‘At least it’s not a ghetto anymore’: Experiencing gentrification and ‘false choice urbanism’ in Rotterdam’s Afrikaanderwijk

Abstract

Chinese

Gentrification has become a central pillar of urban policy in cities around the world. Proponents often frame it as a necessity and the sole alternative to neighbourhood decline. Critics call this a ‘false choice’ as it ignores other possibilities for improvement without gentrification. But how do working-class residents who live through the process of gentrification view the impact it has on their neighbourhood? Do they see it in such a stark binary way? This article addresses these questions by using qualitative interviews with long-term residents of the Afrikaanderwijk, a multicultural neighbourhood in Rotterdam where municipally-led gentrification is taking place. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon literature on experiencing gentrification, our respondents had far more mixed, complex and ambivalent perspectives on the process. To some extent, this was due to the neighbourhood’s recent history as a stigmatised ‘ghetto’ and the expectation that the arrival of white, ethnically Dutch middle-class people would help to improve the neighbourhood, which was ranked worst in the country in 2000. We also stress the role of local context, such as the early phase of gentrification and the comparatively strong social housing sector and tenant protection laws in the Netherlands, in contributing towards a more nuanced experience of gentrification.

Keywords

Afrikaanderwijk class community displacement ‘false choice urbanism’gentrification housing neighbourhood Rotterdam

Introduction

Gentrification is one of the biggest forces shaping cities and neighbourhoods and a central strategy for the neoliberal remaking of urban space (Kallin and Slater, 2014; Paton, 2014; Smith, 2002). In many policy and political circles, gentrification is heralded as the saviour of cities and is framed as both necessary and as the opposite of neighbourhood decay (see Davidson, 2014; Duany, 2001; Rotterdam Municipality, 2007, 2016). Critical scholars have described this as a ‘false choice’ binary where gentrification has:

left residents of low-income neighbourhoods in a situation where, since they exert little control over either investment capital or their homes, they are facing the ‘choices’ of either continued disinvestment and decline in the quality of the homes they live in, or reinvestment that results in their displacement. (DeFilippis, 2004: 89, as quoted in Slater, 2014a: 518)

Dominant discourses in gentrification research tend to also be polarised and support the idea of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Empirical studies reinforce this by focusing either on the gentrifiers themselves (e.g. Boterman, 2012; Butler, 2003) or those displaced or under threat of displacement (e.g. Atkinson, 2015; Huisman, 2014; Kern, 2016; Sakizlioğlu, 2014). Perspectives from those who live through gentrification have, until relatively recently, been less engaged with. Two prominent gentrification scholars, Tom Slater and Damaris Rose, have separately called for more research into the lived experience of gentrification:

My purpose here is … to point out that there is next to nothing published on the experiences of non-gentrifying groups living in the neighbourhoods into which the much-researched cosmopolitan middle classes are arriving en masse. (Slater, 2006: 743)

Our trio of case studies leads us to strongly endorse recent calls for critical gentrification researchers to pay more attention to how the power geometries of the latest incarnations of social mix will play out between the different groups in public space. (Rose et al., 2013: 447)

These calls have been taken up by a growing number of scholars, many of whom are focusing their work on the experience of displacement or waiting to be displaced (Atkinson, 2015; Huisman, 2014; Paton, 2012, 2014; Sakizlioğlu, 2014; Shaw and Hagemans, 2015; Valli, 2015).

This article is, in part, a direct response to Slater’s and others’ calls for more research into non-gentrifiers. Our respondents are witnessing the municipal policy of state-led gentrification being rolled out before their eyes. They witness the character of their neighbourhood changing, sometimes dramatically and at other times more subtly. We seek to understand to what extent they experience gentrification in the binary ways that are often presented in debates. Do they see gentrification as a false choice?

The aim of this article is to explore and listen to the complex and diverse experiences that residents have of gentrification, as well as analyse how they both interpret and navigate through the process of gentrification taking place around them. As with recent work by Shaw and Hagemans (2015), we are interested in the interactions, social practices and sense of place that non-gentrifiers have towards their neighbourhoods.

Our research was carried out in Rotterdam, the second largest city in the Netherlands and a major international port. The Netherlands makes for an insightful place to study neighbourhood change, gentrification and displacement; because of strong tenant protection laws, low-income residents are not subject to the same displacement pressures as in Anglo-Saxon countries, for example. Our case study was the Afrikaanderwijk, a low-income neighbourhood on the south side of the city. This neighbourhood began as a working-class Dutch community, which during the 1960s and 1970s, transformed into an area with a high concentration of immigrants, largely from Turkey and Morocco. We selected this area for three reasons. First, gentrification is actively taking place as a result of a municipal policy to gentrify several low-income neighbourhoods near the city centre. This is being done through the demolition of older, social rented housing and its replacement with new, owner-occupied dwellings, or market rent apartments. This approach to neighbourhood change has been enshrined in two major policy documents of the City of Rotterdam: the 2007 Stadsvisie (Urban Vision) and, more recently, the Woonvisie (Housing Vision), published in 2016. The latter plan was met with considerable opposition by residents’ and tenants’ organisations (see Doucet et al., 2016), who organised a referendum on the Housing Vision in November 2016. Second, the Afrikaanderwijk is known for its ethnic diversity as it has been an immigrant settlement area in Rotterdam for some time. This also makes it a useful case study to examine the relationship between ethnicity and class in a gentrifying neighbourhood, contributing to other studies on gentrifying ethnic neighbourhoods. Third, while gentrification is at an early phase of development, the neighbourhood has many characteristics of other areas in the Netherlands where gentrification is actively promoted, including a high proportion of social rented housing combined with newbuild owner-occupied housing and policies and programmes to encourage new amenities catering to a more upmarket clientele to locate in the neighbourhood.

State-led gentrification

It is increasingly recognised that gentrification is not something that just ‘happens’ (see Slater, 2014b), but is rather part of a wider approach to upgrade neighbourhoods and even entire cities. Neil Smith (2002) famously referred to gentrification as a ‘global urban strategy’ and, in the words of Roland Atkinson (2003: 2346), gentrification has become a ‘strategy of regeneration’.

