Gentrification in a Global Context

Rowland Atkinson, Gary Bridge, Rowland Atkinson, Gary Bridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134330645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Gentrification, a process of class neighbourhood upgrading, is being identified in a broader range of urban contexts throughout the world. This book throws new light and evidence to bear on a subject that deeply divides commentators on its worth and social costs given its ability to physically improve areas but also to displace indigenous inhabitants. Gentrification in a Global Perspective brings together the most recent theoretical and empirical research on gentrification at a global scale. Each author gives an overview of gentrification in their country so that each chapter retains a unique approach but tackles a common theme within a shared framework. The main feature of the book is a critical and well-written set of chapters on a process that is currently undergoing a resurgence of interest and one that shows no sign of abating.

1
Introduction

Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge

Globalisation and the new urban colonialism

Gentrification is now global. It is no longer confined to western cities. Processes of neighbourhood change and colonisation represented by an increasing concentration of the new middle classes can be found in Shanghai as well as Sydney, or Seattle. Nor is it now limited to the ‘global’ cities, the focus of much of the gentrification debate to date. It can now be found in new regional centres such as Leeds (United Kingdom) and Barcelona (Spain) as well as capital cities previously not associated with the process such as Moscow, Brussels and Berlin. All of this is to say nothing of the now rampant and almost exhaustive process of gentrification in cities like San Francisco, London, New York, and Melbourne. For some gentrification is now no longer even confined to cities, with examples of growing rural gentrification in the UK (Philips 1993; D.Smith 2003), or upstate New York.

The geographical spread of gentrification or ‘gentrification generalised’ as Neil Smith has recently called it (Smith 2002) raises questions about how much gentrification is a part of globalisation, involving, in this case, the growth of an international professional managerial class and the new or rehabilitated residential enclaves which they choose to colonise. To what extent is gentrification an important component for city governments of wider ‘regeneration’ strategies involving commercial or prestigious flagship arts of sporting facilities—what Monje and Vicario in this book call ‘the Guggenheim effect’ in the wake of Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao? Alternatively how does the fact that gentrification has moved into very different urban contexts—rapidly urbanising, post-colonial, post communist, or communo/capitalist all overlaid by a diversity of cultural and religious forms—inflect, or indeed generate, a very different process? Is global gentrification hallmarked by its cultural, national or regional specificities?

A further set of questions is raised by these contextual details when pitched at the global scale. To what extent is gentrification a global phenomenon, with diverse causes and characteristics, or a phenomenon of globalisation, conceived as a process of capital expansion, uneven urban development and neighbourhood changes in ‘new’ cities? At the very least these questions raise a much wider research agenda than has often been presupposed by numerous local case studies at the neighbourhood and city scales in past years.

The current nature and extent of gentrification raises questions not just about its interrelations with globalisation but also its manifestation as a form of new urban colonialism. The geographical spread of gentrification over the last twenty years has been reminiscent of earlier waves of colonial and mercantile expansion, itself predicated on gaps in economic development at the national scale. It has moved into new countries and cities of the global ‘south’ but has also now cascaded down the urban hierarchies of regions within the urban north where it has been established for much longer. In short, gentrification appears to have migrated centrifugally from the metropoles of North America, Western Europe and Australasia. This has happened at the same time as market reform, greater market permeability and population migration have promoted internal changes in the economies of countries not previously associated with gentrification.

Contemporary gentrification has elements of colonialism as a cultural force in its privileging of whiteness, as well as the more class-based identities and preferences in urban living. In fact not only are the new middle-class gentrifiers predominantly white but the aesthetic and cultural aspects of the process assert a white Anglo appropriation of urban space and urban history.

The colonial aspects of gentrification are also evident through the universalising of certain forms of (de)regulation. There is the obvious spread of market discipline, such as the privatisation of housing markets in ex-communist countries for example. The neighbourhood transitions that result are accompanied, or indeed sometimes led by, an expansionist neo-liberalism in public policy that often accentuates the social divisions between gentrifiers and the displaced. As Hammel and Wyly argue in this book, these policies have resulted in a kind of neo-colonialism in the US context.

Gentrification in a global context also has the aspect of colonialism as the universalisation of forms of public administration. There is a trend towards urban governments around the world, of whatever particular political complexion, adopting gentrification as a form of urban regeneration policy broadly connected with an entrepreneurial style of urban governance (Harvey 1989a) and a focus on the middle classes as the new saviour of the city. As Neil Smith has argued, gentrification as urban policy has been tied to a whole range of ‘revanchist’ public policy measures (such as zero tolerance for the homeless in New York) that represents the elite re-taking the urban core (Smith 1996).

