GENTRIFICATION

Impact of Gentrification in Inner Urban Areas

Impact of Gentrification in Inner Urban Areas

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis on the impact of gentrification in inner urban areas. Gentrification became a significant “spatial fix” to accomplish these goals. Derelict inner-city neighbourhoods became the primary targets of gentrification due to the greater profitability created by “rent gaps” in these places. In this process of gentrification of inner-city neighbourhoods, the image of alternative cultures and the vibrant nightlife that characterized these neighbourhoods, had effective deployment to allure yuppies by tapping into their proclivity for the consumption of urban lifestyles.

Discussion

The term "gentrification" had coined by Ruth Glass upon her noticing the process of middle-class residents returning to the devalued and deteriorating inner-city neighbourhoods of 1960s London. She called it gentrification in reference to the return of the landed gentry to the inner city from the outskirts of London. The term has its applications more broadly to middle-class demographic shifts and housing renovations in urban neighbourhoods.

Researches that examine the process of gentrification have a relatively long historical tradition, originating in the late 1970s. It was at this time that the process of middle-class demographic shifts to the inner city was gaining momentum, but had not yet achieved the widespread public acknowledgement that it has today. Early gentrification literature focuses on the debate regarding the causes of this process and its significance. These initial discussions originated out of the need for researchers to simplify gentrification, which has often been called a "chaotic concept" due to the wide range of forms it takes on and the types of people involved in the process. In order to reduce this complicated and different process to a form easily discussed and researched, early gentrification researchers tended to place themselves on either side of the philosophical debate around whether gentrification has enforcement by culture or economics. There are a number of different ways that these two categories can be conceptualized with respect to the driving force behind gentrification.

Although there are a number of seemingly polarized debates surrounding gentrification, it is done for the purpose of simplification. Not all gentrification theorists believe that this theoretical divide is beneficial for understanding the process. In fact, researcher takes issue with the persistent categorization of gentrification research into economic and social causes and explanations. She believes that this divide reproduces unnecessary binary distinctions that prevent exciting work from being done on the interaction of the two processes.

There are two founding perspectives that examine the causes of the gentrification experienced in the late large urban centres in 1970s and 1980s. These two schools of thoughts, the consumption and production based explanations of gentrification are most readily identified. Both the consumption- and production-based explanations refer to larger structural processes that ripen conditions for gentrification. Mapped onto these larger structural processes are assumptions about the agency of the gentrifiers themselves and their motivations for living in the central city. Most consumption-based analyses assume that gentrifies have motivated by emancipator ...