State-led gentrification in neighbourhoods such as the Afrikaanderwijk can be seen as part of Hackworth and Smith’s (2001) third wave of the process. This phase is characterised by the involvement of large actors such as private developers or governments (and in the Netherlands, housing associations), financially riskier neighbourhoods further away from the city centre, and a decline in resistance or opposition. Another common trait of large, state-led gentrification projects is that they are ‘rebranded’ as social-mixing or urban restructuring, rather than overtly stated as gentrification (see Bridge et al., 2012). As these policies become more ingrained and central to urban policy around the world, residents are confronted with what Tom Slater (2014a) has called ‘false choice urbanism’, where gentrification is presented as a necessary, and indeed only option to stem neighbourhood decline. In this binary view, ‘gentrification can nudge a neighbourhood up the slope; decline can roll it off the cliff’ (Davidson, 2014).

Slater is critical of the use of this binary to depict the choices on offer and his work focuses on how ‘the two are fundamentally intertwined in a wider process of capitalist urbanisation and uneven development that creates profit and class privilege for some whilst stripping many of the human need of shelter’ (Slater, 2014b, emphasis in original). And Van Gent (2013: 507) notes that social mixing is a very top-down approach, stating it is ‘a vision of place by governing elites rather than that of residents’.

In the Netherlands, it is the state (through a combination of national and local policies and programmes) which primarily drives gentrification, through policies of social-mixing and urban restructuring (Hochstenbach, 2017; Van Gent, 2013). For more than a decade, this has involved the large-scale demolition of lower-income neighbourhoods (consisting primarily of social rented housing owned by housing associations) and their replacement with mixed tenure neighbourhoods, with a strong emphasis on owner-occupied apartments and houses.

To illustrate how third wave, state-led gentrification is made manifest in the Netherlands, Van Gent (2013) cites two policy documents published by the municipality of Amsterdam, which explicitly call for a rollout of gentrification beyond the city’s historic core. Similar policies of promoting neighbourhood change through gentrification can also be found in Rotterdam (Hochstenbach, 2017; Rotterdam Municipality, 2007; Van Engelen, 2015). A new approach to stimulating gentrification is through tenure conversion from social housing to the private market (Boterman and Van Gent, 2014), rather than demolition and replacement.

While state-led gentrification is prolific in the Netherlands, scholars have noted that its effects are milder than in Anglo-Saxon countries, largely due to the managed and planned nature of Dutch gentrification specifically, and urban development more generally (Aalbers, 2011; Doucet, 2014; Van Gent, 2013). Due to strict housing regulations, there is little chance of becoming homeless as a result of gentrification in Dutch cities (Hochstenbach, 2017), and those who are displaced due to gentrification (particularly those living in social rented housing) are rehoused elsewhere in the city or neighbourhood. They are often bumped to the front of the queue on social housing waiting lists.

Living through gentrification

While displacement is central to the definition of gentrification, not all non-gentrifying residents are displaced in all contexts. The concept of displacement was originally conceived of as the physical outmigration from an area and early studies reflect this interpretation of the term. Freeman and Braconi (2004) found that displacement occurred less often in neighbourhoods which were gentrifying in New York City, and argued that this was due to residents’ desires to stay in their neighbourhood as it was upgrading. This work was contrasted by Newman and Wyly (2006) who found that gentrification did play a role in physically displacing low-income residents.

More recent studies have taken a broader view of displacement to encompass the experiences of loss (of friends, businesses, services etc.) that one can have in situ, as a form of displacement (Atkinson, 2015; Davidson, 2009; Shaw and Hagemans, 2015; Valli, 2015). Peter Marcuse first conceptualised this as displacement pressure as far back as 1985 and it was expanded on by Davidson (2009), who argued that displacement was also about the lived experience of space, rather than just a process of outmigration. As a result, one can be symbolically displaced without actually moving. Atkinson (2015) argues that those who remain in a neighbourhood could still experience a form of displacement because ‘they endure experiences of alienation and newfound disconnection from their neighbourhoods as the character of such places change’ (Atkinson, 2015: 377). He stated that ‘we need to take in deeper feelings of displacement as a deeper set of social and indeed psychological transformations that may be generated by localized examples of gentrification’ (Atkinson, 2015: 377), and concluded that because their neighbourhood had dramatically changed around them, for many low-income residents, displacement had already occurred before they physically left the neighbourhood.

Some studies reveal predominantly negative attitudes towards gentrification and incoming residents, such as the feeling of being excluded (Deener, 2007) or aggression towards gentrifiers (Keating, 2007). For Valli (2015), the gentrification of a low-income, predominantly Hispanic neighbourhood in Brooklyn ‘disrupts the feelings of attachment and belonging of long-term residents’ (Valli, 2015: 1206) and leads to anger, resentment and frustration, predominantly aimed towards the white ‘hipster’. One of the first major studies into those living through gentrification was Paul Levy’s (1978) work on Queen Village in Philadelphia. He showed the struggle for place identity between the existing residents, some of whom had lived in South Philadelphia for generations, and the new incoming professionals. Small details such as the removal of stoops (formerly used by families to sit on and socialise) in front of houses during renovation were lamented by these residents, who consequently questioned the new gentrifiers’ motives and interest in historic preservation. There was also a recognition of indirect displacement; property price rises had priced out the children of the neighbourhood from being able to afford housing when they were older. In a similar vein, Spain (1993) examined conflicts and tensions which existed between those she referred to as ‘been heres’ versus ‘come heres’.

Some of these tensions are articulated by the work of Kirsteen Paton (2014) through what she calls the ‘paradox of gentrification’. The working class, she argues, are encouraged to be consumer citizens, yet they are denied the material and financial means to do this, leading to greater risk of displacement. They are then confronted with fewer choices, as housing associations sell off stock and build more expensive units for an aspiring population to consume, thereby limiting the options for low-income residents. As a result, working-class residents feel both included and excluded from the gentrification process. Kern (2016) studied the rhythms of gentrification in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. She found that events such as farmers’ markets and night markets, as well as the small-scale reductions in public spaces freely accessible to the area’s more marginal population, collectively had the impact of transforming the social spaces of the area in order to make it unfamiliar and even inaccessible to many non-gentrifiers. She calls this the ‘slow violence’ of gentrification.

An increased complexity to the experiences of residents comes through in the work of Sullivan (2006). In Portland, Oregon, he used quantitative data to show that a majority of residents living through gentrification felt that their neighbourhood was changing for the better. However, he noted that there was a strong difference between homeowners, who were more likely to view the changes as positive after seeing their houses increase in value, and renters, who were likely to be paying higher rents as a result of gentrification.

Lance Freeman’s (2006) book There Goes the ’Hood examined the experiences of residents living through gentrification in two New York neighbourhoods. He focused on African Americans who were witnessing both a class transformation and a racial one (though many of the gentrifiers were also African American). He concluded that residents had dualistic views about the process. On the one hand, they appreciated that the neighbourhood was becoming safer, with better quality amenities, such as more fresh food stores. However, they also saw many negatives associated with gentrification, not the least of which was an understanding that these changes were largely being demanded by incoming whites.

