Gentrication

D. J. Hammel, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Devalorization In Marxist urban theory, it is the destruction of a parcel of lands ability to produce increased return on capital invested in it. Displacement The forced movement of a lowerincome individual out of a neighborhood usually due to increasing rents or property taxes brought about by gentrication. Land Rent It is a form of economic rent accrued through the control (or ownership) of land in productive use. Postindustrial City As it relates to gentrication, it is the city created by the move away from a strong reliance on manufacturing as an economic base, particularly throughout the 1970s, and an increasing emphasis on the provision of high-level business and nancial services as the basis for economic growth. Revanchism It is a nineteenth-century French political movement that attempted to take revenge on the working classes for a series of perceived national humiliations. As applied to gentrication, it describes the series of neoliberal policies aimed at poor and minority urbanites to ensure that central cities were more palatable for middle-class habitation and consumption.

process clearly predates the name and what might be termed as modern gentrication began in the mid 1950s as bohemian enclaves in sections of several global cities. The earliest identied gentrication in the United States was the discovery of Georgetown in Washington, DC, by bureaucrats brought to the city to assist in the adminis tration of New Deal programs of the 1930s although the process appeared contemporaneously in some Boston neighborhoods as well. In Europe, the rst signicant evidence of gentrication was in 1860s Paris. Embour geoisment, as it was termed, was one result of the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods inherent in Haussmanns infamous modernization scheme. Despite the precursors, the coining of the word gentrication does represent an important watershed because it marks the beginning of a period of cyclical but sustained gen trication activity in cities around the world.

Shifts in Meaning The term gentrication has been subject to shifts in meaning over the four decades since it was rst created, and debate about the meaning of the term has been a part of the process since the beginning. The gentrication that Glass observed in London involved the basic upgrading of older homes and mews dispersed through several inner city neighborhoods. As the process expanded in London and was identied in other advanced capitalist cities, it began to involve the redevelopment of retail properties as well as residential ones. In addition, some areas experienced demolition and new construction. Little attention has been paid to retail redevelopment, but most scholars seem to acknowledge that it is part of the gentrication process, although clearly secondary to the activity in the housing market. A more robust and longer lasting debate developed around the legitimacy of what is now termed new build gentrication. Some ob servers conne the use of the term gentrication to the process of rehabilitating old housing stock, or what is sometimes termed traditional gentrication. This usage is somewhat more common in work emanating from the design elds, and despite the substantial limitations that it places on both the extent and impact of gentrication, there are still those who adhere to this traditional view. Very few areas, however, have been gentried purely through the redevelopment of old housing stock, espe cially in the North American context. Even Society Hill in Philadelphia, the locus of some of the earliest and most theoretically signicant work on gentrication, involved

Denitions
Gentrication refers to a process of neighborhood transformation in which working class and poor residents are displaced by an inux of middle class residents. This change results in improvements in the areas private housing stock and public infrastructure with a con comitant increase in house values and contract rents. Gentrication, the processes that create it, its effects, and its political ramications have been the focus of a large amount of social science research and substantial political rhetoric. The importance of gentrication rests not only upon the dramatic effects it has upon both the residents of a neighborhood and the neighborhoods landscape, but also upon the linkages that have been created between gentrication and theories of urbanization. Origins Sociologist Ruth Glass originally used the term in 1964 to describe a process of class based neighborhood change in a handful of London neighborhoods like Islington. The

