Gender and Gentrification

Winifred Curran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367362027
• eBook ISBN: 9781317270171
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explores how gentrification often reinforces traditional gender roles and spatial constructions during the process of reshaping the labour, housing, commercial and policy landscapes of the city. It focuses in particular on the impact of gentrification on women and racialized men, exploring how gentrification increases the cost of living, serves to narrow housing choices, make social reproduction more expensive, and limits the scope of the democratic process. This has resulted in the displacement of many of the phenomena once considered to be the emancipatory hallmarks of gentrification, such as gayborhoods. The book explores the role of gentrification in the larger social processes through which gender is continually reconstituted. In so doing, it makes clear that the negative effects of gentrification are far more wide-ranging than popularly understood, and makes recommendations for renewed activism and policy that places gender at its core.

This is valuable reading for students, researchers, and activists interested in social and economic geography, city planning, gender studies, urban studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

Despite an extensive academic literature, and even more extensive, if often inaccurate, press coverage, there is much about gentrification that remains hidden. As Schulman (2012: 28) comments, “Since the mirror of gentrification is representation in popular culture, increasingly only the gentrified get their stories told in mass ways. They look in the mirror and think it’s a window.” Gender is one of these often hidden aspects. For much of the over 50 years since Ruth Glass coined the term, the debate has focused on whether the cause of gentrification is primarily the result of the production of new urban spaces to satisfy capital’s need for accumulation, or rather, the result of an increased demand for urban space from the new middle class in an era of deindustrialization (see the back and forth between Smith (1979; 1987) and Ley (1986, 1987) and the degree to which displacement actually occurs when a neighborhood is gentrified (see Atkinson 2000, Freeman and Braconi 2002, Freeman 2006, Newman and Wyly 2006; Slater 2006, Wyly et al. 2010; Vigdor 2002).

Around the 50th anniversary of gentrification as a term, there have been any number of reevaluations of what it means and where research on gentrification should be headed. Lees (2016) has called for increased attention to race and ethnicity, especially in the Global South, and indeed for more attention to gentrification in the Global South more generally (Lees et al. 2015). Brown-Saracino (2016) calls for more attention to what Lees (2003) termed super-gentrification, and calls on researchers to explore the connection between gentrification and the increasing concentration of poverty (though, of course, Smith (1996) did this work by explicitly placing gentrification within the process of uneven development). Much recent work has also called into question the very importance of gentrification as a process within larger urban trends and the continuation of suburbanization in the U.S. and elsewhere. Zukin (2016) terms it “unimportant” in this context. Studies which focus on quantitative measures to locate gentrification, such as those by NYU’s Furman Center (Dastrup et al. 2015) and the Philadelphia Federal Reserve (Ding et al. 2015) find it limited to fewer neighborhoods than most qualitative studies would suggest. City planners in Chicago have told the anti-gentrification activists in the Pilsen neighborhood (with whom I have been working for 12 years) that gentrification is not a problem.

This book is my contribution to the debate on where we have been and where we should go. Following Smith (2002), I see gentrification as a global urban process. I am far less concerned with how we define or quantify it than I am with contesting gentrification, preventing and ameliorating its negative consequences. Gentrification is producing a highly unequal city in which a redistribution of resources to certain up and coming neighborhoods results in the increasing ossification of poverty in disinvested neighborhoods. In this focus on effects, I argue that the gendered nature of these effects has been too little examined since the flurry of work around gender and gentrification in the 1980s and early 1990s (e.g. Markusen 1981; Rose 1984; Bondi 1991a; Bondi 1999). Notable exceptions to this trend are Kern 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2013; van den Berg 2012, 2013. When gender is addressed in the research, it tends to be with women as gentrifiers rather than as the gentrified. The willful invisibility to gender, both in research and in citation practices, in the greater body of gentrification research reinforces the patriarchal practices that allow for the continuation of those gendered effects and helps to foreclose potential avenues for resistance.

While gender is not necessarily central to the definition of gentrification, it has been central to gentrification’s effects in a patriarchal, heteronormative system. For the purpose of this book, I understand gentrification as the influx of upper income uses into previously working class neighborhoods resulting in the displacement of those working-class users. I like Schulman’s (2012: 14) definition of gentrification as a “concrete replacement process. Physically, it is an urban phenomena: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups.” This definition recognizes the multiplicity of changes that this class transition accomplishes. Gentrification represents not just a change in the housing market. It forestalls the possibility of other ways of being for the populations in urban neighborhoods before these are “rediscovered.”