In the Netherlands, the more managed and mild nature of gentrification (compared with that of Anglo-Saxon countries) means that the negative experiences and perceptions found in the above-mentioned literature are rarely found. Hanneke Posthumus’ (2013) PhD dissertation, Displacement myths, examined the effects of displacement through what she refers to as ‘urban renewal’. She argued that, contrary to many other studies, the beliefs about the negatives associated with displacement are closer to myth than they are to fact, and found that in the Netherlands many residents were satisfied with their relocation outcomes. Visser et al. (2014) examined the effects of displacement on children and also reached similar conclusions: the long-term impact of being forced to move to a new neighbourhood was minimal. However, much of this body of literature is framed within the ‘false choice’ binary of contemporary urban restructuring: residents were presented with either a decaying and (in some cases deliberately) disinvested neighbourhood, or a new house in another neighbourhood. Remaining in situ was not an option. Framed in a dualistic way, it is understandable that many residents would be satisfied with their new houses and that these researchers would conclude that the effects of urban renewal are not that bad.

Such positive accounts are contrasted by scholars such as Huisman (2014) who concluded that most of the displaced are worse off because they cannot find affordable housing of the same quality and location as the units they were forced to leave. She argued that resident participation in state-led gentrification projects is a tool for implementing this policy, rather than a means to strengthen justice, because decision-making power is not transferred to citizens. This idea is similar to recent work by de Koning (2015). She found that the sale of social rented housing in Amsterdam (under the auspice of social mixing policies) led many non-Dutch residents to conclude that there was a policy preference for other residents, and that while this was made manifest in tenure terms, there were implicit racial connotations as well. Pinkster (2016) also found that residents opposed the sale of social housing, and feared a loss of community and local identity. Waiting for displacement can also be a precarious situation for low-income residents; as Sakizlioğlu and Uitermark (2014) and Sakizlioğlu (2014) illustrate, knowing that you will eventually become displaced can heighten tensions and anxieties.

The Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam

The Afrikaanderwijk in Rotterdam South is one of many ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods in Rotterdam South (Rotterdam Municipality, 2007). Its history is tied up with the shifting geography of the city’s port. In the second half of the 19th century, harbour activities began to develop on the then uninhabited southern bank of the river. Large harbours (Maashaven and Rijnhaven) were built opposite the city centre, and new neighbourhoods, including the Afrikaanderwijk, were constructed to house dock workers and their families, many of whom had migrated to the city from rural Zeeland.

In the second half of the 20th century, the neighbourhood underwent a long and pronounced decline. Port and harbour jobs disappeared through containerisation and the continued westward expansion of the harbour, leaving quaysides around the Afrikaanderwijk vacant. Many upwardly mobile families left, predominantly to the suburbs. The area became home to low-income families and newly arrived immigrants and guest workers; as Van Duin et al. (2011) note, it was one of the first areas in the country to receive large numbers of migrants, primarily from Morocco, Turkey and southern Europe. In the 1980s, a programme of urban renewal was initiated, which led to the renovation or rebuilding of much of the original housing stock, which by this point was primarily owned by housing associations. This was part of a wider approach to neighbourhood renewal of ‘building for the neighbourhood’ (bouwen voor de buurt), whereby the aim was to improve housing conditions for residents already living in an area. However, this failed to stem the decline, and in 2000 the Afrikaanderwijk was ranked the worst out of 643 neighbourhoods in the Netherlands (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2009). Today, the average income in the neighbourhood is significantly below Rotterdam’s average (see Table 1): 69% of the population are in the lowest 40% income bracket. Ethnically, 25% of the population are of Turkish origin and 10.5% of Moroccan. The Dutch population has declined in recent years from 2500 in 1996 to around 1500 today, which represents 18.9% of the neighbourhood’s 8200 inhabitants.

Table 1.

Economic statistics, the Afrikaanderwijk and Rotterdam.

	Afrikaanderwijk	Rotterdam
Population	8216	618,109
Population change (2009–2014)	−9.8%	5.3%
Total households	3520	286,540
Average income (€) per household 2011	23,500	29,300
Average household (€) income, 2005	21,400	25,300
Difference 2005–2011	9.8%	15.8%
Income (2012)
Low (bottom 40%)	69%	51%
Middle (middle 40%)	26%	33%
High (top 20%)	5%	16%

To reverse this decline and to build a more ‘balanced’ city (Rotterdam Municipality, 2016), the Afrikaanderwijk is one of a number of neighbourhoods in inner-city Rotterdam which have been directly targeted for state-led gentrification, using methods discussed earlier in this article. The city’s 2007 Urban Vision directly and overtly encourages and promotes gentrification in poorer urban neighbourhoods:

Around the heart of the city centre a number of districts are on the rise: Cool, Oude Westen, Middelland, Delfshaven, Lloydkwartier, Oude Noorden en Afrikaanderwijk. Due to their central position, their historic character and the mix of housing, retail, cafés, restaurants and cultural institutions, these districts are increasingly popular among (former) students and those active in creative industries … In social, cultural and economic terms, these districts have the features necessary for an autonomous gentrification process. (Rotterdam Municipality, 2007: 70)

In a somewhat contradictory tone, the city tries to spur this ‘autonomous’ process by ‘selling rented housing, making housing improvements attractive to homeowners, upgrading public space and creating space for the hospitality industry and creative industries in the old districts’ (Rotterdam Municipality, 2007: 70).

The ‘false choice’ and binary nature of the housing debate in Rotterdam was exemplified in the recent (2016) Housing Referendum about the city’s Housing Vision. For the populist right wing Liveable Rotterdam Party (Leefbaar Rotterdam), a primary reason to support the Vision was to counter what they perceived as a growing Islamification in the city. In a campaign video (Viduate NL, 2017), Leefbaar Rotterdam used the slogan ‘stop the impoverishment, vote for strong neighbourhoods’. The video depicted once stable neighbourhoods falling into disrepair and becoming unsafe and adorned with minarets. Gentrification was situated as the sole option to stem this continued neighbourhood decline.

