Since the term was first coined in 1960s London, gentrification has come to be regarded like a law of nature or scientific fact – but now some communities are finding ways to challenge the familiar stereotypes

In the 1980s, long before his thoughts turned to the US presidency, Bernie Sanders – then mayor of Burlington, Vermont – took it upon himself to try to decelerate the development of the Lake Champlain waterfront. Rejecting a plan to turn it into a series of luxury condominiums, Sanders also worked to preserve public housing by passing ordinances that made it harder for developers to evict tenants, and created a community land trust to allow residents to purchase their units. In addition, he supported the local Onion River Collaborative market (now City Market), instead of accepting a proposal for a large, unpopular supermarket in the centre of town.

Whatever one thinks of his subsequent political career, Sanders’ efforts in Burlington remind us that the impact of – and concerns over – urban gentrification are nothing new. These days, however, gentrification is perhaps the most widely used term in any discussion about contemporary cities, and invariably carries with it sinister implications of deep social division and exclusion.

Rather like a law of nature or scientific fact, the gentrification process is now considered inevitable, and inevitably bad. How did we come to think about it in this way – and what are the consequences of this perception for our cities?

I became aware of the pervasiveness of this view last May, when I wrote an article about the dangers of greening cities. It discussed the “just green enough” approach to implementing urban ecological projects – controlling the scale and speed of gentrification by making incremental changes to more areas of a city, as opposed to commissioning single, large-scale greening projects such as New York’s High Line.

A number of readers challenged the argument. “Interesting, but unavoidable,” one reader posted. No matter the approach taken, others added, gentrification is the inevitable, negative outcome.



Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts, it goes on until the whole social character of the district has changed Ruth Glass

I’m not so sure. Despite how it must sometimes feel to residents of a city, gentrification is not a natural phenomenon that occurs outside of the choices made by individuals and groups. As Quinton Mayne, assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said recently when I asked him whether he feels gentrification is inevitable: “People and politics are both the problem and the solution … If I really thought it was inevitable, I don’t think I could teach my urban politics course. My goal is to help students understand both the complexity and thorniness of the problem, but also to give them hope by helping them break this complexity down into its constituent parts – so they realise that gentrification is constructed and man-made. Then hopefully we can figure out ways of finding points of leverage for them to set a new course for urban development.”

What are these points of leverage? Ways of mitigating gentrification, such as Sanders’ efforts, can take place at widely different scales: from community organising to government policies to a shift away from valuing profit as the ultimate standard of success in urban development projects.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The local community in Berlin formed a coalition to save the greengrocers under threat from regeneration. Photograph: Martha Doerfler - RLS/Flikr/CC BY-SA 2.0

In addition to community coalition-building, there are a variety of laws and policies – from property tax abatements and incentives to zoning ordinances, participatory budgeting and housing policies – that really can make it easier for low- and middle-income residents to stay in their rented homes without anxieties about it becoming unaffordable. Perhaps more importantly, they can also be given the chance to move into other neighbourhoods that might be at risk of rapid gentrification.

Some cities have implemented rent control, or laws requiring developers to include a portion of affordable housing in new buildings. The result: cities that are more just, and more interesting, for residents of all income levels.

Nor is it just about laws. Last spring Bizim Bakkal, a small greengrocers owned by a Turkish family in the popular Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, received an eviction notice from WGW Property Management. The company planned to redevelop the building into condominiums, and divide the grocery store into two smaller shops. In response, the owner joined forces with other residents and small business owners and tapped into existing dissatisfaction with rising rents across Berlin. The eviction was dropped, and the coalition, Bizim Kiez, continues to challenge processes of gentrification, modernisation and expulsion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The London skyline as seen from the Heygate Estate, Elephant and Castle, before it was demolished as part of the regeneration of the area. Photograph: elephantpix / Alamy/Alamy

So why do many people feel that gentrification is inevitable in the first place? Ruth Glass, the British sociologist who first introduced the term in a 1964 study of London, certainly thought so: she wrote that given the economic and social climate of postwar London, gentrification as a process was inevitable.

Glass had witnessed enormous change in the wealth of the city, from “rationed to competitive consumption”. And yet while wealth had increased, London’s new “gentry” was displacing working-class residents, who fled to cheaper housing on the city’s outskirts. As Glass saw it, the city’s liveability, diversity and dynamism were under threat.

“One by one,” she wrote, “many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district has changed.”

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, a number of critical geographers, especially David Harvey and Neil Smith, linked this process to larger social and economic changes happening since the 1970s, namely deregulation and laissez-faire economics. The suggestion was that because these larger economic and political forces were the ultimate causes of gentrification, it could not be fully addressed without a change in the mode of production. “I would love to see a world after gentrification,” Smith wrote in 1996, “and a world after all the economic and political exploitation that makes gentrification possible.”

Gentrification X: how an academic argument became the people's protest Read more

At the same time as academics devoted themselves to the systematic study of this new analytical category, however, real-estate developers were applying it as a refined strategy. Gentrification became a recipe: add artistic elements; celebrate the neighbourhood’s diversity; mix in luxury loft residences; attract expensive stores. A recent episode of South Park, The City Part of the Town, in which the city bends over backwards to attract a Whole Foods, brilliantly captured just how much of a caricature this gentrification recipe has become.

Global political movements against the process of gentrification are thus, perhaps, caught in a loop. The more we use the term gentrification to analyse widely disparate urban problems worldwide, the more the idea is reinforced that gentrification is a force of nature. And the more gentrification is perceived as inevitable, the more developers will take it as a ready-made recipe.

Therefore, we must go beyond familiar stereotypes of gentrification. Yes, developers push people out of their homes – but other factors, such as inadequate housing stock and vacant land, play as much, or even more, of a role in limiting affordable housing. The caricature of gentrification may be useful to activists, developers and TV producers, but it will not lead us to novel solutions to real socio-economic and spatial inequality.

Jeanne Haffner is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Trustees for Harvard University). Her book, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space, is published by MIT Press.

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