7 Key excerpts on "Gentrification"

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  eBook - ePub

  Globalizing Cities

  A Brief Introduction

  • Mark Abrahamson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7

  Gentrification

  Gentrification is usually defined as the process by which higher status residents replace lower status residents in a neighborhood, or other geographical area (such as a street, series of streets, census tract, etc.). To be more specific, analysts have viewed Gentrification as a change in the social class composition of a place over time, compared to other places in the same area.1 Central city neighborhoods have been a major site for such changes, but the same types of transitions have also become increasingly common in the inner suburbs of many cities as well.

  The conventional definition of Gentrification, presented above, emphasizes changes in the characteristics of residents, but it can also refer to changes in the retail composition of a geographical area in which art galleries, gourmet food shops, and clothing boutiques replace locally owned bakeries, barber shops, grocers, etc. The reinvestment of capital into the retail sector of a neighborhood typically follows residential Gentrification, but the temporal relationship between them can be reversed.

  While as we will note there is some disagreement about the consequences of Gentrification, there is little debate about its growing prevalence, especially in major (i.e., global) city-regions. Theoretically, Sharon Zukin has proposed two major explanations for why Gentrification occurs, and why it is increasing.2 The first, consumption-side, notes the growing appeal of city versus suburban living to young professionals and executives and the advantages of living closer to work in downtown areas. Such lifestyle attractions are the basis of consumption-side explanations for Gentrification, and why it frequently targets inner-city neighborhoods. The second explanation stresses how depressed land values invite investment. It is the spread between actual and potential land values that are the basis of production-side explanations, and they also focus upon deteriorated inner city neighborhoods that were formerly manufacturing centers as Gentrification targets. (Production-side is also frequently referred to as the rent gap theory, initially associated with Neil Smith.3

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  Planetary Gentrification

  • Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin, Ernesto López-Morales(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Theoretical enquiries by means of constant shifting between abstraction and concrete realities inevitably focus on how changing realities influence the refinement, enrichment or abandonment of original concepts. Gentrification has been no exception. It has gone through many rounds of debate on how it can be understood in, and applied to, a particular space and time other than those associated with its original conceptualization. While it is important to pay attention to the complexity of urban processes influenced by a set of on-going and historical contingencies of economic processes, socio-political relations, cultural norms and regulatory systems, it is equally important to avoid excessive conflation of urban processes by paying attention to both ‘order and simplicity’ (Clark 2005), as we do in our enquiry into the process of Gentrification.

  The conceptual definition of Gentrification has been evolving over time and space, reflecting the expanding epistemological horizon over how the urban is defined and what new trends of urbanization have emerged. Gentrification in its first conceptual appearance was largely referring to the take-over of working-class neighbourhoods by middle-or upper-income households through residential rehabilitation (Glass 1964a). This focus on residential rehabilitation and inner-city location remained for some time. Neil Smith, in his 1982 article on Gentrification and uneven development, defined Gentrification as:

  the process by which working class residential neighborhoods are rehabilitated by middle class homebuyers, landlords, and professional developers…The term Gentrification expresses the obvious class character of the process and for that reason, although it may not be technically a ‘gentry’ that moves in but rather middle class white professionals, it is empirically most realistic.

  (pp. 139–40, n. 1)

  For quite some time, residential upgrading or rehabilitation remained as a core characteristic of Gentrification, and therefore neighbourhood change through demolition and new build development was differ­entiated from Gentrification. Smith (1982) made this ‘theoretical distinction between Gentrification and redevelopment’, arguing that the latter ‘involves not rehabilitation of old structures but the construction of new buildings on previously developed land’ (ibid.). For some, the preoccupation with the key characteristics outlined by Ruth Glass (1964a), that is, incremental residential rehabilitation in inner-city working-class neighbourhoods resulting in displacement, has led to overly sensitive approaches to contextualizing Gentrification (for example, Maloutas 2011; see a critique of this in the introduction to Lees, Shin and López-Morales 2015). Warning against dogmatic adherence to concepts abstracted out of non-necessary relations, Eric Clark stated in 2005, ‘being necessary for explaining a particular case is different from being a necessary relation basic to the wider process. Central location may be one important cause of the process in some cases, but abstracting this relation to define the process leads to a chaotic conception of the process, arbitrarily lumping together centrality with Gentrification’ (p. 259).