In the Afrikaanderwijk, gentrification is in its incipient phase and is not yet in as advanced a stage as other neighbourhoods. Yet the aims of the municipality are clear and some changes are already evident. Specifically, the municipality has three goals for the neighbourhood: 1) better connections to and from the Afrikaanderwijk; 2) differentiated housing tenures so that households are not forced to leave if they wish to purchase a home; and 3) an impulse for the local economy (Rotterdam Municipality, 2011). The measures used to achieve the second goal, in particular, focus on demolishing older social housing units and replacing them with mixed tenure developments. This means that some existing residents will be displaced; some of them will be able to return to new social housing units in the neighbourhood, while others will be allocated housing in other parts of the city. In total, 1800 new dwellings will be constructed. The target audience for these new homes is both younger people from the neighbourhood and new incoming ‘creatives’ who, in keeping with the city’s recent Housing Vision (Rotterdam Municipality, 2016), will give more ‘balance’ to the socioeconomic makeup of the population.

The percentage of owner-occupied housing increased from 1% in 2000 to 11% in 2011, with social housing and private rental dwellings comprising the rest of the stock. New apartments and single-family homes in the north end of the neighbourhood represent the largest change to the housing stock thus far. The aim to transform the Afrikaanderwijk does not end with its housing stock. Two major arts and cultural projects, the Creative Factory and Freehouse, have as their goal the introduction of new creative industries to the area (Nijkamp, 2016). Additionally, several smaller-scale entrepreneurs have opened more upmarket cafes and small businesses in the north end of the neighbourhood, such as an organic food store, a gallery, a new artisan bakery and a few restaurants. Despite this, the Afrikaanderwijk remains one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Rotterdam (Doucet, 2015), and more than half the area’s population relies on benefits (Kamerman, 2016).

The Afrikaanderwijk is often compared with its neighbour, Katendrecht, in terms of gentrification and neighbourhood change (Doucet, 2015; Van Engelen, 2015). Thanks to its proximity to the flagship Kop van Zuid development and the arrival of several major amenities, Katendrecht has become a hip and trendy destination for the middle class. New-build housing and renovated ‘do it yourself’ houses sit side-by-side with the area’s remaining social housing stock.

Methods

Our fieldwork involved qualitative methods, in the form of in-depth, semi-structured interviews, to provide a rich source of detailed information about the day-to-day experiences, habits, perceptions and opinions of those affected by neighbourhood change. The study is rooted in the notion of constructivism: the visible social world is not a pre-given, but the social phenomenon and their meanings are continually being accomplished by social actors (Bryman, 2012: 33). Therefore, we assumed that neighbourhoods are continually changed by different actors and that conceptualisations of gentrification by residents are constantly established, renewed and perceived.

Twenty-one interviews were conducted with residents who had lived in the neighbourhood long enough to witness the changes as a result of state-led gentrification. Most interviews lasted between 50 and 60 minutes and were transcribed and coded for analysis. Respondents were approached by a combination of snowballing and through recommendations from gatekeepers active in different networks and working with different groups representative of the social and ethnic composition of the neighbourhood.¹ These included not only a worker at a community centre and the head of the Afrikaander Garden (a local community garden), but also a resident who we met at a neighbourhood event and the local postman. While some respondents were active in the neighbourhood, many others were not, giving us a variety of perspectives from those who live through gentrification.

The respondents came from a variety of backgrounds. Ten were Dutch, three were Turkish, two were Moroccan, two were from the Antilles, one was Italian, one was Surinamese, one was from the former Yugoslavia and one was Cape Verdean. While our sample has a greater percentage of Dutch respondents than the percentage within the neighbourhood as a whole, when we examine the income levels of our respondents, they correspond well to the average incomes in the Afrikaanderwijk. Fourteen of the 21 had incomes below €1383 per month, four respondents had medium incomes and only three had high incomes.

In order to make talking about gentrification and neighbourhood change easier and more consistent across the different interviews, respondents were shown a map of the neighbourhood indicating where new housing and amenities were located, as well as photos of some of the gentrified spaces. Topics discussed included how residents perceived the changing built environment and public space, how gentrification has influenced the perception of changing amenities and facilities and the changing place attachment and interactions as a result of gentrification. Our article now turns to these topics, which will be discussed through the stories of four different residents and their experiences with gentrification and neighbourhood change. These vignettes represent the main narratives present within our interviews.

Experiencing gentrification

Hussam: Hopeful for a better neighbourhood

Hussam² is 44 and has lived in the Afrikaanderwijk since 1997, when he arrived in the Netherlands from Morocco to study. For the last decade, he has lived on a street close to where many of the new, owner-occupied houses have been built. He is married with three children. Despite having a university degree, he has been unemployed for several years and has a household income of around €1200 per month. Hussam is active in the Afrikaanderwijk through volunteer work, primarily centred on sport.

Hussam is optimistic and positive about the changes which are happening in the neighbourhood. This is due to both the arrival of white Dutch residents and the new amenities which are coming into the neighbourhood. His view on the ethnic changes in the Afrikaanderwijk reflect those of many of the people we interviewed, particularly those from non-Dutch backgrounds.

Hussam: Yes, there are definitely new residents. I see the new buildings. And I see that whites are coming back to the Afrikaanderwijk. I think that’s good, I really do. First it was a ghetto.

Researcher: A ghetto?

Hussam: Yes, all these allochtonen³ living together. Where were all the white people? They had migrated to the suburbs and now they are coming back. I think that a diverse society is really good.

The literature on living through gentrification suggests that non-gentrifiers experience a sense of separation and exclusion from the new amenities which arrive in the neighbourhood (Deener, 2007; Doucet, 2009; Spain, 1993; Valli, 2015). And we did find this in some interviews (see below). But for Hussam, there was a sense of optimism and new amenities were a sign that the neighbourhood was improving: ‘They are giving hope for the neighbourhood. I hope that as the new residents arrive, new amenities will come too, such as new schools. I am happy to live here’. While these new amenities may not have been directly intended for him, it was the diversity of activities, businesses and facilities that made him optimistic:

I see that the municipality wants to have cultural diversity and that is why these new shops came in. These new projects are aimed at people from different cultures, whereas before the neighbourhood was dominated by Turks. Fortunately, that is now changing.

However, his enthusiasm for the changes in the neighbourhood did not necessarily translate down to changes in his own daily patterns of consumption, and there was a sense that these amenities, while nice and beneficial for the neighbourhood, were not really intended for him:

Hussam: I haven’t been to these new stores yet. I am curious about them and I will go, but I haven’t been yet. But I would like to go and ask them what they do there.

Researcher: Why haven’t you gone yet?

Hussam: It looks a bit closed off. It doesn’t really welcome you in. I don’t know what people do in there. Maybe they prepare food and deliver it to the other side of the bridge or something.