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both the redevelopment of historic structures, and clearance and construction of large condominium towers. The political context of gentrication has also created substantial debate over the use and meaning of the term. While there was little early reaction to Glass usage, by the mid 1970s the term had signicant competition. Reinvestment, revitalization, renewal, and renaissance were all preferred over gentrication. The authors of one of the early scholarly collections on the topic chose to use the phrase neighborhood renovation in the title, and the special section of the Journal of the American Planning Association appearing in 1979 used the title Symposium on neighborhood revitalization. There has been no sys tematic investigation of the evident discomfort that American scholars had with the term, but the class re lationships explicit in gentrication may have played a role. In addition, early North American research often viewed gentrication as a generally positive process, and alternate terms, particularly renaissance, may reect that bias. Throughout the 1980s, research on gentrication took a much more critical approach and organized re sistance to gentrication became much more common. The term was increasingly used by academics in Europe and North America, but had acquired a strong enough negative connotation that policymakers, developers, and gentriers themselves actively avoided it. Perhaps the most acute example of this avoidance in the Urban White Paper completed in 2001 as a guide to the future of the cities of the United Kingdom. The term renaissance appears in the subtitle of the implementation document, and regeneration is used commonly to describe the goals of the policy. Some critics have pointed out that the document is one of the most comprehensive policy statements on gentrication ever written, but the term gentrication never appears in the hundreds of pages of text. For many, the term gentrication is one to be avoided for fear of a political backlash. For others, its explicit class connotations make it the preferred label for the process. Urban scholars have also expressed some difculty with the term on a conceptual level. Since the early 1980s, there has been concern that gentrication has been a catch all term used to describe an increasingly chaotic concept. In an attempt to introduce more specicity, various modifying phrases have been added. New build and traditional gentrication have been joined by rural gentrication and super gentrication as ways to describe newly theorized aspects of gentrication. Rural gentri cation was rst identied in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s and most of the research on the topic has been conducted there. The term is used to describe the class transformation of large portions of small rural vil lages. New telecommunications technologies have made it possible for a small portion of the urban middle class to leave the city and establish rural residences. The

transformation in some villages is similar to that in gentrifying urban neighborhoods and the concept of rural gentrication has gained recognition as another form of the gentrication process. At the same time the process in urban areas has continued to develop, and after a history of over four decades in some cities gentrication in some areas has intensied to the extent that a previous gen eration of gentriers has been displaced from their homes by a set of very wealthy gentriers who may have mul tiple residences and reside in the neighborhood on a part time basis. This super gentrication appears to be conned to major global centers, and is yet another facet of the larger process of gentrication.

History of Gentrication
Gentrication Waves Like most urban processes, gentrication is temporally uneven. In the European and North American context it has been closely linked with economic cycles, rst as a counter cyclical process, and later as a cyclical one. The rst signicant wave of gentrication appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith observe that gentrication during this period was led by state redevelopment efforts and was conned to major US and Western European cities. A second wave of gentri cation began to gain momentum in the late 1970s. At this point, it became evident that gentrication was no longer conned to global cities, but was present in moderate amounts in cities well down the hierarchy. Although the state still was actively involved in pro moting the process, the role of private actors, who had begun to see the market potential of gentrication, was more prominent in creating gentrication. This time period, particularly in the mid 1980s also saw coales cence of organized resistance to gentrication, albeit mostly at the local levels. In the United States, this period also saw one of the largest ofce building booms in the countrys history due in part to tax policies of the Reagan administration. Much of the new construction was fo cused on the core of major American cities and the combination of public/private partnerships to create large gentrication projects and substantial ofce tower construction made a highly noticeable impact on the landscape of the American downtown. The third wave began in the mid 1990s as the economies of the indus trialized world began a long period of sustained economic growth that lasted throughout the decade and into 2001. Another mild recession slowed gentrication activity, but unusually low mortgage interest rates, especially in the United States, allowed urban housing markets to navigate the recession with little difculty. The result has been nearly a decade and a half of substantial growth and expansion of gentrication. This wave of gentrication is

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distinguished from prior bursts of activity not only by its duration, but also by the expansion of the process to cities outside the industrialized world. Some research has also suggested that this new gentrication has been nanced more by large, global sources of capital than in previous periods. Geographic Extent Over the four decades that gentrication has become a signicant feature of the urban fabric, its extent and in tensity have changed dramatically. By the late 1970s gentrication seems to have been identiable in most major cities in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Throughout the 1980s published reports of gentri cation in Johannesburg, Kyoto, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aries, and Tel Aviv appeared. Shortly after the fall of com munist regimes in Eastern Europe, the gentrication process began in earnest in cities such as Prague and Budapest. It was even identiable in Warsaw whose historic core was almost completely destroyed in World War II. By the late 1990s, gentrication was evident even in Moscow. Given the strong movement toward a mar ket based economy in East and South Asia it is un surprising that gentrication and displacement became major issues in Chinese and Indian cities, especially, Shanghai and more recently in Mumbai. While the spread of gentrication continued, its intensity in North American and European cities increased. By 2001, large sections of London and New York were heavily gentri ed. The processes had proceeded to the point that long standing areas of poverty were gentrifying: Harlem and the Lower East Side in New York, and sections of Brixton and the East End in London. Manhattan had become such a center of activity that gentrication spilled over into substantial sections of Brooklyn and even Hoboken, New Jersey. In Chicago, gentrication reached deep into the south side, and northwest of the Loop has surrounded Cabrini Green, one of the largest public housing projects in the country. In several more spatially limited central cities like Boston and San Francisco, gentrication, combined with an overheated housing market, had almost eliminated any affordable housing in the central city. Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney also faced similar issues. At the same time, gentrication was moving down the urban hierarchy both in Europe and North America. By 2000, urban programs explicitly designed to foster gen trication had created small but viable areas of re development in the United Kingdoms old industrial centers. The remote Spanish city of Bilbao was selected as the site for the European branch of the Guggenheim museum, the now famous structure helped start a wave of gentrication that penetrated well away from the

