Gentrification around the World, Volume II

Innovative Approaches

Jerome Krase, Judith N. DeSena, Jerome Krase, Judith N. DeSena

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030413408
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030413415
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Bringing together scholarly but readable essays on the process of gentrification, this two-volume collection addresses the broad question: In what ways does gentrification affect cities, neighborhoods, and the everyday experiences of ordinary people? In this second volume of Gentrification around the World, contributors contemplate different ways of thinking about gentrification and displacement in the abstract and "on-the-ground." Chapters examine, among other topics, social class, development, im/migration, housing, race relations, political economy, power dynamics, inequality, displacement, social segregation, homogenization, urban policy, planning, and design. The qualitative methodologies used in each chapter—which emphasize ethnographic, participatory, and visual approaches that interrogate the representation of gentrification in the arts, film, and other mass media—are themselves a unique and pioneering way of studying gentrification and its consequences worldwide.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. Krase, J. N. DeSena (eds.)Gentrification around the World, Volume IIPalgrave Studies in Urban Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41341-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jerome Krase¹ and Judith N. DeSena²

(1)

Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY, USA

(2)

St. John’s University, Queens, NY, USA

Jerome Krase (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Judith N. DeSena

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

GentrificationInnovationDevelopmentIm/migrationUrban policyPlanningDesign

End Abstract

As was the first in our two-volume edited work on Gentrification around the World, this second on Innovative Approaches contains multidisciplinary explorations of the myriad ways that gentrification, globally defined, has impacted cities, neighborhoods, groups, and individuals. For both projects, the editors gathered detailed works that investigated the social, political, and economic significance of gentrification and related displacement that was previously unpublished and based on original research. Topics, as they relate to gentrification, include but are not limited to: social class, development, im/migration, housing, political economy, power dynamics, inequality, displacement, social segregation, homogenization, urban policy, planning, and design. Especially valuable are the papers on gentrification outside of Western Europe and the United States of America. This particular volume examines what we believe are especially innovative approaches in focus and/or methodology.

The chapters in this volume are divided simply by regions, specifically the Global North and Global South. This collection includes chapters, using various perspectives on gentrification in the United States of America, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, Finland, Peru, Argentina, and India. Selections utilize primarily, but not exclusively, qualitative methodologies that emphasize ethnographic, participatory, as well as visual approaches.

We hope our efforts in Gentrification around the World: Innovative Approaches will result in broad discussions of cross-national and comparative theoretical and practical issues among academics as well as activists and practitioners. While the first volume focused mostly on individual cases of gentrification and displacement, this, the second volume, is more abstract and represents different ways of thinking about both gentrification and displacement. The themes of various “types” of gentrification, for example, tourism, corporate, commercial, transnational, and the gentrification of education, are represented in this volume. Included in the chapters are discussions focused on investment and development, and consequences of global capitalism, which serve to drive the process of gentrification and attract the affluent.

In our book Race, Class, and Gentrification in Brooklyn: A View from the Street (2016/2018), we interrogated how displacement engendered by gentrification was both fostered and fought against and asked, rhetorically, “What is lost by gentrification?” “Who is harmed?” The chapters in this volume address increased property values for owners, better local shopping opportunities, and the increase in the neighborhood’s political power due to gentrification. As will be shown, gentrification brings with it improvements in local city services, better public parks, schools, security, and law enforcement. Certainly, it is better to live in a once poor and neglected community that has been thoroughly gentrified than its precursor.

In general, the ultimate consequence of gentrification is the physical displacement (Cybriwsky 1978; Marcuse 1986; LeGates and Hartman 1986) or “replacement” (Freeman and Braconi 2004) of lower status people and small businesses by more affluent and sometimes “elite” groups. This is due to basic economic factors. People can no longer afford to stay. Local businesses undergo a transition from “mom and pop” establishments to retail chains and upscale boutiques that sell products and services different from those favored by the older residential cohort. Lower status residents also have fewer housing choices and as affordable units disappear so do they. Prior to physical displacement, individuals and businesses can experience social displacement as well. Social displacement occurs in a neighborhood when one group gains “… a dominant position at the expense of another” (Chernoff 2010, 301). Principal criteria for social displacement are age, lifestyle, and stages in the lifecycle. A good example of this is when bars, restaurants, and dance clubs catering to “hipsters” took over the working-class commercial streets in Williamsburg. In the process, the personal sense of community for some people is lost along with their ties to it. In turn, social as well as economic displacement can contribute to physical or rather geographic displacement by encouraging those who can leave their “old” neighborhood.