The use of the term ‘other side of the bridge’ is important here; Rotterdam has historically been a city divided between a more affluent north, and a poorer and more industrial south, with the river separating the two sides.

One point that Hussam was critical of, however, was a recent spate of break-ins. Some of this, he argued, was down to the fact that many of the new-build properties were not yet occupied. But again, his sentiment was one of optimism where he equated the arrival of more affluent residents with better police patrols:

When new residents arrive in the new-build houses, safety will improve. I think that there will be more control. In the past, I didn’t see police officers here. But now I see the power of the city. All of a sudden, I see these signs – I think it’s come from the new people who are living here amongst the allochtonen.

For a resident like Hussam, there are two factors that are responsible for the changes in the neighbourhood, which he largely views as positive. First, he sees the role of the municipality of Rotterdam as the central force leading the developments, as was evidenced by the numerous references to the city government. Second, he attributes much of the improvement to the arrival of white inhabitants in a neighbourhood that had been predominantly allochtoon. He discussed the arrival of a new, white neighbour; a point which he saw as positive, and noted this change in the customers frequenting the local neighbourhood market: ‘Yes, I can see who the old and new residents are. Recently I have seen more and more whites in the market. I’m really happy about that; it’s healthy to have these developments in the diversity of society’.

Bernice: Searching for a better reputation

In many ways, Bernice’s experience with the gentrification and neighbourhood change was similar to that of Hussam. Like him, she was hopeful about the direction that the neighbourhood was going. The 41 year old of Surinamese origin had lived in the neighbourhood for five years and had two children. While she lived on a minimum income, she was also a new entrepreneur looking to set up a location for a clothing store that would appeal to both rich and poor customers. For Bernice, many of the changes she was witnessing were important because of the improvements to the Afrikaanderwijk’s reputation: ‘Yes, I’m for change, that’s necessary. The Afrikaanderwijk has had a bad name for a long time. But the new developments can change that’.

Bernice frequently referenced other parts of the city when discussing how areas had changed and the impact this has had on their reputations. In referring to streets in the city centre which have recently undergone commercial gentrification, she stated that:

The more businesses that settle in a neighbourhood, the nicer it becomes. I have seen these good changes in the Pannekoekstraat and the Meent [in Rotterdam city centre]. But here we still have the situation where people don’t have much money. Therefore, you need to have creative people come here that can offer something [for the area], but the prices need to be lower to attract them.

While yuppies are often seen by lower-income residents as a threat or in a negative light, Bernice sees them much more positively: ‘Last week we had an international restaurant day and there were lots of yuppies there. It was really nice’. When asked why she found the presence of yuppies good for the neighbourhood, she responded by referencing the nearby neighbourhood of Katendrecht.

Just look at Katendrecht; that used to be a really dangerous area. When the yuppies move in here the people can learn from them, and see that change isn’t scary. And for the people looking to move in, I try to give them the confidence that they can live here, because if the yuppies move in this will be a good neighbourhood.

Building on that, she described the changes in Katendrecht in more detail: ‘Deliplein [the main square in Katendrecht] used to be a mess. The pioneers⁴ made it better. It’s nicer there now. The dingy cafes are now nice cafes. Just like that it has a fresh look and a safer feel’. The same sentiments can also be felt when it comes to schools, which, as Boterman (2013) notes, are a key arena for gentrification. Amongst non-gentrifiers from all backgrounds, there was the hope that gentrification would bring more contact with white Dutch residents, particularly for children in the neighbourhood. Bernice’s experiences with selecting a school for her children reflected both how she hoped that schools would become more diverse (specifically less non-Dutch) as the neighbourhood changed and the challenges she faced when selecting a school for her children:

It would be good for the schools if there were more Dutch people in the neighbourhood. Even with me being foreign, my friends and I all want our kids to go to a school that isn’t just allochtonen. You talk of black schools, white schools, come on, this isn’t apartheid! So my son goes to the RSV [Rotterdam School Association] in the centre of Rotterdam and my little one is going there as well.

Sentiments such as this express both the daily life patterns of non-gentrifiers (sending their children to a school on the other side of the city in the hopes of them having more contact with native Dutch children) and why many residents see these changes as necessary for bringing opportunities for them, their families and their neighbourhood.

Paul: Disappointed about recent changes

Paul has lived his entire life (52 years) in the Afrikaanderwijk. He is white, has a low level of education, lives with his daughter and is unemployed. While Paul feels very connected to the neighbourhood and considers himself to be an ‘Afrikaanderwijker’, he also wants to leave the area because of the changes that have occurred in the past few years. In his eyes, the neighbourhood has deteriorated, not because of gentrification, but because there are too many ‘foreigners’ moving in, many of whom are causing problems in the neighbourhood. For this, he lays the blame on the municipality and the housing association. He hopes that the new, owner-occupied housing will lead to positive changes, but is bitter about what has happened to his community:

The makeup of the neighbourhood has changed. I hoped that more Dutch people would come and live here, that it would be like 50/50. Why can’t that happen? It’s always been like that and now they’ve completely changed the policy and the whole composition has changed. With all the new-build developments, many of the people who used to live there (before their social housing was demolished) have moved here beside me, but they’re all foreigners.

While Paul expressed optimism about the prospect of Dutch residents moving into the new housing constructed in the north end of the neighbourhood, he also revealed that he has not interacted with them:

I’ve had hardly any contact with the new residents … It is really a shame that there isn’t much contact with them. You can’t really assess the new residents. I don’t speak to them, yeah, why not? Maybe that’s because I keep to myself. In the Klooster [a city-funded cultural centre on the Afrikaanderplein], I’ve made contact with people, but the new residents don’t really come there.

While many of our respondents were optimistic and hopeful about the arrival of new amenities to the Afrikaanderwijk, Paul was a bit more ambivalent and, as with the arrival of new Dutch residents, they really did not impact him much: ‘I don’t use the new stores. First, I don’t know them … It’s all so strange because you aren’t used to it. I don’t know their products. I don’t recognise any of it’. Paul’s responses focus on three issues: the way in which changes in the ethnic composition of the neighbourhood have led to a deterioration, in his eyes; the hope that more Dutch households would arrive, and move into the new-build housing; and disappointment regarding the lack of contact with or connection to the new Dutch residents and the new businesses which are catering to them.