Displacement is central to the experience of gentrification, though as more recent research understands, this displacement need not always be physical (Anguelovski 2015; Davidson 2008, 2009; Shaw and Hagemans 2015). The displacements of gentrification are central to the theme of this book. Class is gendered, raced, aged, and abled. In “reclaiming” parts of the city that had previously experienced disinvestment and displacing the populations who lived in those areas, gentrification exposes the fundamental inequalities of modern society and urban planning. Gender is foremost among these, though it is rarely recognized as such in the gentrification literature. The goal of this book is to daylight the many and varied effects of gentrification on the social construction of gender, for “while gender identities may be fluid, diverse and ultimately impossible to generalise, particular modes of gender power may be named and traced with some precision at a relatively general level” (Brown 2006 quoted in Jupp 2014: 1311). I contend that these effects are overwhelmingly negative, reinforcing gendered divisions of labor, privatizing public life, and atomizing groups within the city. These gendered effects are so common they have become banal, uncommented upon in most gentrification research. My goal in putting gender at the forefront is to raise a feminist consciousness and critique that can create solidarity and strength, building resistance that recognizes common violences and the structures that produce them (Parker 2016b: 2).

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Gender was central to early debates about the causes and visible effects of gentrification, and some theorized that gentrification could be emancipatory. Markusen (1981) went so far as to argue that gentrification was a result of the breakdown in the patriarchal household. Gentrification, so theorists argued, had the potential to allow for a more flexible and visible role for groups such as women and gays in the urban environment, a reworking of gendered assumptions, and thus a fundamental change in urban form (e.g. Caulfield 1989; Rose 1984). Evidence of this sort of demographic shift was partly supported by work by Smith (1996), Rose (1989) and Mills (1988) who found the following key features in gentrified neighborhoods in New York, Toronto, and Vancouver, respectively: a female population increasing faster than the male population, a high proportion of young and single women, a high proportion of professional women, high levels of academic credentials, a high proportion of dual-earner couples, but few families, and a postponement of marriage and childbearing (Warde 1991). In Smith’s (1996) New York study, the only census tracts studied that did not conform to this pattern were those in which gay men dominated the gentrification process.

Urban change paralleled changes in the role of women, with gentrification following the influx of women into the work force, especially the growing numbers of highly educated women in high-end service industry jobs. Many theorists (e.g. Beauregard 1986; Bondi 1991a; Markusen 1981; Rose 1984; Wekerle 1984) argued that the move of women into the labor force, and the concomitant search for urban neighborhoods that could accommodate women’s dual roles at home and at work and provide the necessary services, accounted, at least in part, for the existence of gentrification. In this conception, women were not only potential beneficiaries of gentrification, but drivers of the process. Wekerle (1984: 11) argues that women were a major impetus for the revitalization of the North American city, that they both needed and gained more from an urban location since “women use the city more intensively than men and for a wider range of functions: work, childrearing, shopping, cultural facilities and neighborhood participation. Women also gain more time since they show the greatest decline in travel-to-work time after a move from the suburbs to the city.” These benefits accrued to women despite the fact that the city was still very much a place planned by and for men. What would be required then, in light of the fact that these demographic and economic shifts were not going away, was a major change in the land use patterns of cities.

This change in land use patterns and gendered divisions of labor has not yet been realized. Markusen (1981) argued that just as the dominance of the single-family home, its separation from the workplace, and its distance from the urban core was as much the result of patriarchal organization as it was the result of the capitalist organization of work, gentrification marked a remaking of urban space that reflected changes in both patriarchy and capitalism. The rise of both women and gays in the managerial classes was necessary to creating the demand for more central urban locations. Two-income households were both a by-product of the rise of the new middle class (Ley 1986) and a requirement to afford the increasing costs of urban housing. While the structure of work changed with deindustrialization, urban spatial structure was slow to respond. As Markusen (1981: 33) recognized,

its existence continues to constrain the possibilities open to women and men seeking to form new types of households and to reorder the household division of labor. The fact that housing, the primary workplace for social reproduction, is also the major asset for many people tends to reinforce the single-family, patriarchal shape of housing and neighborhoods.

These limited choices affect all women and caregivers. The inefficiency of this polarized organization of urban space, individualizing child care, travel to work, home maintenance, meal preparation and so on, increases the burdens that disproportionately fall on women and others in caring roles (Markusen 1981; Mackenzie and Rose 1983; Hayden 2002). Empirical work on the gendered practices of gentrifier households found no difference from their suburban counterparts (Bondi 1999; Mills 1988). The materiality of cities still overwhelmingly reflects the fundamentally gendered assumptions that formed them. This is evident in everything from zoning plans and housing types to, as I have written about elsewhere, snow plowing, where major streets and the city center are prioritized over the side streets where schools and daycare centers are often located (Curran 2014). Rather than contest these assumptions, gentrification has largely solidified them, further exacerbating the competition for the best urban spaces in ways that build upon the inequalities of the industrial city that gentrification is remaking.

