‘It is the People that Have Made Glen Innes’: State‐led Gentrification and the Reconfiguration of Urban Life in Auckland

Public or state housing has ordinarily been viewed as an impediment to the forces of gentrification, as private property owners or developers are limited in their ability to purchase, renovate or redevelop houses in otherwise desirable areas. As a result, neighbourhoods with significant proportions of state‐housing and low‐income residents have often been able to establish unique identity and character, sense of place and belonging and strong social support networks. This article examines changes underway in Glen Innes, a central suburb of New Zealand's largest city, Auckland. Here, established norms around community and urban life are being rapidly and radically reworked through a wave of state‐led gentrification. We focus on experiences of displacement, the disruption of long‐established community forms, and the reconfiguration of urban life. Our particular contribution is to consider the speed and trauma of gentrification when the state is involved, the slippage between rhetoric and reality on the ground, and the challenges of researchers seeking to trace the impacts of gentrification in the lives of those who have been displaced.     

Cooperative Islands in Capitalist Waters: Limited‐equity Housing Cooperatives,Urban Renewal and Gentrification

Improving the habitat of residents in central‐city neighbourhoods without simultaneously gentrifying these is becoming a pressing dilemma in right‐to‐housing and right‐to‐the‐city agendas, both in the global North and the global South. This article explores what possibilities limited‐equity housing cooperativism can bring to the table. Insights are drawn from two urban ‘renewal’ processes in which limited‐equity housing cooperatives have played an important role: in Vesterbro (Copenhagen) and Ciudad Vieja (Montevideo). The article analyses the everyday politics within and around these cooperatives through a broader institutional and political‐economy lens. This approach sheds light on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that operate within these cooperatives, as well as on the processes through which they have been directly and indirectly implicated in the displacement of low‐income neighbours. Despite providing a grassroots housing alternative for local ‘non‐owners’, individual cooperatives participate in, and are vulnerable to, urban transformations that traverse multiple scales. They are inserted, moreover, within wide‐ranging unequal social structures that the cooperative's formal equality has limited tools to offset. The ways in which cooperatives interlink as a sector and how this sector relates to the state are two key dimensions to be considered in challenging capitalist‐space economies.     

Neoliberalization,Housing Institutions and Variegated Gentrification: How the ‘Third Wave’ Broke in Amsterdam

Neil Smith argues that in the last two decades gentrification has become a generalized global urban phenomenon. His theory is at a high level of abstraction, as it links urban gentrification to globalization, financial capitalism and neoliberalization. With these global processes, all cities have experienced ‘third wave’ gentrification. The theory, however, leaves little room for variegations of gentrification, apart from characterizing geographical differences as idiosyncrasies or as minor variations. This downplays the role of intervening mechanisms that impinge upon the pursuit and social outcomes of gentrification. This article aims to amend abstract theory by looking at Amsterdam from a historical institutional perspective. In Amsterdam, gentrification was particularly made possible by a process of neoliberalization within the housing system. However, as institutional change is incremental and based on layering and conversion, many older institutional arrangements remain in place. These arrangements tend to slow gentrification and assuage social consequences. Nevertheless, neoliberal modifications to the housing system have been accelerating the pursuit of gentrification. Current policies will very likely lead to exclusionary displacement.     

The Tunisian Revolution: Neoliberalism,Urban Contentious Politics and the Right to the City

This article engages in the debate on urban contentious politics by returning to the Tunisian revolution. In the article, I chart movements provoked by neoliberal restructurings, and show how these ultimately came together to form a mass movement demanding radical political change. I first describe the socio‐spatial roots of the Tunisian revolution to understand its dynamics. Based on the chronology of the unfolding events I sketch the classes, social groups and movements that coalesced against authoritarian rule in early 2011. Although the Tunisian revolution started in rural environments, I focus more specifically on the role of urban social movements in the uprising to link questions of urbanism to what were clearly national revolts. Secondly, I outline the scope of neoliberal reforms in Tunisia by looking at the impact of these reforms to chart the resulting emergence of contentious politics in response to the increasing violence that characterized all levels of economic life during this period. I also consider the resulting uneven development and the changing relations between the state and the different social classes. This enables me to reflect on the politicization of the city with the aim of opening up new opportunities for engaging with a more comparative and cosmopolitan theory about cities around the world.     

Reappearance of the Public: Placemaking,Minoritization and Resistance in Detroit

Recent studies of public space in US central cities tend to focus either on (1) market‐driven placemaking (privatized parks, hipster shops) in gentrifying enclaves or (2) street cultures (community gardens, hip‐hop) in low‐income neighborhoods. Neither focus adequately frames the ability of African Americans to shape public space as the white middle class returns to central cities. In this case study of downtown Detroit, I theorize a dialectic: the history of clashes between racial capitalism and social movements in public space reappears in the contradictory design of market‐driven placemaking, which suppresses and displays cultures of resistance. White business and real‐estate interests showcase downtown spaces to counter news of disinvestment and suffering in low‐income neighborhoods. The legal and political legacies of civil rights and black power struggles—combined with consumer demand (black culture sells)—force them to involve black entrepreneurs, professionals and artists in placemaking. This placemaking subordinates the black urban poor, even as it incorporates their street cultures. The contradictions of placemaking shape possibilities for resistance, as shown in mundane subversions and street protests that use the downtown spotlight to call for social justice citywide. This analysis contributes to research on public space at a time when new movements are challenging public order in the financial core of US cities.     