Ria: The neighbourhood’s ‘not for us’ anymore

Ria has lived her entire life (58 years) in the Afrikaanderwijk. She lives with her grandson, has a vocational education, a low income and no employment. For her, the story of the Afrikaanderwijk in recent years has been one of loss: loss of its Dutch identity and a loss of atmosphere. While she would welcome gentrification if it brought Dutch residents back to the neighbourhood, her story of loss is related to both class and ethnicity. When asked about the area of new housing in the north end of the neighbourhood, she stated:

I don’t go there. Well, I only walk by with my grandson on the bicycle … there is nothing cosy there. If there was a nice cafe or something, then it would be attractive. For 30 years we had a bar on a corner there. There was a terrace, it was very messy, but it was completely full the whole day, not all the fuss of being open some days but closed on others. I knew lots of people there. Some have died and many have left the neighbourhood.

For Ria, the new-build houses in the north end of the neighbourhood do not represent the arrival of Dutch, middle-class residents, but of more Turks and Moroccans: ‘[The new-build area] doesn’t attract me at all. There has been so much change, primarily the Turks have taken it all over … In those owner-occupied houses, it’s mainly Turks!’

While Bernice looked to Katendrecht as an example of what should happen to the Afrikaanderwijk, for Ria, that was an example of a loss of atmosphere and place attachment that she feared would come to her neighbourhood too. In her interview, she began by referencing Katendrecht when asked if she used the new amenities in the Afrikaanderwijk:

No, I really don’t. I find it a little like Katendrecht, and the Deliplein. There isn’t any atmosphere there. There used to be a good atmosphere there, cosy bars, a really good feeling. And if you look at the Afrikaanderwijk today, I think the new area is a bit like that. And I don’t think there’s any atmosphere there. The new shops are favourable, but they’re not for people like me. They are more for students. It doesn’t attract me, but I’d rather see them than an endless row of phone stores. It’s more varied but I don’t have the feeling that I’m going to step out of my house and go there. I went to the Sate Man [a new restaurant in the neighbourhood] once, I thought I’d go have a look and see if he had any patties. He said they were sold out of chicken. Eleven o’clock and no chicken?! Ok, bye! I don’t think I’ll go there anymore. So I think they’re more for students than the old Rotterdammers … A grilled cheese sandwich or meatballs, you don’t get that in the neighbourhood anymore.

Ria’s final comment, given in response to a question about what she knew about the people living in the new-build housing, sums up her sentiment towards the changes in the Afrikaanderwijk:

I’ve got no idea who lives there. When the hookers were walking there it was cosy. They didn’t do any harm and everyone benefited. For a fancy restaurant so-and-so I’m not going to go there and pay €30 for a meal. I’d prefer to go to the McDonald’s for €5. There’s no atmosphere here anymore.

Conclusion

For both those who support gentrification and those who write critically about it, it can be all too easy to boil down the discussions about its effects into discrete categories of winners and losers. Academic debates tend to focus on gentrifiers and the displaced. Policy debates present gentrification as the necessary antidote (and only alternative) to neighbourhood decline (cf. Slater, 2014a). In Rotterdam, two key policy documents, its 2007 Urban Vision (which describes the gentrification of low-income, inner-city neighbourhoods as an explicit municipal strategy) and 2016 Housing Vision (which emphasises the need to ‘rebalance’ the city’s population with more middle-class households (see van Eijk, 2015)), support gentrification and frame it as the necessary solution for urban and neighbourhood decline.

Our primary aim in this article has been to analyse the perspectives and experiences of residents who live through this gentrification. Do they see their world in such binary ways? As our four vignettes have shown, our respondents navigate through the world of gentrification and neighbourhood change with nuance and complexity.

We have found an acceptance and ambivalence about gentrification that is not often found in the scholarly literature. There are certainly some aspects of gentrification that residents welcome. New amenities bring a sense of normality to the neighbourhood, a trend previously noted with the arrival of the nearby flagship Kop van Zuid project (Doucet et al., 2011). Residents also see improvements and investments in their neighbourhood for the first time in decades. To many in the Afrikaanderwijk, gentrification is made visible by the arrival of white, middle-class Dutch inhabitants in what was both one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country and one with the highest concentrations of residents from non-Western backgrounds. White, middle-class households settling in the area is, for them, a way in which the stigma associated with the Afrikaanderwijk can be reduced.

Hope is a theme that resonated through many of the interviews. For Hussam, there was hope that new residents and amenities would bring general improvements to the neighbourhood. Bernice also sees an enhanced reputation as being important to her sense of place in the Afrikaanderwijk. For both Bernice and Hussam, gentrification represents opportunity – Hussam is well-educated and sees more employment and amenities opportunities for himself; Bernice is a budding entrepreneur who sees the chance to grow a business in the neighbourhood. Even Ria thought that the new middle-class amenities were better than endless phone stores. There was an expectation that the arrival of the ethnically Dutch middle classes, aided by the municipality, would end the perception of the neighbourhood as a ghetto. This sentiment was summed up by another respondent, who stated that ‘[t]he concentration of ghettos must be broken through and this needs to come from a higher hand. Housing associations, politics, whatever! Hope hope hope that the Dutch return to the neighbourhood’.

On the other hand, there were many areas in which these same residents were critical of gentrification and its effects on their neighbourhood. There was a ‘not for us’ sense of both loss and detachment from the changes, sentiments which resonate with other studies (Doucet, 2009; Valli, 2015). Ria, in particular, experienced losses to her community and sense of place, particularly with changes to local amenities. That many of the residents moving into the new owner-occupied housing have been from non-white backgrounds is a cause of disappointment among many of our respondents (even among those from non-Western backgrounds themselves). This taps into many prejudices and ethnic divisions present in Dutch society, but it also relates to the failures of the promises of gentrification, specifically that it would bring white Dutch residents and a more ‘normal’ neighbourhood. Another respondent summed up this sentiment: ‘They build new houses, and it’s just Turkish moving in. That isn’t helping, is it?’ Such sentiments about race and ethnicity are not uncommon in the Netherlands, and resonate with recent findings by Pinkster (2016) (see also de Koning, 2015).

Residents we spoke with had ambivalent, nuanced, complex, contradictory and divergent perspectives on, and experiences with, gentrification. These are tied to much wider experiences and trajectories, both within a resident’s own life and within the ever changing neighbourhood and city around them. Unlike recent work by Atkinson (2015), we cannot conclude that our respondents felt ‘the sense of subordination, discomfort and unease with trying to stay-put’ (Atkinson, 2015: 382) as the dominant experience of gentrification.