Gender is just one of the lenses through which we can view how gentrification reinforces urban inequalities, but given how important it is to the shaping of urban space, it has been profoundly under-studied, and the work that has been done is under-cited in the literature. Attention to gender in the process of gentrification has tended to focus on the role of gentrifiers rather than on the effects of those who find themselves gentrified. This was true of the original burst of interest in the role of women in gentrification in the 1980s and in more recent work on women and gentrification in the (excellent) work of Leslie Kern (2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2013) on the way in which gendered assumptions have been reinforced in the gentrification of Toronto (see van den Berg’s (2013) work on Rotterdam for a partial exception).

But while gentrification allowed access to a panoply of urban benefits for those middle class women who could afford them, it is also true that women were those most likely to be displaced by the process (Rose 1984; Bondi 1991b). Women are the most disadvantaged members of already disadvantaged communities (Jupp 2014). The polarization on the landscape that gentrification represents parallels the increasing polarization in the labor force, with women concentrated in low wage labor and the gender wage gap high globally (Grossman 2014). Women are also more likely to be single parents. Responsibility for children continues to reduce earning power in what has come to be known as the motherhood penalty (Budig et al. 2012). And the increasing population of elderly are overwhelmingly female, living on fixed incomes and vulnerable to displacement (Bondi 1991b). Failure to recognize the gendered nature of displacement is not simply an oversight; it is an obfuscation of the process of gentrification and what it is actually accomplishing on the ground.

While “gender” may be a contested and fragmented field of analysis, it undoubtedly remains a felt reality within everyday lives (Jupp 2014). My goal here is to take an intersectional approach to the relationship between gender and urban space through the specific process of gentrification in order to argue that we cannot fully understand the effects of gentrification if we are not looking at the way in which gender intersects with race, class, sexuality, immigration status, age and ability to disadvantage and displace populations now deemed undesirable in the urban core. As Bondi (1991a) has argued, the refusal to consider the centrality and complexity of gender has hampered the gentrification literature’s attempt to move beyond the dichotomies of production and consumption, structure and agency, economy and culture. This does not mean an exclusive focus on women; I am interested in how gendered assumptions have served to reinforce race, class, age, and other inequalities on the urban landscape.

There is an extensive literature on gentrification, an extensive literature on women in the city, and to some extent, on gender in planning, but these literatures have too rarely been in conversation with each other. This book is an attempt to further that conversation so that we can achieve changes on the ground that realize some of the emancipatory potential once hoped for gentrification without the social, cultural, economic, and physical displacement gentrification invariably brings.

Mackenzie (1988) argued that the process of gender constitution and the process of constituting urban environments are inextricably linked. In her historic look at Canadian cities, she found that periods of urban transition coincided with periods of gender role transition. Industrialization separated the traditionally unified sphere of home and work, bringing women into public spaces in a way that was deemed dangerous. The solution, suburban homes that separated women and children from the temptations of the city, became less sustainable as women were forced into the workplace as the costs of domestic work and raising a family became ever more expensive. This dual role then became the problem (Mackenzie 1988). Gentrification was seen as a solution to the problem of the separation of work and home (Warde 1991). But as with the previous “solutions,” this brought its own problems.

Gentrification offered a market-oriented, individualized, privatized spatial solution to the problem of work-life balance. With urban planning failing to catch up to the lived experiences of urban dwellers, those who could afford to found more advantageous spaces in which to attempt the balance, “rediscovering” inner city neighborhoods which offered easy access to downtown jobs and other amenities. But this privatized solution further served to disadvantage working class women, people of color, immigrant communities, seniors, people with disabilities, and other less advantaged urban populations. Increasing demand for urban housing made it less affordable. The condo boom reduced the supply of rental housing. The transformation of public housing into mixed-income housing displaced the majority of public housing residents from the redeveloped projects. The domestic labor of women, never sufficiently valued by the market, was replaced by low-income labor, often done by working class women, many of them immigrants, in sectors like child care, house cleaning, and food preparation. Private security patrols and more aggressive policing are supposed to make gentrifiers, especially women, feel safe even as these policies criminalize people of color, especially youth. The problem of urban education leads to ever more extensive private schools and charter schools that starve the public system. Urban governance is dominated by private groups that are both profoundly undemocratic and dominated by men and masculinist agendas. Urban safe havens such as gayborhoods become commodified and end up displacing the communities they were created to serve. The inequalities created by these privatizations are the urban problems of the 21st century and the topic of this book.

