Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper, we examine a new form of neighborhood change that appeared towards the end of the 1990s and early 2000s and explore its causes, processes, and effects. We suggest that a neoliberal policy regime focused on revitalizing cities through deconcentrating poverty and increasing low-income and moderate-income home-ownership has created a new funding and decision environment for the redevelopment of select inner-urban neighborhoods. The results have been an emerging process of neighborhood reinvestment marked by land-use and social transformations driven not by rent-seeking private developers but primarily by local political actors and community development organizations struggling in resource-poor environments. This neighborhood change process promotes benefits for those with a vested interest in neighborhood and urban revitalization and for a small group of moderate-income, minority homebuyers. The effect of these revitalization efforts on very-low-income residents who have lived in these neighborhoods through a period of severe disinvestment is uncertain. Despite the rhetoric of neighborhood revitalization, the reality of this reinvestment looks more like a new process of gentrification than a process of community-controlled redevelopment.

Protect-community movements across America are alive and well. The authors examine one such movement in a Chicago working-class neighborhood—Pilsen. They focus on a discourse oppositional to gentrification that has effectively mobilized space and historicity to speak its truths. The results reveal that diverse mental spaces were constructed and used in discourse to offer two critical constructions: positive resident identities, and developers as villains. Such spaces, grounding medium in the discourse, framed, organized, and illuminated these constructions. This visual rhetoric, Henri Lefebvre's representation of spaces, was a key ingredient in discourse. With actual and threatened opposition to gentrification, many developers formed a sense of a ‘ready-to-rumble neighborhood’. Fears of virulent street tactics (that is, harassment of gentrifiers) most discouraged developers because they could make development projects risky.

By offering a response to recent calls for a ‘geography of gentrification’, the author attempts to move on from the intractable theoretical divisions and overgeneralizations that continue to pervade the gentrification literature. The research described in this paper takes the form of a comparative assessment of the gentrifying neighbourhoods of South Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, and Lower Park Slope, New York City, USA. A central part of this research has been an engagement with two contrasting academic discourses on gentrification, the ‘emancipatory city’ (a Canadian construct) and the ‘revanchist city’ (a US construct), to examine how gentrification may or may not have changed since these discourses were produced and articulated. The author combines narratives from in-depth interviews (with a particular focus on displaced tenants) with supplementary data from secondary sources and demonstrates that gentrification is neither emancipatory nor revanchist in either case. This has important implications for how gentrification is understood and evaluated in Canada and the USA. Although one can see crucial broad similarities both in the causes and in the effects of gentrification in each neighbourhood (which would appear to endorse casual references to ‘North American gentrification’), the process is also differentiated according to contextual factors, and the nuances of the gentrification process are illuminated and clarified by international comparison. In sum, the author points to the need to exercise caution in referring to ‘North American gentrification’, especially as a geography of gentrification is only in its infancy.

Recent discussions of the ‘geography of gentrification’ highlight the need for comparative analysis of the nature and consequences of inner-city transformation. In this paper, the authors map the effects of housing-market and policy changes in the 1990s, focusing on 23 large cities in the USA. Using evidence from field surveys and a mortgage-lending database, they measure the class selectivity of gentrification and its relation to processes of racial and ethnic discrimination. They find a strong resurgence of capital investment in the urban core, along with magnified class segregation. The boom of the 1990s and policies targeted towards ‘new markets' narrowed certain types of racial and ethnic disparities in urban credit markets, but there is evidence of intensified discrimination and exclusion in gentrified neighborhoods.

This paper looks at the linkages between gentrification and the displacement of small-scale manufacturing and blue-collar work in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Although the link between global economic change and gentrification has been made for the upper classes who are the consumers of the gentrified landscape, very little work has been done on the blue-collar work and workers that remain in the central city despite the assumption by policymakers that deindustrialization is complete. I argue that manufacturing is still a viable sector of the urban economy that is increasingly at risk of displacement because of the conversion of industrial space to residential use and speculative real-estate pressure. In this way, gentrification is encouraging industrial displacement, which in turn is leading to the degradation of the blue-collar work that remains and to the increasing informalization of work.

An understanding of metropolitan spatial structure in property-value distribution is essential for international real-estate decisionmaking, yet knowledge accumulated in this area is limited because of data and methodology constraints. The author extends knowledge of the area by examining the spatial distribution pattern of housing prices (instead of the much-studied population and employment distributions) and two Pacific-Asia metropolises (rather than US cities or other cities in developed countries). Data were collected in Beijing, China, and Jakarta, Indonesia, from field reconnaissance surveys and interviews in 2000 and 2001. Digital terrain models were constructed for visualizing the property-value distributions. Profiles of the three-dimensional surfaces were extracted and curve-estimation statistics were used in a series of systematically selected geographical sectors in order to assess the intrametropolitan spatial variations. The findings suggest that neither of the two cities resembles a smooth surface featuring a cone, or the roof of a circus tent. Rather, Beijing's residential property value surface looks like a castellated rooftop, whereas Jakarta's resembles two television towers. The dynamic price terrains in the two cities are shaped by many factors, including their physical settings, history, and institutional frameworks. Intrametropolitan variations in property prices were remarkable in both cities. Properties in each of the systematically defined geographical sectors and in the history-development core show unique profiles and curvefitting statistics different from any other. The findings add to the existing generalizations and modeling exercises in the study of the internal structure of cities.

The increasing level of labor mobility in China challenges the current population-management structure. In particular, recent reforms in urban housing provision seem largely to overlook the needs of the migrant population. In this paper I examine the sources of migrant housing disadvantage in cities. Specifically, I analyze the institutional and socioeconomic factors underlying migrant housing choice and conditions, and how these factors influence migrants differently from the locals. Data are drawn primarily from citywide housing surveys and interviews conducted in Shanghai and Beijing. The findings show that migrants make housing decisions based on whether they intend to settle in the cities, and market-related factors such as income and education have a significant, positive impact on migrant housing conditions. But more importantly, the general disadvantage experienced by migrants has much of its root in the institutional restrictions associated with the hukou system that outweigh the combined effects of socioeconomic factors.

‘For some, networks have ontological status, being associated with the embeddedness of social life in general and the necessary embeddedness of firms in their industries and regions in particular. For others less certain about ontology, networks are vital ingredients in firm-specific competitive strategies and long-term growth prospects. In this paper we approach the issue with reference to firm-specific competitive strategies, reporting the results of a large-scale pan-European survey of small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) network-related responses to changing market conditions. Distinguishing between different types of production network (supply and distribution) operating at various geographical scales (regional, national, EU, and global), it is shown that the scope and scale of firm networks are strategic issues. All things being equal, firms adopt advanced technologies in response to changing market conditions, enabling their networks to change in scope and geographical scale. We also show that the significance of local as opposed to national and EU networks is changing with less ‘localism’ and wider geographical scope becoming increasingly important. Using probit models for different types of networks, we identify and distinguish between predictive variables driving network formation, including the type of SME ownership. Implications are drawn for the theoretical status of networks in industrial organisation and their significance for European economic development.