Fear and Loathing (of others): Race,Class and Contestation of Space in Washington,DC

Our article explores the cultural politics of public space and the placemaking politics of urban redevelopment in the Atlas District of Washington, DC, a popular commercial district undergoing rapid gentrification. The major questions we address are, how do race and class impact the ways public space is controlled and/or managed in the context of rapid changes in the built, economic and social environments of the neighborhood? What role do those narratives play in justifying changes in and management of public space? We focus on uses of public space and describe how various forms of power are linked to the control of space in the context of gentrification. Our analysis focuses on designated public space in the Atlas District—the Starburst Plaza. By analyzing everyday practices around community control at the Starburst Plaza, this case study focuses on the discrete methods by which the symbolic and material inequities promulgated by the neoliberal state are reconfigured through struggles to define and manage contested public spaces.     

Sowing Seeds of Displacement: Gentrification and Food Justice in Oakland,CA

Green gentrification is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low-income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire to serve long-term residents, activists embody a hip green aesthetic that is palatable to affluent whites and can be appropriated by urban boosters to promote the neighborhood. We use this process as a lens to theorize links between food and green gentrification, highlighting the importance of food to cities’ efforts to brand themselves as ripe for redevelopment, and understand green gentrification as a racialized process tied to cultural foodways. We also attend to the practical stakes for food justice activism, arguing that a clear understanding of green gentrification and food justice activists’ unwitting role in it can help the latter to attempt to mitigate their culpability and seek to develop broad inclusive strategies for locally led development without displacement.     

‘Gentrification Without Displacement' and the Consequent Loss of Place: The Effects of Class Transition on Low‐income Residents of Secure Housing in Gentrifying Areas

The increasingly disputed concept of gentrification‐induced displacement is combining with the argument that the poor benefit from social mix to produce a theoretical case for ‘positive gentrification'. The notion that new middle‐class residents not only attract more investment but bring opportunities for ‘upward social mobility' to low‐income people who manage to stay in gentrifying areas has become policy orthodoxy. While there are scholarly challenges to the extent of these benefits, the disadvantages of imposed social mix on low‐income communities even where they are not physically displaced remain under‐researched. This article helps to fill this gap by reporting on research into the experience of long‐term low‐income residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods who managed to stay put. The research explores notions of social mix, place and displacement among residents of secure community housing in Melbourne, Australia (the equivalent of small‐scale social housing in Europe and North America) with the object of establishing whether the absence of physical displacement is sufficient to ameliorate gentrification's negative impacts. The findings demonstrate that transformations in shops and meeting places, and in the nature of local social structure and government interventions, cause a sense of loss of place even without physical displacement.     

Healthy Food Stores,Greenlining and Food Gentrification: Contesting New Forms of Privilege,Displacement and Locally Unwanted Land Uses in Racially Mixed Neighborhoods

Local activists engaged in contemporary environmental justice struggles not only fight against traditional forms of hazardous locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), they also organize to make their neighborhoods livable and green. However, urban environmental justice activism is at a crossroads: as marginalized neighborhoods become revitalized, outside investors start to value them again and they themselves invest in green amenities. Yet vulnerable residents are now raising concerns about the risk of displacement from their neighborhoods in consequence of environmental gentrification processes. Their fear is linked to environmental amenities such as new parks or remodeled waterfronts, as well as (most recently) healthy food stores. Using the case of a conflict around a new Whole Foods supermarket in Boston, MA, I examine how food venues and stores labeled as healthy and natural can create socio‐spatial inequality together with privilege, exclusion and displacement in racially diverse neighborhoods. I analyze how high‐end supermarket chains target inner‐city neighborhoods for their growth and profit potential, and demonstrate that their arrival contributes to what I call ‘supermarket greenlining'. This greenlining illustrates the process of food gentrification, and the manipulation of health and sustainability discourses about food by healthy and natural food investors and their supporters. The opening of high‐end supermarkets thus converts such stores into new LULUs for historically marginalized groups.     

Loving Diversity/Controlling Diversity: Exploring the Ambivalent Mobilization of Upper‐Middle‐Class Gentrifiers,South End,Boston

This article centers on a group of upper‐middle‐class gentrifiers living in a neighborhood in the South End of Boston, and their complex attitude towards diversity. I use data from my fieldwork in the South End, based on ethnographic observation and 77 interviews with residents active in local organizations, such as neighborhood associations. These residents explicitly stress their endorsement of diversity, in terms of class, race, but also sexual orientation, and their commitment to maintaining it. I examine the meaning they give to this principle, the actions they take in its name and the kind of relations they establish with those ‘others’ who embody such diversity. I argue that the gentrifiers' love of diversity, which cannot be reduced to sheer hypocrisy, is intrinsically linked to their capacity to control it, thus shedding light on the changing definition of social distinction in upper‐middle‐class culture.     

Urban Distinctions: Class,Culture and Sociability in the City of Porto

This essay employs Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice and the methodology of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to extend the mapping of the dynamic relations between class and culture presented in Bourdieu's Distinction to encompass urban space, drawing on data from a multi‐method research project on the city of Porto, Portugal. We present a detailed analysis of the formation and structure of local social space and show its relevance for the study of the (re)production of urban lifestyles. Differences in the volume and composition of the capital of city residents are identified and shown to underpin the relations between social positions, dispositions and position takings in various realms of cultural consumption. Meaningful configurations of ‘lifestyle modalities’ have clear roots in the city's social space, which in Portugal, as in France, can be interpreted in terms of distinction, pretension and necessity.