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  Gentrification in a Global Context

  • Rowland Atkinson, Gary Bridge, Rowland Atkinson, Gary Bridge(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter, Gentrification is seen as a process of inner-city neighbourhood change by a simultaneous physical upgrading of dilapidated residential buildings and the displacement of the original population by more wealthy newcomers. The direct relationship between capital investment and displacement at the level of individual properties forms the nexus of Gentrification. Property rehabilitation associated with the arrival of more wealthy inhabitants is likely to have wide implications for neighbourhood change. Residential Gentrification is accompanied by the changing nature of restaurants, shops and other services located in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the side effects and accompanying features of Gentrification should not be mixed with the core issue of the process, which is residential refurbishment and population displacement. Some authors like Cooper and Morpeth (1999) speak about ‘commercial Gentrification’ in Prague. They mean central city upgrading associated with commercial functions. This process is in this chapter termed commercialisation, while Gentrification is restricted to the residential field.

  In this chapter, Gentrification will be associated with established residential neighbourhoods, where old property is being refurbished. There can be new development on single lots or individual buildings extensions. Construction of large condominium complexes significantly contributes to urban restructuring through physical and social change, however, it is not considered here as Gentrification.

  The other crucial aspect of Gentrification is displacement of original low social status inhabitants by a more wealthy population, often through eviction. Despite a number of unlawful cases of forced evictions in post-communist cities, tenants enjoy formal protection. Eviction is not a common mechanism behind displacement and Gentrification. In rental stock, landlords interested in property refurbishment with an aim to lease or sell it for higher returns usually have to offer tenants replacement flats within city limits and attempt to come to an agreement to speed along their removal. This can be realised for the whole building, which is usually the work of institutional investors and developers. Some people can be pushed out from a revitalising area by rising prices and they usually move to more affordable housing in different parts of the city. Rent regulations, however, up to now largely prohibited such impacts. The replacement is often going on through voluntary moves out from the neighbourhood by a variety of people, while the new population consists of those who can afford to live there. Such a mechanism can gradually lead to the substantial shift in the aggregate composition of population.

  Gentrifying neighbourhoods are often transformed simultaneously by a number of processes that contribute to general revitalisation. In the post-communist urban context the functional transformation from residential to commercial uses often goes hand in hand with the conversion of dilapidated tenement housing to luxury renovated condominiums. Neighbourhoods are therefore often transformed by both commercialisation and Gentrification at the same time.

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  Urban Politics

  Cities and Suburbs in a Global Age

  • Myron A. Levine(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Gentrification refers to the upgrading of a core urban neighborhood that results when young professionals (and, in some cities, well-off retirees as well) place new value on city living. The term itself denotes the arrival of a relatively well-heeled “gentry” who once may have lived in the suburbs or the countryside (or even in other city neighborhoods) but who now have discovered the virtues of living close to the job, cultural, and entertainment opportunities of cities with an active downtown.

  Over the years, urban commentators have used a number of synonyms for Gentrification: neighborhood renewal, inner-city revitalization, urban rebirth, neighborhood reinvestment, the back-to-the-city movement, and, more critically, urban invasion.3 Strictly speaking, Gentrification denotes a neighborhood’s residential upgrading and transformation. More broadly used, however, the term “Gentrification” can also refer to an area’s commercial revival—the opening of a new shopping galleria, a multiplex cinema, or a number of upscale fashion boutiques and cafés (Figure 4.1 ) in a previously overlooked section of the city. On New York’s City’s Lower East Side, East Village, and the Bowery, trendy cocktail restaurants, hipster bars, and music venues and other nightlife destinations occupy the sites of former factories and working-class “saloons.”4 In New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and cities across the nation, the opening of a local Starbucks or even a Whole Foods supermarket has come to signify the upscaling and transformation of a once-neglected inner-city neighborhood.

  Figure 4.1 Gentrification. Outdoor Tables and a Trendy Cafe Scene in a Once-Gritty Oakland, California, Neighborhood .

  Source: Photo by cdrin / Shutterstock.com .

  Clearly, not all cities and neighborhoods experience substantial Gentrification. Gentrification is most extensive in corporate headquarters cities that offer high-paying jobs and a variety of cultural and nightlife opportunities, that is, in cities that have found their “fit” in the global economy. In declining Rustbelt centers like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, Gentrification is more limited and is concentrated in only a small handful of neighborhoods while other nearby neighborhoods continue to decline. In more troubled cities, urban deterioration continues to seep from troubled neighborhoods into abutting areas; the few islands of Gentrification stand out as exceptions.5

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  Doing Global Urban Research