When reflecting on why our responses were more mixed and nuanced than is often found in the scholarly literature, three points are worth reflecting upon. The first is that in the Afrikaanderwijk, gentrification is in an early, incipient phase and is taking place against the backdrop of decades of disinvestment and decline. This means that at the time of our research, displacement has been limited, and to many respondents the changes they are witnessing represent a better reputation and new amenities, rather than losses that may or may not come if gentrification continues to develop. Residents we spoke with have lived through longer periods of neighbourhood decline than gentrification. They are comparing these changes to a neighbourhood that was ranked worst in the country less than 20 years ago. Whether these sentiments remain if gentrification continues and they are threatened with displacement is a question for future research.

Related to this, the second factor is that the respondents we spoke to were neither already displaced (see Atkinson, 2015), nor under immediate threat of displacement, as studied by Sakizlioğlu (2014). While some state-led displacement has already occurred in the Afrikaanderwijk and more has happened since our fieldwork was conducted, this was not yet a serious concern for the people we spoke with.

The Afrikaanderwijk is unlikely to become 100% gentrified in the future, however, and that is related to the third point about the specific Dutch context. In the Netherlands, non-marketised forms of social housing represent the dominant housing stock in many low-income neighbourhoods (across Rotterdam, roughly 58% of the stock is in this sector), and tenants enjoy levels of protection against displacement and eviction that are unheard of in Anglo-Saxon countries. As a result of these factors, gentrification tends to be milder in the Netherlands (Aalbers, 2011; Doucet, 2014), and the levels of precariousness associated with Matthew Desmond’s (2016) recent book Evicted, for example, are virtually unheard of. Being in the social rental sector (with rents capped at €710/month) meant that our respondents were not subject to the same rent increases or harassment from landlords that characterised both Atkinson’s (2015) and Valli’s (2015) studies of how private rental households lived through gentrification. This protection against displacement means that residents are able to appreciate some tangible benefits of neighbourhood improvement without feeling threatened that they will necessarily be displaced because of them. To sum up this point, our respondents, even those living on a minimum income, enjoy levels of housing security, protections and rights that are virtually unheard of amongst respondents in most other, particularly Anglo-Saxon, studies about living through gentrification.

The caveat, however, is that most of the displacement that does exist because of gentrification in the Netherlands happens because of state, rather than private, actors and the Afrikaanderwijk is no exception. Tenure conversion (the sale of social rented units by housing associations when a tenant leaves a property) is a growing trend in the country (Boterman and Van Gent, 2014); recent work by Pinkster (2016) found that residents in a working-class neighbourhood in Amsterdam were primarily opposed to this development because of the fear of a loss of community and neighbourhood identity. But, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon countries, for example, processes such as these are more managed, with tenants being relocated to other housing within the social rented sector, rather than being left to fend for themselves in the private rental market (see Posthumus, 2013).

Gentrification is a dominant policy tool in the Netherlands and is characterised by top-down, policy-driven approaches (Doucet, 2013; Hochstenbach, 2017; Van Gent, 2013), rather than a process which is primarily led by the private sector. We have demonstrated that it is presented as a ‘false choice’ between continued neighbourhood decline, and a renewal which is aimed at promoting middle-class consumption (Slater, 2014a). Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, urban renewal focused on ‘building for the neighbourhood’ (bouwen voor de buurt), these more recent approaches use the umbrella concept of ‘building for the city’ (bouwen voor de stad). The premise behind this is that the regeneration of lower-income neighbourhoods through their redevelopment into middle-class (or at least socially mixed) areas should benefit the entire city by bringing in much-needed middle-class housing stock (and consequently middle-class residents). The old approach of ‘building for the neighbourhood’ – with its emphasis on good quality, affordable housing for neighbourhood residents – has, since the 1990s, largely fallen out of favour with policymakers and politicians.

We have attempted to meaningfully engage with residents who live through gentrification on a daily basis. While we have found trends, there is no singular narrative that we can take away from this research apart from that residents experience the contradictions inherent to gentrification and that an individual can experience both gains and losses as their neighbourhood gentrifies. Many respondents are ambivalent, and there are divergent understandings and experiences between and within individuals who too often tend to be categorised under a singular grouping (working class, non-gentrifiers, low income, etc.). Therefore, we argue for continued research into the complexities of the individual geographies of gentrification through genuine engagement with those living through gentrification in order to further both academic and policy debates. Our research into the individual geographies of gentrification should enrich, and hopefully complicate, the debates about the impact of gentrification on people and places.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

Aalbers

(2011) The revanchist renewal of yesterday’s city of tomorrow. Antipode 43(5): 1696–1724.

Atkinson

(2003) Misunderstood saviour or vengeful wrecker? What really is the problem with gentrification? Urban Studies 40(12): 2343–2350.

Atkinson

(2015) Losing one’s place: Narratives of neighbourhood change, market injustice and symbolic displacement. Housing, Theory and Society 32(4): 373–388.

Boterman

(2012) Residential mobility of urban middle classes in the field of parenthood. Environment and Planning A 44(10): 2397–2412.

Boterman

(2013) Dealing with diversity: Middle-class family households and the issue of ‘black’ and ‘white’ schools in Amsterdam. Urban Studies 50(6): 1130–1147.

Boterman

Van Gent

(2014) Housing liberalization and gentrification: The social effects of tenure conversion in Amsterdam. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 105(2): 140–160.

Bridge

Butler

Lees

(2012) Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth? Bristol: Policy Press.

Bryman

(2012) Social Research Methods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Butler

(2003) Living in the bubble: Gentrification and its ‘others’ in North London. Urban Studies 40(12): 2469–2486.

10.

Davidson

(2014) Is gentrification all bad? New York Magazine, 2 February. Available at: http://nymag.com/news/features/gentrification-2014–2/ (accessed 5 March 2018).

11.

Davidson

(2009) Displacement, space and dwelling: Placing gentrification debate. Ethics, Place and Environment 12(2): 219–234.

12.

DeFilippis

(2004) Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital. New York: Routledge.

13.

de Koning

(2015) This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too: Neoliberalism, racialization, and urban policy. Antipode 47(5): 1203–1223.

14.

Deener

(2007) Commerce as the structure and symbol of neighborhood life: Reshaping the meaning of community in Venice, California. City and Community 6(1): 291–314.

15.

Desmond

(2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

16.

Doucet

(2009) Living through gentrification: Subjective experiences of local, non-gentrifying residents in Leith, Edinburgh. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 24: 299–315.

17.

Doucet

(2013) Variations of the entrepreneurial city: Goals, roles and visions in Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid and the Glasgow Harbour megaprojects. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(6): 2035–2050.

18.

Doucet

(2014) A process of change and a changing process: Introduction to the special issue on contemporary gentrification. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 105(2): 125–139.

