Search Results

This chapter outlines how race- and class-based stratification and criminalization shape New York City’s street vending industry. The vast majority of New York’s street vendors are first generation immigrants of color who experience racial profiling for turning urban public space into their workplace. Since the Great Recession, a small but growing class of native-born and highly educated actors have been able to enter this profoundly criminalized industry with comparative ease largely due to class and race privileges, spurring gentrification through the city’s underground food permit rental market. The author argues that any meaningful reform of New York’s broken system of street vending oversight must directly engage these inequities and work to decriminalize poor and working class street vendors of color through a participatory and inclusive process rooted in principles of social justice.

In this reflection on the chapters included in the volume, the editors draw out major threads of discussion and highlight opportunities for future research. Two main threads of conversation about power surfaced throughout the collection: power and cultural identity, and power and criminalization. This final chapter explores and summarizes the ways in which the chapters in the volume illustrate the emerging urban trend of food as a cultural commodity. Additionally, the chapter synthesizes depictions of the bifurcation of the food truck industry and the discriminatory implementation of regulations. Finally, the editors recommend further investigation into the direct connection between identity formation and social justice, as well as the impact of incubator organizations on food trucks and street food vending. Importantly, the editors call for research on the relationships between street food vending, food trucks, and gentrification.

Case study 6: Dried Seafood Street is a popular commercial neighbourhood, specialising in selling a wide variety of dried seafood, tea, and herbal goods. Close to Hong Kong’s central business district and served by the iconic tramline, the cultural landscape comprises several blocks of colourful, bustling shops with distinctive sights, sounds, and smells. Historic urban districts in Hong Kong are vulnerable because land is scarce, property values are high, and the usual consequence of such economic forces is eventual loss of heritage sites to new development. However, for over a century the dried seafood businesses have survived several phases of urban renewal thanks to the Nam Pak Hong Association, a traders’ organisation, which has provided a degree of cohesion and stability that other commercial districts lack. The importance of conserving both the hardware and software of heritage sites is discussed. In the absence of conservation tools in Hong Kong to protect heritage urban cultural landscapes like Dried Seafood Street, land use zoning and financial incentives used elsewhere in Macau and Singapore are reviewed for comparison.

The 1964 designation of the Marais as a conservation area by Culture Minister André Malraux was a watershed in its history. Gentrification also had its downside, and the pros and cons of the area’s renovation are here explored through a variety of representations, literary and cinematic. René Fallet’s novel Paris au mois d’août, filmed by Pierre Granier-Deferre with Charles Aznavour, finds a place here cheek-by-jowl with a rather seedy 1968 guide to local commercial sex and Gérard Oury’s film Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob. Contrasting political stances are taken by Isabelle Backouche who criticises the gentrification and effective social cleansing of the area and Yvan Christ who with his collaborators proffers an out-and-proud advocacy of the Marais as ‘the living memorial of bygone France.’

Today’s Marais is perhaps best known as the gay hub of Paris, though this is a comparatively recent phenomenon; the first gay bar opened in 1978. Jewish texts, notably by Jacques Lanzmann, do figure in this chapter, along with a couple of minor works set in the Marais which allude to it as neither a Jewish nor a gay quartier, but the stress is predominantly on the neighbourhood’s now all-but-universal reputation as the centre of today’s ‘gay Paris.’ The extravagantly hedonistic autofictions of Guillaume Dustan and the graphic novels Le Mariage de Roberto and Bienvenue dans la Marais offer a highly-seasoned view of the area, replete with nostalgie de la boue, while literary and cinematic evocations (not invariably gay-focused) likewise figure.

Chronicles the recent commercial and cultural revitalization of boulevard life throughout Los Angeles and examines more closely the transition in Highland Park and Eagle Rock in relation to local preservation and slow growth movements. Depicts the Northeast LA art scene and hipster culture as a convergence of Latino/a and Asian immigrant culture and vintage Americana. Features public characters and neighborhood leaders as they reflect on small business authenticity, safety, community building, community gardening, bicycle culture, economic development, gentrification and racial/ethnic transition. There is literature review of sociological studies of streets, bohemia and the creative economy in urban culture.