  • John Harrison, Michael Hoyler(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Finally, it is important for researchers to think of why they carry out Gentrification studies. Thinking about the purpose of one’s research is closely related with the question of ‘how to’ do global Gentrification research. On the one hand, there is the urgency of situating our understanding of Gentrification in the concrete web of urban life, to give meaning to the struggles of displacees, and to think of the generality based on our own observations and review of empirical studies. With displacement of existing land users at its heart, Gentrification research is essentially bound up with the question of social injustice (Lees, 2014; Smith, 1996). Devising local action plans to realize social justice and progressive urbanism requires the identification of place-specificities that produce injustice, while having a longer-term perspective on what cities after capitalism would look like. Gentrification research means to learn from the real struggles of displacees who open up new avenues of innovative anti-Gentrification measures (Derickson and Routledge, 2015). This process of learning is what constitutes knowledge co-production in Gentrification research, which would bring Gentrification studies out of the entanglements about definitional disputes (Slater, 2006). Only then can we begin to think of place-specific strategies to fight urban injustice which is in part generated by Gentrification. Global Gentrification research, in this regard, is to inform locally embedded endogenous struggles against displacement in order for wider cross-regional alliances and solidarity to be formed so that social justice and cities after capitalism can be imagined collectively at planetary scale.

  Notes

  1. This type of displacement may result in the scarcity of remaining affordable housing units, preventing people from moving out of their current neighbourhoods even if their neighbourhoods experience rent hikes. Area-based poverty concentration may be one of the outcomes of exclusionary displacement.

  2. Mega-Gentrification is also increasingly popular in the Global North with the rise of mega-displacement; for example see Lees (2014) for the Gentrification of council housing estates in London.

  3.

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  Gentrification

  • Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  How, in the large context of changing social geographies, are we to distinguish adequately between the rehabilitation of nineteenth-century housing, the construction of new condominium towers, the opening of festival markets to attract local and not so local tourists, the proliferation of wine bars—and boutiques for everything—and the construction of modern and postmodern office buildings employing thousands of professionals, all looking for a place to live?... Gentrification is no longer about a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market but has become the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavour: the class remake of the central urban landscape.

  (N. Smith 1996a: 39)

  New-build residential developments, nevertheless, stand in stark contrast to the renovated Victorian and Georgian landscapes of classic Gentrification texts (e.g., those of Glass [1964] and N. Smith [1982]). Th is has led housing researchers such as Christine Lambert and Martin Boddy (2002: 20) to question whether new-build, city center residential landscapes can in fact be characterized as Gentrification at all:

  [W]e would question whether the sort of new housing development and conversion described in Bristol and other second tier cities, or indeed the development of London’s Docklands, can, in fact, still be characterised as “Gentrification”—post-recession or otherwise. There are parallels: new geographies of neighbourhood change, new middle class fractions colonising new areas of central urban space, and attachment to a distinctive lifestyle and urban aesthetic. But “Gentrification”, as originally coined, referred primarily to a rather different type of “new middle class”, buying up older, often “historic” individual housing units and renovating and restoring them for their own use—and in the process driving up property values and driving out former, typically lower income working class residents. Discourses of Gentrification and the Gentrification literature itself do represent a useful starting point for the analysis of the sort of phenomenon discussed above. We would conclude, however, that to describe these processes as Gentrification is stretching the term and what it set out to describe too far.

  Debating these positions, Davidson and Lees (2005) drew up the cases for and against new-build Gentrification (see Box 4.1 ).

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  Gentrification of the City

  • Neil Smith, Peter Williams(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is important to understand the present extent of Gentrification in order to comprehend the real character and importance of the restructuring process. If by Gentrification we mean, strictly, the residential rehabilitation of working-class neighborhoods, then, in the United States (where the process is probably most dramatic), it shows up clearly in data at the census tract level but not yet at the scale of the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (Chall 1984, Schaffer & Smith 1984). For a number of cities, income, rent and other indicators from the 1980 census show clear evidence of Gentrification in central tracts. However, the process has not yet become significant enough to reverse or even seriously counter the established trends toward residential suburbanization. Although this is an interesting empirical pattern, alone it hardly amounts to a secular change in patterns of urban development. If, however, we eschew the narrow ideology fostered around Gentrification, and see the process in relation to a number of broader if still less “visible” urban developments; if, in other words, we examine the momentum of the process, not a static empirical count, then a coherent pattern emerges of a far more significant restructuring of urban space.

  Before examining the precise trends that are leading toward the restructuring process, it is important to note that the question of spatial scale is central to any relevant explanation. We can say that the restructuring of the urban-space economy is a product of the uneven development of capitalism or of the operation of a rent gap, the result of a developing service economy or of changed life-style preferences, the suburbanization of capital or the devalorization of capital invested in the urban built environment. It is, of course, a product of all of these forces, in some way, but to say so tells us very little. These processes occur at several different spatial scales, and although previous attempts at explanation have tended to fasten on one or the other trend, they may not in fact be mutually exclusive. Where authors have attempted to incorporate more than one such trend, they have generally been content to list these as factors. Yet this version of “factor analysis” is quite unambitious. The whole question of explanation hinges not upon identifying factors but upon understanding the relative importance of, and relation between, so-called “factors.” In part, this is a question of scale.

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