Gentrification Research Articles

From Silt to Shit: The Past and Present of Post-Natural Bangkok

Using the Anthropocene as a guiding proposition, this essay offers a critical historical geography of post-natural Bangkok, and an equally critical assessment of present-day gentrification. One of the most interesting aspects of the recent literature on the Anthropocene is its geological approach to nature and culture. I borrow the notion of layer to convey the idea that contemporary Bangkok is the product of a process of material layering that may be traced back to the early nineteenth century. Contemporary Bangkok is here represented by Centenary Park, a green space under construction in the city center that is being marketed as a ＂great gift＂ to society. In line with my approach, I make an interpretive, critical analysis of Centenary Park and its immediate surroundings. The park is part of a next-generation, open-air shopping district, including upscale apartments, known as Lifestyle Center and Community Mall. Finally, I provide a critique of the concept of ＂hybridity＂ as a valid approach to both Thai modernity and the Anthropocene.

Comparative ruralism and 'opening new windows' on gentrification.

In response to the five commentaries on our paper ‘Comparative approaches to gentrification: lessons from the rural’, we open up more ‘windows’ on rural gentrification and its urban counterpart. First, we highlight the issues of metrocentricity and urbanormativity within gentrification studies, highlighting their employment by our commentators. Second, we consider the issue of displacement and its operation within rural space, as well as gentrification as a coping strategy for neoliberal existence and connections to more-than-human natures. Finally, we consider questions of scale, highlighting the need to avoid naturalistic conceptions of scale and arguing that attention could be paid to the role of material practices, symbolizations and lived experiences in producing scaled geographies of rural and urban gentrification.

Comparative approaches to gentrification: Lessons from the rural.

The epistemologies and politics of comparative research are prominently debated within urban studies, with ‘comparative urbanism’ emerging as a contemporary lexicon of urban studies. The study of urban gentrification has, after some delay, come to engage with these debates, which can be seen to pose a major challenge to the very concept of gentrification. To date, similar debates or developments have not unfolded within the study of rural gentrification. This article seeks to address some of the challenges posed to gentrification studies through an examination of strategies of comparison and how they might be employed within a comparative study of rural gentrification. Drawing on Tilly (Big structures Large Processes Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage), examples of four ‘strategies of comparison’ are identified within studies of urban and rural gentrification, before the paper explores how ‘geographies of the concept’ and ‘geographies of the phenomenon’ of rural gentrification in the United Kingdom, United States and France may be investigated using Latour’s (Pandora’s Hope. London: Harvard University Press) notion of ‘circulatory sociologies of translation’. The aim of our comparative discussion is to open up dialogues on the challenges of comparative studies that employ conceptions of gentrification and also to promote reflections of the metrocentricity of recent discussions of comparative research.

Neighborhood size in planning large cities of the Middle East and North Africa: insights to mobility and social interactions

Recently a number of cities of the Middle East and North Africa like Tehran, Istanbul, Cairo, Mashhad, and Esfahan have defined a new neighborhood-level division system. According to academic literature and the implemented practice, the Iranian cities have had the main goal of promoting bottom-up approach in urban governance as well as public participation in regeneration/gentrification plans. Based on the statistical analysis by Analysis of Variance and Welch’s Test undertaken in this study, the areas determined for the neighborhoods in Tehran, Mashhad, and Esfahan are significantly larger than that of the historical cores of two cities in central Iran, namely Yazd and Kashan. This finding indicates that Iranian decision makers did not mean to use the vernacular urbanism to generate a city of short distances with local centrality that leads to sustainable mobility and enhanced social effects. Focusing only on public participation and local governance and neglecting the potential benefits of changing human behaviors and perceptions by means of sustainable urban forms may be targeted by other Middle Eastern and North African countries like Turkey and Egypt, because the size of the new quarters in these countries are very similar to that of Iran. As a result of this analysis, the planning bodies of the region are recommended to include two main fields in their neighborhood planning in parallel: (1) community-based planning with the aim of enhancing public participation and urban gentrification; (2) physical neo-traditional neighborhood planning with the aim of creating human-scaled fabric and promotion of sustainable mobility and social effects.

