Gentrification has many costs and benefit but it seems to fail to address the fundamental causes of deprivation and urban decay in some of the least affluent parts of society. It will be interesting to see if the London Olympics 2012 which is to take place in the 3rd poorest borough in England, Stratford East London will benefit the existing local community or whether it is to be the new Docklands waiting to be discovered by the next wave of gentrifiers.
Who are the ‘winners’ in the gentrification process?
There are many benefits of the gentrification cited but Atkinson (2002) has highlighted the lack of research into the empirical benefits of the process. The following are the most commonly mention benefits:
- Boost to city tax revenues
- Increased property values
- Increased social mix
- Improvements to local services
- Improvements to the physical environment
It is often the young, 25-35, who are highly educated, highly skilled and highly paid who are the main beneficiaries of the process (Slater, 2004). Richards (2005) comments on the changes to her community of Newington Green, an area which has experienced gentrification since 2000. There has been a reduction in poverty, crime, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse and a corresponding increase in new white middle class professionals, building restoration, bars, cafes, restaurants, estate agents, pedestrian schemes, landscaping of the green and new children’s play equipment to name but a few. She concludes that ‘it feels better, safer place to live’.
Who are the ‘losers’ in the gentrification process?
The main disadvantage continually cited within the literature is the displacement of less affluent households due to increasing rent/property prices but the following are also mentioned (Atkinson 2002):
- Community conflict
- Racial tension
- Landlord harassment
- Lower population densities
- Greater demand on local spending by incoming affluent households
The literature also indicates that there is a much wider set of costs compared with benefits of gentrification. Again in Newington Green (Richards, 2005) there are many examples of ‘losers’ in the process. The existing Turkish community is being exiled because their restaurants and pizzerias no longer meet the demands of the new white middle classes. There is less parking for people to access local shops due to traffic re-routing schemes and new retail space is about to be built making it increasingly difficult for existing local/independent businesses to survive. The local drug addicts and squats were moved on by the police with little attempt made to deal with their addictions. Alcoholics have been replaced by binge drinkers, especially affluent teenagers. The incomers do not mix or participate with the local community and socialised with those from outside Newington Green. The over riding sentiment gained from Newington Green is that the community action group who campaigned for improvements to the green and hence providing the seed for gentrification where serving their own self interest and not benefiting the whole community.
Outline the main geographical approaches that have attempted to explain the process of gentrification
The arguments about what precisely gentrification is started in 1979 with Neil Smith’s paper proposing the ‘rent-gap’ theory. This theory explains the relationships between flows of capital and the production of urban space also known as the production-side argument influenced by the structural Marxism approach.
Slater (2004) demonstrates how Smith argued that low rents in the urban suburbs during the two decades after World War II led to a continuous movement of capital towards the development of suburban areas. This caused a devaluation of inner-city areas, resulting in the substantial decline and abandonment of inner-city areas in favour of those in the suburbs. As a consequence the value of inner-city land fell relative to the rising value of suburban land. The difference between the current land value and the potential that might be obtained after gentrification is the rent-gap.
Smith proposed that the rent-gap theory was the primary process underlying gentrification. He assumed that when the rent-gap was great enough developers would see the potential for profit and start reinvesting in devalued areas. In addition to Smith’s main theory the de-industrialisation of the inner-city area was seen as prerequisites to gentrification.
Authors from the consumption-side arguments, influenced by the poststructuralist approach, criticised the rent-gap theory. Chris Hamnett argued that the rent-gap theory does not reveal anything about the gentrifiers while David Ley was concerned that the rent-gap theory failed to explain why gentrification occurred in some cities and not in others.
The consumption-side arguments led notably by David Ley gained greater weight as an explanation for gentrification by investigating the characteristics of the gentrifiers themselves rather than the process. Often associated with gentrification was the polarisation of the employment sector between high paid professional and managerial jobs and low paid white collar workers. The emergence of a service (quaternary) class of young people with high disposable incomes and jobs locate in central urban areas and who wished to live close to work were the main tenets of the consumption-side theory of gentrification.
Sharon Zukin in 1982 was one of the first to recognised the importance of both production-side and consumption-side argument and to proposed that to fully understand the processes of gentrification necessitated appreciation of both sides of the discourse, so called ‘cultural capital’.
Since the global recession of the late 1980s early 1990s, where the processes of gentrification lay dormant for several years due to a lack of capital, the academic literature has taken two new theme: the revanchist city and the emancipatory city.
The revanchist researchers took the prospective that the inner-city space of danger, menace, crime, violence and suffering (Slater , 2004) where the middle class were taking revenge for the loss of the inner-city to them. While the emancipatory researchers took an alternative representation of the inner-city space as a welcoming, inclusive, safe and liveable area where different people are united.
Comment on the ‘geography’ of gentrification
Atkinson (2002) who has reviewed the literature on gentrification provides the following data on where gentrification research has taken place.
Source: Atkinson 2002
Note: The number of UK cities does not equal the number of UK studies as some studies consider more than one location.
It is interesting to note that the research would indicate that gentrification in the UK is a London phenomenon and while London has many examples of these processes, Islington being a classic example, gentrification is occurring at varying scales throughout urban Britain and to some extent rural communities. Atkinson (2002) found 3 studies looking at gentrification in rural Britain.
Salter (2004) notes that a 1995 comparative study of London, New York and Paris provides very useful information for highlighting the differences in the processes involved in gentrification and David Lay has called for greater comparative research to be undertaken.
Geography is the study of the earth its peoples, places and environment and therefore gentrification the processes of urban change and the affects on urban society are of interest to today’s geographers.
Bibliography
Atkinson, R (2000) ‘Measuring gentrification and displacement in Central London’. Urban Studies, 37(1) pp149-165
Atkinson, R (2002) Does Gentrification Help or Harm Urban Neighbourhoods? Available at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sps/cnrpaperspdf/cnr5pap.pdf (Accessed: October 2005)
Carter, H. (1995) The Study of Urban Geography. 4th edition. London: Arnold
Know, P and Pinch, S (2000) Urban Social Geography. 4th edition. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd
Redfren, P (2003) ‘What makes gentrification ‘Gentrification’’. Urban Studies, 40(12) pp2351-2366
Richards, M (2005) ‘Gentrification: how was it for you?’. Guardian, 20 April
Slater, T (2004) Gentrification web. Available at http://members.lycos.co.uk/gentrification/ (Accessed: October 2005)
