Gentrification is supported by cities as it attracts investment to the city (money rather than physical people) but it is also seen as a way to solve inner-city problem areas by moving them outside the city limits. It is a case of survival for the city as it is generally applied to areas where there is a high dependence on services but very little tax revenue.
Neil Smith was a significant figure in first analysing the process of gentrification in the late 70s with his book The Urban Frontier. Within this book he describes the process of devaluation and red-lining in which banks refuse mortgages in order to discourage investment, this then causes the collapse of real-estate prices and results in a rent gap (the value and actual purchasing cost of buildings). When this gap is big enough, the city begins the process of making the area appear attractive to a new market of people.
There are some cases in which gentrification can be specific to an area as demonstrated by Peter Marcuse with the development from Fordism to post-Fordism. During the change to assembly-line production, factories were moved to outer-cities as they required more space. They took the skilled workers with them leaving the unskilled in the inner-city. The unskilled become increasingly unemployed due to the changes in manufacturing. The skilled become middle-class due to the impact of trade unions. This process of decentralisation and suburbanisation therefore changes the constitution of the inner-city. Once the unskilled become unemployed the area becomes more deprived and is then seen as a ripe place for the process of gentrification to begin.
Krätke, in reference to Berlin, critiques Florida’s assertion that almost everyone is a member of the creative class and instead, in terms of the process of gentrification, comments both that the creative class is a mask for the ‘economically, politically, and socially destructive actions of the dealer class’ [financial sector], but also that the creative class causes ‘increasing polarisation and inequality within cities’ due to its reliance on zero-hour contracts, unstable working etc. [148, 145]. Whether the creative class is crucial to the development of the city is an interesting one. As in fact, the artists help romanticise an area with a bohemian image which is then built via positive media attention which then causes an alteration in reputation (which is not necessarily real) which then attracts the next wave of lower-middle class families to the area. Both artists and students are associated with the middle class but they don’t have much economic agency and are therefore attractive to developers. These people also attract investment to areas as they require services and they (especially students) are seen as temporal populations. |
In an analysis of gentrification there is a tendency to focus on individuals rather than the general transformation of the city. The city is in fact transformed by the dislocation of people.
-Krätke, Stefan, ‘The New Urban Ideology of “Creative Cities”’, in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer (eds.) Cities for People, Not for Profit (Oxon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 139-49.
-Marcuse, Peter, ‘Housing Policy and the Myth of the Benevolent State’, in J Rosie Tighe; Elizabeth J Müller (eds.), The Affordable Housing Reader (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 36-43.
-Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, (London: Routledge, 1996).