Gentrifications: Views from Europe 9781800736597

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G E N T R I F I C AT I O N S

A N TH ROP OLO GY OF EU ROPE

General Editors: Monica Heintz, University of Paris Nanterre Patrick Heady, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Europe, a region characterized by its diversity and speed of change, is the latest area to attract current anthropological research and scholarship that challenges the prevailing views of classical anthropology. Situated at the frontier of the social sciences and humanities, the anthropology of Europe is born out of traditional ethnology, anthropology, folklore and cultural studies, but engages in innovative interdisciplinary approaches. Anthropology of Europe publishes fieldwork monographs by young and established scholars, as well as edited volumes on particular regions or aspects of European society. The series pays special attention to studies with a strong comparative component, addressing theoretical questions of interest to both anthropologists and other scholars working in related fields. Volume 7 Gentrifications Views from Europe Marie Chabrol, Anaïs Collet, Matthieu Giroud, Lydie Launay, Max Rousseau and Hovig Ter Minassian Volume 6 A Taste for Oppression A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus Ronan Hervouet Volume 5 Punks and Skins United Identity, Class and the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture Aimar Ventsel Volume 4 In Pursuit of Belonging Forging an Ethical Life in EuropeanTurkish Spaces Susan Beth Rottmann

Volume 3 All or None Cooperation and Sustainability in Italy’s Red Belt Alison Sánchez Hall Volume 2 European Anthropologies Edited by Andrés Barrera-González, Monica Heintz and Anna Horolets Volume 1 The France of the Little-Middles A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant, Olivier Masclet and Yasmine Siblot

G E N TR I F I C AT I O N S Views from Europe

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Marie Chabrol, Anaïs Collet, Matthieu Giroud, Lydie Launay, Max Rousseau and Hovig Ter Minassian Translated by Jean-Yves Bart

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Marie Chabrol, Anaïs Collet, Matthieu Giroud, Lydie Launay, Max Rousseau and Hovig Ter Minassian

The book was originally published in French by Éditions Amsterdam under the title Gentrifications © 2016 Éditions Amsterdam All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chabrol, Marie, author. Title: Gentrifications: Views from Europe / Marie Chabrol, Anaïs Collet, Matthieu Giroud, Lydie Launay, Max Rousseau and Hovig Ter Minassian; translated by Jean-Yves Bart. Other titles: Gentrifications. English Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Anthropology of Europe; volume 7 | Originally published in French by Éditions Amsterdam under the title Gentrifications in 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022027930 (print) | LCCN 2022027931 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736580 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800736597 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Gentrification—France. | Gentrification—Europe. | Urban renewal. Classification: LCC HT178.F8 C4313 2023 (print) | LCC HT178.F8 (ebook) | DDC 307.3/416094—dc23/eng/20220701 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027930 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027931 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-658-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-659-7 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736580

CO N T E N TS

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

x

Acknowledgements

xii

Introduction. From Gentrification to Gentrifications PART I. STRUCTURES

1 43

Chapter 1. From Industry to Real Estate: Creating the Gentrification Supply

46

Chapter 2. The Existing Built Environment: How Urban Morphologies Inform Gentrification ‘Potentials’

62

Chapter 3. On the Diversity of Gentrifiers: Structural Effects and Contextual Effects

77

PART II. POLICIES

97

Chapter 4. Are Pro-Gentrification Policies Real? An EvidenceBased Inquiry

102

Chapter 5. Gentrification: A Matter of Images and Representations

120

Chapter 6. Moving Upmarket: A Neoliberal Strategy of Urban (Re)Development

142

vi

contents

PART III. INHABITANTS

161

Chapter 7. Gentrification, Pauperization, Immigration: One Process May Hide Another

166

Chapter 8. Popular Continuities in Gentrifying Neighbourhoods: The Presences and Practices of Nonresidents

181

Chapter 9. Residing in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood: The Importance of Trajectories and Mobilities

198

Chapter 10. Negotiating Diversity in Daily Life: Controlled Neighbourly Relations and School Choices

213

Conclusion

226

Index

237

I LLU ST R ATIONS

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ FIGURES 1.1. 1.2. 1.3.

1.4.

1.5.

2.1. 2.2. 2.3.

The first signs of gentrification in Roubaix: rehabilitation of city-centre houses began in the 1980s. © Max Rousseau.

50

Roubaix’s La Piscine museum: a ‘Trojan Horse’ for gentrification? © Max Rousseau.

53

Former textile factory converted in 2009 into around sixty loft apartments, in the neighbourhood of Le Pile, close to the centre of Roubaix. Since the economic crisis, a third of the building has been owned by a social housing landlord. © Max Rousseau.

56

Derelict houses near the textile factory, Le  Pile neighbourhood, Roubaix. Forty  per  cent of inhabitants of Le  Pile live below the upper poverty threshold. © Max Rousseau.

57

The end of gentrification? A planned development of loft apartments in Roubaix city centre, initiated in 2007 but regularly postponed since the economic crisis. © Max Rousseau.

58

A first-floor flat, where the lights have to be kept on all day long, La Goutte d’Or, Paris, 2008. © Bertrand Chabrol.

69

Buildings in Rua Coelho, Alcântara, Lisbon, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

71

Garden side of the buildings in Rua Coelho, Alcântara, Lisbon, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

71

viii

2.4.

3.1.

3.2.

3.3. 5.1. 6.1. 6.2.

6.3.

7.1. 8.1. 8.2.

8.3.

illustrations

Ownership structure, physical transformation of homes and social change: the example of Alcântara’s Rua Coelho, Lisbon, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

73

Exposed beams and floor tiles: rehabilitation works in progress in a canut apartment, in the Croix-Rousse area, Lyons, 2007. © Anaïs Collet.

88

Urban fabric of Bas-Montreuil: single-family houses with gardens, small industrial premises and low-rise apartment buildings, 2009. © Anaïs Collet.

89

In Bas-Montreuil, former industrial premises converted into a home, 2009. © Anaïs Collet.

90

Manufacturing El Raval’s new identity, Barcelona, 2005. © Hovig Ter Minassian.

124

A vision of ‘quality’: large billboard in the centre of Sheffield. © Max Rousseau.

151

The Peace Garden, in the very centre of Sheffield. This public garden is the first project of the ‘Heart of the City’ urban renewal policy. In the foreground, back to the camera, is a ‘city centre ambassador’, a public agent whose role is to provide information to visitors about amenities in the city centre, as well as ensure a security presence in the public space. © Max Rousseau.

152

A Sheffield art squat denounces the land acquisition strategy of Hallam University in the city centre (the squatters have since been removed). © Max Rousseau.

157

Persistence of urban poverty in the neighbourhood of El Raval, Barcelona, 2012. © Hovig Ter Minassian.

170

Shops and restaurants in Château Rouge, Paris, 2011. © Marie Chabrol.

185

Shopping and meeting places in Château Rouge, Paris, 2011. Many patrons of the neighbourhood live elsewhere, sometimes travelling considerable distances. © Lydie Launay.

186

Berriat–Saint-Bruno: retail offer targeting those on lower incomes and immigrants, Grenoble, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

188

illustrations

ix

TABLES 7.1.

The diversity of residential trajectories in Alcântara, Lisbon. © Matthieu Giroud.

173

MAPS 7.1.

Social dynamics in the district of Ciutat Vella (Barcelona) between 1991 and 2005. © Hovig Ter Minassian.

168

PR EFACE

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬

T

his book is the result of a collective research project that began in January 2012, based on an idea suggested by Jean-Pierre Lévy a few months earlier. The initial aim was to bring together six junior scholars who had all defended their Ph.D. dissertations on gentrification, but in different disciplines, using different approaches and investigating different sites, between 2007 and 2011. We met on a monthly basis between early 2012 and June 2013 to compare and discuss our respective studies, and eventually came up with an outline of what would become this book. The writing phase proper spanned the period from late 2013 to late 2015. As we were drawing to a close, our friend and co-author Matthieu Giroud was murdered during the 13 November terrorist attacks in Paris. Throughout this project, we remained steadfastly self-reliant, having no funding and nobody to report to. We worked at our own pace, juggling teaching engagements, job and grant applications, as well as the births of our children (five in four years!) – gradually moving on from meeting rooms to comfy cafés. Having varied disciplinary backgrounds, we took time to discuss our respective approaches, to tell each other about our fieldwork, to share our findings. We also made the choice to write genuinely collaboratively, and to learn from each other instead of simply presenting our results in succession. The contents and overall structure of the book are the result of these four years of discussions, joint writing, and cross-reading. Each of us brought something to the table, and we all learned a lot from the process, working as a team at a time when our institutions encourage us to be increasingly individualistic. Matthieu played a prominent role in this dynamic, not only taking part in the collective endeavour, but acting as the main driving force behind this book. He guided us from the beginning to the end, always tactfully and kindly, making sure we remained organized and worked hard. He was also

preface

xi

the liaison with our French publisher, with whom he had developed a relationship characterized by trust and friendship. Although he was too modest to admit it, his stature as an intellectual and human made him the de facto leader of this large-scale project. He deserves much of the credit for this book, and for turning this small team into a group of good friends, now sadly missing one of its members. Marie Chabrol Anaïs Collet Lydie Launay Max Rousseau Hovig Ter Minassian

ACK NOW LE D GE M E N TS

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬

F

irst of all, we would like to thank Jean-Pierre Lévy, who initially encouraged us to work together. This book is the fruit of this joyful and stimulating collective work conducted between 2012 and 2015. It was originally published in French by Les Editions Amsterdam in 2016. We would like to thank Nicolas Vieillescazes, our French publisher, for trusting us and for allowing us to publish it in English. We thank Jean-Yves Bart for translating the entire book and Oliver Waine for copyediting the manuscript. The translation and editing of the book were funded by the research units SAGE (UMR 7363, CNRS/University of Strasbourg), CITERES (UMR 7324, CNRS/University of Tours) and Habiter le Monde (UR 4287, University of Picardy Jules Verne); by CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development); by the IdEx Unistra excellence initiative (an ANR ‘Investissements d’Avenir’ programme); and by the Institut Universitaire de France. We are most grateful for their support. Finally, we would like to thank Michelle and François Giroud as well as Aurélie Silvestre for their support and their permission to reproduce the photographs and diagrams created by Matthieu Giroud. We dedicate this book to Gary and Thelma.

