Aesthetics Of Gentrification

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

The Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change explores cultural shifts that result from gentrification and redevelopment, showing how cultures of racially and economically marginalized groups are appropriated or erased by the introduction luxury real estate and retail branding. The book explores the literal and symbolic shifts in ownership that are happening in urban locations undergoing redevelopment and demographic shifts. As lesser discussed manifestations of these shifts, cultural symbols of leisure, tourism and elite consumption can be witnessed as cities work to reshape their landscapes through real estate, retail, and public space development. Aesthetic changes often show up in the form of boutique coffee shops, distilleries, high-end restaurants, retail flagships, and more. Through careful branding and visual design, the new spaces and places become recognized as signs of exclusivity. This exclusivity also emerges in public spaces through local, informal retail practices like street vending, food trucks and outdoor markets. As these changes take shape, more affluent groups replace and displace the cultural practices of existing groups. These changes send tangible, observable messages of neighborhood change which signal the race and class profiles of the desired incoming population who can afford to participate in the redeveloped landscape. Developing a discourse on how to better observe and analyze signs of exclusion in the built environment, The Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change will be of great interest to scholars of community development, social mobilization, urban studies and design, and urban planning and development. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art’s dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art’s role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods. Since the 1980s, art and artists’ role​s in gentrification ha​ve been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban space​s illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance​. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.

"While Washington, D.C. is still often referred to as 'Chocolate City,' it has undergone significant demographic, political, and architectural change in the last decade. No place represents this shift better than H Street, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the April 1968 riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Over the last decade and a half, the H Street corridor has changed from a historically low-income, African American neighborhood--featuring black-owned businesses that catered to the local residents--to one of the most sought after commercial and residential areas in the nation, replete with art house theaters, fusion restaurants, and rising property values that have pushed out much of the original population. Brandi T. Summers explores this shift from chocolate city to cosmopolitan metropolis, looking at the role of race in urban environments and how the neighborhood's aesthetics--from fashion and language to foodways and black bodies themselves--have been commodified and branded. Through ethnography, interviews, archival research, and media analysis, Summers sheds new light on the relationship between race, space, and capitalism"

Rule by Aesthetics offers a powerful examination of the process and experience of mass demolition in the world's second largest city of Delhi, India. Using Delhi's millennial effort to become a 'world-class city,' the book shows how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. This practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms - what Ghertner calls 'rule by aesthetics' - allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums hence were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers' creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi as in aspiring world-class cities the world over.

Although we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than two thousand storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, the study charts two very different types of local Brooklyn retail signage. The unique and consistent features of many words, large lettering, and repetition that make up Old School signage both mark and produce an inclusive and open place. In contrast, the linguistic elements of New School signage, such as brevity and wordplay, signal not only the arrival of gentrification, but also the remaking of Brooklyn as distinctive and exclusive. Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, a sociolinguist and an anthropologist respectively, show how the beliefs and ideas that people take as truths about language and its speakers are deployed in these different sign types. They also present in-depth ethnographic case studies that reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are intimately connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of privilege. Far from peripheral or irrelevant, shop signs say loud and clear that language displayed in public always matters. This book is the recipient of the 2021 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

"Latinx Catholics have used Our Lady of Guadalupe as a symbol in democratic campaigns ranging from the United Farm Workers movement to the Chicano movement to the movement for just immigration reform. In diverse ways, these groups use Guadalupe's symbol and narrative to make claims about justice in society's basic structures (law, policy, institutions, for example) while seeking to generate greater participation and representation in US democracy. Yet, Guadalupe is illegible within a liberal political framework that seeks to protect society's basic structures from religious encroachment by relegating religious speech, practices, and symbols to the realm of the background culture. In response to this problem, religious ethicists have argued for expansions of the liberal framework that would make religious language, arguments, and practices communities legible within a pluralistic society without capitulating to anti-democratic modes of governance that undermine pluralism. What remains unexplored is the way that the aesthetic dimensions of particular religious traditions can be engaged toward cultivating a more participatory democracy that invites substantive contributions to society's common life from religious people and communities. Instead, in conversation with political liberalism, Latinx theological aesthetics, and Catholic social thought, The Aesthetics of Solidarity examines the use of particular religious symbols to make democratic claims and generate greater participation and presence in the life of US democracy. After evaluating liberalism's capacity for constructive engagement with religion toward strengthening democratic participation, the project employs Latinx theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought to offer a constructive framework for interpreting religious symbols in the context of a religiously pluralistic and participatory democratic life"--

Drawing on a rich diversity of theoretical approaches and analytical strategies, urban geographers have been at the forefront of understanding the global and local processes shaping cities, and of making sense of the urban experiences of a wide variety of social groups. Through their links with those working in the fields of urban policy design, urban geographers have also played an important role in the analysis of the economic and social problems confronting cities. Capturing the diversity of scholarship in the field of urban geography, this reader presents a stimulating selection of articles and excerpts by leading figures. Organized around seven themes, it addresses the changing economic, social, cultural, and technological conditions of contemporary urbanization and the range of personal and public responses. It reflects the academic importance of urban geography in terms of both its theoretical and empirical analysis as well as its applied policy relevance, and features extensive editorial input in the form of general, section and individual extract introductions. Bringing together in one volume 'classic' and contemporary pieces of urban geography, studies undertaken in the developed and developing worlds, and examples of theoretical and applied research, it provides in a convenient, student-friendly format, an unparalleled resource for those studying the complex geographies of urban areas.