citys redeveloped waterfront. In the United States, gen trication has slowly begun to transform small areas of cities near the bottom of the urban hierarchy with row house redevelopments and warehouse conversions in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or the creation of lofts in small downtowns like Bloomington, Illinois. Some critics have cautioned that gentrication has been dened so broadly that if you look for it you can nd it almost anywhere, and there are conceptual difculties with conating redeveloped houses in a city of 50 000 people with the massive ows of capital that have rebuilt large portions of a number of global cities. Nonetheless, there is an identiable trend toward both a spatial expansion and intensication of the gentrication over the last 30 years of the 1900s, and the trend appears to be con tinuing into the new century.

Causes of Gentrication
Early Explanations The emergence of gentrication throughout the 1960s and 1970s caught the attention of urban scholars for several reasons. It was evident on the urban landscape, it offered some solution to the problems of urban decline, and it seemed to contradict nearly 50 years of urban theory that focused upon the out movement and subur banization of the middle class. This challenge to the theoretical canon required serious consideration of the causes of gentrication. While the early research on gentrication covered a range of issues from displace ment to other social and policy considerations, it was the attempts to theorize gentrication that dominated the scholarly research throughout the 1980s. The earliest explanations for gentrication developed out of a view that it was a temporary phenomenon rooted in demographic factors present in both North America and Europe. Brian Berry suggested the major recession of the early 1970s followed by large numbers of baby boomers entering the housing market created a signi cant shortage of housing, rapidly driving up housing prices beyond the means of many members of the large cohort of rst time homebuyers. A few of these indi viduals turned to lower cost housing in declining areas of central cities. These gentriers, Berry suggested, would soon leave their central city location and move to more typical suburban locales when their incomes rose, hous ing became more affordable, and they began to have children. This demographic explanation was echoed by many others and established a general view of gentri cation as a highly ephemeral event. As it became clearer that gentried areas were expanding throughout the 1980s instead of contracting, Berry suggested that gen trication was more an issue of contagious abandonment of inner city housing brought about by overbuilding in

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suburban housing markets. This substantial shift from a demand side to a supply side explanation has been largely ignored because of Berrys famous contention that gentried areas were islands of renewal in seas of decay. While early explanations of gentrication emphasized demographic factors, many also noticed the correlation between gentrication and emerging high order service centers. Starting in the mid 1970s numerous scholars linked gentrication with an increasing concentration of white collar jobs in the central business district. By the late 1970s, some were trying to empirically evaluate this link. At the same time, a number of other suggestions were made about the root causes of gentrication: high fuel prices, increasing numbers of women in the work force, etc. While all these factors probably played a role in bringing about gentrication, they were frequently offered in an ad hoc fashion. Critics of this early phase of explanation accurately pointed to the lack of coherent theories to contextualize the process. However, it is somewhat inaccurate to refer to the explanations as ad hoc. Both of the Berrys explanations of gentrication, although mutually exclusive, were consistent with and linked to prevailing neoclassical theories of urbanization (although he claims to have challenged these same the ories). It is accurate, however, that most of the early re search on the causes of gentrication failed to make explicit links to established urban theory. This situation changed dramatically in 1979 and 1980. Capital and Culture With the publication of a short paper dedicated to moving toward a theory of gentrication, Neil Smith introduced what has become known as the rent gap hy pothesis. In doing so, he identied gentrication as the leading edge of a process of urban restructuring driven by the demands of advanced capitalism. He suggested links between the rent gap and Marxist theories of urban ization being honed by Henri Lefebvre and David Har vey, and cemented those links in his later work on uneven development. The rent gap hypothesis emphasized the supply side causes of gentrication and focused on movements of capital in the gentrication process. The subtitle of Smiths paper was A back to the city move ment by capital and not people. The rent gap theory focused on a cycle of devalorization, or destruction of value, that all urban land is subject to. The ve stage cycle suggests that while some land maintains its value, other land proceeds through phases of devalorization, perhaps eventually to abandonment. As devalorization occurs, the actual land rent (termed capitalized land rent) declines as less and less value can be extracted from the land given its current use. At the same time, in a met ropolitan area with continued investment in the built environment, or valorization, the potential land rent of