Some view these gentrification and displacement outcomes as “natural” and therefore are not stimulated to act. Others reject them as inevitable consequences are moved to act. As do many other scholar activists and urban social scientists today, we believe these essentially neoliberal and classic urban ecological responses can be contested as issues of social justice.

For us questions such as “Who has a right to the city?”, “What is urban justice?”, and “What is a just city?” require an affirmative response. Although a full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this volume, we feel a few comments in reference to the distributive social justice principles of John Rawls and especially those in regard to urban territory of David Harvey are a necessary foundation for the readers’ understanding of our point of view. For a society to be called “just,” it must guarantee its members equal access to the liberties, rights, and opportunities it can offer and simultaneously to care for the least advantaged. This depends, however, on the acceptance of the idea of a social contract freely entered into by its members to which Rawls and Kelly believed free rational people would ascribe. The principles of justice in the contract “specify the basic rights and duties to be assigned by the main political and social institutions, and they regulate the division of benefits arising from social cooperation and allot the burdens necessary to sustain it” (2003, 7).

Harvey refers to Rawls in his discussion of eight principles of territorial distributive justice to address the uneven distribution of urban resources and rights. From these, he chose three in the following order—need, contribution to the common good, and merit—that “are sufficiently comprehensive to subsume many of the issues which could legitimately be raised under the other headings” (1973, 100–101). However, he cautions that the concept of territorial distributive justice is not all-inclusive but a principle for resolving conflicting claims—“a just distribution, justly arrived at” (See also Olander 2015).

Most germane for our study is Harvey’s most important principle of “Need – Individuals have rights to equal levels of benefit which means that there is an unequal allocation according to need” (100). This book highlights the need for urban policy that is balanced, equitable, and complete. Everyone has a right to the city.

Global North

North America

In Chapter 2, Stephanie Polsky notes that gentrification is most often associated with a process wherein a group of higher economic and cultural status comes into physically displace those of a lower economic or cultural status from the local residential and commercial regions they inhabit. A great deal of research has focused on this phenomenon in Silicon Valley with a strong emphasis on its physical, visible manifestations. Such research focuses specifically on the ways in which gentrification impacts local patterns of consumption, the structure and patterns of public life, and the socioeconomic appearance of the local itself. This chapter, by contrast, aims to conceptualize gentrification as a phenomenon impacting upon individuals as much as places. It looks at its effects on their psyches through processes of social organization that seek to re-establish cultural beliefs, norms, and behaviors which most closely conform to the principles of physical gentrification. Not coincidentally, in Silicon Valley, those most willing to accede to the mind-set associated with gentrification are also those who maintain the greatest cultural capital within this region.

Aneta Kostrzewa examines the impacts of gentrification on ethnic entrepreneurship in Chapter 3. She argues that while classic gentrification narratives emphasize structural forces that effect change, the core analysis of this study turns to ethnic actors’ agency. Faced with mounting economic pressures—declining number of co-ethnic customers, skyrocketing commercial rents, and upscale tastes of the incoming gentrifiers—many traditional ethnic shopkeepers struggle to keep their stores and their livelihoods. At the same time, a group of younger entrepreneurs innovate and adapt by catering directly to the tastes, needs, and desires of the middle-class gentrifiers. Paradoxically, by changing store profiles, and blurring and erasing visible ethnic and working-class markers, the new ethic entrepreneurs undermine the area’s traditional ethnic character and themselves facilitate gentrification-led retail change. Such commercial distancing from working-class definitions of ethnicity is emblematic of broader shifts in the meaning and practice of white ethnic identity in the United States.

Europe

Alberto Rodríguez-Barcón, Estefanía Calo, and Raimundo Otero-Enríquez, in Chapter 4, provide a visual analysis of the different gentrification processes that have been developed in the historic center of A Coruña, a mid-sized city in the Spanish urban system. Thus, we can identi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Global North: North America
• Part II. Global North: Europe
• Part III. Global South: Africa and Latin America
• Part IV. Global South: South Asia
• Back Matter