‘Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live’: Resisting gentrification in the 21st Century City (original) (raw)

Shopping Streets and Neighborhood Identity: Retail Theming as Symbolic Ownership in New York

City & Community, 2019

As the economies of production and trade have dwindled in Western cities, urban locales have had to capitalize on other opportunities for growth. Middle and upper class consumers are now sought after resources for cities and neighborhoods once supported by manufacturing. This article considers the role of local retail actors in shifting neighborhood identity towards luxury consumption. Important in this transformation is the process of theming by which business owners rely on cues from the neighborhood's identity and institutions, incorporate these cues into decisions for their own businesses, and thereby reify or change neighborhood identity. By tracing changes on shopping streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Manhattan's Lower East Side, I show how retail theming interacts with neighborhood identity. Interviews with storeowners and archival retail data illuminate how choices made by entrepreneurs or coporations contribute to dramatic aesthetic changes on the street. As the neighborhood identities change, existing long-term residents and less wealthy visitors become excluded from the local shopping streets and lose ownership over neighborhoods.

Hipsters on our High Streets: consuming the gentrification frontier

2016

Gentrification involves the displacement of working class populations, a phenomena most obviously manifest in the transformation of residential landscapes. But this is also palpable in the changes visible on many shopping streets, with locally-oriented stores serving poorer populations and ethnic minorities being replaced by 'hipster' stores such as 'real coffee' shops, vintage clothing stores and bars serving microbrews. These stores have been taken as a sign that the fortunes of struggling shopping streets are improving, with the new outlets often depicted as offering a better range of healthy, green and 'authentic' consumption choices than the shops they displace. However, this paper argues that we need to resist this form of retail change given it typically represents the first stage of a more thoroughgoing retail gentrification process, remaining suspicious of forms of hipster consumption which, while aesthetically 'improving' local shopping streets in deprived areas, actually encourage the colonisation of neighbourhoods by the more affluent.

Traditional retail markets: the new gentrification frontier

This paper presents traditional retail markets in the UK caught between a narrative of decline and revival, on the edge of a gentrification frontier. Traditional indoor and outdoor markets have become somewhat residual in many British cities but essential for many low income citizens that rely on their affordability. At the same time, the market is being reinvented for a wealthier type of customer interested more in local, environmentally friendly, ethical and "authentic" shopping experience. We take the case of Kirkgate Market in Leeds, the largest of its kind in Britain to analyse the process of disinvestment by the local authority, displacement of traders and customers and rebranding of the market for a new wealthier customer base. The paper is based on an action-research project on which one of the authors is involved alongside traders and other campaigners to defend the public nature of Kirkgate Market in Leeds

Staging and Enforcing Consumerism in the City: The Performance of Othering on the 16 th Street Mall

This essay combines literature on gentrification and neo-liberalism within a framework that examines how consumerism is constituted performatively within and by an urban redevelopment area in downtown Denver, Colorado. Through participant-observation and reflexive personal narratives, we consider how the popular 16 th Street Mall becomes a stage for diverse performances of consumerism, particularly vis-à-vis the presence of non-consumer others. Though there are other possible identity performances for this space—most notably carried out by the homeless, transients, and buskers who also traverse The Mall—our analysis suggests that liberal capitalist ideologies threaten to erase or subsume non-consumer subjectivities. By ignoring non-consumer others, registering complaints about them, or regarding them with pity, consumers perpetuate neo-liberal ideologies. " The street is an intermediary between human lives, and its commodities are exchange values elevated to sovereign heights.

Dispatches from 'The frontline of Gentrification'

City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2012

Chatsworth Road in Hackney, has recently been branded in an article in The Guardian newspaper as ‘the frontline of gentrification’ in East London. As one of the ‘faces’ of the article, and through my position as local street market trader, I want to open up these claims to scrutiny, beyond both scholarly discourses on gentrification and the tough language of militant resistance. Through a blossoming of local action groups, the planning mirage of the Localism Bill, the proximity to the Olympic Park and the activities of local estate agents, the Clapton area is certainly at the centre of intense transformations in both demographics and property values. How are such urban shifts are created and the resulting values distributed in this area and for whose benefit? Where is the place for truly transformative social justice in the scope and tools of the Localism Bill? At the crossroads between declared missions of ‘managing gentrification’ for the love of the local, and the ways in which the employment of images of area distinction and notions of cultural ‘authenticity’ inevitably bolster the fragmentation of the local as the locals know it, the probing of Chatsworth Road and Clapton at this point in time offers a valuable vantage point to observe East London beyond the Olympic rhetoric.

The Battle for the High Street (chapter one)

This book analyses the social and cultural status of high streets in the age of recession and austerity. High streets are shown to have long been regarded as the heart of many communities, but have declined to a state where boarded-up and vacant retail units are a familiar sight in many British cities. The book argues that the policies deemed necessary to revive the fortunes of high streets are often thinly-veiled attacks on the tastes and cultures of the working class. Policy-makers often promote boutiques, art galleries and upmarket cafés at the expense of some of the outlets frequented by less affluent populations, including betting shops, fast food takeaways, discount stores and bargain booze outlets. Highlighting the social and cultural roles that so-called 'dying' high streets continue to play in the lives of working class and disadvantaged populations, this book provides a powerful argument against retail gentrification, and a timely analysis of class conflict in austerity Britain. It will be of great interest to scholars of geography, social policy and cultural studies.

Dead Malls: Suburban Activism, Local Spaces, Global Logistics

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2011

An entire category of urban space, albeit hardly recognized as such, is disappearing across North America. As retail logistics globalizes and big-box power centres replace enclosed shopping malls from the postwar era, a distinct form of social infrastructure vanishes as well. 'Dead malls' are now a staple of North American (sub)urban landscapes, and have provoked local activism in many places. But despite popular concern for the demise of mall space, critical urban scholarship has largely sidelined the phenomenon. Much of the disjuncture between popular outcry and academic silence relates to conceptions of 'public' space, and specifically the gap between formal ownership and everyday spatial practice. Spatial practice often exceeds the conceptions of designers and managers, transforming malls into community space. This is particularly true in declining inner suburbs, where poor and racialized communities depend more heavily on malls for social reproduction as well as recreation and consumption. In this article we investigate the revolution in logistics that has provoked the phenomenon of 'dead malls' and the creative activism emerging that aims to protect mall space as 'community space'. Taking the case of the Morningside Mall in an old suburb of Toronto, we investigate the informal claims made on mall space through everyday spatial practice and the explicit claims for community space that arise when that space is threatened. We argue that many malls have effectively become community space, and activism to prevent its loss can be understood as a form of anti-globalization practice, even if it never employs that language.