GENTRIFICATION gentrify, v. trans. To renovate or convert (housing, esp. in an inner-city area) so that it conforms to middle-class taste; to render (an area) middle-class. Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Other keywords and phrases to consider when searching: "urban renewal", redevelopment, "neighborhood change"
The term “gentrification” often arises in conversations about urban inequality and the increased cost of rental housing. Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964, defining it as a process by which a neighborhood’s “original working-class occupiers are displaced” by the influx of higher-income newcomers. More broadly, gentrification refers to a process of neighborhood change involving the migration of wealthier residents into poorer neighborhoods and increased economic investment.
70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green: The Demolition of Public Housing in Chicago
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Filmed over a period of 20 years, 70 ACRES IN CHICAGO chronicles the demolition of Chicago's Cabrini Green public housing development, the clearing of an African-American community, and the building of mixed-income communities on the valuable land where Cabrini once stood. More than a specific portrait of a single housing development, 70 ACRES IN CHICAGO illuminates the layers of socio-economic forces and the difficult questions behind urban redevelopment and gentrification taking place in cities throughout the United States today.
City rising : Examining gentrification and its historical roots.
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Cities across California are booming with investment and opportunity; these dramatic changes are shifting demographics and displacing historically vibrant communities. CITY RISING is a multi-platform documentary series examining gentrification and its historical roots, economic role, and social consequences. CITY RISING illuminates the journey of California's neighborhoods fighting gentrification and advocating for responsible development.
Class Divide: Effects of Gentrification in West Chelsea, NYC
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Acclaimed filmmaker Marc Levin explores the effects of hyper-gentrification and rising economic disparity in the NYC neighborhood of West Chelsea.
On one side of the intersection of 10th Ave. and 26th St. sits Avenues: The World School, an elite, state-of-the art private school (pre-K through 12th grade) with a $40,000 plus per year price tag. On the other side sits the Elliott-Chelsea public-housing projects, home to thousands of underemployed and underserved residents living mostly below the poverty line.
Flag Wars
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Simply put, this profoundly compelling and thought-provoking documentary is the best case study available of the social and human consequences of urban gentrification in contemporary America. Filmed over a four-year period in Columbus, Ohio, "Flag Wars" explores with eye-opening candor and unforgettable poignancy the effects on a long-established black neighborhood when gay white professionals move into and begin to transform the area.
A Hole in the Fence.
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In a hidden corner of Brooklyn, change is anything but straightforward...Chronicling the changing fortunes of Red Hook, Brooklyn, A Hole in a Fence is a documentary that explores the complicated issues of development, class and identity facing one of New York City's most unique neighborhoods. It's the story of a vanished homeless community and the young architect who documented it; of an urban farm run by local kids amidst a landscape of industrial decay; of young graffiti writers losing their stomping grounds; of the arrival of a controversial IKEA megastore; of a photographer's vision of nature's renewal; of the doomed struggle to save a rare part of the neighborhood's working waterfront; and of a filmmaker's discovery of a fleeting, hidden world on the other side of a rusty old fence.
My Brooklyn.
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My Brooklyn follows director Kelly Anderson's journey, as a Brooklyn gentrifier, to understand the forces reshaping her neighborhood. The film documents the redevelopment of Fulton Mall, a bustling African-American and Caribbean commercial district that - despite its status as the third most profitable shopping area in New York City - is maligned for its inability to appeal to the affluent residents who have come to live around it. As a hundred small businesses are replaced by high rise luxury housing and chain retail, Anderson uncovers the web of global corporations, politicians and secretive public-private partnerships that drive seemingly natural neighborhood change. The film's ultimate question is increasingly relevant on a global scale: who has a right to live in cities and determine their future?
Priced Out: 15 Years of Gentrification in Portland, Oregon
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This documentary explores the complexities and contradictions of gentrification and life after the era of "the ghetto." It powerfully illustrates how government policies and market forces combine to destroy and rebuild neighborhoods. Some embrace new investment at first, but few are left standing when new money moves in and old residents find themselves priced out.
Rezoning Harlem - A Community Fights Against Gentrification
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Rezoning Harlem follows longtime members of the Harlem community as they fight a 2008 rezoning that threatens to erase the history and culture of their legendary neighborhood and replace it with luxury housing, offices, and big-box retail.. A shocking expose of how a group of ordinary citizens, who are passionate about the future of one of the city's most treasured neighborhoods, are systematically shut out of the city's decision-making process, revealing New York City's broken public review system and provoking discussion on what we can do about it.
Whose Barrio?: The Gentrification of Spanish Harlem
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Residents, elected officials and activists clash over gentrification of a Latino New York neighborhood.
Gut Renovation: Gentrification in Williamsburg, NYC
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In 1989, together with a group of female friends, Su Friedrich rented and renovated an old loft in Williamsburg, an unassuming working-class district of Brooklyn. In 2005 this former industrial zone was designated a residential area and the factories, manufacturers and artists' lofts were priced out by property speculators lured by tax breaks. Friedrich spent five years documenting with her camera the changes in the area between East River and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She shows the demolition of industrial buildings and the construction of trendy new apartments for wealthy clients, watching old tenants leave and new inhabitants arrive. As she keeps meticulous record of developments, the extent and speed of the upheaval becomes clear. Her own tenancy agreement expires too and so her documentary images and trenchant commentary become the tools of her growing anger.
