On gentrification and digital
Look around your hamlet, village, town, city.
Unless you live in an Utopian world (and sorry, I seek authenticity, not a sterile, perfect environment), odds are that there’s a section of your community that is struggling and rough around the edges, yet is still probably populated by a hearty bunch of people that cherish their neighborhood and are weary of any outside influence. Perhaps they’re longtime residents or recent migrants who relish the low rents, realness of the surroundings, and the beauty of distress.
To them, “progress” is a dirty world.
They’ll say, “How is it progress if you’re destroying my neighborhood and displacing me for the sake of shiny new buildings, young families with expensive strollers, and a cafes serving three dollar cups of coffee?”
They have a point, but…
For a municipality seeking reinvention, progress is defined as a new image, an influx of tax money into the coffers, and the possibility of becoming a local destination. Politically, it’s a winner, as it’s an ongoing story for the media, and revitalization is generally viewed by the community as a wise process.
If you haven’t seen it in your town or experienced it in your immediate neighborhood, you’ve certainly heard of it. It’s called gentrification, defined as just as I’ve explained it: a multitude of forces meshing together to transform a neighborhood.
Transforming old to new. Decay to vibrancy. Poor to rich. Again, who’s to say that “old” and “decay” are not aesthetics that some people love. They’re clearly subjective, but to the establishment, they both stand in the way of progress.
Without going into a detailed lecture about post World War II American life (cheap land, early suburbs, the construction of the interstate highway system, jobs and shopping centers chasing the population, and the gradual, sad decline of urban centers—once the engines of life), the stage for urban reclamation was set even before the first families started fleeing for the suburbs over fifty years ago.
However, people have been moving back to cities in droves in recent years, and per capita income has been expanding. Artists, bohemians, and the rest of the alternative culture have been back for decades (just look at Soho in the 1960s)—or perhaps never left—but in the past 10 to 15 years, cities have been morphing, shedding off the “depressed” skin of the past, and embracing hopes of a grand future. They’ve become entrepreneurial, competing with each other—and in larger cities like New York, competing internally—and attempting to re-brand themselves as meccas, where people can live, work, and play in peace and harmony.
Although the last paragraph was written with a bit of my tongue in my cheek (“peace and harmony,” for example, is a highly subjective term), Joe Q. Public will rarely view a urban revitalization as a bad thing. The denizens of the previously “depressed” neighborhood, who have been summarily displaced from their homes, may not share the same sentiments, of course, and as fighters, will extol the evils of gentrification.
Alas, I’m not writing a post to distill the upsides/downsides of gentrification. (You be the judge.) The overall theme of this blog is innovation, change, and emerging technologies in the planning process—although I don’t necessarily think change is always the best route to achieve a goal—so the next post will review how a few communities are leveraging new media to achieve their progress goals.
Quite exciting.
Related posts on The New Wave Planner:
A Win For Urban Planning: Supermarkets Potentially On Their Way To New Jersey Cities
Innovation Is Now King, And It’s Perfectly Parallel With Obama’s Urban Policy Goals
Backyard Chicken Coops? Urban Farming? There’s A Silver Lining To The Recession
NYC Planners: Zoning Bonuses Will Spur Healthy Eating And Economic Development
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