At the neighbourhood level itself poor and vulnerable residents often experience gentrification as a process of colonisation by the more privileged classes. Stories of personal housing dislocation and loss, distended social networks, ‘improved’ local services out of sync with local needs and displacement have always been the darker underbelly of a process which, for city boosters, has represented something of a saviour for post-industrial cities (Atkinson 2003b). Again Neil Smith (1996) has long argued that the symbolic and practical implications of the movement of the gentrification ‘frontier’ are profound and have had enormous implications for the fate and status of the colonised.

Those who come to occupy prestigious central city locations frequently have the characteristics of a colonial elite. They often live in exclusive residential enclaves and are supported by a domestic and local service class. Gentrifiers are employed in what Gouldner (1979) called ‘new class’ occupations, and are marked out by their cosmopolitanism. Indeed in many locations, especially in excommunist European and east Asian countries, they often are western ex-patriots employed by transnational corporations to open up the markets of the newly emerging economies.

We suggest that debates emerging in gentrification research also capture the degree to which the ‘colonial rule’ of gentrification can be sustained in some of its outposts and at its margins. Twenty years ago Damaris Rose coined the term ‘marginal gentrifier’ to capture some of the variability of profiles and motives of those in the gentrification process (in her case poorer female lone parents) (Rose 1984). Now the sheer extent of gentrification raises questions about the gentrifier and neighbourhood types involved, especially away from the core cities and locations, calling for an expanded imagination and nuanced reading of the profile and contextual unravelling of the process. This has led to discussions about the emerging differences of provincial forms of gentrification and instances where the gentrification aesthetic has a weaker link to class identity (Dutton in this volume and Bridge 2003). In other words, the wider social, economic, political and cultural benchmarks within which gentrification has been interpreted have themselves shifted dramatically in a quarter of a century.

The range of these questions mark out the expanded terrain of this volume. It collects the writings of gentrification researchers from around the globe to assemble a comprehensive overview of its emerging forms and current conceptualisations. The book contains contributions from Australia, Canada, Japan, England, Spain, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Argentina, Germany, East European cities and the US. We include established scholars and voices that represent a new generation of gentrification researchers and which testify to the continued strength and relevance of gentrification research.

Forty years of gentrification ication research

The range of perspectives included in this volume is just the latest in a research area now entering its fifth decade. It is exactly forty years since the term ‘gentrification’ was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964. It is worth returning to Glass’s original definition as a way of judging just what has happened to gentrification and gentrification research in the subsequent four decades:

One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes, upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages -two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Large Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period—which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation—have been upgraded once again. Nowadays, many of these houses are being subdivided into costly flats or ‘houselets’ (in terms of the new real estate snob jargon). The current social status and value of such dwellings are frequently in inverse relation to their size, and in any case enormously inflated by comparison with previous levels in their neighbourhoods. Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.

(Glass 1964:xviii–xix)

Since the time of Glass’s article more than a thousand research papers, monographs, book chapters, government evaluations and reports have been written on the subject. Early developments were concerned essentially with an empirical mapping of the extent of the process in the larger western cities. Early definitions, like that of Glass, tended to focus on the residential housing market and the rehabilitation of existing properties. In the introduction to their landmark collection Smith and Williams defined gentrification as ‘the rehabilitation of working-class and derelict housing and the consequent transformation of an area into a middle-class neighbourhood’ (SmithandWilliams 1986:1). Since then the definition has been widened by some to include vacant land (usually in prior industrial use) and newly built designer neighbourhoods, as well as neighbourhoods of working-class housing suggesting a portability to the concept which has grown over time.

Where Glass’s definition focused on ‘sweat equity’ gentrification, with the middle-class householder rehabilitating, or hiring a small builder to gentrify their dwelling, more recent discussions have included off-the-peg new-build developments, often beside water or in other landmark locations in the city. And most recently Smith has argued that gentrification has widened yet again to become a new form of neo-liberal urban policy (Smith 2002). Certainly the impacts of gentrification have been hotly disputed politically, with certain municipal governments, hungry for tax dollars, in the US and elsewhere, welcoming middle-class resettlement of the inner city. Alternatively a diversity of grassroots neighbourhood groups have opposed gentrification because of its effects in displacing the poor and the vulnerable (Marcuse 1989; Atkinson 2001a, 2001b; Slater 2002). Table 1.1 summarises some of the main neighbourhood impacts of gentrification.