the devalorized parcel remains high because of their high levels of accessibility. This difference in capitalized and potential land rent is the rent gap. In land rent terms, gentrication represents the closing of the gap. The rent gap hypothesis stood in stark contrast to the demographic explanations of gentrication because it emphasized the supply of gentriable land and housing and not the de mand for gentrication growing out of the rise of a particular cohort of urbanites. The postindustrial city hypothesis formed another new strand in gentrication theory, emerging at the same time as the rent gap. David Ley was the rst to fully elaborate the impact of this hypothesis on gentrication in a seminal paper in 1980. Ley emphasized the effect of a new liberal ideology in changing the inner city landscape in Vancouver, British Columbia. As the citys economy was transformed by the increase in high level service functions, a growing group of elite white collar pro fessionals began to assert power in local politics, adopting a liberal ideology that Ley suggests was characterized by a concern with humane governance and emphasized issues involved with the urban esthetic. As this political transition played itself out, it became clear that the new liberal elite were not terribly concerned with issues of social justice, but instead, placed issues of urban livability above all other concerns. The urban orientation of this new class was in part a result of their employment in the urban core and in part a function of the liberal ideology. Ley outlines many of the emphases of Vancouvers liberal movement in a case study of False Creek, an old indus trial area that was the subject of city led redevelopment. Ley never used the term gentrication in the 1980 paper, but it was clear that he was outlining a different view of the process of gentrication. He explicitly links gentri cation to larger political and economic forces that help create a new class of potential gentriers. He also suggest that liberal ideology was so focused upon livability and esthetics that some of its results, including the False Creek, project were uneconomical. In this sense, the liberal ideology explanation of gentrication would seem to be in direct opposition to the rent gap hypothesis, and in some respects, it is. The debate surrounding these explanations of gen trication continued through the 1980s, and included a lively exchange between Smith and Ley in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Other gentrication theorists began to portray these explanations of gentri cation as being based either in capital or culture. In this sense, the theories surrounding gentrication became a microcosm of larger debates and theorization in geog raphy and other social sciences. Indeed, much of the attention that gentrication received was not due to its empirical extent, or even its effects on working class and poor neighborhoods. Gentrication was understood as a symbolic process representative of sweeping changes in

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industrialized cities. Theorizing gentrication was a key component in rejecting positivist theories of urbanization and supplanting them with alternative theories. However, the capital and culture debates were not actually about capital and culture. The rent gap hypothesis was often simplied to a deterministic diagram representing the gap between potential and capitalized land rent, but ig noring the politics of neighborhood change and class constitution that drove land rent changes. Conversely, while the liberal ideology explanation certainly con tained a cultural component, it also relied heavily upon concepts common in political economy. Both Smith and Ley seemed to move in this direction in later work, and most scholars who wrote about gentrication theory seemed to suggest the need for some combination of both explanations, but often with the clear intent of privileging one of them. Revanchism and Neoliberalism By the early 1990s, the so called capital and culture debates had run their course, and gentrication itself was slowed by a recession in Europe and North America. Given the culmination of these two events, it is un surprising that several scholars began to speculate about the end of gentrication, and processes of degen trication. Once again they raised questions about its usefulness as a concept. The rapid reappearance of gentrication in many global centers, however, silenced many of those questions (even when they raised im portant and difcult issues). As academic interest renewed in gentrication, the focus changed. Jan Van Weesep suggested that after the experiences in gentried areas during the 1980s more attention needed to be paid to issues of displacement and the inequalities that gen trication was inscribing in the landscape. The research that followed focused initially upon documenting and eventually upon understanding and theorizing processes of gentrication as they unfolded after the recession of the early 1990s. Gentrication in the 1990s can be differentiated from early processes in several ways. Oddly, there appeared to be less political resistance to the process in gentried areas, especially in contrast to the sharp and sometimes violent conicts of the 1980s. In the United States, part of this difference may be explained by shifts in a range of housing policies. Throughout the 1980s the residential lending industry was deregulated in ways that allowed an increase in both the products that mortgage lenders could offer and the type and characteristics of the lenders themselves. A secondary mortgage market had existed in the United States for decades, and had expanded mas sively in the 1970s, but in the 1980s private secondary market added to the growth. Historic discrimination in lending had been addressed in a series of legislation

