Exploring the attractions of city centre living: evidence and policy implications in British cities

The British city centre has been the focus of dynamic housing development and repopulation strategies as a key dimension of the government's urban renaissance programme. Through large scale interview surveys in the provincial city centres of Bristol and Swansea, this paper explores the positive and negative features of city centre living, and how these vary amongst a range of social and physical characteristics. The findings suggest that the practical and mundane attractions of city centre living are more important than the more widely publicised lifestyle and cultural attractions of the city centre commonly emphasised in the gentrification literature. Moreover, the research points to differences in attitudes between age groups, with younger adults placing greater value on the range of social and cultural activities in the city centre, whilst older people express high levels of satisfaction with the attractiveness of the environment. A number of policy implications emerge to encourage inclusive marketing strategies within the continued urban renaissance, particularly to challenge the negative perceptions and promote the varied attractions of city centre living to a mix of social groups.     

The super-gentrification of Park Slope,Brooklyn

Studies of classical gentrification typically focus on the embourgeoisement of neighborhoods and displacement of marginalized people. Recently, a new form of gentrification – super-gentrification – has emerged with the expansion of global finance capital, according to urban geographer Loretta Lees. Super-gentrification entails the further upscaling of already gentrified neighborhoods with the in-migration of upper-income residents and displacement of middle class residents, many of whom were among the initial gentrifiers. Despite the attention policy makers, urban planners, and the media are paying to the “middle class squeeze,” few quantitative studies of super-gentrification exist. Using data from the United States Decennial Census, American Community Survey, public residential sales transaction records, and real estate listings, this article sheds light on the landscape of super-gentrification and how to identify it with a quantitative analysis of changes in income, demographics, and housing affordability in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York since 1970.     

Manila’s metropolitan landscape of gentrification: Global urban development,accumulation by dispossession & neoliberal warfare against informality

A new regime of gentrification is dramatically restructuring Manila’s metropolitan landscape. Grounded upon an on-going neoliberal warfare of accumulation by dispossession, this gentrification serves as the fulfillment of postcolonial visions of a world class and modern metropolis through public–private arrangements and market-oriented developments but necessitates the systematic demolition of informal settlements, the home of the Manila’s urban poor and working class population. Through a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines gentrification’s spatial forms and trajectories and exposes context specific dynamics facilitating accumulation by dispossession. Using barangay (village)-level data on changes in population of informal households and median zonal values, I calculate for local measures of spatial autocorrelation and locate significant clusters of spatial shifts. Using the quantitative results plus field narratives and community histories, I triangulate local dynamics of accumulation by dispossession. What emerges is a sprawling gentrification process that, in producing a market-oriented metropolis, displaces and asphyxiates informal spaces. These accounts illustrate the contingencies of violence, neoliberal urbanism, colonial legacies of land regimes, and elite power in the production of a globally-competitive Manila. With other Global South megacities similarly competing in the global market, gentrification in Manila, with its expanding landscape of property accumulation and ’legitimized’ dispossession, is instructive of the emerging form of gentrification in the 21st century.     

Microgeographies of Retailing and Gentrification

It has long been argued that gentrification is a process of consumption as well as production but, in the main, analyses of consumption and gentrification have only tangentially or anecdotally considered the retail spaces of gentrified neighbourhoods. In this paper we investigate the nature of the retail landscapes of gentrification, using empirical evidence from Sydney, Australia. We point to micro retailscapes that differ between gentrified neighbourhoods that suggest a divergence of consumption practices between different groups of gentrifiers. These consumption practices are considered both in terms of their relations to identity (through food and the conception of the body) and to the spaces of the city. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications for future research on the consumption practices of the new middle class and the working class in an international context .     

Culture,capital and the big screen: tracing the changing dynamics of gentrification in the films of Woody Allen

This paper undertakes an analysis of the shifting dynamics of gentrification through the lens of the films of Woody Allen. With his focus upon the spaces of residence and high-end consumption for the upper and middle classes, the paper argues that Allen’s films can be used as a lens to examine the changing dynamics of gentrification in contemporary (Western) cities from something deemed almost novel in the 1970s, to a dominant approach to urban transformation in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the paper demonstrates the constant tension between the desire to carve out a particular urban idyll and that of a sense of loss perceived by gentrifiers themselves of the rate of change taking place in the contemporary city.     