19.

Doucet

(2015) Ongelijkheid, gentrificatie en de stad. Vers Beton, 1 December. Available at: https://versbeton.nl/2015/12/ongelijkheid-gentrificatie-en-de-stad/ (accessed 5 March 2018).

20.

Doucet

Van Den Berg

Van Eijk

(2016) Rotterdam’s anti-gentrification movement must learn lessons of its failed referendum. The Guardian, 12 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/dec/12/rotterdam-anti-gentrification-housing-referendum (accessed 5 March 2018).

21.

Doucet

Van Kempen

Van Weesep

(2011) Resident perceptions of flagship waterfront regeneration: The case of the Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 102(2): 125–145.

22.

Duany

(2001) Three cheers for gentrification. American Enterprise Washington 12(3): 36–39.

23.

Freeman

(2006) There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

24.

Freeman

Braconi

(2004) Gentrification and displacement in New York City in the 1990s. Journal of the American Planning Association 70(1): 39–52.

25.

Hackworth

Smith

(2001) The changing state of gentrification. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 92(4): 464–477.

26.

Huisman

(2014) Displacement through participation. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 105(2): 161–174.

27.

Hochstenbach

(2017) Inequality in the gentrifying European city. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.

28.

Kallin

Slater

(2014) Activating territorial stigma: Gentrifying marginality on Edinburgh’s periphery. Environment and Planning A 46(6): 1351–1368.

29.

Kamerman

(2016) Wijk bloeit niet op van hippe gasten. NRC Handelsblad, 7 December. Available at: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/12/07/wijk-bloeit-niet-op-van-hippe-gasten-5696289-a1535552 (accessed 5 March 2018).

30.

Keating

(2007) Love and treason: Mission the yuppie eradication project. Infoshop. Available at: http://www.infoshop.org/myep/myep_criticism.html (accessed 5 March 2018).

31.

Kern

(2016) Rhythms of gentrification: Eventfulness and slow violence in a happening neighbourhood. Cultural Geographies 23(3): 441–457.

32.

Levy

(1978) Queens Village: The eclipse of a community. Public Papers in the Humanities no. 2. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Civic Values.

33.

Musterd

Ostendorf

(2009) Problemen in wijken of probleemwijken. Assen: Van Gorcum.

34.

Newman

Wyly

(2006) The right to stay put, revisited: Gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York city. Urban Studies 43(1): 23–57.

35.

Nijkamp

(2016) Counting on creativity. PhD thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

36.

Paton

(2012) Not the only power in town? Challenging binaries and bringing the working class into gentrification research. In: Bridge

Butler

Lees

(eds) Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 251–272.

37.

Paton

(2014) Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective. London: Routledge.

38.

Pinkster

(2016) Narratives of neighbourhood change and loss of belonging in an urban garden village. Social & Cultural Geography 17(7): 871–891.

39.

Posthumus

(2013) Displacement Myths: The Real and Presumed Effects of Forced Relocations Resulting from Urban Renewal. PhD Dissertation, Utrecht University.

40.

Rose

Germain

Bacque

, et al. (2013) ‘Social mix’ and neighbourhood revitalization in a transatlantic perspective: Comparing local policy discourses and expectations in Paris (France), Bristol (UK) and Montréal (Canada). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(2): 430–450.

41.

Rotterdam Municipality (2007) Stadsvisie Rotterdam, Ontwikkelingsstrategie tot 2030. Rotterdam: Gemeente Rotterdam.

42.

Rotterdam Municipality (2011) Bestemmingsplan Afrikaanderwijk. Rotterdam: Dienst Stadsontwikkeling Gemeente Rotterdam.

43.

Rotterdam Municipality (2016) Woonvisie Rotterdam: Koers naar 2030, agenda tot 2020. Available at: https://www.rotterdam.nl/wonen-leven/woonvisie/DEFINITIEF-Woonvisie-Rotterdam-2030-dd-raad-15-december-2016.pdf (accessed 5 March 2018).

44.

Sakizlioğlu

(2014) Inserting temporality into the analysis of displacement: Living under the threat of displacement. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 105(2): 206–220.

45.

Sakizlioğlu

Uitermark

(2014) The symbolic politics of gentrification: The restructuring of stigmatized neighborhoods in Amsterdam and Istanbul. Environment and Planning A 46(6): 1369–1385.

46.

Shaw

Hagemans

(2015) ‘Gentrification without displacement’ and the consequent loss of place. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(2): 323–341.

47.

Slater

(2006) The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(4): 737–757.

48.

Slater

(2014a) Unravelling false choice urbanism. City 18(4–5): 517–524.

49.

Slater

(2014b) There is nothing natural about gentrification. New Left Project, 24 November. Available at: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/there_is_nothing_natural_about_gentrification (accessed 5 March 2018).

50.

Smith

(2002) New globalism, new urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy. Antipode 34(3): 427–450.

51.

Spain

(1993) Been-heres versus come-heres: Negotiating conflicting community identities. Journal of the American Planning Association 59(2): 156–171.

52.

Sullivan

(2006) Assessing residents’ opinions on changes in a gentrifying neighborhood: A case study of the Alberta neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Housing Policy Debate 17(3): 595–624.

53.

Valli

(2015) A sense of displacement: Long-time residents’ feelings of displacement in gentrifying Bushwick, New York. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(6): 1191–1208.

54.

Van Duin

Tzaninis

Snel

, et al. (2011) Marginality and stigmatization: Identifying with the neighbourhood in Rotterdam. Paper for the Annual RC21 conference 2011: The struggle to belong. Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 2011.

55.

Van Eijk

(2015) Balanceren met bakfietswijken. Vers Beton, 29 May. Available at: https://versbeton.nl/2015/05/balanceren-met-bakfietswijken/ (accessed 5 March 2018).

56.

Van Engelen

(2015) Gentrificatie: Nu is Rotterdam aan de beurt. Vrij Nederland, 31 October. Available at: https://www.vn.nl/gentrificatie-nu-is-rotterdam-aan-de-beurt/ (accessed 5 March 2018).

57.

Van Gent

WPC

(2013) Neoliberalization, housing institutions and variegated gentrification: How the ‘third wave’ broke in Amsterdam. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(2): 503–522.

58.

Viduate

(2017) Animatie video: Woonvisie Rotterdam. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bAyCRrxHw (accessed 5 March 2018).

59.

Visser

Bolt

van Kempen

(2014) Out of place? The effects of demolition on youths’ social contacts and leisure activities – A case study in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Urban Studies 51(1): 203–219.