I N TRODUCTION

F R O M G E N T R I F I C AT I O N TO G E N T R I F I C AT I O N S

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬

T

he word ‘gentrification’ has spread beyond the confines of scientific discourse and is now uttered by researchers, politicians, the man on the street and journalists alike. It also comes up in protest discourses and in landuse conflicts across the world.1 To some it may refer to the rebirth of old, unfashionable neighbourhoods and to others it is a new form of sociospatial inequality. Regardless, gentrification is now discussed in the mainstream media. Many articles describe the lifestyles of social groups perceived as new (‘yuppies’, ‘hipsters’, ‘bobos’ in France) who move into working-class neighbourhoods. They investigate the electoral impact of such changes in the population of inner cities and occasionally denounce the resulting forced migration of working-class residents towards peripheral areas. Yet, reading the mainstream media is often insufficient to gain an in-depth understanding of the causes, consequences and stakes of these processes. Indeed, media analyses of the transformations of central neighbourhoods in some metropolises can be largely incomplete, dumbed down and biased – often they reduce gentrification to a simplistic mechanism, reproduced identically from one city to the next. Although they sometimes adopt a critical tone, the media are themselves part of the process: their depictions of the transformed neighbourhoods and of the new residents’ lifestyles might in some instances be mildly sarcastic, but they are as a rule quite flattering and reinforce changes in image for those places. With this book, we intend to help readers gain an informed, healthy sense of scepticism when it comes to the sometimes grossly oversimplified representations of the transformations of the inner cities so often found in public debate. Our objective is to offer a nuanced, detailed and empirically sound

2

gentrifications

overview of the processes that fall under the term ‘gentrification’. In the process we are careful to avoid two of the main pitfalls in public discussion of the subject. First, gentrification is very often presented as an implacable phenomenon that follows a linear course from the moment it hits a neighbourhood to the ultimate level of social homogenization. Second, we have observed that the vocabulary of gentrification and a standard interpretive approach are applied to a very wide range of cities, neighbourhoods and phenomena, to the extent that they are used to describe all kinds of upgrades in the characteristics, uses and residents of a space. Against the extensive and excessive use of the term ‘gentrification’, leading to superficial perceptions of the processes and mechanisms at work, this book strives to document the great variety of the paces, actors and forms of gentrification in different contexts, and to identify as precisely as possible the forms of urban change it covers, by evidencing a number of invariants. In other words, we rely on painstaking analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate its DNA. We should make it clear from the outset that by using the term DNA we are pointing to the idea of a social relationship to the appropriation of space involving unequally endowed actors and groups. The following pages hence address the place of social groups in the city, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to them by economic and political actors, and the stakes of everyday social relationships. Emphasis is also placed on the infinitely varied forms taken by these relationships, rooted in different historical, geographic and political contexts, and embodied in buildings, populations, practices, images and aesthetics that are specific to given places and cannot be reduced to a single descriptive scheme. Our approach here is inextricably theoretical and empirical. The entire book is based on the confrontation of materials carefully elaborated in several urban contexts, following diverse disciplinary approaches and using a variety of methods to grasp the multiple facets of urban change. Geography, sociology and political science, with their references, concepts, research questions and tools, are necessary and complementary to account for the plural dimensions of the actors, rationales and forms of gentrification. Urban change is also studied over the long term, as simply observing changes whenever they become visible in public space is insufficient and all too superficial. Indeed, gentrification emerges progressively at the crossroads of the trajectories of cities, neighbourhoods, policies, business dynamics and residents. These trajectories must be examined in their entirety for a better understanding of their social and spatial effects. Gentrification unfolds over long periods, at varying paces depending on the period and the place; it can also stop, and its dynamic can be reversed. Also, it is not the only process at work in inner cities – it interacts with other dynamics, including pauperiza-

introduction

3

tion. We grant special attention to the diversity of the sources, actors and logics that feed gentrification. This entails not relying on a single explanatory theory: however powerful theories may be, overreliance on them poses the risk of giving a truncated account and makes ingredients of change (or hindrances to change) invisible when they do not fit within the theory. This does not mean we do without the available theories, which offer fruitful insights and avenues of research. Rather, we combine them and use them in complement to each other, as their heuristic value may vary according to the facets of change under study. We begin by presenting the theories and explanatory models of gentrification that founded one of the most dynamic research fields in international urban studies at the turn of the 1980s. The flip side of their effectiveness is that they tend to convey a unified, smoothed-over image of gentrification processes; hence the approach adopted in this book, which is to look at gentrifications, in the plural. PIONEERING STUDIES: GENTRIFICATION IN THE SINGULAR It is worth mentioning that the classical theories of gentrification were for the most part elaborated on the basis of studies on British and North American cities, where the situation of central neighbourhoods differs significantly from France. In France, the middle and upper classes have generally resided in the centres of large cities for a long time. By contrast, in the US and Canada, for instance, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed the exile of the mostly white middle classes towards the suburbs, a phenomenon coined ‘white flight’. Mass suburbanization accelerated the decline of central neighbourhoods to the extent that some authors have feared the future ‘death’ of American cities.2 This made the early forms of gentrification all the more visible. France has never experienced such a large-scale flight from the inner cities, but a number of its pericentral and central neighbourhoods have remained working class (for instance, in industrial and port cities) – they too have been affected by gentrification. Early studies in urban research on gentrification have attempted to describe and explain the process with a theoretical ambition; they outlined two main approaches. The first approach, which may be called ‘sociocultural’, focuses on the demand for housing and services and explains gentrification by the tastes of a new urban social class eager to live in the inner cities. The second approach is more economic, and explains gentrification by the creation of a new supply of housing – in other words, by the action of profit-oriented economic agents (developers, real-estate agents, etc.). These classical approaches to gentrification have for a long time been pitted against each other, often in very

4

gentrifications

exaggerated fashion. Yet they share the common feature of conveying a linear, ordered and sequential conception of the process and of placing central emphasis on the underlying market rationales of the real-estate business.

Gentrification as Emancipation: The Demand Explanation The gentrification processes observed in the 1960s and 1970s in the US and Canada displayed significant similarities both in way they unfolded and in the backgrounds of the households concerned. It was thus tempting to develop a model of the phenomenon. The earliest attempts were made in the 1970s, with the emergence of ‘stage models’ aimed at describing a typical sequence of the gentrification process (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008). In 1977, in an academic work on two neighbourhoods in the Boston metropolitan area, Timothy Pattison evidenced different phases witnessing the arrival of small groups of new homeowners ‘attracted at a given time by a given type of neighbourhood’ (Pattison 1977: 2). Gentrification, he argued, is triggered by ‘pioneers’: young, childless, artists, intellectuals, who purchase and renovate dilapidated homes. Funding these purchases and renovations often comes at a great financial risk for these households. This first phase results in the ‘promotion’ of the neighbourhood, which becomes more visible to new households belonging to the same social and cultural groups as the pioneers. These more numerous new households are attracted by the opportunity to negotiate purchase and rental prices in a somewhat strained housing market. They in turn move into old homes requiring renovation, but may also find it difficult to come up with the budget needed for the renovation work. At this point we observe the first evictions of long-time residents, either unemployed or blue-collar workers, especially following the progressive transformation of houses that are home to several families into individual units and the successive purchases of small adjoining flats to expand family homes. The third and fourth phases stand out not so much through their content as through the intensity of the processes at work and the actors that come into play. The neighbourhood has increasingly gained exposure and now attracts more investors and speculators; meanwhile, the public authorities support changes in the area by offering new community facilities. Little by little, the upwardly mobile middle classes, who are able to afford the rising prices resulting from the actions of developers, move in, more frequently as owners than as tenants. Banks that now recognize the neighbourhood’s potential facilitate the funding of purchases and renovations. The number of evictions decreases, as the collective houses hosting workers’ families have already all been sold. The ‘pioneers’, for their part, see in the rise of housing prices an opportunity to sell their homes.

introduction

5

Building on Timothy Pattison’s research, in 1979 and 1980, two other US students, Philip Clay and Dennis Gale, each proposed a ‘stage model’ based on observations conducted in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington (Clay 1979; Gale 1980). In both models, the gentrification of a neighbourhood is again presented as a linear, progressive and sequential process, with new ‘gentrifiers’ intervening at each stage to move the phenomenon towards a point of stabilization and ‘maturity’. This model displays many similarities with Pattison’s observations, but also a few differences, particularly regarding the intensity and progression of evictions of working-class residents, which here are observed until the very last stage of the model. Inspired by the principle of invasion–succession dear to the Chicago-school sociologists (Rhein 2003),3 these models are built around typical profiles of gentrifiers, characterized in Clay’s work by a degree of aversion to risk (insecurity, decline in value of housing, etc.) and in Gale’s by the combination of type of household, educational level, average income level and type of profession; each profile replaces the previous one. Numerous criticisms have been voiced against these early ‘stage models’, accused of being too simplistic, particularly when it comes to their theoretical underpinnings, and also too rigid as they are incapable of accounting for local specificities or differences within each of the categories of actors identified. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly also point out that several factors, such as the existence of local speculative housing bubbles or much earlier and continual public interference, can disrupt the ‘smooth progression between each stage’ of the process (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2010: 33–34). Such criticisms have failed to affect the spread of these models, whose popularity precisely derives from their simplicity. One of the main contributions of these models, regardless, was to shed light on the variety of actors involved in gentrification processes. These approaches began to be considerably enhanced in the late 1970s, particularly following the impulse of innovative work by the Canadian geographer David Ley (1996).4 Ley remarked that under the influence of globalization, the economic structure of Western countries shifted from the production of manufactured goods towards services. This economic change has come with a social change, marked by the decline of blue-collars and the rise of unskilled and low-skilled workers and white-collar workers in the new service economy. The most skilled stratum of white-collar workers gave rise to a new social group that he calls the ‘new middle class’ and that the British called the service class in reference to their employment sector (Bidou-Zachariasen 2000). In France, pioneering scholars of gentrification tended to highlight the role of the welfare state in the development of ‘new middle classes’ or ‘salaried middle strata’, for the majority holding public jobs (in education, culture, social

6

gentrifications

work, health, etc.) (Bidou et al. 1983; Bidou 1984). Additionally, under the influence of 1960s counterculture, according to David Ley the ‘new middle class’ rejected the traditional lifestyle of the North American middle class, perceiving life in suburban houses to be alienating and massively moving ‘back’ to central areas. This rejection of suburban monotony and subsequent choice of dense spaces deemed to be more conducive to individual self-fulfilment suggest looking at gentrification as a feature of a transition towards the postindustrial city. This might be supported by contributions made in the 1980s, emphasizing the rise of salaried work for women and the decline of the traditional distribution of roles within nuclear families, also facing the competition of other types of family structures. Damaris Rose, for instance, noted the preferences of women, but also and more generally of those she calls ‘nontraditional households: single-parent families, households formed by individuals without any family ties, single women, single men, couples with two incomes, etc.’ – for the central neighbourhoods of Montreal. Rose claims that they enable ‘the diversification of ways to accomplish the tasks related to reproduction; they offer a concentration of services and a “tolerant” atmosphere’ (Rose 1987: 218). It is lastly worth noting that in the US, the UK and France, these early studies did not argue that gentrifiers were moved by pure self-interest; they generally emphasized their supposed progressive values and presented gentrification as an emancipatory process (Caulfield 1989),5 or at least one that could help break from the ‘rigidities of the Fordist city’ (Bidou-Zachariasen 1995: 149) – without altogether neglecting the question of the conflicts between gentrifiers and longer-established residents (Herzhaft-Marin 1985).6 These approaches generally depicted gentrification as a gradual process, during which groups on a journey towards social and political emancipation (women, artists, gay people,7 students) act as pioneers owing to their greater acceptance of the reputation of some working-class neighbourhoods (insecurity, drugs, disreputable schools, lacking urban facilities such as convenience stores and parks, etc.). They are also better placed to live alongside marginalized social groups owing to their social trajectories and values. However, as they move into these neighbourhoods, they change their image and ‘prepare the ground’ for other social groups that less readily cross social boundaries. The role of artists as ‘the expeditionary force for inner-city gentrifiers’ (Ley 1996: 191) has been subjected to particularly intense scrutiny. In a major work, sociologist Sharon Zukin (1982) examined the conversion of industrial wastelands into lofts by artists looking for large affordable spaces in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood. Largely encouraged by public authorities and celebrated by cultural tastemakers (decorating magazines, etc.), the neighbourhood’s transformation gave rise to the emergence of a bohemian lifestyle called ‘loft living’ that attracted the attention of more

introduction

7

privileged social groups. The interest of real-estate developers in SoHo’s lofts then led to the conversion of offices and workshops into upscale homes and the progressive eviction of the artists. Zukin subtly analyses the underlying mutation of capitalism at work in SoHo’s transformation, whereby the artist is used as a Trojan Horse to make a profit. Due to its insights into capitalism, Sharon Zukin’s work also partakes in the second classic approach of the process, focusing on the gentrification supply. Gentrification as the Urbanization of the Class Struggle: The Supply Explanation The late 1970s saw the emergence of a debate that has since become famous in urban studies, between proponents of the demand-and-supply explanations of gentrification. The latter emphasized the role of capital in the process. Their leading figure was the Scottish geographer Neil Smith, a former Ph.D. student of radical geographer David Harvey. In a landmark 1979 paper, he opposed the ‘humanist’ theories that dominated at the time and proposed to interpret gentrification as a ‘back-to-the-city movement by capital, not people’ (Smith 1979b). The paper sparked controversy: instead of being presented as a form of emancipation, gentrification was pictured as the translation of the class struggle in urban space. Neil Smith’s main weapon was his ‘rent-gap’ theory. Based on the case of North American cities, he argued that gentrification was explained by long-term changes in the processes of investment and disinvestment in the built environment. In the mid-twentieth century, the suburbanization of industrial activities and of the middle and upper classes caused a decline in land values in the inner cities and a widening gap with the suburbs. The depreciation of inner-city neighbourhoods came with a deterioration of the built environment that follows a cyclical logic. Owneroccupiers of homes in a neighbourhood affected by that process indeed generally tend to sell or rent their home in order to protect their assets under the threat of depreciation. The neighbourhood’s transition to tenancy changes the logic of investments in the maintenance of housing, which is only performed if raised rents make it profitable. However, the price of rents also depends on the environment of the homes concerned. This means that investors tend to leave the neighbourhood to focus on less risky areas. Further pauperization ensues, along with plummeting rent and sale prices. As properties are left vacant, the development of vandalism accelerates the process. In the last step, many properties are abandoned altogether. The depreciation of inner-city neighbourhoods serves as the basis for profitable reinvestment. At a certain stage in the depreciation of the existing homes, capitalized ground rent (i.e. the value of the house or land) is significantly lower than potential ground rent (its potential value under the land’s best use). The ensu-

