The Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change

Lisa Berglund, Siobhan Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000051889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change explores cultural shifts that result from gentrification and redevelopment, showing how cultures of racially and economically marginalized groups are appropriated or erased by the introduction luxury real estate and retail branding.

The book explores the literal and symbolic shifts in ownership that are happening in urban locations undergoing redevelopment and demographic shifts. As lesser discussed manifestations of these shifts, cultural symbols of leisure, tourism and elite consumption can be witnessed as cities work to reshape their landscapes through real estate, retail, and public space development. Aesthetic changes often show up in the form of boutique coffee shops, distilleries, high-end restaurants, retail flagships, and more. Through careful branding and visual design, the new spaces and places become recognized as signs of exclusivity. This exclusivity also emerges in public spaces through local, informal retail practices like street vending, food trucks and outdoor markets. As these changes take shape, more affluent groups replace and displace the cultural practices of existing groups. These changes send tangible, observable messages of neighborhood change which signal the race and class profiles of the desired incoming population who can afford to participate in the redeveloped landscape.

Developing a discourse on how to better observe and analyze signs of exclusion in the built environment, The Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change will be of great interest to scholars of community development, social mobilization, urban studies and design, and urban planning and development. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

Introduction: the aesthetics of neighborhood change

Lisa Berglund and Siobhan Gregory

In recent decades, the emergence of “return to the city” movements, led by private investment, have focused on redeveloping and redefining inner city neighborhoods. State support for privately initiated inner city development has become a dominant paradigm in city building (Jonas and Wilson 1999, Hackworth and Smith 2001). While these developing neighborhoods experience the demographic shifts that come with gentrification, they are celebrated as “up and coming” and part of a “renaissance.” The focus on “the new” often neglects the needs, wants, and desires of long-time residents, as development goals privilege the attraction of affluent, upwardly mobile incoming residents and tourists. The image of a growing white creative class is used to bolster the perception that an entrepreneurial, creative, or artistic “spirit” has returned to the city. The presence of that spirit is then discerned, not only through changes in demographics and amenities, but also in language, imagery, and consumption patterns that seem to celebrate the “grit” found in the present conditions of poverty and the nostalgia of industrial, prosperous pasts. Meanwhile, the social and political circumstances that tie those pasts to the present are widely neglected in these narratives.

The aesthetics of gentrification becomes a form of cultural production that allows places to be constructed around depoliticized cultural fantasies of “authenticity” and “nostalgia”. These are indicated by an array of material factors including, but not limited to, repurposed aging infrastructure, renovated historical architecture, DIY and craft industries, and local production. These aesthetic changes create a materiality that commodifies the “grit” of urban life to be consumed by affluent consumer populations, both as new residents and as tourists. In these ways, the materiality of gentrification allows for engagement with curated experiences of “authenticity” that mask traumatic pasts, present conditions of racial and economic disenfranchisement of the urban core, and the hardships of the people who make up the communities being replaced.

An extensive body of writing, both academic and journalistic, has examined demographic shifts associated with redevelopment and gentrification of cities and neighborhoods in transition (Marcuse 1985, Smith 1996, Freeman 2006). A less-discussed manifestation of these restructuring processes are the aesthetic changes to the landscape caused by such shifts. These changes can be witnessed as cultural symbols of leisure, tourism, and elite consumption, from boutique coffee shops and distilleries to high-end retail flagships (Slater 2006, Zukin 2011). Similar, yet often less overt symbols of exclusivity are also found in the careful branding, design and promotion of these spaces, often referred to as “place-making” strategies. Even local informal economies like street vending, vernacular architecture, food trucks, and street markets become appropriated as vehicles for place-making. Through this appropriation, more affluent groups replace and displace the cultural practices of existing residents and other stakeholders, who are often lower-income and belonging to minority groups. Equally problematic, artists, designers, and entrepreneurs leverage divestment and “decay” in the promotion of their own endeavors. These younger more transient groups are then touted by the media as harbingers of gentrification. Furthermore, the cultural dominance of sanitized, middle- and upper-middle-class amenities tend to position gentrification as a form of altruism through consumption. Participation in urban life is thus grounded by the production and consumption of highly curated indoor and outdoor spaces of commerce that offer protection from the poverty and crime that exists in the surrounding landscape. Ultimately, aesthetics may have ethical implications for the displacement and exclusion of low income communities, along with the regional and cultural erasure that is associated with globalization and “whitewashing.”

Here we aim to critically engage with the aesthetics of the material components of these culturally dominant landscapes and development paradigms as an extension of broader strategies driving gentrification. In this thematic section we will explore these literal and symbolic shifts in ownership in urban locations undergoing gentrification and similar forms of restructuring. Ryan Devlin draws from a recent trend of applying frameworks of urban informality to understand informal activities such as street vending in cities in the global North in his piece, “A focus on needs: toward a more nuanced understanding of inequality and urban informality in the global North”. In the context of Brooklyn, he proposes ways that urban governance might differentiate informal activities that are carried out for leisure and convenience of elite classes from those carried out as acts of social exclusion and protectionism of working class immigrants. Lisa Berglund’s article is similarly concerned with the ways that traditions of informal practices are often appropriated for capital accumulation in the context of gentrification in Detroit. In the piece “Excluded by design: informality versus tactical urbanism in the redevelopment of Detroit neighborhoods”, she explores the differential treatment and portrayal of sanctioned versus unsanctioned street venders and food trucks, through legislation and in popular media. Siobhan Gregory also focuses on the quickly changing urban core of Detroit. In her article, Authenticity and luxury branding in a renewing Detroit landscape, she investigates how luxury brands use imagery, graphic design, and copywriting to promote their products and services though place-based narratives of poverty and abandonment. Patrick Bond and Laura Browder continue the work of exploring historical narratives within the material artifacts of gentrification, in their piece “Deracialized nostalgia, reracialized community and truncated gentrification: capital and cultural flows in Richmond, Virginia and Durban, South Africa”. Their work discusses place marketing strategies that “remake history, without the memory” in two cities with difficult pasts of segregation undergoing rapid neighborhood change.

