Gentrification is Not One-Size-Fits-All

Sitting at a round table at the Lucky Lab yesterday I sat across from a young couple from the West Village in Manhattan. We laughed and talked as we bantered around the topics of living in the city and the pace of life in Manhattan vs Portland, hipsters, inner-city public school education, and celebrities in the West Village. One worked in finance in the heart of the city while the other worked for a major non-profit that has its aim to create better schools in rough-and-tumble neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Inevitably the topic of gentrification is a major role player in our conversations in regards to the city, better schools, hipsters, and so forth. Brooklyn College sociologist Sharon Zukin laments over the process which has a way of stripping character from the neighborhood and replacing it with a faux-authenticity. In writing of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn she writes, "In the areas where hipsters and gentrifiers live there's a new cosmopolitanism in the air: tolerant, hip, casual. And that isn't bad. But little by little the old ethnic neighborhoods they have moved into are dying, along with the factories where longtime residents plied their trades and the Irish bars, Latino bodegas, and black soul food restaurants where they made their homes away from home. The people who seemed so rooted in these neighborhoods are disappearing." (Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, 7-8)

Gentrification is a city-shaping movement that shows no sign of slowing down. Cities are continuously being recalibrated. Old is new and what once was new is losing its tarnish and is becoming the catch-basin of those who're being displaced. The trick is in spotting gentrification because there are numerous mutations where it becomes problematic to always go, "A-ha! There it is!" Here are a few of the mutations:

Classical Gentrification - can thus be described as, “the restoration of run-down urban areas by the middle class (resulting in the displacement of low-income residents).” It is usually what comes to mind when one thinks about gentrification and the typical characteristics.

New-Build Gentrification - “New build residential developments, nevertheless, stand in stark contrast to the renovated Victorian and Georgian landscapes of classic gentrification.” (Gentrification, 139)  What this reveals is that gentrification is not always easy to spot. In regards to new-build gentrification, Linda Bletterman writes,

In a world in which cities increasingly have to compete for residents, investment and visitors, governments are looking out for some new strategies to attract them. The attraction and retention of middle- and upper-income households through the manipulation of the built environment has become an explicit or implicit urban policy aim for local governments. Governments are initiating or stimulating restructuring and new-build development projects, in order to achieve further social and economical urban policy objectives. Several authors and scientists have argued that these new-build developments, restructuring projects and flagship regeneration projects (of for example urban waterfronts, wasteland and Brownfield sites) can be accounted for as the post-1990s new type of gentrification; namely the “third wave.” This change in the definition and the meaning of gentrification lies intrinsic to the problem statement of this thesis. (Bletterman, "Who are the gentrifiers in new-build gentrification?")

The question rises whether these developments can be accounted for as being gentrification? And do the residents of new-build developments have the same characteristics, motivations and preferences as the gentrifiers?

Event-Based Regeneration - Another point of consideration in the gentrification conversation is around the topic of event-based urban regeneration. In his book Events and Urban Regeneration: The Strategic Use of Events to Revitalise Cities, Andrew Smith, Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster, UK, writes, “Major events are staged for many reasons. They are opportunities for socialising, celebrations of achievement, markers of time and vehicles for political posturing. In the contemporary era, events have become platforms to sell a variety of products, including the host city itself. Major events are also increasingly associated with urban regeneration.” (1) The reason why I am adding this topic into the gentrification conversation because the forces behind utilizing events as a vehicle for urban regeneration can lead to gentrification whether classical, new-build, or super-gentrification.

Super-Gentrification - The last variation of gentrification that I will highlight is super-gentrification. Lees, Wyly, and Slater define it as:

In the term 'super-gentrification', the prefix 'super' is used to demonstrate that this is not only a higher level of gentrification, but also one superimposed on an already gentrified neighborhood; one that has global connections – social, economic, and cultural; and one that involves a higher financial or economic investment in the neighborhood than previous waves of gentrification, and as such requires a qualitatively different level of economic resource. The suffix 'gentrification' is used as a metaphor for social change; here as new, more elite, more globally connected gentry is moving into the neighborhood. (Gentrification, 149)

The scope of this super-gentrification is happening only in a few select neighborhoods in top-tiered global cities like London and New York. (Ibid)

So gentrification is not as neat and tidy as we always make it. If we're to apply an urban missiological lens to the topic then what does it mean for living out and proclaiming the missio Dei in these neighborhoods? Depending on the neighborhood, the city, and the type of gentrification taking place it means there are many applications.