8

gentrifications

ing gap in returns enables the provision of gentrification supply by land and real-estate markets, but it requires heavy public and private investments at the neighbourhood level to launch a rehabilitation process. At the turn of the 2000s, this theory led to a new stage model that some (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008: 173) considered more robust or at least better suited to describing and explaining the process such as it was observed in the cities of North America, Western Europe and Australia. Applied to the case of New York, the model singled out three main phases of gentrification, separated by two transitional periods of high recession (Smith 1996: 267; Smith 2002, 2003). The first phase of ‘sporadic gentrification’ began in New York in the 1950s and ended in 1973 with the first oil crisis and the major global recession. Limited to inner-city neighbourhoods such as Greenwich Village and SoHo, it was characterized by the arrival of artist and intellectual ‘pioneers’, often at odds with the mainstream, who spontaneously began to progressively rehabilitate buildings and homes, but also by the role of public authorities who at the time began to fight urban decline by injecting federal and municipal funds into renewal and redevelopment projects. According to Neil Smith, developers and investors became full-fledged actors of gentrification during the first recession period that began in 1973. In a context of global economic crisis and local fiscal crisis leading to a decline in real-estate and land values and in public investments in inner cities, the ‘ground rent gap’ between initial investments and potential capital gains quickly widened, leading several real-estate developers and financial institutions to commit capital to various housing programmes aimed at the middle and upper classes. These investments laid the groundwork for the second phase of the process, the ‘anchoring’ of gentrification, which lasted until the late 1980s. During that period, the process spread beyond the initial neighbourhoods where it had taken place through a ripple effect, affecting for instance Tribeca and the Lower East Side. This spread is, however, not so much the outcome of the settling of a ‘second generation’ of gentrifiers, generally better off than the ‘pioneers’, as of the often joint action of public authorities and private actors around emblematic urban renewal and economic redevelopment projects (Harvey 2014). The third phase, which was still ongoing in the early 2000s, followed a second recession period in the early 1990s. During that recession, capitals were essentially channelled into neighbourhoods where the gentrification process was already well under way, limiting its spatial expansion. While at the time some referred to this as ‘degentrification’ (Lees and Bondi 1995), Neil Smith argued that this second transition led to widespread gentrification, both the accomplishment of a concerted, global urban strategy and the true expression of a ‘classist’ takeover of the inner city and surrounding neighbourhoods. The process no longer solely affected the housing sector. It impacted on employment, commercial activ-

introduction

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ity, cultural facilities, recreational infrastructure and public spaces. It drew on numerous large-scale urban renewal plans, again jointly funded by public authorities and private interests. Gentrification became a highly integrated conquest of urban space, particularly for developers and private investors, who produced new urban landscapes ‘ready for consumption’. Building on Sharon Zukin’s work (1982)8 on the media’s contribution to the imagery of ‘urban pioneers’ on a quest for cosmopolitanism and ‘authenticity’, several sociologists and geographers have also shown the crucial role played by the press and more broadly by ‘key cultural intermediaries’ (McLeod and Ward 2002) – including TV programmes on food and home improvement and various lifestyle magazines – in the success of this consumption model. In her examination of the representations of American cities in three ‘urban lifestyle’ magazines over the period from 1960 to 1990, Miriam Greenberg shows how, beginning in the late 1980s, the concentration of the media in the hands of a few conglomerates and the rise of a prosperous urban middle class have led the press to adopt a new, depoliticized outlook on the city, presenting it under the angle of the new lifestyles of the American middle class and its new neighbourhoods of choice (Greenberg 2000). Gentrification is no longer only perceived as a residential strategy, but also as the ‘figurehead of metropolitan change in the inner cities’ (Smith 2003: 58). Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly (2008: 178) have recently proposed to update Smith’s model by including a fourth phase, characterized (especially in North America) by the ever-growing financialization of the residential economy and the multiplication of urban policies that explicitly support gentrification. Neil Smith’s extremely influential theory in the field of urban studies marked a clear shift in perspective: it looks at gentrification as the result not so much of a demand by social groups with distinctive values, revealing deep-seated sociodemographic changes, but rather as the outcome of the ‘mechanical’ supply offered by actors pursuing a purely economic interest (landowners, developers, real-estate agencies, banks) and/or a political interest (public actors). The competition of social groups in urban space is no longer of an ‘ecological’ nature9 as in the first-stage models, but instead takes a much more structural turn. The fundamental innovation of such ‘neo-Marxist’ models is to offer a new conception of the spatial diffusion of gentrification. Building on Neil Smith’s approach to gentrification as a ‘new urban frontier’ between ‘areas of disinvestment’ and ‘areas of reinvestment in the urban landscape’, these models now represent a process that spreads in areolar and contiguous fashion owing to the progressive and irremediable movement of one or several ‘gentrification frontier[s]’ (Smith 1996: 186– 87). Smith argues that ‘mapping’ these ‘frontier lines’ and their shifts is key not only to representing the progress of gentrification but also to providing

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neighbourhood organizations, residents and housing activists with a tool to anticipate the process and find the means to ‘defend themselves’ against it. In his classic book The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith draws on the indepth analysis of fiscal data on the residential tax arrears of building owners to propose a chorographic map of New York’s Lower East Side that depicts the temporal and spatial evolution of the ‘economic’ gentrification frontier as a ‘frontier of profitability’ and of ‘reinvestment’ in the built environment. According to Neil Smith (1996: 201–2): The frontier is most evident where there are no enclosed contours (that is, no peaks or sinkholes). Peaks, with later years at the centre of enclosed contours, represent areas of greatest resistance to reinvestment while sinkholes, with earlier years at the centre, represent areas opened up to reinvestment in advance of surrounding areas. The major pattern that emerged is a reasonably well-defined west-to-east frontier line with the earliest encroachment in the north-west and south-west sections of the Lower East Side.

These ‘peaks’, which serve as ‘nodes of resistance’ to the advancing gentrification frontier, are areas characterized by noise, congestion and pollution issues, numerous social housing buildings or a high concentration of poor, essentially Latino, populations. This ‘economic’ gentrification frontier mirrors what Smith calls the ‘revanchist city’, in reference to the revanchist reactionary campaign led by the bourgeois elites against the working class following the Commune of Paris in 1871, which has often been used to describe the ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ facet of the reconquest of working-class inner-city neighbourhoods and their surrounding areas by the market. Many geographers have drawn inspiration from this conception of the spatial diffusion of gentrification in their own work.10 On the strength of its analytical, metaphorical and arguably political effectiveness, the concept of the ‘gentrification frontier’ appears to have prevailed not only in the scientific field, but also in the media. In her book entitled Paris sans le peuple. La gentrification de la capitale, the geographer Anne Clerval elaborates on the concept (Clerval 2013: 256). She explains that, in Paris, this frontier shifts in quite a regular fashion from one area to the next (unlike the coalescent nodes observed in New York). She maps out the progress of the gentrification frontier since the 1960s based on fieldwork and statistical analysis of the detailed socio-occupational categories of households, the features of housing and the nationalities of the total population. The map, which generated a certain amount of media coverage, shows the frontier’s progress from the centre – formed by a bourgeois core of affluent neighbourhoods, described as an ‘out-migration area, even though the residents of these neighbourhoods in particular are not the ones who settle elsewhere’ – to the northeastern fringes of the city. The language of the frontier is expanded even further,

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acquiring a military dimension: ‘while spatial diffusion represents the main mode of advancement of the gentrification frontier, it also has its outposts’ (like Montmartre or around the Parc des Buttes Chaumont), and ‘sometimes bypasses certain areas, in particular around spaces characterized by a high concentration of foreign populations, like an army avoiding a pocket of resistance to sweep in from the rear’ (Goutte d’Or, Belleville, Faubourg Saint-Denis) (Clerval 2010). In these ‘new models’, emphasis on the underlying macroeconomic mechanisms of gentrification and their key role in linking the phases of the processes has given way to lively debates. Indeed, one of the main criticisms lodged against this concerns the fact that these models inspired by the ‘ground-rent gap’ theory neglect the great variety and diversity of individuals involved in the gentrification process. The attention to that variety and diversity was precisely the strong point of the early stage models in the eyes of some (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008: 173). The new models can also be faulted for their sometimes unequivocal treatment of the rationality and internationality attributed to the actors of gentrification – developers, public actors and residents alike. While they have the advantage of emphasizing actors (thereby asserting the idea that gentrification is not a ‘natural’ process), they sometimes minimize the plurality of the logics and issues that inform the choices and practices of these actors. At odds with this monocausal approach to the process, authors like the Canadian geographer Damaris Rose (1984, 1996) actually wrote about the ‘diversification’ of gentrification – an aspect that will be elaborated upon in later pages – precisely because it involves multiple processes and actors with varied rationalities and intentions. The opposition between these two approaches (sociocultural/economic; demand/supply) is of course based on metatheories, different worldviews, making it caricatural and deeply counterproductive for the purposes of understanding the process. Most authors now concur in acknowledging their complementarity (Lees 1994; Bidou-Zachariasen 2003). In a landmark paper – one of the first articles on gentrification to be translated in France – the British researcher Chris Hamnett (1997) showed that the two conditions were in fact necessary for gentrification to occur. According to him, first, there needs to be a supply of gentrifiable buildings in the inner cities: the existence of a ‘ground-rent gap’ is crucial, but it does not necessarily lead to gentrification. Second, there also needs to be an effective demand for inner-city properties on the part of potential gentrifiers. This may result from the financial inability to buy a house in the most affluent neighbourhoods or – a reason more often put forward – from a preference towards life in the inner cities, close to places of employment and cultural and social facilities. This preference in turn depends on the growth of service-sector employment in the inner cities, demographic changes and lifestyles. For the

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middle and upper classes, living within the city offers easy access to jobs, restaurants, cultural activities and other infrastructure. Without this effective demand, related to the attractiveness of life in inner cities, gentrification is unlikely to occur even in the presence of a wide ground-rent gap. Lastly, in some neighbourhoods, despite their central location and supply of affordable housing, gentrification can be delayed or nonexistent. This is the case for neighbourhoods that have been strongly affected by pauperization and decay (generally the outcome of massive deindustrialization, as in the emblematic case of Detroit), by a depreciated architecture, like the high-rise apartment blocks built in the 1960s and 1970s in France, or by the sizeable and visible presence of migrant populations associated with negative representations that discourage potential candidates from moving in (Marin 1998: 101–13; Bacqué and Fijalkow 2006). While weaving these two main theories together is indeed necessary, it should not be overlooked that they shed light on very different drivers of gentrification dynamics and forms of gentrification. As scholars have repeatedly pointed out,11 the Western European and North American cities that have served as bases for these theories and explanatory models vary widely from one another, and the concrete processes of urban change that have inspired them are quite heterogeneous: changing residential choices of the young middle classes and rehabilitation of old homes in London (Hamnett 1973; Hamnett and Williams 1980); construction by local authorities and powerful economic actors of luxury high-rises in Philadelphia’s old Society Hill neighbourhood (Smith 1979a); transformation of industrial warehouses into artists’ workshops in New York’s SoHo, followed by the transformation of these lofts into commercial products (Zukin 1982); mobilization of residents opposing rehabilitation and interference in local politics in Vancouver (Ley 1981), etc. Once imported to France, the term was used chiefly to describe the consequences of housing rehabilitation policies in old neighbourhoods, as in Vieux-Lyon (Lyons’ old town) (Authier 1993), as well as in neighbourhoods where rehabilitation was combined with operations involving the demolition/reconstruction of residential buildings, as in Belleville in Paris (Simon 1994). Rather than seeking to integrate contradictory theories at all costs, should we not acknowledge the great variety of causes, actors and effects of the phenomena described by the term ‘gentrification’? GENTRIFICATION IN THE PLURAL In this book we intend to tackle this question of the diversity of gentrification head on. The collective analysis of a huge wealth of material on cities with very different backgrounds in France and other European countries has

