Initial Thoughts About Gentrification and Equitable Urban Change
Initial Thoughts About Gentrification and Equitable Urban Change.
A core premise of our weekly essays is that all human settlements, including large cities, are complex layers of different types of human systems: material systems, life-supporting systems, and social systems. This is true today, and it has been true since the first permanent human settlements began to emerge in multiple parts of the world about 10,000 years ago.
Big human settlements, i.e. cities, have many material systems. People build cities from whatever materials are available in different locations. Some materials are natural to each city’s location while other materials are procured from other places and/or engineered by people for specific needs.
Cities also have many life-supporting systems. They bring water, food, clean air, and warmth, and take away dirty water, trash, and other refuse so that the biological needs of residents are met.
Cities have even more social systems. Social systems create patterns of collaborative behavior and problem-solving among residents. Those patterns reveal the contours of social authority within each city, i.e. who has power to influence or control the behavior of others. Those who have social authority become elites. They use their power to establish priorities for collective problem-solving, thereby playing essential roles in governing how each city will evolve over time.
The complex multi-layered nature of the human systems in cities, therefore, results in one common characteristic of all cities: cities change constantly because they solve the problems that arise as time inevitably moves on.
Yet not all problems are solved. The priorities of those who exert social authority are always addressed first. No city, however, can sustain itself for long if only the problems of social elites are addressed. History is filled with examples of cities – and even empires – that collapsed because the problems of too many people were left unresolved.
For the last three centuries, more and more cities around the world have been evolving in ways that reflect the growing social authority of people whose principal source of social authority is their ability to accumulate large amounts of financial capital.
Old cities that were originally constructed to express the priorities of religious leaders, hereditary rulers, and authoritarian conquerors have been reshaped, remolded, and rearranged to adapt old urban layouts to meet the needs of new, large-scale production centers, trade and distribution activities, and command & control management centers. Hundreds of new cities also have been established. These new “industrial” cities were the physical expressions of whatever priorities derived from the specific industrial activities they were designed to enable.
As older city elites yielded their social authority to newly evolving “industrial” elites, the quality of life for many residents in more than a few old cities and in most new cities declined sharply throughout the 19th and 20thcenturies.
It was Friedrich Engels who first identified in writing, in 1872, one specific way that industrializing cities create unsolved problems for working class residents when industrial elites take over. In an essay titled The Housing Question, Engels wrote:
“The result is that the workers are forced out of the centre of the towns towards the outskirts; that workers’ dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable, for under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive dwelling houses, builds workers’ dwellings only by way of exception.”[i]
Engels’ initial observations seem rather quaint when compared to the many waves of urban change that have occurred in industrial cities worldwide since 1879. Historians capture these eras as different “industrial revolutions,” each with its own forms of organizing and reorganizing urban spaces and sprawled metropolitan regions as part of creating newer and more productive forms of production – heavy manufacturing, mass production consumer industries, the rise of knowledge workers and the service sectors, the rise of creative industries, social media and the digital economy, and perhaps today’s advent of a new era dominated by artificial intelligence.
Each era has had its own distinctive patterns of reshaping, remolding, and rearranging land use, most of which have involved some form of displacement and re-engineering of residential land use patterns. And since capital remains the dominant source of social authority in most contemporary cities, the interests of working-class people and the poor tend to have the least social authority during each era’s process of re-engineering urban residential land use.
Gentrification is the word that many observers use to characterize the more recent consequences. The British sociologist Ruth Glass used this term in 1964 to describe how upwardly mobile, well-educated, young professionals were moving into working class neighborhoods in London as post-World War Two economic restructuring was creating new office jobs in the city’s central core[ii]. They were a new form of gentry in England’s class-structured social system, and their residential preferences were displacing thousands of factory workers, who themselves were losing work as London’s manufacturing economy declined.
Displacement of working-class and poor city residents by continual waves of land use change has become a common feature of cities throughout the world since the middle of the 20th century. Today, the term gentrification has come to represent both positive and negative consequences of 21st century industrial evolution.
On the positive side, new forms of professional services, digital commerce, and the first steps toward artificial intelligence have combined with the unique context of the COVID-19 global pandemic to create new opportunities for cities to reshape land use and transportation.
New patterns are just beginning to be understood, but many observers predict new forms of revitalized city life. Economically strong, higher density cities (and less sprawled metropolitan regions) are especially important since they also create important new opportunities to mitigate carbon emissions and help achieve a carbon neutral future.
Yet those same trends also open newly perceived threats of displacement to low-income working people, the poor, and the elderly. Displacements through new waves of gentrification are criticized as potential examples of the callous disregard for the “right to the city” that should be enjoyed by otherwise vulnerable residents.
The result is that some U.S. cities have created strong networks of neighborhood activists, elected officials, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropists who are using effective local tactics to minimize the flexibility of land use changes that might characterize the next wave of global industrial evolution.
Are these cities making themselves unattractive places for a new wave of 21st century city building? If so, will these cities be left behind? On the other hand, are these cities giving themselves the capacity to steer that new wave of prosperity into paths that can create more equitable outcomes for working class and poor city residents whose rights have been disregarded in the past? If so, how will they protect their vulnerable residents while still facilitating the needs of new elites and creating new opportunities to create a more equitably distributed urban prosperity?
Bob Gleeson
[i] Fredrick Engels, 1872, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing- question.
[ii] Ruth Glass (1964) Introduction: Aspects of change. In: Centre for Urban Studies (eds) London: Aspects of Change. London: MacKibbon and Kee.