The Lost Village: The Gentrification of Greenwich Village
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A devastating expose of how Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the counterculture in the 1960s and '70s, is being turned into a wasteland of chain stores, banks and multi-million dollar condos.
THE LOST VILLAGE follows filmmaker Roger Paradiso on a journey through Greenwich Village as he tries to figure out how this 'gentrification on steroids' got started. Talking to journalists, activists, shop-owners, professors and more, he uncovers how the landlords, politicians and NYU turned the Village into a place that is losing its heart and soul.
Not sure where to start your research? The interdisciplinary databases are good places to search for information on any topic, and have lots of full-text material available.
The Gentrification Debates
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Uniquely well suited for teaching, this innovative text-reader strengthens students’ critical thinking skills, sparks classroom discussion, and also provides a comprehensive and accessible understanding of gentrification.
The Gentrification of the Mind
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In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.
There Goes the Hood
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There Goes the 'Hood analyzes the experience of gentrification for residents of two predominantly black New York City neighbourhoods. It thereby adds an important yet often overlooked perspective to debates on gentrification - the residents of formerly disinvested neighbourhoods themselves. Their perspectives suggest that neither gentrification is neither entirely threatening or redemptive for urban neighbourhoods. Rather, it can both offer a better life and threaten long-established communities. While residents appreciate the opportunities, they resent that it often takes full-scale gentrification to make their neighbourhoods nice. The concluding chapters of the book suggest ways for limiting the negative aspects of gentrification and new ways of thinking about gentrification and the inner city.
Black Politics in Transition
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Black Politics in Transition considers the impact of three transformative forces-immigration, suburbanization, and gentrification-on Black politics today. Demographic changes resulting from immigration and ethnic blending are dramatically affecting the character and identity of Black populations throughout the US. Black Americans are becoming more ethnically diverse at the same time that they are sharing space with newcomers from near and far.
A Neighborhood That Never Changes
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Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as A Neighborhood That Never Changes demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities—the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden—Japonica Brown-Saracino paints a colorful portrait of how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification.
Cooking up a Revolution
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During the late 1980s and early 1990s the City San Francisco waged a war with the homeless. During this period over 1,000 arrests and citations where handed out by the police to activists for simply handing out free food in public parks. Why would a liberal city arrest activists helping the homeless? In exploring this question, the book uses the conflict between the city and activists as a unique opportunity to examine the contested nature of urban politics, homelessness, and public space while developing an anarchist alternative to liberal urban politics that is rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, and anti-capitalism. In addition to exploring theoretical and political issues related to gentrification, broken-windows policing, and anti-homeless laws, this book provides both activists, students, and scholars, examples of how anarchist homeless activists in San Francisco resisted these process.
Black on the Block
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In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo—a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century—uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.
Barrio Dreams
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Arlene Dávila brilliantly considers the cultural politics of urban space in this lively exploration of Puerto Rican and Latino experience in New York, the global center of culture and consumption, where Latinos are now the biggest minority group. Analyzing the simultaneous gentrification and Latinization of what is known as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem, Barrio Dreams makes a compelling case that―despite neoliberalism's race-and ethnicity-free tenets―dreams of economic empowerment are never devoid of distinct racial and ethnic considerations.
Erasing Mexican Chicago: The Role of Community Based Organizations and Immigrant Networks in the Gentrifying Neighborhood of Pilsen
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Master's These: This study explores the effects of gentrification in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, a historic port of entry for Mexican immigrants and a basin for community organization and other resources. The research questions of this study first query the effects of gentrification on the informal immigrant networks that make Pilsen a site for community resources for new immigrants. Second, the study explores the effects of gentrification on community-based organizations in a rapidly changing environment. As the racial and economic demographics of the neighborhood shift, community based organizations must adapt. Finally, this study examines the relationship between neighborhood residents and community based organizations. This relationship is examined through a comparison of perceptions about neighborhood change.
The Battle of Lincoln Park
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In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the middle class back from the Chicago suburbs to the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the city's North Side. In place of the old, poorly maintained apartments and dense streetscapes of taverns and butchers, “rehabbers” imagined a new kind of neighborhood―a renovated, modern community that held on to the convenience, diversity, and character of a historic urban quarter, but also enjoyed the prosperity and privileges of a new subdivision.
Clybourne Park
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Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? The author's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property. -- Publisher description.
The Near Northwest Side Story
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The Near Northwest Side Story is a fascinating account of transnational migration as survival strategy, one bound up in kin, region, and gender. Gina M. Perez offers an intimate and unvarnished portrait of Puerto Rican life in Chicago and San Sebastian, Puerto Rico - two places connected by a long history of circulating people, ideas, goods, and information.
The Gentrification Reader
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This Reader brings together the classic writings and contemporary literature that has helped to define the field of Gentrification, changed the direction of how it is studied and illustrated the points of conflict and consensus that are distinctive of gentrification research.
Gentrification in a Global Context
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Gentrification, a process of class neighbourhood upgrading, is being identified in a broader range of urban contexts throughout the world. This book throws new light and evidence to bear on a subject that deeply divides commentators on its worth and social costs given its ability to physically improve areas but also to displace indigenous inhabitants. Gentrification in a Global Perspective brings together the most recent theoretical and empirical research on gentrification at a global scale. Each author gives an overview of gentrification in their country so that each chapter retains a unique approach but tackles a common theme within a shared framework. The main feature of the book is a critical and well-written set of chapters on a process that is currently undergoing a resurgence of interest and one that shows no sign of abating.
The New Urban Frontier
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