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led us to question the pertinence of the analyses of gentrification that present it as a gradual, ineluctable process involving groups of residents and actors identified as a function of their role in the process. Our research yields a rather clear conclusion: the analytical schemes in terms of successive waves of settling of various upper- and middle-class groups are rarely observed as such in the field – this also applies to the idea of the inexorable and total eviction from the inner-city neighbourhoods of the older working-class residents. Indeed, despite the spectacular character of gentrification, the centres and immediate surroundings of large cities remain marked by the cohabitation of great wealth and abject poverty. Likewise, in the cases we have studied, it is quite difficult to make a clear distinction between the professional producers of gentrification on the one hand and the private individual consumers of gentrified spaces on the other. Sometimes private individuals or entrepreneurs from outside the field of housing ‘manufacture’ gentrified space – through their material work or symbolic productions – and businesses or developers ‘consume’ these places and images to maximize the value of their supply. The role of public authorities cannot be reduced to a systematic alliance with the representatives of capital. Last but not least, gentrification is never the only process at work in a neighbourhood: it can also operate hand in hand with other trends – including dynamics of stabilization or social pauperization that may also have an impact on business activity and the development of tourism – so that the renewal of the population is sometimes relative in social and spatial terms (Authier 2003). This echoes conclusions already formulated in France in the early 2000s by the sociologist Jean-Yves Authier and the geographer Jean-Pierre Lévy, who argued that ‘gentrification presents itself more as a coexistence of different populations and mobilities, as the social outcome of a complex game in which sedentary and mobile residents rub shoulders, the combination of population movements, urban planning decisions, actors’ strategies and the distinctive ways of living and cohabitating of the different social groups’ (Lévy 2002: 200). The Importance of Contextual Variations One of our main goals in this book is therefore to build on the legacy of the classical theories of gentrification and move beyond them to expand our understanding of the process by unveiling its multiform character. We shed light on the complexity and diversity of gentrification processes, drawing on concrete examples. The main deviation observed from theories and explanatory models concerns the timing of urban change. Gentrification can hardly be reduced to a linear, sequential and progressive temporality: depending on the case, it fol-

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lows distinctive paces, with more or less long periods of acceleration, slowdown and stagnation, and in some cases of deadlock and even regression (in times of economic crisis, for instance). It can occur extremely quickly and sometimes much more slowly, owing to the multiplicity of drivers and brakes involved, as well as to its intertwining with sometimes contradictory trends. The ‘diversity’ of gentrification is also reflected in the social dynamics that it launches and produces. Again, the process can hardly be reduced to an ineluctable mechanism of invasion/succession, where (pre)defined social groups perceived to have uniform social backgrounds and lifestyles come in succession – with the wealthier chasing the poorer away. There is of course a competition for space, with a struggle for domination between social groups, creating inequalities. But the resources used in these struggles are quite varied, especially considering that economic and social structures in the West have become a great deal more complex since the pioneering studies on gentrification. It is precisely in the overlaps, mixes, coexistences and changes in social position that these different resources come to light and that social positions and groups are redefined. Gentrifiers and the gentrified are not always found where one might expect them; the most involved actors are not only capitalists moved by the sole objective of making the most of their economic investments. Lastly, the ‘diversity’ of the process is also spatial – both in the way it spreads and in the form that it produces. The areolar vision proposed in Neil Smith’s model and largely adopted by others, in which gentrification progresses continually across space with a ‘frontier’ preceded by ‘outposts’, does not always account for the way in which space can in some urban contexts alternatively act as an ingredient and as an obstacle to gentrification. Likewise, the urban products of gentrification – the form and aesthetic of buildings, homes, businesses – vary widely depending on the history of the place under study (Launay and Nez 2014). Obviously, merely describing the multiform character of this process, which leads to discussing gentrification in the plural, is not enough. We must understand where this ‘diversity’ comes from, where lags, gaps, deadlocks and obstacles come from (Ley and Dobson 2008; Walks and August 2008). We must also present the manifold elements – forces, dynamics, dimensions, actors – that influence and sometimes contribute to disrupting the linearity of the process. We have quickly noted that the combination or mix of these elements varied according to the local contexts. This means that local urban contexts unarguably impact the paces, forms and actors of the process. We readily acknowledge that this attention to contextual variations in the understanding and very definition of the process is not a new idea. It was in particular the subject of heated debates in the 1990s, revolv-

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ing around the terminology to be used to name the process. However, the approach that consists in concretely demonstrating the existence of this contextual dimension of gentrification by cross-examining and comparing cases is a more innovative one. Even an ambitious book like 2015’s evocatively titled Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Lees, Shin and López-Morales 2015) is ultimately not entirely satisfying in that respect. To be able to defend the ‘global’ character of gentrification, the authors adopted a ‘cosmopolitan perspective’ on the process by relying on some twenty case studies in highly varied locations including Karachi, Athens, Damascus, Cairo, Taipei, Istanbul, Seoul, Jerusalem, Lagos, Lisbon and Mexico. In addition to the global character of the process, the diversity of the forms it takes in various cities across the world is striking, leading Eric Clark to claim in the afterword: ‘The rich empirical analyses presented here reflect how gentrification is characterized by particular social, economic, cultural, political and legal contexts’ (Clark 2015: 453). The editors infer from this that there are ‘multiple gentrifications in a pluralistic sense rather than “Gentrification” with a capital G’ (Lees, Shin and López-Morales 2015: 442). This argument obviously directly echoes the position and message we wish to convey in this book. Yet Global Gentrifications differs from our work in that it proposes an overarching view of case studies conducted in parallel rather than a genuine comparison and cross-examination; it considers the variations and effects of local contexts on the forms of the process not so much as objects but as results of the analysis. In that perspective, we concur with Greek geographer Thomas Maloutas’s call to better take into account the contextual diversity of gentrification. In a paper entitled ‘Contextual Diversity in Gentrification Research’, he argued that gentrification is ‘context-dependent’ in the sense that its ‘patterns and impact are determined by the combined effect of mechanisms and institutions involving the market, the state, civil society and the specific and durable shape of local sociospatial realities, i.e. built environments, social relations inscribed in property patterns, urban histories and ideologies’ (Maloutas 2012: 34). He explains that it is precisely because gentrification is highly dependent on contextual causality that it must be seen only as a ‘midrange’ theory, that is, one that allows for a degree of generalization without proposing an all-encompassing interpretation of society. In that sense Maloutas openly opposes the tendency of many English-language authors to use the concept of ‘gentrification’ in a very extensive and simplified manner: ‘the way gentrification is evolving as a concept that embraces almost any form of urban regeneration is detrimental to analysis, especially when applied to contexts different from those it was coined in/for’ (Maloutas 2012: 44) (meaning British and North American metropolises). As we will later explain, we partly agree with this criticism; however, we are more wary

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of Maloutas’s scepticism regarding the interest of studying gentrification through multiple case studies. Should we then concur with Damaris Rose, Thomas Maloutas or Alain Bourdin (2008) in distrusting this ‘chaotic concept’ that appears to cover a great diversity of tangled processes? According to Maloutas, ‘looking for gentrification in increasingly varied contexts displaces emphasis from causal mechanisms to similarities in outcomes across contexts, and leads to a loss of analytical rigour’ (Maloutas 2012: 34). Juxtaposing case studies can indeed be somewhat sterile if the sole point is to spot similarities and differences. However, comparison can allow us to go much further if these similarities and differences are taken not as an end point, but as a starting point – an observation that needs careful explaining. Why can gentrification be so fast, or so slow and sometimes even unfinished? Why does it take the form of luxury housing in some places and of spontaneous microinterventions on the environment in others? Why does it spread to vast areas in some cities while remaining limited to a few neighbourhoods in others? Why does it sometimes induce a very brutal elevation of the backgrounds and income levels of residents when other cases witness long cohabitations between different fractions of the middle classes? It is by seeking to understand these contextual variations in the actors, forms and paces of gentrification that we have more chance of discovering its drivers and brakes, the economic, social and political factors that underlie and explain it – this is the approach we pursue in this book. Three Main Structuring Dynamics Remaining attentive to the contextual variations of gentrification does not mean considering that they are local versions of a phenomenon that exists somewhere in pure form and has its own logic that varied local conditions would merely alter. On the contrary, it means considering that gentrification emerges from the temporally and spatially situated encounter, between a number of urban, economic, social and political dynamics – some national if not international, others temporary and local. Based on the many empirical and theoretical studies published over the past forty years, three main and largely intertwined dynamics can be identified at the national and international levels. The Large-Scale Economic Transformations of Western Societies The first dynamic results from the ‘great transition’ of Western economies, from industry-based economies to service-based economies. Beyond this well-documented process, capitalism has experienced other transformations over the past four decades. Mass Fordist production gave way to a

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quest for faster adaptation to customer demands, enabling access to niche markets, relying on the intensive use of technological innovation. The hierarchy of post-Fordist firms operating within the ‘knowledge-based economy’ is generally more flexible; they require a greater degree of adaptability and creativity from their workforce. Geographically speaking, they tend to be organized in districts, that is, networks of innovative and interdependent networks, thus reinforcing their position in the international competition, as in the paradigmatic example of the Silicon Valley in the US (Castells 1998). Territories are no longer considered as passive supports for growth; they are in and of themselves factors of growth and competitiveness. This change is far from insignificant – in particular, it explains the international success of urban development strategies based on attracting the ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002), whose mere presence is expected to create new ad hoc activities. From the perspective of the labour market, where this shift has been most striking, the ‘Fordist compromise’ of indexing wage growth to productivity growth has resulted in a trend towards the bipolarization of the workforce. On the one hand, we have an elite of ‘integrated’, skilled and mobile employees, who secure significant pay-related and/or financial benefits (shares, stock options, etc.). On the other, we have a precariat that expands under the effect of the increasing numbers of low-skilled, interchangeable, badly paid, massively weakened jobs (unwanted part-time work, fragmented working hours, fixed-term contracts, etc.) (Castel 1995). Between these two poles, intermediary jobs remain numerous and differ in multiple ways (according to sector of activity, status, working conditions, required qualifications, etc.), leading some authors to use the image of an archipelago (Chenu 1990). This (still ongoing) rearrangement of the labour market, which produces new, more complex and unstable social structures (Savage et al. 2013),12 feeds fragmentation processes in the post-Fordist city. The categories that move up towards the higher levels of the middle class provide the demand for differentiated goods (including private homes located in areas well served by public transport and endowed with reputed educational institutions). Conversely, the most precarious categories are as a whole forced to fall back on the less attractive supply (large social housing high-rises, standardized periurban lots) or to move out of the metropolises and their job opportunities altogether, ending up at the boundary of the rural world (Rougé 2005). Additionally, these mechanisms relating to the emergence of the post-Fordist economy are reinforced by the growing importance of transmission by inheritance, recently highlighted in the work of Thomas Piketty (2014), which partly explains the considerable increase in real-estate prices observed during the last two decades in the inner cities of large metropolises. This economic transformation also strongly affects post-Fordist urban policies, which according to many studies have contributed to the rise of inequalities

