1950s and 1960s, residential relocation has been examined as a matter of social and political debate, especially in gentrification studies focusing mainly on negative residential relocation outcomes long after the process was over. This paper argues that such a focus had led researchers to ignore subtle, practical dimensions of relocation delivery and the causal relationships between these and often very diverse relocation experiences. Based on the HMR case, the study shows that residential relocation in a differentiated polity is delivered by complex networks of actors and that residential relocation outcomes are the result of cooperation or non-cooperation of network members. Key innovation rests in devising a theoretical vehicle that shows how governance has a profound impact on relocation delivery and residential relocation experiences.

‘Worlds of Justification’ in the Politics and Practices of Urban Regeneration

A considerable body of research has developed on processes of neoliberal urban regeneration and gentrification. On the one hand, there are many political economy accounts emphasising the role of economic capital in processes of urban change and gentrification. On the other hand, there is a wealth of governmentality studies on the art of government that fail to explain how ungovernable subjects develop. Similarly, within gentrification studies there are many accounts on the role of changing consumer lifestyles and defining gentrification, but less concern with the governance processes between actors in urban regeneration and gentrification. Yet such issues are of considerable importance given the role of the state in urban regeneration and dependence on private capital. This paper utilises the French Pragmatist approach of Boltanski and Thévenot to examine a case study state-led gentrification project. Boltanski and Thévenot argue that social coordination occurs by way of actors working through broader value-laden ‘worlds of justification’ that underpin processes of argumentation and coordination. The examined case study is a deprived area within an English city where a major state-led gentrification programme has been introduced. The rationale for the programme is based on the assumption that reducing deprivation relies upon substantially increasing the number of higher income earners. The paper concludes that market values have overridden broader civic values in the negotiation process, with this intensifying as the state internalised market crisis tendencies within the project. More broadly, there is a need for French Pragmatism to be more sensitive to the spatial processes of social coordination, which can be achieved through critical engagement with recent concepts of ‘assemblages’.

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

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

Gentrification and Cosmopolitan Leisure in Inner-Urban Melbourne, Australia, 1960s–1970s

Studies of gentrification in Australia have typically analysed the phenomenon through the lens of housing and residential change. This article explores how non-residential factors, including the concept of and the everyday practices associated with cosmopolitanism, offer an opportunity to analyse leisure specific to gentrification in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s. The article particularly explores leisure based on food and drink cultures located in restaurants, cafés and pubs. Adopting a discursive interdisciplinary approach to studies of the urban past, the article seeks to enhance our historical understanding of the interplay between gentrification and cosmopolitan leisure at a specific place and time in history, by exploring how people perceived themselves and their lifestyles in the midst of urban change.

Economic decline and gentrification in a small town: the business sector in Aberdeen, Eastern Cape

Small towns are a neglected topic of study but they are gaining importance in South Africa because of rapid urbanisation. This paper discusses a case study of business development and gentrification in Aberdeen, a small town in the Eastern Cape's Karoo. Although there has been a long-term decline in Aberdeen's economy, major changes are now taking place that call for more focused development policies. The findings of a 2006 business survey in Aberdeen are presented here and integrated with findings from the international literature on small town development. The paper shows that endogenous development of a small town's economy by its business sector can lead to some local economic growth; however, it needs to be assisted by judicious government investment. Aberdeen's economy will need a stronger level of municipal guidance to exploit its strengths and overcome its limitations.

Missing Marcuse: On gentrification and displacement

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

The State and New-build Gentrification in Central Cape Town, South Africa

The objective of this investigation is to assess the relevance and potential of current international trends in the study of gentrification in the contemporary South African urban context. Against the backdrop of `new' gentrification experiences and debates it is argued that recent developments in the central-city districts of large South African cities present numerous opportunities for `new' gentrification processes to emerge as a central part of urban regeneration. Moreover, it is contended that specific state policies and interventions focused on inner-city regeneration underpin new forms of gentrification in South Africa.

Diversity, scale and green landscapes in the gentrification process: Traversing ecological and social science perspectives

This paper explores issues of scale and difference within a study of rural gentrification and nature that draws on social science and natural science theories and methods. The paper discusses how these issues emerged as being of significance both within social science studies of gentrification, rural restructuring and landscape studies and also within ecological analysis of village space. The paper suggests that nature is a significant presence in village space, with green vegetated space forming both a quantitatively significant amount of village settlement envelopes and also being of clear significance to inhabitants of at least one village in Melton District in Leicestershire.