What Gentrification? (original) (raw)
Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit
In 2014, approximately 100,000 lots lie ‘‘vacant’’ in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty. Planners and government officials have proposed to repurpose Detroit’s highest vacancy neighborhoods, deemed to have ‘‘no market value,’’ as blue and green infrastructure (retention ponds, carbon forests, urban farms, greenways). According to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional public services (water, street lights, transportation, garbage pickup) and the ‘‘grey infrastructures’’ that deliver them will be reduced and eventually withdrawn from these zones. While Detroit is widely touted for its potential as a model green city, the costs and benefits of green redevelopment are distributed unevenly within the context of gentrification and bankruptcy. Through an analysis of media representations, a contentious citywide planning project, and the construction of a private urban forest, I demonstrate how settler colonial imaginaries and rationalities articulate with austerity measures to prepare a postindustrial urban frontier for resettlement and reinvestment. During the historical era of U.S. settler colonialism, economic development happened through westward expansion on a continental scale (and then imperial scale), but today, in the urban United States, it occurs through internal differentiation of previously developed spaces and is taking a new form. Where the rural settlers of the 19th century sought to conquer wilderness, ‘‘urban pioneers’’ in the 21st century deploy nature as a tool of economic development in a city with a shrinking population and a large spatial footprint. Yet accumulation by green dispossession still turns on some of the defining features of settler colonialism, e.g., private property as a civilizing mechanism on the frontier, the appropriation of collective land and resources, and the expendability of particular people and places. The production of this new urban frontier also depends, like any frontier, on erasure: the material and discursive work of presenting ‘‘empty’’ landscapes as in need of improvement by non-local actors. I argue that understanding the stakes of postindustrial urban development struggles requires attention to how concepts of (white) settler society – which have been absorbed into political and legal-juridical institutions, discourses, myths, symbols, and national metaphors – are used to claim ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘empty’’ lands like those in Detroit.
Journal of Rural Studies, 2013
Amidst China's immense and rapid urbanisation, gentrification has spread from urban centres to periurban and rural areas. Employing an analytical perspective built from the literatures on counterurbanisation, rural immigration and rural gentrification, this study examines the two-stage gentrification processes in Xiaozhou village, Guangzhou, China. Situating rural gentrification in Xiaozhou against broader backdrops e such as urbanisation in Guangzhou and the preservation regulations imposed by the local state e this article unveils the ways in which interplays between the aestheticisation of rural living and indigenous villagers' rent-seeking behaviour fostered rural immigration and gentrification. In Xiaozhou, grassroots artists' aestheticisation and colonisation of the village ignited an initial stage of gentrification. The subsequent commodification of rural land and housing, induced by increasing concentration of art students and middle class "elite artists", led to deepened gentrification, studentification and eventually displacement of pioneer gentrifiers. In this process, local villagers' rent-seeking behaviour went hand in hand with aestheticisation and commodification of rural space. This finding questions the representations of victimised local rural residents in much of Western literature on rural gentrification. The special role played by the government policy and institutional arrangement in the stories of Xiaozhou also has the potential to add a new dimension to rural gentrification explanations. In sum, this paper shows that explanations of the perplexing dynamics of rural immigration and gentrification can benefit from more flexible and fluid conceptualisations of "gentrifiers" and "gentrification" as a whole.
Commodifying Street Art in Detroit: Permissive Location and Rhetorical Messages
ABSTRACT: Street art is a visual rhetorical tool that produces a discourse in opposition to elites and dominant classes. In the city of Detroit, there has been economic devastation, but an influx of artists into low cost housing available throughout the city. Do-it-yourself culture (DIY) is growing due to local government cutbacks and the culture of the people entering the city to live and work. One expression of DIY is through the creation of public art. Public art projects are becoming commonplace in Detroit, some with the permission of owners of property and others without. This paper aims to survey three public art projects in Detroit through the lens of Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry to see how DIY and public art with permission can serve to co-opt the rhetorical messages behind street art. The DIY nature of new public art projects serve neoliberal interests providing free labor and enhancement to the community for the benefit of property owners.
Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 2009
ABSTRACT Over the past few years, Toronto has experienced a massive reinvestment into the inner city, mostly in the form of high-rise condominium towers, which was followed by the largest population growth in over 30 years. The city that used to praise itself as multicultural, ethnically diverse and socially-mixed, has, as recent studies indicate, become spatially divided into three distinct cities: the constant city of the rich, the shrinking city of middle-income households, and the growing city of concentrated poverty. In this paper we suggest that the condominium towers are a new form of gentrification that contributes to the spatial trifurcation of the city. We call it the condofication of Toronto. We start with a discussion of some aspects on gentrification, followed by an analysis of policy documents and reports that have been guiding urban development in Toronto. We then take a look at the incoming condo-dwellers, before we conclude that the City needs to revisit its planning instruments in order to prevent further spatial segregation in Toronto.