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(Desage, Morel Journel and Sala Pala 2014). Indeed, sociologically, the perception of the groups considered as the pillars of urban prosperity (through their productive activity as well as their consumption) has shifted from the working class to the upper class. As a result, urban policy strategies are increasingly geared towards attracting these groups defined more or less scientifically as the ‘new middle classes’, the ‘service class’, the ‘creative class’ or, in France, the ‘bobos’. These great transitions also induced a change in the scale and in the nature of economic regulation: on the one hand, owing to the weakening of the national level under the effect of globalization, cities now appear as new key levels of accumulation (Sassen 1991); on the other, the deregulation of capitalism after the crisis of Fordism has led to the implementation of local policies that proactively seek to attract capital. The post-Fordist city strives for sustained growth in a context of heightened interurban competition for attracting investments that have become more volatile owing to the devaluation of the fixed capitals of Fordism (such as factories). This explains the widespread rise of policies designed for that purpose since the 1980s (with fiscal advantages for the most competitive firms, an attractive environment offered to executives and the new middle classes, etc.). David Harvey argues that the competition between the newly entrepreneurial cities now plays out at four levels (Harvey 2014). First, niches are created within the new spatial division of labour, thanks to the creation of an urban environment that encourages the production of newly valued goods and services. Second, niches called ‘monopoly rents’ are created within the spatial division of consumption – reflecting the current French debate on the supposed benefits of the ‘residential economy’ (i.e. the search for local specialization in tourism, leisure, housing for pensioners, etc.). Third, functions of political, technological and/or financial leadership are pursued. Fourth, European and national public funds are sought after. Lastly, some researchers have shed light on the way in which these transformations are reinforced by the neoliberal turn of the urban planning policies of central states. In an important book, Neil Brenner shows how Western states have progressively given up the objective of fighting local inequalities in development to focus on bolstering the advantages of the better-off territories: the large metropolises with global connections, competing for executives, capitals and the headquarters of firms working in the knowledge-based economy (Brenner 2004). Unsurprisingly, urban researchers have been increasingly interested in the fragmentation of urban societies in the wake of the crisis of Fordism. They argue that the new organization of the city based on reinforced segregation is the spatial translation of the social polarization processes that have resulted from the emergence of the post-Fordist labour market.

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Gentrification has changed accordingly. Its most spectacular form is called ‘super-gentrification’ by some authors. It affects some particularly connected neighbourhoods of global cities such as Brooklyn Heights in New York or Barnsbury in London (Lees 2003; Butler and Lees 2006), in which the post-Fordist elite, which possesses all the forms of capital (economic, inherited, social, educational and cultural) seizes control of already gentrified neighbourhoods and causes real-estate prices to soar to unprecedented heights. This heightened urban polarization results from changes in the local economy under the effect of globalization, but also from the rising interest of global firms in real-estate investments – an interest that has been reinforced by the post-Fordist transition, and often stoked if not triggered by urban policies. The impact of finance on the spatial organization of cities was first shown in the case of ‘global cities’ (Sassen 1991), and subsequently in recently ‘re-created’ cities such as Dubai (Davis 2007). However, recently, many studies have built on Neil Smith’s work in an effort to show that it is also at play in increasingly less prestigious cities across the world. The French real-estate market, for instance (offices and homes), is also affected by the strategies of financial firms. The Transformations of Employment and Active Populations The second large-scale dynamic informing the emergence of gentrification phenomena very largely results from the aforementioned economic transformations. It consists in transformations in the social structure and lifestyles of these social groups in Western countries. In particular, the steady growth in numbers of the middle and upper classes, owing to the growing tertiary sector and rising educational attainment levels, has transformed the social division of space. The period from 1945 to 1975 witnessed the very rapid growth of a large group of skilled professionals with higher-education degrees who formed an ‘intellectual elite of technicians’ (Dagnaud 1981) at the global level. In France, executives and holders of intermediate occupations saw their numbers nearly double over twenty years (from 1962 to 1982), with a boom in teaching research, health and social work, and engineering. These engineers, social workers, teachers, magistrates, doctors, architects, urbanists, journalists, arts managers and consultants sold their expertise, recommendations or know-how in the implementation of public policies or services, or converted their cultural capital by introducing occupations tailor-made for them in communications, advertising, polling or private consulting. These ‘white-collars’ working in administrations, public facilities or business services brought about gentrification owing to the new – or renewed – demand for housing in the inner cities, close to their workplaces and the places where they go out. The family models of these populations formed

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in the 1960s have changed: longer education, including for women, spread of double-income households, lower marriage rates and delayed motherhood have contributed to disaffection towards the suburban US model or the emerging periurban areas in France, as middle- and upper-class women are no longer limited to the domestic sphere. Deserted by the bourgeoisie or populated by aging working-class residents, the inner cities are also more conducive to the development of nontraditional familial and sexual standards – homosexual relationships, single-parent families or simply families opened up to sociabilities based on friendship or activism. For young graduates, they also offer nonstandardized places and homes that meet a new aspiration – namely to move away from the models for success that prevailed in their parents’ generation, be they blue-collar workers who accessed the modern convenience of low-rent housing, small-business owners who became richer, dignitaries or members of the technician elite in power. It was also with that generation born in the immediate postwar period that youth fully became a social age in its own right, owing to the (relative) democratization of higher education and the extension of studies, but also to the emergence of a highly politicized student movement that got involved in public debate nationally as well as internationally – see, for instance, the Students for a Democratic Society in the US or the student protests of 1967 in Germany and 1968 in France. The political models defended by the politicized youth of that generation were diverse, but several advocated the reappropriation of power by lay citizens and the politicization of everyday life. Their demands informed a distinctive relationship to local spaces, which served as the basis for forms of DIY or collective organization (alternative economy, work or consumption co-ops, associative restaurants, cultural venues, associations). This explains the interest in cheap available inner-city space that had lost value in the 1970s and 1980s and growing periurban villages (Bidou 1984). In both types of space, the involvement of these groups in local social life led to access to local power during the ‘pink [socialist] wave’ of the 1977 French municipal elections, with a major impact in terms of cultural and urban policies and economic development. The neoliberal turn of the 1980s impacted the labour market with a sharp slowdown in the growth of public employment and, in large administrations and corporations, a trend towards the outsourcing of jobs, especially for unskilled positions, but also for some skilled jobs. The holders of expertise or know-how in communications were, for instance, encouraged to freelance and deal with the contingencies of fluctuations in activity themselves. Occupations in the fields of culture, media, engineering and management, however, kept registering rising numbers of jobs: the past thirty years in France have witnessed ‘the increasing prevalence and exposure … of salaried or independent professions revolving around expertise and specialized knowledge’

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(Bosc 2008: 106). These professionals strive to convert their competencies into social status and economic gratifications (Savage et al. 1992). Yet these three elements are increasingly disconnected owing to the outsourcing and deterioration of their jobs. Spatial proximity can then serve as a resource, as it transpires in French studies on the residential choices of information, arts and performing-arts professionals: their particularly strong spatial aggregation clearly relates to the importance of maintaining a social network to find work in those fields (Préteceille 2010; Collet 2015). Reflecting the aforementioned complexification of the post-Fordist social structure, studies on the social division of space have shown a rather sharp polarization of the residential space between ‘private-sector people’ (corporate executives) and ‘public-sector people’, although they might not necessarily have a public-sector job any more: teachers, researchers, arts managers, healthcare professionals and public policy professionals (de Singly and Thélot 1989; Oberti and Préteceille 2003). For the young professionals entering the labour market since the 2000s, short-term employment or freelancing is now the norm. The generations born in the late 1960s and onwards, facing the crisis of the salaried Fordist employment that had served their parents well, experienced both the devaluation of their degrees and increased risks of downward social mobility (Peugny 2007). With varying degrees of violence depending on the period of birth, they suffered a generational decline in comparison to the generation born in the immediate postwar period (Chauvel 1998). This resulted in the lengthening of ‘youth’, an age of life that is no longer associated with political mobilizations and upward social mobility through education, but is instead perceived as a time of strenuous, never-quite-certain crossing of the thresholds of independence – having a job, gaining financial self-sufficiency and a home of one’s own, becoming a parent. In light of this employment volatility and of the very steep increase in real-estate prices in metropolises and in particular in the ‘global cities’, opting for a home in a neighbourhood on the path to rehabilitation is a means to make one’s trajectory safer by ensuring a roof over one’s head, and a safe, profitable investment (Tassé, Amossé and Grégoire 2013). Increasingly often, real estate even offers an alternative to the labour market for accumulating capital. This strategy may also allow those who pursue it to put their cultural and symbolic capital to work by investing in the aesthetic dimension of their homes. However, entering the real-estate market requires family support, heightening the importance of inequalities in inheritance – gaps that are further widened by the rise of property values in large metropolises since the early 2000s. Also, as knowledge on the mechanisms of gentrification has spread, opportunity hunters are increasingly numerous, and push the least endowed out of the residential market in the inner cities.

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The Renewal of Urban Policies for Inner Cities The third set of national and international trends contributing to the emergence of gentrification phenomena obviously pertains to urban policies. As we have briefly noted, a number of urban policy trends in the late 1960s and onwards were instrumental in encouraging various forms of gentrification, directly or indirectly. These were first trends in the history of ideas in architecture and urbanism, which resonated in the priorities of urban policies. The principle of functionalist and rational architecture and urbanism, consisting in creating new towns and in the demolition and reconstruction of the existing urban fabric, started being discredited in the late 1960s, owing to the many issues raised by their implementation (poor-quality housing deteriorating quickly, sparseness or absence of facilities, dislocation of social relations, authoritarian forms of intervention, etc.) and to the resulting ‘urban struggles’ (Fourcaut and Dufaux 2004). The large suburban high-rise social housing estates that were emblems of this modern movement began to be rejected and stigmatized during the 1970s by architects, planners, politicians, intellectuals and residents alike (Roncayolo 1985; Murie and Willmott 1988). The 1980s were marked by a sharp rise in social inequalities and the emergence of a ‘new poverty’ (Paugam 1991) concentrated out of sight in these estates, which buried all the hopes of social and political emancipation of the working classes sparked by the modern movement. Worse yet, it was from the outset almost exclusively addressed by politicians, journalists and urban experts with a spatial approach to social relationships, to the detriment of a genuine consideration of the post-Fordist transformations of modes of production and the consequences of these modes of production on the living conditions of the working classes. As we will later demonstrate, this new take on society, which sociologists and political scientists have discussed in terms of reducing the social question to the ‘new urban question’ (Tissot and Poupeau 2005), contributes to the redefinition of central and local social policies in a variety of Western countries. In the old centres, the rejection of modern, authoritarian urbanism came with a new outlook that symbolically upgraded neighbourhoods that were until then generally considered slums. This revaluation of old neighbourhoods – also named the ‘return to the centre’ – operated through the rediscovery and legal protection of their architectural and urban value (the old street layouts, reducing the place of cars to the benefit of foot traffic), their historical and patrimonial value (by highlighting their manufacturing/ industrial past), as well as their social value (dense sociabilities, associated with those of villages, and contrasted with the anonymity of large suburban estates). This rehabilitation was initially launched by local populations with varying backgrounds, from activists of the ‘urban struggles’ to simple resi-

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dents and business owners,13 some of whom were directly threatened by the expropriations and evictions carried out within the framework of ‘bulldozerstyle urban renewal’ operations (Fijalkow and Préteceille 2006). It was done in the name of the supposedly ‘authentic’ nature of the physical space and residents of these neighbourhoods. Still, it contributed to the symbolic and territorial reappropriation of these neighbourhoods by members of the ‘new middle classes’ (Veschambre 2008),14 ultimately heralding a ‘bourgeois recapture’ of the inner cities, in the words of Alain Bourdin (1984). These new middle-class residents were more attracted by life in the inner cities – as opposed to suburban residential lots and periurban areas, even as those were becoming particularly popular in the 1970s. Urban planners, architects and political actors in turn adopted this new outlook on the city. Faced with urban social movements on the one hand and with the issues raised by the massive low-cost construction of large housing estates on the other, they made a complete U-turn that would deeply impact national and local orientations and decisions in the field of urban planning in the following decades. Old towns, with their streets lined with shops, their aligned facades, their low-rise buildings and their functional and social diversity, became the benchmarks for rethinking modes of public and private urban intervention (Colomb 2006; Charmes 2006). Emphasis was now placed on producing a ‘city with a human face’, better suited to the emergence of ‘communities’ with a strong sense of belonging and intense forms of solidarity. This return to the golden age of the old town, which intensified in the following decades as the dual process of revaluation of old central areas and rejection of the high-rise estate model continued to apply, carries with it a number of notions (mixing, heritage, participation, attractiveness) that have become new reference points of local public policy. Depending on the political levels – central or local – but also on the types of neighbourhoods and cities in which these public policies are implemented, the reference points are not always the same or are not always translated similarly. In any case, the success of these concepts points to a larger transformation of the objectives of social policies within the framework of welfare-state reforms. The French sociologists Patrick Simon and Sylvie Tissot have demonstrated this in their respective works on the increasingly frequent invocation of social mixing (Simon 1995; Tissot 2007). The local social policies – which fall under the term politiques de la ville in France – that have been implemented since the 1980s and 1990s focus more on the spatial embedding of poverty and social precarization, which is now considered a problem in itself, than on their real causes, that is, the social inequalities produced by the transformation of modes of production towards a tertiarized and financialized capitalism. These reorientations of local social policies are therefore not disconnected from other evolutions that can be observed in the political represen-