The urban land debate in the global South: New avenues for research

The global ‘land grab’ debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments – investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and ‘worlding’ – and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central – or recentralized – and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land.     

Gentrifications in the Planetary Elsewhere: tele-urbanization,Schengtrification, colour-splashing,and the mirage of “more-than-adequate” critical theory

ABSTRACT

Despite the recent planetary turn that has swept through gentrification research, the theoretical barycentre remains pegged to a few strongholds located in the global north-west. Against this background, this essay offers a provincialized account of three gentrification-like trends – tele-urbanization, Schengtrification and colour-splashing – which are currently taking place in Tbilisi, Riga and Kiev. It is proposed that these processes are supported by an underlying logic that is not pinned to these cities’ specific (“post-communist”) contexts, raising questions about the avowedly universal validity of theories of gentrification stemming from the global northwest, and particularly those developed within the more critical scholarly tradition.     

“绅士化运动”对我国旧城更新的启示

探讨了西方“绅士化运动”的概念、起源及其发展演变的动力机制 ,着重分析了“绅士化运动”对原住居民的影响以及城市地方政府在“绅士化运动”中的作用 ,认为“绅士化运动”对我国当前的旧城更新具有重要的启示与借鉴作用。文中建议在编制旧城更新规划时开展关于旧城更新项目对原住居民影响的专项研究 ,以保障社会公平的实现。     

Property-based redevelopment and gentrification: The case of Seoul, South Korea

The urban experiences of South Korea in times of its rapid urbanisation and economic growth show that wholesale redevelopment had been a dominant approach to urban renewal, leading to redevelopment-induced gentrification. This was led by a programme known as the Joint Redevelopment Programme, transforming urban space that was once dominated by informal settlements into high-rise commercial housing estates. This paper tries to explain how this approach was possible at city-wide scale in its capital city, Seoul. Through the examination of redevelopment processes in a case study neighbourhood, it puts forward three arguments. First, the development potential arising from the rent gap expansion through under-utilisation of dilapidated neighbourhoods provided material conditions for the sustained implementation of property-based redevelopment projects. Second, this paper critically examines the dynamics of socio-political relations among various property-based interests embedded in redevelopment neighbourhoods, and argues that external property-based interests have enabled the full exploitation of development opportunities at the expense of poor owner-occupiers and tenants. Third, South Korea had been noted for its strong developmental state with minimum attention to redistributive social policies. The Joint Redevelopment Programme in Seoul was effectively a market-oriented, profit-led renewal approach, in line with a national housing strategy that favoured increased housing production and home-ownership at the expense of local poor residents’ housing needs.     

Relocation of urban poor in Chicago: HOPE VI policy outcomes

The HOPE VI program was created in 1992 as a tool for public housing authorities in the US to deconcentrate poverty in project-based public housing neighborhoods. As part of the process, thousands of public housing residents have been required to relocate. They have the option to move to temporary housing in another project unit, to leave the subsidized housing system all together, or to participate in local housing voucher programs. This study focuses on those public housing residents in Chicago who move with a housing voucher certificate. The purpose of the study is to evaluate and reveal the relocation outcomes of these voucher users, both numerically and geographically. Conditions in their origin and relocation tracts are examined using 1990 and 2000 US census data to determine if they relocated to less poor and segregated neighborhoods. Evidence shows that voucher users are moving in an outward direction away from the central city. This movement is reshaping the landscape of advantage and disadvantage in Chicago: suburbs are becoming poorer while the old neighborhoods are gentrifying. Poverty is highly concentrated in the neighborhoods chosen by most voucher recipients, but not as high as the poverty levels which existed in the old neighborhoods. Mapping relocation shows that outcomes vary geographically, demonstrating the importance for future research to address spatial and contextual differences.