Table 1.1 Summary of neighbourhood impacts of gentrification

See Table

As the significance of this social/physical neighbourhood change was noted, the conceptual meaning of gentrification, its origins and characteristics became the subject of dispute. Early interpretations saw it as a ‘back to the city’ movement of middle-class suburbanites wanting better proximity to jobs and the kind of cultural and recreational infrastructure that were hard to find on city peripheries (Laska and Spain 1980). From a Marxist perspective Smith countered this with the assertion that gentrification was a ‘movement of capital, not people’. For Smith gentrification was explained by the ‘rent gap’ which was the difference between the potential value of inner urban land (low—because of abandonment due to deindustrialisation and suburbanisation) and its potential value (if put to a higher and ‘better’ use). When the gap between actual and potential values was wide enough investors would discount the riskiness of inner urban land because of the greater opportunity for profit by re-investing on devalorised land and closing the rent gap. Gentrification was one way of closing the rent gap.

While the rent gap theory was set in a Marxist critique of global capitalism it focused on the relativities of land values between a city and its suburbs. At its widest, the explanation looks to an urban system within the nation-state. Equally, it is hard to imagine Ley’s ‘following the hippies’ explanation of the urban liberal neighbourhood movements in waterside Vancouver accounting for the massive expansion of gentrification in 1980s London, which although involving an enlargement of the professional managerial class, was associated strongly with financial deregulation of the City of London (Big Bang). In earlier explanations of gentrification both ‘capital’ and ‘culture’ were very firmly located in a national context.

The early distinction between a back-to-the-city movement of capital or a back-to-the-city movement of people has persisted in the literature on gentrification in various guises (production/consumption, capital/culture, supply/ demand, production of gentrifiable housing/production of gentrifiers, Marxist or liberal explanations). David Ley (1986, 1996) in his work on Canada has suggested how the bohemianism of a student generation following the hippy era fed the prourbanism of this generation as they entered new middle-class occupations. This lifestyle aesthetic informed their activism in neighbourhood preservation and the politics of a liveable city (Ley 1996). At the same time in the USA Neil Smith has argued that middle-class pro-urbanism has now been replaced by a desire for revenge on the poor and the socially marginal. This ‘revanchism’ has taken the form of middle classes re-occupying, forcibly in some cases, and re-appropriating the central core of the city through the operation of the property market, gentrification, and by other means, for example the use of the police and legal agencies.

Some authors have sought to encompass the insights of both capital and cultural explanations for gentrification. Sharon Zukin’s (1982, 1995) work suggests how cultural innovation, particularly around the activities of artists, can at first attract and then in fact be displaced by commercial forms of gentrification —capital captures culture. Chris Hamnett (1994b) has argued that neither culture nor capital arguments are particularly germane and points to the expansion of professional occupational sectors in key cities, of which gentrification is a residential manifestation. Loretta Lees (2000) suggests that the complex geography of gentrification means that both culture and capital explanations have a part to play. More recently there have been some attempts to reconcile culture and capital arguments by using the work of Pierre Bourdieu to look at gentrification as a manifestation of cultural capital (Butler 2003; Butler and Robson 2001; Bridge 2001a, 2001b).

At the same time as we might chart this move from description to explanation there have been numerous case studies which have looked at particular neighbourhood or city examples of the process. However, on the whole there has been more theory and less observation in recent times with perhaps not enough work to connect the two and engage with pragmatic policy responses to gentrification. This is highlighted by the use of urban pioneer terminology in the UK urban renaissance documentation which sought to promote a new life for Britain’s cities (Lees 2003c). Economic and local state institutions often seem strongly motivated by re-capturing the middle class in the central city as both a symbol of, and mechanism for, success. All of this only serves to maintain and sustain moves towards a gentrifying imperative in many cities.

The gentrified neighbourhood in a global context

Whatever the emphasis given to capital or culture we argue that gentrification today must be seen in the context of globalisation. Globalisation has become a complex term expressing conflicting conceptualisations of growing economic, political and cultural interchanges at the ultimate geographical scale. For Cable (1999) ‘globalization has become a portmanteau term—of description, approval or abuse’ (p. 2) while, for theorists like Giddens, globalisation represented a decoupling of space and time with knowledge and culture being shared around the globe in very short timespans (1990). For other writers globalisation has been expressed as a kind of re-articulation of state power (Brenner 1998) at supra and sub-state levels which have become increasingly significant.