The aim of these pieces is to develop a discourse on how to better identify and track both subtle and deliberate signs of exclusion as a collection of symbolic gestures and material evidence found in the built environment. More specifically, the aesthetics of gentrification will be discussed in this work as a facilitator of the dominance of entrepreneurial, professionally-focused design interventions that work to frame, exploit, and erase poor or minority led communities. This collection of articles brings the focus of cultural geography, and specifically place-making strategies, into conversation with urban geography, urban planning, and anthropology scholarship. In doing so, the analysis of localized material aspects of gentrification are strengthened as they are related to broader processes of privatization and globalization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

References

• Freeman, Lance, 2006. There goes the ‘hood: views of gentrification from the ground up. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Hackworth, Jason, and Smith, Neil, 2001. The changing state of gentrification. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 92 (4), 464–477. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00172.
• Jonas, Andrew, and Wilson, David, 1999. The urban growth machine: critical perspectives, two decades later. 1st ed. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Marcuse, Peter, 1985. Gentrification, abandonment, and displacement: connections, causes, and policy responses in New York city. Washington University Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 28, 195–240.
• Slater, Tom, 2006. The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (4), 737–757. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00689.x.
• Smith, Neil, 2006. From gentrification to the revanchist city. In: The new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city, 206–227. New York: Routledge.
• Zukin, Sharon, 2011. Naked city: the death and life of authentic urban places. Reprint edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A focus on needs: toward a more nuanced understanding of inequality and urban informality in the global North

Ryan Thomas Devlin

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been an increase in work on urban informality in Northern cities. While this newfound focus is welcome, a problem arises when it comes to conceptualizing various practices under study. Specifically, I argue for the importance in differentiating the informality of need – defined here as practices undertaken to fulfill basic needs like housing and income generation – from the informality of desire – defined as activities that serve interests of leisure, aesthetics, and convenience. Using the case of the Red Hook food vendors in Brooklyn, New York, I show how ignoring needs can lead to imprecise conceptualizations, misunderstood intentions, and misread political subjectivity when it comes to informal actions. I move on to show how existing theories concerning informality in the North fail to provide tools for understanding the specific characteristics of needs-based informal practice. I close the paper by arguing that need-driven informality deserves its own set of conceptual tools, and I determine that by turning to Southern theory on informality and inequality, Northern scholars can open helpful new pathways for theory.

Introduction

Informal urbanism has long been associated with city life of the global South. Given the scale and scope of informality in the urban South, it should come as no surprise that most of the scholarship on informal urbanism emanates from this part of the world. That being said, scholars working in Southern cities have noted that informal practices are not tied to underdevelopment and not confined to the South (Yiftachel 2006; Watson 2013), and over the last few decades a growing body of literature within urban studies has emerged that focuses on informality in the North.

As it exists now, the literature is largely characterized by a sprawling collection of case studies concerning a wide variety of practices that break or bend laws regulating urban space. These include things like street vending (Devlin 2011; Villianatos 2014), community gardens (Mares and Peña 2010; Eizenberg 2012), public art activism (Merker 2010; Pask 2010; Przyblyski 2010), informal housing (Ward 2004; Giusti and Olivares 2012; Mukhija 2014; Durst 2016), and informal physical planning (Finn 2014; Lydon and Garcia 2015; Silva 2016) to name just a few areas of focus. Like ornithologists who just discovered an island replete with new bird species, Northern urbanists, having only recently “discovered” informality, are mostly working to identify, describe, and catalogue different examples of the practice, while largely neglecting the work of synthesis or theory-building. Even recent edited volumes that attempt to pull together studies on informality tend to include widely disparate examples of spatial practice, with the only real connection being that each example breaks or challenges a law regulating the use of space (Chase et al. 2008; Hou 2010; Mukhija and Loukaitou-Sideris 2014).

As studies of informality in the global North accumulate, a bit of conceptual ground clearing is in order. One important task involves differentiating and sorting the motley collection of practices currently under study in the North as “informality”. One of the most important areas in need of delineation involves the difference between the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: the aesthetics of neighborhood change
• 2 A focus on needs: toward a more nuanced understanding of inequality and urban informality in the global North
• 3 Excluded by design: informality versus tactical urbanism in the redevelopment of Detroit neighborhoods
• 4 Authenticity and luxury branding in a renewing Detroit landscape
• 5 Deracialized Nostalgia, reracialized community, and truncated gentrification: capital and cultural flows in Richmond, Virginia and Durban, South Africa
• Index