Vivencias, prácticas y concepciones urbanas en el barrio del Puerto de Tarragona

Con base etnográfica, el presente artículo aborda la transformación social y espacial que el Barrio del Puerto de Tarragona ha vivido en las últimas décadas y el resultado con el que se enfrenta al futuro. Parte de un análisis de corte lefebvriano, pues atiende el plano vecinal cotidiano, el plano de la práctica consciente del espacio y el plano proyectual en sentido político y urbanístico. La realidad de la unidad de observación ha llevado al análisis de fenómenos como la decadencia urbanística, la gentrificación, la xenofobia y la construcción de identidades. El caso refleja los conflictos de los procesos globales en lo particular de un barrio donde los agentes urbanos chocan y confluyen ante la pregunta de qué fueron, qué son y qué quieren ser.

Saving space: strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today

LGBT/queer film festivals provide counter-public spaces for marginalised subjects to formulate community, negotiate identity and rally under political banners. At the same time, screening work by LGBT* filmmakers interpellates spectators into a common subject position and locates discursively ‘homeless’ subjects in space and time. The creation of queer, urban, community space is particularly vital in the current context of rapid urban gentrification which has resulted in the steady decline of queer venues in many Western urban centres. This article argues strategies of space re/claimation mobilised by LGBT/queer film festivals today can be conceptually understood in relation to women’s film events of the 1970s. Women’s film festivals staged a direct challenge to the social reality of gendered access to space and proposed alternative modes of spatial configuration. Focusing on UK- and US-based festivals, I will argue that it was precisely the way in which women’s film festivals, feminist filmmaking practices and theory informed each other that facilitated a multi-layered reclamation of both material and discursive space for women. Drawing on Jose Muñoz's work in Cruising Utopia, I will further argue that the occupation of space at LGBT/queer film festivals constitutes a radical political act that carries with it the potential of a queer utopia.

Anthropological analysis on the development model, and the social, political and economic inequality of Puerto Rico

The following article present an ethnographic and historical analysis of the main political, economic and social problems of Puerto Rico. In addition, the article present an ethnographic description of the main problems related to poverty and urban gentrification that affect the living conditions of the marginalized communities. The communities where the data were obtained were: Los Filtros, Municipality of Guaynabo and La Perla, Municipality of San Juan. At the theoretical level, will be discussed a series of community ethnographic research focused on the analysis of poverty, development and political project of Puerto Rico. Such as: La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty by Oscar Lewis (1967). The following concepts will also be analyzed: “Innercity” by Phillipe Bourgois “In Search of Respect” (2010), and Urban Gentrification from the anthropological perspective by Conrad Phillip Kottak and Kathryn A. Kozaitis (2012). Finally, the article present a reflections of the current economic crisis and the most important events during the recovery process after the impact of the Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Gentrification and Conservation: Examining the Intersection

Gentrification and Conservation: Examining the Intersection

Eroding Paradigms: Heritage in an Age of Climate Gentrification

Eroding Paradigms: Heritage in an Age of Climate Gentrification

Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo. Gentrification, Art and Industry in New York, 1950-1980

« There are many reasons to celebrate the South Bronx, but some Bronx residents don’t think a new artisanal coffee shop is one of them ». Alors que le New York Times avait place le sud du Bronx comme un des nouveaux quartiers en vogue, les reactions furent vives, notamment de la part de nombreux artistes installes depuis parfois plusieurs decennies dans une zone en proie a la gentrification. La presse etait attaquee pour sa complicite avec les promoteurs et son absence de recul critique face ...

Book review: <i>Planetary Gentrification</i>

Book review: <i>Planetary Gentrification</i>

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

The canonization of Jane Jacobs continues. Increasingly, for those occupying midlevel positions on the spectrum of urban gentrification—between the original tenement poor and the eventual investment banker—the community activist Jacobs has taken on an increasingly important role as a sort of Mother Courage of urban pioneerism. This was not always the case. Despite her intractable (and ultimately career-ending) battles with the New York City planner Robert Moses, Jacobs did not rate a mention in Robert Caro's monumental 1974 Moses biography, The Power Broker. Studies by Roberta Brandes Gratz and Anthony Flint have subsequently gone some way in righting that wrong. Foundations have been established in her honor; awards are given in her name. An opera, Joshua Frankel's A Marvellous Order (2016), has been written about Moses's and Jacobs's entanglements. We can now add to this list the documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, directed by Matt Tyrnauer and funded largely by the Rockefeller Foundation (longtime custodians of Jacobs's work and legacy).