Examines the impacts of the sharpening gentrification process in Northeast Los Angeles and its socioeconomic and racial overtones as immigrant working class Latino/a families are increasingly threatened by displacement through rent increases, evictions, and socially traumatic uprooting of multi-family networks. Gentrification is tied to neoliberal local state efforts in Los Angeles to incentivize private investment through urban policy strategies like transit-oriented development, transit villages and small lot housing development. I argue the creative frontier of urban restructuring in Northeast LA also generates social violence expressing capitalism’s tendency to foster “accumulation by dispossession” that has been countered by neighborhood “right to the city” movements. I examine the rise of the urban social movements like Friends of Highland Park and Northeast LA Alliance that advocate for the rights of those threatened by housing displacement and eviction, address community and environmental impacts of new high-density housing projects, and campaign for more socially just housing and urban planning policies in Los Angeles. There is also examination of the plight of the homeless and rehabilitating gang members

Examines prospects, implications and final comparisons. Considers the challenges of neighborhood activism in Northeast LA as an older cadre of artists and activists makes way for a new generation of movement leaders who confront a shifting racial and socioeconomic landscape in the transition from suburbanization and white flight to gentrification and white return. Attention to conflicts in the Latino/a experience in Boyle Heights and Northeast L.A. and the power of processions and rituals to cope with the social trauma of eviction and displacement. The struggle to save imperiled cultural landmarks and the promise of new cultural festivals and music scenes is addressed. NELA is viewed as an illustration of going “back to the future” in regional transit policy turns away from the failures of the postwar auto-centered metropolis towards smart growth and green alternatives. Urban policy solutions are considered with respect to transit oriented development, affordable housing development and supporting tenants’ rights and programs for the homeless. Reflections are given on meanings of taking back the boulevard. The significance of looking at the neighborhood scale in metropolitan change is addressed. Addresses the book’s contribution to interpretive, public and critical sociology.

This chapter interrogates the racial, spatial, and colonial implications of two pieces of public art in a gentrifying Toronto neighborhood, looking for the ways that emotional memory, colonial nostalgia, and fear shape both the built and discursive public domain. Using anti-colonial and anti-racist theories, this chapter also seeks to uncover the author's personal implications in re-ordering space as a white settler, social service worker, and former arts facilitator in the neighborhood.

Chapter 2 argues that most planning policy and practice is dependent on the assumption of growth and is oriented towards leveraging development into a locality. Examples of this includes urban regeneration practice but also the widespread use of planning gain to deliver social and environmental benefits (through S 106 agreements, the New Homes Bonus, Community Infrastructure Levy). Gentrification through such growth-dependent planning is generally seen as an indicator of success. Once growth has been leveraged, some communities then seek to protect the local property market and associated amenities through conservation and anti-development policies. The background theory for this emphasises the dominant importance of economic drivers in delivering urban change. With current concerns over sustainable development, growth-dependent planning has been recast as green growth or ecological modernisation with the emphasis on how new urban development can deliver energy efficiencies and more sustainable places.

Chapter 4 argues for a greater awareness and understanding of how macro-level developments, such as gentrification and transnational migration, influence the creation of AFCCs. It identifies two key challenges which limit the success and effectiveness of both age-friendly initiatives and the scholarly field of environmental gerontology: first, microfication, or the tendency to focus on immediate aspects of everyday life while overlooking broader, overarching aspects of the social context that define and set key parameters of daily experience; and second, erasure, referring to the issue that certain groups of people remain ‘unseen’ in policy, research, or institutional practices. Remedying the limiting effects of these tendencies will be essential to increase the value and effectiveness of both of these enterprises, the authors conclude.

Chapter 5 examines the impact of gentrification processes in Berlin, Germany, on the distribution of older people across the city as well as the everyday experiences of ageing in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The chapter concludes with an overview of developments in the context of political processes, where urban transformation driven by economic interests generates growing conflict and contradiction with the needs of an ageing and increasingly less affluent population.

Briefly considers the challenges and possibilities faced by west side neighborhoods and West Charlotte High at a time of rapid gentrification, low social mobility, a shortage of affordable housing and expanding educational "choice."

Chapter Six recounts the decimation of Lawrence's public services in the 1980s and 1990s, with an emphasis on public safety and education. Major metropolitan centers experienced a "tale of two cities" phenomenon in this era (substantial reinvestment in some neighborhoods along with deepening crisis in others); in smaller postindustrial cities, however, economic decline often continued to define the city as a whole. Lawrence's crisis is situated in the larger battles over public spending in the late twentieth century, especially state-level education and welfare reform legislation. These reform efforts illustrate a distinctly suburban political agenda that came to reject the liberal welfare state when many voters saw it as privileging poor, urban communities of color.