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tations of society, its problems and what it should be, which also contribute more indirectly to the gentrification of old neighbourhoods. In the wake of the ideas channelled by the 1968 movements and the ensuing birth of the ‘new social movements’, left-wing political parties broadened their palettes to include the claims of the ‘new middle classes’ (ecology, feminism, access to the law for ethnic/racial minorities and homosexuals) while emptying them of their critical content – for instance, by formulating them in cultural terms rather than in terms of economic inequalities resulting from capitalist modes of production (Boltanski and Chiapello 2006). Urban questions were no longer limited to the struggles to improve housing conditions for workers and immigrants, and expanded to include demands on ‘quality of life’ in the city. Only in the early 1980s would a real ideological turn come, with the triumph of neoliberal dogmas. The ideological and social shifts of left-wing parties towards a reformist agenda, the decline of the Communist utopia and its political apparatuses, the access to power of conservative parties, including in the UK and the USA, and the French socialist government’s embrace of austerity in 1983 ultimately led to the abandonment of Keynesian policies to the benefit of policies inspired by neoliberal ideology. More broadly, they brought about the redefinition of these policies’ relations to the working class – towards more strained relations, focused on individuals more than on the mechanisms of domination that keep them in subordinate positions in modes of production and in society at large. The encounter between these three intertwined overarching dynamics is most visible, as we have noted, in the central neighbourhoods of large Western cities. However, they can result in multiple processes of urban change: large-scale construction of offices, leisure spaces, high-end shops and luxury homes, tourist-oriented facilities, spontaneous or planned revaluation of neighbourhoods for use by the ‘creative class’, ‘super-gentrification’, ‘studentification’ (revaluation almost exclusively for the use of students), arrival of very well-paid residents with little public presence, looking for carefully selected neighbours, etc. The forms of the ‘upgrading’ (Rousseau 2014) of the inner cities are multiple. Some central neighbourhoods can also remain unaffected by these dynamics, continue to be populated primarily by newly arrived immigrants and serve as drivers of integration for wider communities – for instance, by hosting high concentrations of businesses targeted towards these populations. All depends on the local configuration in terms of urban morphology, ownership structure, political commitment and the social groups present. Some material, political and social configurations are conducive to gentrification in the stricter sense, that is, the progressive elevation of the sociological features of residents combined with forms of rehabilitation or transformation of old buildings. But others rather tend to foster massive intervention by public or private actors and lead to demolitions and

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reconstructions that more radically transform the urban landscape. Others yet can slow down transformations and support the status quo, or even the development of competing dynamics such as the degradation of old buildings or their exploitation by slum landlords, squatters or small entrepreneurs. In other words, gentrification processes also emerge at the intersection of the aforementioned macrosocial dynamics and of the trajectories of neighbourhoods, buildings, residents and elected officials. Here we argue that it is in this sense that the concept of gentrification is worth retaining, insofar as its use is limited to well-defined phenomena of urban change, situated at the crossroads of wide-ranging economic, social and political dynamics specific to the post-Fordist period and to distinct trajectories of neighbourhoods, offering the conditions for revaluation without large-scale demolition. We believe that using the term, as some have suggested, as a ‘generic’ (Clark 2015) concept very broadly referring to all phenomena consisting in ‘the production of space for – and consumption by – a more affluent and very different incoming population’ (Slater, Curran and Lees 2004: 1145) empties it of its value and poses the risk of creating confusion and depriving it of its analytical power, as Thomas Maloutas and others have argued. It would, for instance, mean treating the transformations in rural areas or the Haussmannization of nineteenth-century Paris as gentrification. In our view, the concept of gentrification is useful precisely in that it relates to historically and geographically situated processes. Again, this does not mean that the question of competition between social groups for the appropriation of territories is not a major one. But while this class struggle for and in space can be observed in all gentrification processes, it does not in itself define gentrification. The concept is fertile in that it allows us to point to a certain type of competition between certain actors for certain particular space; this is also why it should remain, as Thomas Maloutas suggests, a ‘mid-range’ concept, to be used for bringing together and comparing numerous concrete cases operating under similar logics, but one that only refers to a particular manifestation of this struggle for the appropriation of space.

LOOKING FOR THE DNA OF GENTRIFICATION An Unequal Social Relation to the Appropriation of Space We have made clear that the ambition of this book is not to put forward a stabilized definition of gentrification to claim what is and what is not gentrification, to claim that territories are ‘gentrifying’ or not, as if the concept alone could sum up everything that happens there. Rather, our intent is to

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use gentrification as an analytical concept instead of a descriptive one, unveiling social, geographic, political and economic mechanisms specific to the postindustrial period, which shed light on the evolution of today’s urbanized societies. It shows, for instance, the extent to which the urban model of the old town has for over thirty years been overwhelmingly prevalent in legitimate representations. It shows the way in which relations of competition, alliance or domination between social groups now unfold largely in and for the city, with the contribution of more or less consciously involved private and public actors. It enables us to see in inhabited space a base material of social distinction, and calls attention to the power of cultural resources, alongside economic ones, in the rise and fall of places and their residents. The confrontation of materials and cross-analyses featured in the following pages evidence a few basic elements of the DNA of gentrification – allowing us to identify the content of the concept. Gentrification appears as a process of economic and symbolic (re)valuation of a space, partly under the influence of an urban model inspired by old European towns, and through the competition between various actors and social groups unequally endowed to appropriate and transform it. We will now elaborate on each of these elements, beginning with the latter – arguably the most important. Gentrification refers first and foremost to the transformation of the social makeup of a neighbourhood due to the departure or death of working-class residents, and the arrival of younger households with higher qualifications and social statuses, whose incomes are not necessarily much greater initially but are poised to increase. This replacement of a population by another comes with transformations in the urban fabric (rehabilitation of buildings, increase in real-estate value) and in the business community (with the apparition of a new supply to meet the demand of the new populations). It admittedly reflects the evolution of the relative place of these groups in society as a whole, but at a heightened pace, as the working classes decline more quickly in those neighbourhoods than elsewhere (Clerval and Van Criekingen 2014). Whether they leave of their own accord or they are chased can be established only by conducting refined, local analyses – as the working class (just like the middle and upper classes) can vary quite widely, including within a single neighbourhood. The evolution of the social makeup reflects a competition between unequally endowed social groups for the appropriation and conservation of the local space. In practice, retired skilled workers who own their homes and newly arrived young migrants who rent them and work undeclared, part-time jobs do not have the same resources to stay in the neighbourhood where they reside together. These resources are not only economic; they are also legal (having the right to be there), linguistic (to defend their rights) and symbolic (the older residents prevail). Likewise, public-sector managers

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with stable and well-paid positions and theatre and visual artists employed discontinuously do not have the same resources to move into a neighbourhood, settle there and appropriate space: they have very unequal abilities to pay rents or repay loans on a regular basis, and are not armed with the same guarantees on the real-estate market. Yet, as we have seen, inheritances can serve to correct these inequalities, as well as nonfinancial resources such as access to information, advice, legal aid, restoration aid, a flexible schedule, and material and aesthetic forms of know-how allowing them to transform and revalue properties with little economic value. Appropriation does not only consist in the purchase or transformation of a property; it also refers to the ability to impact the evolution of a place beyond the property itself – neighbourly relations, school operations, political power struggles, urban projects, etc. The resources to resist or contribute to gentrification are multiple and varied. Their value depends on the neighbourhood’s context and characteristics: type of housing, availability of land, actors in play, state of the local political game, prices, etc. One of the characteristics of gentrification is undoubtedly this variety of resources to be used to appropriate and transform places – in particular the role of cultural and symbolic capitals in convincing elected officials, decorating one’s house or having influence in parent groups. Gentrification can thus be defined as, among other things, an unequal social relation to the appropriation of space that plays out on several levels: between social groups, between generations, between ethnicized and racialized groups – three types of groups that do not have the same boundaries. These social relations also change with time, as the context and the values of the resources of the different actors change too. Hence, the categories of ‘gentrifier’ and ‘gentrified’ cannot refer to stable social actors or groups: one can be a very long-time resident and actively contribute to gentrification; one can be gentrifier one day and gentrified the next. They should rather be used as a couple, to refer to these unequal social relations that keep taking on new forms and involving new actors. The actors of gentrification are not only residents: the customers of businesses and business owners, and those who work in or regularly visit the neighbourhood can also take part in it. Most importantly, real-estate professionals (developers, buyers and sellers, real-estate agents), though they may not necessarily reside in the neighbourhood, play an important role and intervene with their own resources in this local game: economic capitals, of course, but also highly variable degrees of knowledge of the local market – a distinction must, for instance, be made between long-established real-estate agents and investors with only superficial knowledge of the neighbourhood but considerable resources. The effects of their participation in gentrification vary.

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Lastly, the public authorities definitely play a role in gentrification processes by strongly contributing to defining the rules of the game in a number of areas. They impact the social fabric with housing policies; the economic fabric with (re)development policies favouring some activities to the detriment of others; urban planning with the definition of rules and norms in urbanism as well as concrete interventions in urban space; the housing market, by establishing what is and is not possible when transforming buildings, by playing a part in transactions, and by implementing policies that modify supply; and, finally, schools and associations. Yet we must also refrain from considering residents, economic actors and political actors as entirely separate categories. Among the first group, some might become buyers/sellers – for one or two transactions or on a more long-term basis – while others might open a business that is adjusted to the tastes of their social group, manage a cultural venue or get elected to municipal office. Likewise, the city can become an economic actor, for instance through a semipublic company. Being a real-estate agent or a business owner does not prevent one from securing an electoral mandate. These individuals accumulate resources by combining roles. The second main feature of gentrification is that this appropriation of space appears to be informed by a distinctive model of urbanity that can be summed up in four words: centrality, density, diversity and historicity. The dream space of the actors of gentrification is not quiet and peripheral, natural or wild, vast and loose; it is busy, dense, made of small streets, small businesses and small cafés; it can be crossed on foot and brings together a great number of activities and people who meet in public spaces. This dream space is not homogeneous, smooth or harmonized when it comes to the housing stock and the population: it displays a diverse landscape, houses and attracts residents and visitors with varying backgrounds, and combines housing, facilities, workplaces and all kinds of businesses. This diversity is in itself the reflection of a local history that leaves traces in the present. The dream city is not new or modern, it does not deny its past, but displays it as a token of authenticity, unicity and appropriability: a place where everyone can leave their mark. This model is not socially neutral. It was initially defended by protesting youths in the ‘urban struggle’ of the 1960s and 1970s before triumphing in urban policies, first in the 1970s, as we noted earlier, with the abandonment of urban renewal policies in the old centres and of the construction of highrise suburban estates, and the adoption of measures to protect and rehabilitate old towns. It prevailed for a second time at the turn of the 1990s with the political formulation of the so-called suburban problem (‘problème des banlieues’) and the main orientations of urban policy, including the adoption of a model based on old neighbourhoods for corrective intervention on large