공공미술이 젠트리피케이션에 미치는 영향 연구

현재 젠트리피케이션은 우리나라는 물론 세계적으로 이슈가 되고 있다. 최근 독일에서는 이민자 및 난민들이 살고 있는 낙후된 도심에서도 젠트리피케이션 현상이 일어나 당국이 관련법을 만드느라 고심하고 있다고 한다. 낙후된 도심은 대부분 이름 없는 예술가들의 작은 ‘그래피티’ 공공미술 활동으로 부터 시작한다. 이후 다른 예술가들의 이주, 사람들의 관심과 임대료 상승으로 기존 거주자가 몰려남, 새로운 상권, 지역문화의 부흥(또는 황폐화) 등으로 이어진다. 젠트리피케이션 현상으로 인해 생기는 가장 큰 문제점은 낙후된 지역에 거주하던 주민이나 세입자 등이 지가의 상승이나 임대료의 폭등으로 인해 다른 곳으로 이주를 하게 되어 그 곳의 사회에서 쫓겨나가게 된다는 것이다.BR 연구의 내용과 방법은 여러 도시에서 나타나는 그래피티에 대해 미술적 관점에서 국내외 각 도시의 사례를 조사하여 젠트리피케이션이 나타나는 도시의 특성과 현황을 비교 검토하여 공공미술과 젠트리피케이션의 관계를 규명하고자 하였다. 본 연구에서 사례 조사된 도시는 미국(Soho), 호주(Melbourne), 한국(홍대), 캐나다(Islinton), 중국(798 Art District)이다. 연구 결과 젠트리피케이션은 예술가들에 의해 자연적으로 발생하거나 지역커뮤니티 및 정부에서 주도하는 두 가지 형태로 발생하는 것으로 분석되었다. 연구의 결과 대부분의 도시에서 나타난 공공미술은 젠트리피케이션에 상당한 영향을 미치는 것을 알 수 있었다. 향후, 다양한 도시의 사례를 중심으로 데이터를 중첩해서 검증하는 거시적이고 광범위한 연구가 필요할 것으로 판단된다.BR

‘Comics on the Main Street of Culture’: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999), Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011) and the politics of gentrification

Abstract Through a comparative discussion of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (serialized 1989−96, collected 1999), which is now widely marketed as a ‘graphic novel’, and Laura Oldfield Ford’s more self-consciously subcultural zine, Savage Messiah (serialized 2005 to 2009, collected 2011), this article explores the correlation between the gentrification of the comics form and the urban gentrification of city space − especially that of East London, which is depicted in both of these sequential art forms. The article emphasizes that both these urban and cultural landscapes are being dramatically reshaped by the commodification and subsequent marketization of their subcultural or marginalized spaces, before exploring the extent to which this process neutralizes their subversive qualities and limits democratic access to them. In conclusion, however, the article demonstrates that comics artists tend to collect their ephemeral comics and publish them as marketable graphic novels not to commodify them, nor to maximize their profits. Rather, they do so in order to reach a wider readership and thereby to mobilize their subversive, anti-gentrification political content more effectively, constituting radical urban subcultures that resist the reshaping of London into a segregated and discriminatory cityscape.

State, Class and Capital: Gentrification and New Urban Developmentalism in Hong Kong

Drawing on a recent wave of scholarship on urban development in East Asia, this article offers a critical account of the twists and turns of Hong Kong’s urban development by focusing on class recomposition, state strategies and their relationships with the city’s changing position in its regional political economy. To do so, it examines how the middle class and their housing and investment demand have begun to lose their significance as a driver of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, since the resumption of China’s sovereignty over the city and the outbreak of Asian financial crisis, the local and central state have engineered a finance-led growth model whose diverse neoliberal interventions and political calculations have persistently lead to widespread discontent with “developer hegemony” and private property-led urban redevelopment. Using a case study of Wan Chai and the rise of serviced apartments, this article argues that this transition has marked the rise of a new urban developmentism in Hong Kong.

Book Review: Planetary Gentrification

Book Review: Planetary Gentrification

Preface to an Interventions Forum on Contextual Urban Theory and The ‘Appeal’ of Gentrification

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including urban redevelopment, gentrification and political participation.

젠트리피케이션 다시보기: 아상블라주로서의 도시 개념과의 정합성에 관한 시론적 연구

젠트리피케이션 다시보기: 아상블라주로서의 도시 개념과의 정합성에 관한 시론적 연구

Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition

Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition

The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry, 1950–1980. By Aaron Shkuda

<i>The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry, 1950–1980</i>. By Aaron Shkuda