throughout the 1970s, which the Clinton administration began to enforce with some vigor. These developments, combined with market pressures, began to open up inner city neighborhoods to mainstream mortgage capital for the rst time. The intended result was that low and moderate income individuals would have increased ac cess to mortgages, and this did occur, but these shifts also made gentrifying areas the target of increased mortgage lending. Home buying and renovations in gentrifying areas had traditionally been funded through processes of sweat equity, personal savings, and informal loan net works. While mortgages were made in gentrifying areas, they were difcult to obtain, and were often at un favorable rates. Access to mainstream mortgage capital, initially in the 1980s and in massively increasing amounts throughout the 1990s helped nance gentrication at a pace that had not been experienced previously. Resist ance to gentrication at the local level was handicapped by an increasingly direct link between the process and global capital markets. The extent of gentrication in many major US cities was signicant enough that David Leys suggestion, made in the early 1980s, that gentrication may one day turn North American cities inside out creating a morphology much more similar to other cities around the globe, seemed plausible. The amount of gentrication in places like Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC, and San Francisco made a signicant mark on local politics. Neil Smith borrowed the term revanchism to outline a theory of middle class revenge upon the poor in an at tempt to take back the city and make it more palatable for middle class consumption habits. The vigorous po licing championed in New York, with its occasional overt violence inicted upon marginalized groups, effectively pushed the poor and dispossessed out of Manhattan. It also served as a model for other US cities. Similar tactics were adopted in European cities, although initially they were somewhat less aggressive. Revanchism was quickly linked to a political and economic movement in advanced capitalism, termed neoliberalism. A number of scholars have argued that gentrication is a clear example of neoliberal policies and its expansion during the 1990s was brought about by those policies. Philosophically neoliberalism is a return to a deeply held belief in the efcacy of the free market, albeit with substantial assistance from the public sector that is typically used to guarantee a high return on private investment. Gentrication throughout the 1990s was often aided by local neoliberal regimes that saw it as a free market solution to urban problems. There are numerous examples in the United States, but the United Kingdom may offer the single most sweeping example of neoliberal gentrication policy in the Blair adminis trations plan for regenerating the countrys central cities.

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The Process of Gentrication

Stage Theories There has been signicant investigation into the process of gentrication, and a few useful generalizations have been made. Early work suggested a rst group of gen triers who were risk oblivious and thus were willing to live in neighborhoods that probably lacked many of the typical amenities they would expect, and from a real estate perspective posed signicant investment risks. These early gentriers often had specic reasons, fre quently economic constraints, that moved them toward gentrication. College students have been identied in this group, but the arts community is often seen as the most prominent participants in the early stages of the gentrication process. Artists need for studio space, their low incomes, and their counter cultural outlook led them to neighborhoods that were, in real estate terms, off the map. Some research has suggested that gay men and lesbians have also been key actors early in the gentri cation process. During the earliest waves of gentrication, the social barriers to living openly as homosexuals in many parts of the city made economically marginal areas attractive as safe havens. In addition, single working mothers, another group with limited housing choices, may have chosen gentried areas because of their prox imity to the workplace, which helped them maintain the difcult balance between domestic and professional re sponsibilities. Discussion and theorization about the role of these groups introduced an important gender com ponent into gentrication and while it has never been the primary concern of most research on the topic, theories explicating processes of gendering space have been pre sent in work on gentrication for several decades. These early gentriers have often been the subject of debate about their role in the gentrication process. If these groups manage to start the process of gentrication, do they bear some responsibility for the resulting dis placement from later, more intense gentrication? The subject has received much discussion on web forum and electronic mail lists, and the issue has received serious consideration by some members of the subject com munities that are often characterized by progressive pol itics. However, from a policy standpoint, it may be myopic to lay blame on socially marginalized groups for a process that other research has clearly indicated is largely driven by mainstream economic and cultural forces. Gentrication in the second stage is characterized by risk prone or risk aware in movers. These individuals are attracted to gentrifying areas because of the social diversity and the counter culture trendiness that result from the rst stage of activity. The gentriers may be professionals with somewhat limited nancial resources, but are well aware of the investment risks of purchasing in areas in early stages of the gentrication process. On the other hand, they are

