Gentrification is relentless, but not inevitable if locals are able to help shape redevelopment

Across the US and in much of the developed world, many urban authorities regard gentrification as one of the only paths to neighborhood regeneration. Using activism in Pilsen, Chicago, as a case study, Winifred Curran argues that while the displacement of lower income residents is an essential component of gentrification, its worst effects can be alleviated when locals have a say in how their neighborhoods are redeveloped

In Defense of Old Industrial Spaces: Manufacturing, Creativity and Innovation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

innovation , clusters , manufacturing , USA ,

Gentrification and the nature of work: exploring the links in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

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.

“Mexicans Love Red” and other gentrification myths: Displacements and contestations in the gentrification of Pilsen, Chicago

This paper uses experiences from a decade-long community-based research project in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, a Mexican-American neighborhood whose residents are both experiencing and resisting gentrification, to show how displacements and contestations evolve in conversation with each other in an iterative process we could call “actually existing” gentrifications. I analyze a series of “moments” in 13 years of research in Pilsen to illustrate the constantly shifting terrain of gentrification politics, covering not just housing affordability, but the nature of identity, democracy, and belonging. As communities develop resistance strategies to gentrification, so too do city planners, policy makers and developers adapt to these community strategies to reframe their vision of the community. In highlighting both the success of community resistance in mitigating some of the worst effects of gentrification and the cooptation of some of these same strategies in the reframing of gentrification, my goal is to show that gentrification is rarely ever done or complete but continuously enacted and resisted, challenging the idea that gentrification is somehow inevitable