The Niche City Idea: How a Declining Manufacturing Center Exploited the Opportunities of Globalization

This article examines a small city that forged a global service industry niche. Its leaders aligned the temporality of its historic downtown with that of the international furniture industry to make it the world's primary furniture merchandising node. This article overviews the radical transformation of the downtown, describes the 'choreography' of the area, and considers what the author feels are the important wider implications of what is, on the surface, a deceptively odd case. The author suggests that, in engaging this specific strategy, this very unique city portends a more general type of post-industrial "Niche City", a city that forges global centrality by creating an economic specialization in a specific segment of the global service economy. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation(c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Contextualizing impressions of neighborhood change: Linking business directories to ethnography

This article suggests a research tool, the temporal map, for ethnographers to employ in supplementing the accounts of urban change provided by local informants. Such a map, created using city business directories, can provide an external validity check to ethnographic research. The authors\u27 tool allows urban ethnographers to extend contemporary ethnographic accounts backward to a period prior to the beginning of fieldwork. It provides a geooral contextualization by fitting fragmented, geographically and historically specific ethnographic accounts into a broader area and across a broader period of time. The authors show how two ethnographic case studies were enhanced by such temporal maps. Their cases involve a redeveloped central business district in North Carolina and a gentrified neighborhood in New York City. © 2008 American Sociological Association

Gentrifier? Who, Me? Interrogating the gentrifier in the mirror

Schlichtman and Patch suggest that there is an elephant sitting in the academic corner: while urbanists often use \u27gentrification\u27 as a pejorative term in formal and informal academic conversation, many urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. Even though urbanists have this firsthand experience with the process, this familiarity makes little impact on scholarly debate. There is, Schlichtman and Patch argue, an artificial distance in accounts of gentrification because researchers have not adequately examined their own relationship to the process. Utilizing a simple diagnostic tool that includes ten common aspects of gentrification, they compose two autoethnographic memoirs to begin this dialogue. © 2013 Urban Research Publications Limited

Gentrifier

Gentrification and gentrifiers are often understood as \u27dirty\u27 words, ideas discussed at a veiled distance.Gentrifiers, in particular, are usually a \u27they\u27. Gentrifier demystifies the idea of gentrification by opening a conversation that links the theoretical and the grassroots, spanning the literature of urban sociology, geography, planning, policy, and more. Along with established research, new analytical tools, and contemporary anecdotes, John Joe Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill place their personal experiences as urbanists, academics, parents, and spouses at the centre of analysis. They expose raw conversations usually reserved for the privacy of people\u27s intimate social networks in order to complicate our understanding of the individual decisions behind urban living and the displacement of low-income residents. The authors\u27 accounts of living in New York City, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Providence link economic, political, and sociocultural factors to challenge the readers\u27 current understanding of gentrification and their own roles within their neighbourhoods. A foreword by Peter Marcuse opens the volume