This dissertation explores the contours of artistic economic activity through participatory action research conducted with artists and artisans in the Greater Franklin County, Massachusetts. The creative economy has drawn significant attention over the past ten years as a principle economic sector that can stimulate the redevelopment of post-industrial cities. However, dominant creativity–based development strategies tend to cater to the tastes of an economically privileged, and implicitly white, “creative class,’ leading to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. The data were collected as part of a collaborative research project in which twenty-two artists and artisans were hired from the region to conduct interviews to explore the economic lives of their peers. These peer-interviews were embedded in a collaborative research process, which generated two data streams: one hundred and thirty-two peer-interviews conducted by the research team and the ethnographic data from the collaborative research process itself. Through analyzing the peer-interview data, I find that regional artistic economic activity spans both the formal and informal economy and derives from a wide range of non-market logics. I argue that the multiple values of artists and artisans give rise to heterogeneous economic practices and logics, which fall outside the formal economy and are thus largely ignored in existing entrepreneurial initiatives to support the arts. Within the already precarious situations of professional artists, I also find that these conventional initiatives intensify vulnerability for artists from marginalized groups. Through analyzing the ethnographic data from the research process, this dissertation also deepens understandings of community-based research methods. In particular, I extend the discussion of peer interviewing beyond how interviews are conducted to developing new ways to analyze the data produced by this method. I also illustrate the micro-political effects of conducting participatory action research on its subjects, arguing that this method offers an innovative model for transformative social change.
No "Blank Canvas": Public Art and Gentrification in Houston's Third Ward
Public art and urban renewal have become integral to reconstructing urban landscapes. In this essay we assess how these two spatial practices converge and diverge in the historically and predominately Black community of the Third Ward in Houston, Texas. The essay examines the work of MF Problem and The Black Guys, two Black artist collectives based in the Third Ward. We argue that their public performances critically engage the spatial processes of gentrification and ghettoization in their neighborhood. Furthermore, these performances indicate a unique spatial imaginary held by Black artists that privileges the use value of public and private space over the potential exchange value rooted in the spatial imaginaries urban renewal projects.
This paper explores how gentrifiers in Istanbul mobilise their social networks and social capital during the gentrification process, and how their networks are constructed through processes of “place making” and belonging. In addition, this chapter aims to demonstrate how social capital and social networks work in practice during the gentrification process. Concepts of social capital, social network and belonging offer new discussions in gentrification research and enable researchers to investigate how the new middle class acquires privileged positions in power relations (Bourdieu 1986; Savage et al. 2005; Southerton 2002). Power relations among different classes are not stable, but rather dynamic and ever- changing. Therefore, this chapter examines place making and claiming strategies of gentrifiers by focusing on the following questions: (a) What are the spatial strategies of the new middle class, and what is the importance of these strategies?; (b) How are class and spatial boundaries designated in gentrified neighbourhoods?; (c) What kinds of networks and relationships play a role in developing certain housing dispositions or belonging patterns? The outline of the chapter is as follows: the next sub-section describes the field research areas and the qualitative data collected in gentrified neighbourhoods. Section two reviews the literature on gentrification and class analysis by exploring the possible contributions of social capital, belonging and social network literatures to gentrification research. Additionally, this section briefly reviews the gentrification research in Turkey. Section three scrutinizes the social networks and belonging patterns of gentrifiers in the Fener-Balat-Ayvansaray and Galata neighbourhoods of Istanbul. The analysis focuses on two different personal and institutional networks and their function and impact on the gentrification processes. The chapter ends with a conclusion in section four.
This paper explores how gentrifiers in Istanbul mobilise their social networks and social capital during the gentrification process, and how their networks are constructed through processes of “place making” and belonging. In addition, this chapter aims to demonstrate how social capital and social networks work in practice during the gentrification process. Concepts of social capital, social network and belonging offer new discussions in gentrification research and enable researchers to investigate how the new middle class acquires privileged positions in power relations (Bourdieu 1986; Savage et al. 2005; Southerton 2002). Power relations among different classes are not stable, but rather dynamic and everchanging. Therefore, this chapter examines place making and claiming strategies of gentrifiers by focusing on the following questions: (a) What are the spatial strategies of the new middle class, and what is the importance of these strategies?; (b) How are class and spatial boundaries designated in gentrified neighbourhoods?; (c) What kinds of networks and relationships play a role in developing certain housing dispositions or belonging patterns?