Book review Urban Studies 1–3 Book review

Schlichtman and Patch suggest that there is an elephant sitting in the academic corner: while urbanists often use 'gentrification' as a pejorative term in formal and informal academic conversation, many urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. Even though urbanists have this firsthand experience with the process, this familiarity makes little impact on scholarly debate. There is, Schlichtman and Patch argue, an artificial distance in accounts of gentrification because researchers have not adequately examined their own relationship to the process. Utilizing a simple diagnostic tool that includes ten common aspects of gentrification, they compose two autoethnographic memoirs to begin this dialogue. The mirror At the 2009 RC-21 conference in São Paulo, a young scholar began her presentation with the premise 'we all know that gentrification is bad'. Urban scholars rail against the process of gentrification and its destruction of working-class communities. We read about the waves of gentrifiers and the kinds of cafes, boutiques and new amenities that they bring. We express worry to our peers that the city is going to become a bastion of elitism or a generic suburb stripped of diversity. Often, we treat gentrification as a contemporary form of urban class and racial warfare (Smith, 1996). As urbanists, however, we increasingly notice an elephant sitting in the academic corner: many (dare we say most-'mainstream' and critical) urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. As Brown-Saracino (2010: 356) suggests, 'many of us have firsthand experience with gentrification'. But what difference has this made on our research? Very little. We have created an artificial distance in our analysis because we do not examine our own relationship to the data. The last few years have witnessed lively debates among urbanists on the topic of gentrification. Some of these debates have seemed quite personal. The truth is that those of us situated in the phenomenon of gentrification carry suppositions on the issue that are deeply rooted in our personal biographies. We agree with Maso (2001: 137) that the

2010

Taylor and Francis CCIT_A_458437. gm 10.1080/1360 810903579287 ity: Analysis of Urban Trends 360-4813 (pri t)/1470-3629 (online) Original Article 2 1 & Francis 4 0 0 00 February 2010 Professor Ch isHamnett chris.h [email protected] am pleased to have the opportunity to respond once again to Tom Slater’s (2010) arguments regarding gentrification and displacement. The issue is an important one, which has major social, analytical and political implications and it merits serious debate. Tom’s case seems to boil down to four key issues. These are: first, that I ignore or fail to engage with the key issue of Marcuse’s classification of different types of displacement; second, that I focus on the claimed diversionary issue of replacement versus displacement, which is in fact undermined by Marcuse’s concept of exclusionary displacement; third, that I utilize aggregate class analysis rather than a more rounded approach to class; and fourth, that my work is deemed to be mainstream versus critic...

Environment and Planning A, 2004

Metropolitics.eu

The debate on the causes, effects and extent of the "gentrification" of working-class neighbourhoods in the central areas of our cities has animated (and divided) the fields of geography and urban sociology for the last decade or so in France. This debate was reignited in September 2013 by the publication of a book by Anne Clerval titled Paris sans le peuple ("Paris Without the People"). In this article, Anne Clerval and Mathieu Van Criekingen reply with force to those fellow researchers and those politicians and administrators who see gentrification as a positive process that can modify social structures and encourage urban renewal.

Environment and Planning A, 2007

London School of Economics and Political Science, 2018

In the Handbook of Gentrification Studies, Loretta Lees with Martin Phillips bring together contributors to explore different types of gentrification around the world, debate the term's utility for describing diverse phenomena and consider modes of response. The volume offers a good starting point for understanding the wide-ranging discussions of gentrification, underscores the need to approach it flexibly, comparatively and through a cosmopolitan lens and also invites reflection on the complicated potential offered by communal resistance, finds Helen Traill. Handbook of Gentrification Studies. Loretta Lees (ed.) with Martin Phillips. Edward Elgar. 2018. Find this book: As this book shows, the need for alternatives to gentrification (and indeed decline) is more urgent that ever, given how this socially unjust process has progressed through time and space.

City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2012

Chatsworth Road in Hackney, has recently been branded in an article in The Guardian newspaper as ‘the frontline of gentrification’ in East London. As one of the ‘faces’ of the article, and through my position as local street market trader, I want to open up these claims to scrutiny, beyond both scholarly discourses on gentrification and the tough language of militant resistance. Through a blossoming of local action groups, the planning mirage of the Localism Bill, the proximity to the Olympic Park and the activities of local estate agents, the Clapton area is certainly at the centre of intense transformations in both demographics and property values. How are such urban shifts are created and the resulting values distributed in this area and for whose benefit? Where is the place for truly transformative social justice in the scope and tools of the Localism Bill? At the crossroads between declared missions of ‘managing gentrification’ for the love of the local, and the ways in which the employment of images of area distinction and notions of cultural ‘authenticity’ inevitably bolster the fragmentation of the local as the locals know it, the probing of Chatsworth Road and Clapton at this point in time offers a valuable vantage point to observe East London beyond the Olympic rhetoric.