While women have long organized around the struggles for housing, child care, and neighborhood preservation, these movements have often been neglected in the literature of urban social movements (e.g. Castells 1983). Organizing around gentrification offered the possibility to understand urban space as both a capitalist and patriarchal problem. Rose (1984) offered this possibility in her seminal article “Rethinking gentrification: Beyond the uneven development of Marxist urban theory.” Rose rightly argued that it is essential to understand the relationships between gentrification and the reproduction of labor power and people in order to overcome the polarizations created by gentrification. So, for example, “gentrification by employed women with children may be a deliberately sought out environmental solution to a set of problems that are inherently social problems” (Rose 1984: 66, emphasis in original). In other words, gentrifiers are struggling with similar constraints as those they displace, though of course, with different resources to cope with these constraints. Thus, “the moderate-income women’s environmental solution to the problems created by her dual role exacerbates the problems of the low-income woman who is displaced to other neighborhoods which are more environmentally restrictive and less socially supportive” (Rose 1984: 66). Rose argued that we need to see gentrifiers as more than just the bearers of a process determined independently of them; we can see the needs they have in common with those with whom they compete for space. Failure to see these commonalities forestalls the political possibilities that these shared challenges could create by forging alliances between gentrifiers and those they could potentially displace. What alternatives could these alliances develop to challenge the limits of urban form?

Rose proposed this possibility over 30 years ago, and yet we have seen very little recognition of the common struggles and political potential this understanding of gentrification could provide. As McDowell (1983: 69) recognized over 30 years ago, “[t]he majority of women in the city are defined in relationship to men within a locality instead of in relation to other women in different areas.” I argue, following Bondi (1991a), that it is the refusal of much of the gentrification literature to recognize the role of gender that limits our conceptions of how gentrification might be replaced by more genuine strategies for urban revitalization. Class and gender are co-constituted; gender inequality and particular visions of the masculine and feminine are “core ingredient[s] of class formation and consciousness” (Hart 1989, quoted in Bondi 1991a: 193). Bringing gender into the gentrification debates goes beyond recognizing the role of, and effects on, women, to recognize the “structures of patriarchy” (Walby 1989, quoted in Bondi 1991a: 196) to which gentrification contributes. Bondi suggests exploring the gender (as well as class, race, and ethnicity) ideologies of those involved in gentrification, from architects to those displaced, as a way forward. Her own research (Bondi 1999) indicates that gentrification is not nearly the emancipatory process once hoped. In her study of two inner-urban and one suburban neighborhood in Edinburgh, she finds no evidence of variations in gender practices. While a majority of those interviewed expressed egalitarian views about gender and employment, the raising of children challenged these aspirations towards gender equity. The environmental solution of gentrification has not solved the social problem of an inadequate infrastructure for care. Whatever remaking of urban space gentrification has accomplished, it has not even begun to address this fundamental inequality.

Gentrification has become, as Smith (2002) argued, a globalized urban strategy; it represents the leading edge of change at the urban center. That is why a thorough understanding of its consequences is so vital. This does not mean that gentrification happens the same way in every city. Place matters, and local policy matters enormously. But gentrification produces urban landscapes that convey the same aspirations and reproduce the same inequalities (Smith 2002). The mobility of policy means that policies that accomplish gentrification can be replicated in wildly different geographic contexts (Mountz and Curran 2009). While the examples cited throughout the book are largely, though not exclusively, from North America and Europe, where gentrification research has previously been focused, the processes that have accomplished gentrification are decidedly global.

This ubiquity has led to what Schulman (2012) calls “the gentrification of the mind,” in which mainstream consumerism has come to replace a more transformative radicalism (see also Paton 2014). Among both planners and academics, we are perennially seeing gentrification talked about in the same way, often by the same people, to the exclusion of other voices. We are presented the false choice between gentrification and urban decline (DeFilippis 2004), with gentrification presented as the only way to attract the necessary capital to accomplish urban upgrading. This has been enshrined in urban policy. As Schulman (2012: 27–8) argues,

Spiritually, gentrification is the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity- the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together. Urbanity is what makes cities great, because the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real makes innovative solutions and experiments possible. In this way, cities historically have provided acceptance, opportunity, and a place to cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Housing
• 3. Labor
• 4. Social reproduction
• 5. Safety
• 6. Queer spaces
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Index