just as aware of the potential nancial benets, although most work focusing on stages of gentrication typically emphasizes the cultural aspects of gentrication in its early stages. It is also in this risk aware stage that investors and developers begin to pay attention to the area. The nal stage of gentrication is often referred to as the risk adverse stage. At this point a neighborhood is heavily gentried and will likely have many of the typical amenities upper middle class urbanites expect in their neighborhoods. In movers, at this point, will pay sub stantial prices for homes and expect that investment to be safe. Gentried neighborhoods at this point have taken on a particular economic prole and may be solidly middle class, or in some cases an elite urban enclave that is comparable to some of the traditional outposts of urban wealth. While stage theories of gentrication are useful in understanding the potential forms that gentrication may take, it is difcult to effectively apply them to individual neighborhoods due to the diverse forms that gentri cation may take and the incredible range of urban contexts that occurs within. There has been some in vestigation into various types of gentried areas, but it has typically been constrained to neighborhoods within a single city, or at most selected neighborhoods in cities from one country. The diversity of international contexts poses a signicant challenge to anyone attempting to create some form of classication of gentried neigh borhoods, but the task might provide an entre e into more fully understanding the multitude of processes that cre ate and maintain gentried areas. Prole of Gentriers Questions about the identity of gentriers and their mo tivations have been addressed in a wide array of research projects. The initial view of gentriers as a back to the city group was shown to be inaccurate by early empirical studies. By and large, gentriers lived in households that were either new, or that had moved from other areas of the city. A more sophisticated picture began to emerge in the 1980s that tied gentriers to both liberal ideology and a culture of consumption. More recently, some have argued that gentriers should be understood as part of a trans formed middle class who seek to identify themselves through the process of gentrication. Theorists in this vein have invoked Bourdieus concept of habitus in an attempt to link the structural aspects of gentrication to individual beliefs and dispositions.

Consequences of Gentrication
Displacement The potential of gentrication to displace lower income residents from a neighborhood seemed obvious very

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early after the identication of the process. Some of the earliest research focused on displacement, and while the ndings were based on relatively small scale studies, the general consensus was that gentrication in a tradi tional neighborhood setting would result in the dis placement of many of the original residents of the neighborhood. Most of the displacement was the direct result of economic issues, but the stress and strain of class differences and neighborhood change were also identied as factors. More recently, some controversy has arisen over the issue of displacement, as part of a larger movement that seeks to suggest that gentrication is a largely positive phenomenon and the only realistic way of revitalizing many inner city areas. Several studies conducted by Lance Freeman have indicated that gentrication does not directly contribute to displacement of low income individuals. There is a high degree of residential mobility in poorer households and the background rates of mobility are high enough and the typical process of gentrication slow enough that it is impossible to attri bute the out movement of low income individuals dir ectly to gentrication. On the other hand, there are a number of case studies that clearly identify inci dences of displacement directly caused by gentrication. In addition, there can be little doubt that gentrication can dramatically reduce the housing options for low income people, forcing them to direct their search elsewhere. Displacement is an on going concern with gentri cation and is likely to be the source of a great deal of debate. The debate, however, has tended to focus on the link between gentrication and displacement. In aca demic research, at least, there is little argument about the severity of the process and the difculties displacement creates for low income people. Policy Consequences The consequences of gentrication reach beyond the neighborhoods in which the process is operating, because it has become the centerpiece of a range of urban policy initiatives. In much of the industrialized world, gentri cation has been seen as a possible solution to a range of urban problems. There is little doubt that the massive gentrication of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn con tributed to the strong scal position that New York City enjoyed throughout the 1990s and was in strong contrast to the debt ridded metropolis of the 1970s. In the US, the purported scal benets have provided a justication for many cities to subsidize gentrication. While the process has long been subsidized and even initiated by the state in myriad ways, it was not until the 1990s that gentri cation became fully linked with large scale redevelop ment policies and theories.

