The Gentrification Debates

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.

Gentrifier opens up a new conversation about gentrification, one that goes beyond the statistics and the clichés, and examines different sides of a controversial, deeply personal issue. In this lively yet rigorous book, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill take a close look at the socioeconomic factors and individual decisions behind gentrification and their implications for the displacement of low-income residents. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the authors present interviews, case studies, and analysis in the context of recent scholarship in such areas as urban sociology, geography, planning, and public policy. As well, they share accounts of their first-hand experience as academics, parents, and spouses living in New York City, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Providence. With unique insight and rare candour, Gentrifier challenges readers' current understandings of gentrification and their own roles within their neighborhoods. A foreword by Peter Marcuse opens the volume.

How we lost control of the internet--and how to win it back. The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people--not businesses--online.

Planetizen's Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning is a fascinating review of major topics and issues discussed in the field of urban planning, assembled by editors at Planetizen, the leading source of news and information for the planning and development community on the web. The book brings together a wide range of editorial and discussion topics, coupled with commentary and overviews to create an enlightening record of the continuously evolving philosophy of building and managing cities. The book's contributors include the most well-known experts in the planning and design fields, among them James Howard Kunstler, Alex Garvin, Andres Duany, Joel Kotkin, and Wendell Cox. These and other prominent thinkers offer passionate debates and thought-provoking commentary on the most important and controversial topics in the field of urban planning and design: gentrification, eminent domain, the philosophical divide between the Smart Growth community, libertarians and New Urbanists, regional growth patterns, urban design trends, transportation systems, and reaction to disasters such as Katrina and 9/11 that changed the way we look at cities and security. Planetizen's Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning provides readers with a unique and accessible introduction to a broad array of ideas and perspectives. With the increasing awareness of the need for sound urban planning to ensure the economic, environmental, and social health of modern society, Planetizen's Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning gives professionals in the field and concerned citizens alike a deeper understanding of the critical, complex issues that continue to challenge urban planners, designers, and developers.

There are always two sides to every argument. Advocating for issues that matter to you is important, but what's equally as important is understanding those issues from the other perspective. Pros and Cons: Gentrification dives deeper into this highly debated topic and provides readers with the tools and strategies to think critically and analyze the topic through an unbiased lens. Readers will learn how to use logic and facts to defend and argue against both stances while also learning how to stay empathetic and emotionally levelheaded. Book encourages, promotes, and helps build social-emotional learning (SEL) and highlights key 21st Century Skills and Content. Includes research activity, table of contents, glossary, index, author biography, sidebars, and educational matter.

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 is a global process that the United Nations now sees as a human rights issue. This new Planetary Gentrification Reader follows on from the editors’ 2010 volume, The Gentrification Reader, and provides a more longitudinal (backward and forward in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo-/Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrification studies over time and space, drawing on key readings that reflect the development of cutting-edge debates. Revisiting new debates over the histories of gentrification, thinking through comparative urbanism on gentrification, considering new waves and types of gentrification, and giving much more focus to resistance to gentrification, this is a stellar collection of writings on this critical issue. Like in their 2010 Reader, the editors, who are internationally renowned experts in the field, include insightful commentary and suggested further reading. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in urban studies, urban planning, human geography, sociology, and housing studies and for those seeking to fight this socially unjust process.

Multistable figures offer an intriguing model for arbitrating conflicting positions. Moving back and forth between different aspects, one recognizes that contradictory descriptions of a situation can be equally valid and that disputes over the correct account can be settled without dissolving differences or establishing a higher synthesis. Yet, the experience of a gestalt switch also offers a model for radical conversions and revolutions, that is, for irreversible leaps to incommensurable alternatives foiling ideals of rational choice while providing the possibility and necessity of decision. Accentuating the temporal dimensions of multistable figures, this multidisciplinary volume illuminates the critical potential and limits of multistability as a complex figure of thought.