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high-rise housing buildings (Tissot 2007). As Sylvie Tissot has shown, the circulation of the ideas and representations of what a city should be largely relates to the circulation of the people who defend them: many of the urban policymakers of the 1990s were former activists of 1968 protest movements. More broadly, this ‘revenge’ of the old town model can be interpreted as the triumph of upwardly mobile groups under post-Fordism, who have a key impact on urban power: members of the intellectual middle class in the 1970s and 1980s and more recently the transnational elite of the great metropolises, as well as, from a remove (particularly through the writings of individuals such as Richard Florida), the ‘creative class’, marked by varying degrees of precarity in midsized and declining cities. However, asserting the importance of this urban model does not mean that gentrification can only exist in central, dense, historic, mixed neighbourhoods. It means, rather, that gentrification partly consists in acknowledging or producing this centrality, density, historicity and diversity on the basis of available elements. These can sometimes be tenuous, as in the cases gathered under the label of ‘new-build gentrification’, in which old buildings are completely demolished to be replaced by new ones. Even in such cases, the architecture adopted mimics the dense city, structured by streets and squares lined with shops where pedestrians, cyclists and motorists mix. Also, it connects to local history by highlighting traces of former activity – a tower crane, a factory chimney or salvaged materials. The image of these places that is conceived and channelled by public authorities and developers often explicitly refers to carefully selected specific facets of local history. These forms of appropriation and transformation of places result in economic and symbolic (re)valuation, which in turn supports and speeds up social and urban change. These spaces may have been built for the bourgeoisie and prized for that reason, and over the decades experienced a social decline as the bourgeoisie left for new spaces and less wealthy residents moved in. This applies, for instance, to the Marais in Paris or Stoke Newington in London. The former was the place of residence of the Ancien Régime nobility, while the latter was home to the intellectual bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, they welcomed often poor populations of migrants in private mansions and large houses, divided into small flats with minimal comfort. In such cases, the revaluation draws on the old housing stock to emulate the splendour of past constructions and decorations while combining it with contemporary comforts and aesthetics; it also feeds on local history to promote the image of a distinguished, sought-after neighbourhood. But gentrification can also occur in poor areas, built to accommodate working-class activities and populations, as in the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse in Lyons, Bas-Montreuil near Paris, Alcântara in Lisbon or El Raval in Barcelona. In such cases, revaluation involves the attribution of a new value to

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these spaces and their buildings. It is facilitated by the recognition of an ‘old’ urban fabric – that is, which pre-dates the second half of the twentieth century – but also requires recognizing a specific aesthetic or architectural value in an industrial or working-class area – this is, for instance, what happened with Brooklyn lofts – and sometimes brushing aside the political history of these neighbourhoods and the protests that took place in them. This entails a change in outlook, for instance by adopting a perspective focused on heritage, which is turned definitively to the past and attributes a new cultural value – therein lies the beauty of the redefinition of ‘working-class’ or ‘poor’ neighbourhoods as ‘popular’ neighbourhoods, giving a watered-down, pacified image of the same place. This can be conversely done by pursuing an approach turned towards the present and future, concerned with finding a place’s ‘potentialities’ and using it as raw material for activity that creates spaces, ways of inhabiting a place, discourses and images that are valued in their own right. In all of these processes, the cultural capital possessed in particular by middle- and upper-class holders of artistic and intellectual occupations must once again be stressed. We may go one step further and ask if the strength of this social group might not come from its ability to have the value of its productions recognized outside its own social space. Such symbolic upgrades come with economic valuation; yet the relation between the two is in no way linear or mechanical, as real-estate prices depend on many other local and especially global factors. Some types of properties can gain particularly large amounts of symbolic value for the aforementioned reasons and have their prices increase more quickly than others; rents may follow with some delay. Prices also quickly increase in cafés, restaurants and shops, which adjust to a new customer base and profit from the new image of their neighbourhood. Again, this is far from a mechanical process, and very different people can still live alongside each other in such neighbourhoods, frequenting dedicated places – for instance, central areas for immigrant populations like Brick Lane in London and Château Rouge in Paris. Also, revaluation for some can mean devaluation for others: a neighbourhood that used to be perceived as shady by some and welcoming by others can become pleasant in the eyes of the former and cold and snobbish to the latter. However, the different place occupied by these populations in the social structure and the existence of a hierarchy of tastes accredited by institutions – beginning with the market – enable us to discuss this change in status as a valuation. This valuation can be observed in the improved social status conferred by the neighbourhood to those who can afford it. Ultimately, speaking of gentrification is raising the question of the reorganization of social domination in space, the question of the winners and losers of the West’s great economic transition in the last forty years and of the political shifts in orientation that came with it. Observing gentrification

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processes means looking at how urban space changes by embracing and reproducing new social hierarchies. These unequal relations in urban space that play out in gentrification must be evidenced, as a number of authors have done before us, without falling into the trap of oversimplification. We should, for instance, be wary of jumping too quickly from identifying inequalities and power struggles to denouncing the same culprits or accomplices everywhere. This would neglect the complexity of local situations and actors’ interests: the benefits of gentrification are not always where one expects them – for instance, long-term residents can take advantage of the revaluation of the housing stock to sell their property and move out – even though some indisputably always end up suffering from it, starting with tenants whose lease has expired. In the following, our first effort will modestly consist in describing and analysing to improve our understanding. Relations of domination endure, change shape and shift their own boundaries. We therefore need to thoroughly examine the forms of appropriation of place they involve; in which public policies they are embodied; where and how they play out again and again. Three Disciplines, Six Researchers, Nine Fieldworks This book is the outcome of the comparison and discussion of research produced in six doctoral theses (three in geography, two in sociology and one in political science) on gentrification, conducted over nine European fieldworks. The benefit of this plural approach is that it allows us to evidence similarities, variations and effects of local contexts on the forms assumed by gentrification in the cities under study. Based on empirical material, we are able to show a variety of expressions of the social relations of appropriation of space that characterize gentrification in different urban contexts. Although the approach we defend here is empirical, our aim is not to provide a thorough review of the current state of gentrifications in Europe; nor do we even strive towards painting a representative picture. Rather, we are concerned with in-depth analysis of what has happened in a few places across the continent. In our view, empirical approaches are crucial to the study of gentrification processes, and taking their temporality into account is also key. Only then can we move beyond partisan discourses, which carry a judgement on gentrifiers, the gentrified and public authorities, sometimes at the price of mythicizing the living conditions and social relationships of the older residents and demonizing the residential strategies of newcomers or the intentions of public authorities. Owing to the lack of fine-grained data on sociospatial transformations and on the practices and discourse of the key actors in projects that contribute to gentrification, it is difficult to establish whether such a process is indeed happening, and if it is explicitly supported

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or sought by public authorities. One might argue that this is not an essential concern, and that taking into consideration their direct and indirect impacts on the populations is more important than knowing whether the effects of policies are actually the ones pursued by public and private actors. However, even from that angle, it is not always clear that the influx of middle and upper classes in some neighbourhoods (including with the indirect support of local authorities) systematically leads to the eviction of poorer residents: this question has been the object of intense debate between scholars for a long time.15 In some urban contexts, the long-established residents, for instance elderly people or families, are actually eager for middle-class residents to move in to secure more attention from the authorities and ensure that local businesses can stay open (Paquette and Salazar 2005) or have forms of social pacification in the neighbourhood reinforced (Uitermark, Duyvendak and Kleinhans 2007). It is worth underlining that projects aimed at improving quality of life in an urban space (such as the creation of green areas and playing fields, the regulation of traffic and noise, or safety projects) do not only benefit the newer residents; they are also enjoyed and in some cases eagerly awaited by the older residents with less social capital. The remarkable thing, however, is that these improvements are often only obtained on the condition of the arrival of new residents. Our goal here is thus to find out what is actually going on in these neighbourhoods. Yet, beyond detailed and informed description, we believe that these specific cases will yield more general insights only by conducting indepth analysis based on precise questions, using the tools of geography, sociology and political science, and by situating the phenomena under study within broader temporal and spatial contexts. Only then will they resonate elsewhere on the continent – and even beyond – and feed further discussion of the causes and consequences, the stakes and actors of gentrifications. Now for a brief presentation of the nine fieldworks that serve as raw material for the remainder of this book, taking us to France, Portugal, Spain and Great Britain. Three of them are located in the Paris metropolitan area – as France’s biggest urban area, a prime site for the study of gentrification: La Goutte d’Or, in the eighteenth arrondissement; its central section, Château Rouge, where dynamics of change are different owing in particular to its commercial reach; and the inner suburb of Bas-Montreuil, which borders the twentieth arrondissement. Three other studies have been conducted in other French cities: in Lyons’ Croix-Rousse neighbourhood; in Grenoble’s Berriat–Saint-Bruno district; and in Roubaix’s central areas. The Portuguese case is Lisbon’s Alcântara district, while the Spanish case is Barcelona’s central district of Ciutat Vella. The ninth and last case is the inner city of Sheffield (England).

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Long-term analysis allows us to identify different stages in the gentrification process according to the cases under study. In most cases, gentrification began between the mid-1980s and the 1990s and remained somewhat limited until at least the mid-2000s, subsequently accelerating sharply (in Bas-Montreuil or in Roubaix’s inner city with the structuring of a ‘loft’ market). In Lyons’ Croix-Rousse, however, the process began in the late 1960s but still went on unabated in the 2000s. Berriat–Saint-Bruno (Grenoble) stands somewhere in between: it witnessed the beginning of gentrification in the early 1980s and a subsequent intensification of the process, as public policy encouraged rehabilitation and the renewal of the population. Several of these cases reflect the ‘model of urbanity’ we described earlier. They are located centrally or close to the centre of their city or urban area, without having the same demographic weight – resulting in necessarily variable concerns in terms of public policies, social change and gentrification: from under 3 per cent of Lisbon’s population for Alcântara, up to nearly a quarter of the municipal population for Bas-Montreuil. Most are former industrial and manufacturing suburbs that began witnessing rapid urbanization in the nineteenth century, except the much more heterogeneous Ciutat Vella in Barcelona and the inner city of Sheffield, historically devoted to industry and trade. Most of the cases under study display a heterogeneous urban fabric, composed of buildings from different eras and of varying architectural styles (nineteenth-century workers’ houses and investment properties, more recent collective housing, new constructions combining social and luxury housing in varying proportions), sometimes with specificities owing to the neighbourhood’s urban history: workers’ houses and workshops in rear tenements in Bas-Montreuil, the so-called canut buildings (where textile workers used to live and work) on the slopes of Lyons’ CroixRousse or La Ribera’s medieval palaces in Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella. Previously dedicated to industrial activity, the urban fabrics of the inner cities of Roubaix and Sheffield reflect trends in the regeneration of urban wasteland, characterized in Roubaix by a high proportion of social housing. All of these neighbourhoods offer opportunities for rehabilitation or real-estate investment, and therefore for gentrification, which vary widely from one area to the next and even sometimes from one building to the next. In varying proportions, these places experience comparable social trends that are characteristic of gentrification (decrease in the share of blue-collar workers and employees, increasing presence of managers and holders of intermediate occupations, growing younger population), even if the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood stands out for being the African commercial hub of Paris, if not Europe – which, as we will see, has effects on the diffusion of the gentrification process – and Ciutat Vella is clearly a centre for the immigrant