In the United States, ideas surrounding the import ance of a so called creative class in initiating and ex panding economic development enmeshed gentrication and development policies. In the creative class hypoth esis, it is the educated, urbane, and highly skilled work force that drives the postindustrial economy. This creative class is often also a gentrifying class and this link has driven a set of neoliberal policies that have attempted to attract the creative class through subsidizing devel opments and projects that would improve the lifestyle of the urban middle class and attract members of the cre ative class. It has also driven a series of revanchist policies aimed at removing the poor from the areas that are likely to be most attractive to the creative class. The hypothesis does emphasize the importance of diversity and tolerance in local governance, but this emphasis is rarely translated to policy. One of the most direct links between gentrication and public policy is the Urban White paper issued by the UK government in 2002. Formally titled, Our towns and cities The future: Delivering an urban renaissance, the paper was based on a government commissioned study of urban problems, Towards an urban renaissance. Both the report and the ensuing policy recommendations place heavy emphasis on the need for the regeneration of the urban core, particularly in the countrys regional metropolises. The document places emphasis on public/ private partnerships in creating gentrication and makes scant mention of a range of social issues that plague the urban cores of the countrys most troubled cities. In short, the document poses gentrication and commercial re development as a solution to a vast range of urban issues. As Loretta Lees has observed, however, the term is not used and renaissance, regeneration, and sustainability are substituted, thus avoiding the deeply imbedded class constitution of the gentrication process. The discourse makes the intent clear. The new urban core will be a place for the British middle classes. Given the inuence of the central government in the United Kingdom, the implementation of these policies, as was intended, has triggered gentrication often as a major facet of central city or waterfront redevelopment. Perhaps, one of the more unusual effects of gentri cation has been its inuence on public housing policy in the United States. In the early 1990s, after a report on the troubling conditions in many of the countrys public housing projects, the HOPE VI program was launched to improve the conditions in the nations worst public housing. HOPE VI was a multidimensional program and its origins were complex, but there is a distinct link with several major aspects of the program and the intense gentrication of many American inner cities. There had been a growing concern about the effects of concentrated poverty in American cities and public housing was seen as one of the greatest contributors to the issue of

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concentration. The results of several decades of gentri cation had led to situations in some US cities where public housing projects and gentried neighborhoods were sitting side by side. The HOPE VI program had adopted a policy of encouraging income mixing when possible, and the presence of gentrication in some lo cales made it possible. Chicago provides one of the most stunning examples, where several of the countrys largest projects were slated for demolition and replacement with a mix of as much as 50% market rate housing, and only vague plans for relocating a majority of public housing residents. Gentrication then has created a new and troubling option for policymakers who seek to create a new form of urbanization that excludes all but the privileged.
See also: Gentrication, Rural; Habitus; Housing; Land Rent Theory; Ley, D.; Neoliberalism, Urban; Regeneration to Renaissance; Smith, N.; Uneven Development; Urban Policy; Waterfront Development.

Further Reading
Atkinson, A. and Bridge, G. (2005). The New Urban Colonialism. London: Routledge. Butler, T. and Lees, L. (2006). Super gentrication in Barnsbury, London: Globalisation and gentrifying global elites at the neighbourhood level. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 467 487.

Duany, A. (2001). Three cheers for gentrication. The American Enterprise 12, 36 39. Freeman, L. (2006). There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrication from the Ground Up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hackworth, J. and Smith, N. (2001). The changing state of gentrication. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geograe 92, 464 477. Lees, L., Slater, T. and Wyly, E. (2007). Gentrication. New York: Routledge. Ley, D. (1980). Liberal ideology and the post industrial city. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, 238 258. Ley, D. (1996). The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, D. (1989). A feminist perspective on employment restructuring and gentrication: The case of Montreal. In Wolch, J. & Dear, M. (eds.) The Power of Geography, pp 18 138. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Smith, N. (1979). Toward a theory of gentrication: A back to the city movement by capital not people. Journal of the American Planning Association 45, 538 548. Smith, N. and Williams, P. (eds.) (1986). Gentrication of the City. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin. Smith, N. (1996). The New Urban Frontier: Gentrication and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Wyly, E. and Hammel, D. (1999). Islands of decay in seas of renewal: Urban policy and the resurgence of gentrication. Housing Policy Debate 10, 711 771. Zukin, S. (1989). Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (2nd edn.). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Relevant Website
http://members.lycos.co.uk/gentrications/ Gentrication Web maintained by Tom Slater, Lycos.