Gentrification and displacement

Abstract

Abstract This essay provides an overview of the topic of gentrification with an emphasis on displacement. According to the urban geographer Tom Slater (2009: 294), gentrification means “the transformation of a working‐class or vacant area of a city into middle‐class residential and/or commercial use.” Incoming high‐income groups therefore colonize (gentrify) a previously working‐class urban neighborhood, as occurred in postwar Islington, north London, which prompted the sociologist Ruth Glass to coin the term “gentrification” back in 1964 (Lees et al. 2008: 4). However, contemporary gentrification occurs on a far larger scale than in previous decades and refers more broadly to the class remaking of cities which are being economically, physically, and culturally transformed via large‐scale property development – increasingly under the aegis of state‐driven urban regeneration programs – into living and leisure spaces for the affluent middle classes (Smith 2002; Lees et al. 2008).

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