The literature on globalisation has not been geared towards the level of the neighbourhood. However, in the context of neighbourhood changes like gentrification it would seem increasingly important to acknowledge that neighbourhood scales may be an important locus of concentrations of professionals and managerial groups in networks of dialogue and co-ordination of state and substate governance structures. In short, the neighbourhood has been under-recognised as the site of the reproduction of a wider set of power relations and contacts which operate at local, urban, regional, and international levels.

On the political left globalisation has been seen as an ideology of and for that of the political right, a justification for unilateral trading partnerships, persistent and widening inequalities and a pro-growth movement that has extended largely western economic hegemony at the expense of the global ‘south’. The contested nature of the debate on globalisation should not be understated. Key questions remain over the role of the state, global economic actors and corporations and the relative impact on and involvement of the world’s poor. However, our focus in this book here is less on the globalisation debate itself, but, rather, on the connections between processes of global social and economic change and upward changes at the neighbourhood scale.

Literature on the effects of globalisation has often focused on its impacts on poorer social groups generally and burgeoning international trade specifically. Processes of global migration by social elites and population displacement of the poor have largely operated in separate social spheres with the former generally being unregulated and embraced while the latter has been seen as a distinctive and unwelcome fallout of regional conflicts. Even in the ‘advanced’ industrial west competition for foreign investment, financial services and the groups servicing these developments, have led away from welfare and social justice agendas in an attempt to remain competitive. The market has been portrayed as a natural reality. The effect in many cities has become increasingly apparent with labour market deregulation, neighbourhood revitalisation and welfare retrenchment leading to progressively ghettoised poverty isolated from work opportunities (Cross and Moore 2002; Friedrichs 2002).

At the crest of this wave of urban redevelopment and colonisation ride the gentrifiers who appear as both the emissaries of global capital flows as well as new-found victims of employment restructuring instigated some years back (Sennett 1998; Butler 2003). For Butler a key message is that gentrification itself may be understood as a response to the insecurities of rapid flows of global finance and identity. Sense of place has become a basis for the ontological security of professionals seeking the habitus of neighbourhood living with likeminded people.

The explanation offered by Smith’s rent gap formulation (1979, 1996) now seems to underpin an expanded cognitive map of search and re-location activities of elite social fractions, be they political, cultural or economic. In a sense the decision to locate in Seattle is no longer a world apart from London in its amenity or ambience, even less its distance by jet. At another level in the professional and urban hierarchy this might be a choice between Athens and Auckland, Madrid and Mumbai. International services, ICT linkages, increasing urban homogeneity of services and ‘feel’, as well as rapid travel, mean that many more ‘new’ neighbourhoods exist insulated from local poverty, wider systemic inequalities and public squalor (Graham and Marvin 2001).

Gentrification appears as a facet of the global forces acting on rapidly urbanising cities in the south and on post-communist cities where the impacts are particularly complex. In cities of the south massive in-migration from the countryside in search of work and strong in situ fertility combines with restrictions in the supply of land, because of private ownership, which has resulted in unprecedented levels of unemployment, inadequate shelter and homelessness. At the same time the communications and financial services sectors have expanded in many of these cities, resulting in a larger professional managerial class. In residential terms this has resulted in a reinforcement and expansion of colonial patterns of neighbourhood segregation with many elites retreating into gated communities, or leaving the city for luxury residential developments in ex-urban locations.

Foreign Direct Investment has been moving away from the west for the last decade. This measure of relative expansion of trans-national corporations and globalisation has been growing particularly quickly in Eastern Europe and developing countries since 1992, though the asset base of these companies often remains largely in the West and other developed economies. In Eastern Europe and post-communist cities social divisions have increased in a housing market that is at once commodifying property relations and subject to the repatriation of property to pre-communist owners. The particular configuration of these forces led to city by city and neighbourhood differences in the extent and impact of gentrification, as Lud k Sýkora points out in this volume.

A further element of gentrification, as an aspect of globalising tendencies, has been neighbourhood-to-neighbourhood connections between geographically dispersed locations. This has already been suggested in the connections between the residential ...