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population. However, the historical, political and economic trajectories in which these processes are embedded differ. Paris, Lyons and Barcelona have experienced political stability, with municipal power in the hands of the left (since 2001 for Paris and Lyons and 1979 for Barcelona) until at least recently (for Barcelona). Roubaix, Grenoble, Sheffield and Lisbon have, on the contrary, seen changes in local political leadership, but those did not necessarily result in significant changes of urban development strategies. Most of the cities examined here fall within the category of national and international dynamic metropolises (Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Lyons, Grenoble), even if their strategic urban policy orientations have varied during the period under study: urban requalification of working-class neighbourhoods and promotion of ‘social mixing’ against a backdrop of continually soaring housing prices in Paris; efforts to attract foreign students and tourism in the inner city and urban renewal in suburban working-class areas in Lyons; internationalization of the economy, touristic development and reduction of the municipal debt in Lisbon; support to high-technology and most recently nanotechnology research and industry in Grenoble; and rehabilitation of urban heritage, touristic development and support to ICT industries in Barcelona. However, two of our fieldworks are set in shrinking cities – Roubaix and Sheffield – owing to the crisis of the textile (Roubaix) and steel (Sheffield) industries. This makes the implications of economic restructuring and of the reclaiming of urban wasteland in central areas and their surroundings very different from the other places under study. Having both witnessed the implementation of successive economic redevelopment strategies, they now target outside investments to attract students (particularly in Sheffield) and firms operating in cutting-edge technologies and services. Montreuil falls into both categories, owing to the combination of an acute demographic and economic crisis from the 1970s to the 1990s and the influence of Paris’s economic and real-estate dynamics, which has been felt since the 1980s and even more intensely since the 2000s. In this former part of Paris’s ‘red belt’, a stronghold of municipal communism, urban dynamics have progressively diversified, from policies supporting the maintenance of industrial activities to the promotion of social housing, the rise of the private real-estate market under the influence of soaring prices in Paris, and an opening-up to the tertiary sector. The research that provides the raw material for this book is the result of long periods of investigation (over several years) and frequent returns to the field, involving a mix of classic information-collection methods (statistical analyses on the evolution of the sociodemographic makeup of the neighbourhoods under study; analysis of archives and urbanism documents) and of more original ones in our domain, such as the monitoring of the social

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makeup in Château Rouge buildings over several years, complemented by a questionnaire survey conducted in the street with residents and visitors to shed light on the uses of the neighbourhood, a press review in the case of Bas-Montreuil16 and a discourse analysis17 in Ciutat Vella. All draw on numerous, repeated interviews with residents from highly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, long-term residents and newcomers, regular visitors to the neighbourhood, public actors (elected officials in municipal and intermunicipal bodies, members of chambers of commerce, school principals, etc.), private actors (shop owners, developers, real-estate agents, etc.) and actors from local community groups. These fieldworks document different forms of gentrification. As we compare them, we can identify contextual effects, but also overarching structuring lines – components of the ‘DNA’ of gentrification. The following pages evidence three components of gentrification phenomena. The first are economic, urban and social dynamics that have affected European countries as a whole over the past forty years and that have been embodied in cities through changes in former working-class neighbourhoods. The second are urban policies – that is, actors, representations, models and procedures – that in turn encouraged gentrification. The third and final components are social groups and relations whose (im)balances shape the ways in which gentrification processes unfold. The texts presented in each of these sections also strive to show the effects of the encounters between these structural dynamics, these policies and these actors, and territories with their own distinctive features. Based on the cross-study of these nine fieldworks, the first section of the book examines the combination of structural effects (changes in the job market, real-estate markets, the built environment, etc.) and local contextual effects in spaces experiencing gentrification. It provides concrete illustrations of the differences in the process observed in each case study, and presents gentrification as a point of intersection between global structural dynamics, a neighbourhood’s trajectory, and the individual trajectories of its residents and regular visitors. The second part of the book focuses on the actors of gentrification, with an emphasis on political actors. It shows that gentrification is also informed by transformations in local public policies, shifts in alliances and discourses promoting urban attractiveness or social mixing – these may act successively as drivers and brakes in the process. Lastly, the third part of the book zooms in on the inhabitants of gentrifying neighbourhoods, residents and nonresidents alike, and their cohabitations. It argues that the social relations over the appropriation of space that play out in gentrification should be understood in light of the other dynamics at work (commercial, migratory and socioeconomic dynamics) and with consideration to the diversity of the inhabitants, their residential and social trajectories and their spatial practices.

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Notes 1. During the night of 26–27 September 2015, in the East London district of Shoreditch, a demonstration organized by anarchist and anticapitalist groups to denounce the gentrification of poor East London districts attracted 150 to 200 people. In January 2014, similar demonstrations took place in Madrid, Barcelona and Burgos. 2. A prominent example is Jane Jacobs, whose book (1961) and activism have unarguably contributed to the symbolic revaluation of the inner cities. On this period of change in large US urban centres, see also Beauregard (2003). 3. On the ecologist vision of Chicago sociologists, see Rhein (2003). 4. See his reference work (Ley 1996) on the sociocultural approach to gentrification, based on a compilation of his main articles published in the 1980s. 5. This approach arguably peaked with Jon Caulfield’s analysis of Toronto’s gentrification as a cultural and social practice stemming from deliberate resistance against suburban ideals and allowing gentrifiers to ‘individually and collectively … pursue practices eluding the domination of social and cultural structures’ (Caulfield 1989: 624). 6. See the pioneering study by Yvette Herzhaft-Marin (1985). 7. One of the first authors to note the role of gay populations in gentrification was Manuel Castells (1984), who showed how moving into a tolerant space (the Castro district in San Francisco) was vital for this oppressed group, but also how it in turn affected other oppressed groups (Blacks and Latinos), forced to leave the neighbourhood as a result of rising rents. 8. On the promotion of the loft as housing and lifestyle in France, see also Biau (1988). 9. In the sense of the researchers of the Chicago school of sociology in the first half of the twentieth century; according to them, relations between social groups are grounded in ‘competition’ for urban space, similar to the fight for survival in the animal and vegetal realms (hence the analogy with ecology). They argue that this competition explains the processes of ‘invasion’ and ‘succession’ that continually reshape the social divisions of urban space. See Grafmeyer and Joseph (1990). 10. For instance, Atkinson and Bridge (2005: 300). 11. For a recent example, see Lees, Shin and López-Morales (2015). 12. For an insightful analysis of this new social structure in the UK, see Savage et al. (2013). 13. Worth mentioning are, for instance, the work of Jane Jacobs in New York (1961) and Manuel Castells in Paris (1973). They analyse the urban struggles that emerged in the 1960s by connecting efforts to defend the local environment and national efforts to reduce social inequalities. In the 1970s, these urban struggles gradually became more focused on increasingly local issues – see Grégory Busquet (2007). 14. In the cases of the French cities of Angers and Le Mans, Vincent Veschambre (2008) has convincingly shown that the heritage revolution in their old towns owed much to the efforts of local cultural and social elites to reappropriate these spaces. 15. In part for methodological reasons, detailed analysis of eviction processes and, more generally, of the harm caused by gentrification for working-class residents is no easy undertaking. On the case of New York City, see Newman and Wyly (2006). 16. The press review sought to count the occurrences of ‘Montreuil’ and ‘Bas-Montreuil’, and representations corresponding to these place names, from the mid-1990s

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onwards, in widely circulated daily and weekly national and local newspapers and magazines. Daily newspapers included in the press review: Le Figaro (1996–2008); Le Monde (1987–2008); Libération (1995–2008); and Le Parisien (1998–2008). Weekly magazines: L’Express (1993–2008); Le Point (1995–2008); Le Nouvel Observateur and its Parisian supplement L’Obs de Paris (2004–7). Other titles were consulted more occasionally (Elle; L’Humanité; Marianne; Paris-Match; Zurban). 17. This involved the textual analysis of over twenty years’ worth of editorials in Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània (1985–2007), a municipal urban-policy journal.

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Gale, Dennis. 1980. ‘Neighborhood Resettlement: Washington, DC’, in Shirley Bradway Laska and Daphne Spain (eds), Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation. New York: Pergamon, pp. 95–115. Grafmeyer, Yves, and Isaac Joseph. 1990. L’Ecole de Chicago. Paris: Aubier. Greenberg, Miriam. 2000. ‘Branding Cities: A Social History of the Urban Lifestyle Magazine’, Urban Affairs Review 36(2): 228–63. Hamnett, Chris. 1973. ‘Improvement Grants as an Indicator of Gentrification in Inner London’, Area 5(4): 252–61. Hamnett, Chris. 1997. ‘Les aveugles et l’éléphant: l’explication de la gentrification’, trans. C. Rhein, Strates 9. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://journals.openedition .org/strates/611. Hamnett, Chris, and Peter Williams. 1980. ‘Social Change in London: A Study of Gentrification’, Urban Affairs Quarterly 15(4): 469–87. Harvey, David. 2014. ‘Vers la ville entrepreneuriale. Mutation du capitalisme et transformations de la gouvernance urbaine’, in Cécile Gintrac and Matthieu Giroud (eds), Villes contestées. Pour une géographie critique de l’urbain. Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, pp. 95–133. Herzhaft-Marin, Yvette. 1985. Ravenscourt Road. Une rue de Londres en cours de gentrification. Lille: Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Launay, Lydie, and Héloïse Nez. 2014. ‘Gentrifizierung sehen. Die Ästhetisierung von Arbeitervierteln in Paris und Lonson. Stadtforschung mit den Mitteln der Fotografie’, Fotogeschichte 34(131): 55–62. Lees, Loretta. 1994. ‘Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Positions of Economics or Culture’, Progress in Human Geography 18: 137–51. Lees, Loretta. 2003. ‘Super-Gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City’, Urban Studies 40(12): 2487–509. Lees, Loretta, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales (eds). 2015. Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement. Bristol: Policy Press. Lees, Loretta, and Liz Bondi. 1995. ‘De-gentrification and Economic Recession: The Case of New York City’, Urban Geography 16(3): 234–53. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. London: Routledge. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly (eds). 2010. The Gentrification Reader. New York: Routledge. Lévy, Jean-Pierre. 2002. ‘Gentrification’, in Marion Segaud, Jacques Brun and JeanClaude Driant (eds), Dictionnaire de l’habitat et du logement. Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 199–201. Ley, David. 1981. ‘Inner-City Revitalization in Canada: A Vancouver Case Study’, Canadian Geographer 25(2): 124–48. Ley, David. 1996. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ley, David, and Cory Dobson. 2008. ‘Are There Limits to Gentrification? The Contexts of Impeded Gentrification in Vancouver’, Urban Studies 45(12): 2471–98. Maloutas, Thomas. 2012. ‘Contextual Diversity in Gentrification Research’, Critical Sociology 38(1): 33–48. Marin, Yvette. 1998. ‘La “gentrification” des quartiers multiethniques. L’exemple de Brixton à Londres’, in Nicole Haumont and Jean-Pierre Lévy (eds), La Ville éclatée: quartiers et peuplement. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 101–10.

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McLeod, Gordon, and Kevin Ward. 2002. ‘Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B 84: 158. Murie, Alan, and Peter Willmott. 1988. Polarisation and Social Housing: The British and French Experience. London: Policy Studies Institute. Newman, Kathe, and Elvin Wyly. 2006. ‘The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City’, Urban Studies 43(1): 23–57. Oberti, Marco, and Edmond Préteceille. 2003. Les Classes moyennes dans la ségrégation sociale. Le cas de la métropole parisienne. Paris: Observatoire Sociologique du Changement. Paquette, Catherine, and Clara Salazar. 2005. ‘Habiter le patrimoine: les résidents âgés du centre historique de Mexico face aux transformations de leur espace de vie’, in Maria Gravaris-Barbas (ed.), Habiter le patrimoine: enjeux – approches – discours. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 75–92. Pattison, Timothy J. 1977. ‘The Process of Neighborhood Upgrading and Gentrification. an Examination of Two Neighborhoods in the Boston Metropolitain Area’, M.A. thesis, Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Paugam, Serge. 1991. La Disqualification sociale. Essai sur la nouvelle pauvreté. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Peugny, Camille. 2007. ‘Education et mobilité sociale: la situation paradoxale des générations nées dans les années 1960’, Economie et Statistique 410: 23–45. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Préteceille, Edmond. 2010. ‘The Fragile Urban Situation of Cultural Producers in Paris’, City, Culture and Society 1(1): 21–26. Rhein, Catherine. 2003. ‘L’écologie humaine, discipline-chimère’, Sociétés contemporaines 49–50: 167–90. Roncayolo, Marcel (ed.). 1985. Histoire de la France urbaine. Vol. 5: La Ville aujourd’hui, croissance urbaine et crise du citadin. Paris: Seuil. Rose, Damaris. 1984. ‘Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Development of Marxist Urban Theory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1(1): 47–74. Rose, Damaris. 1987. ‘Un aperçu féminin sur la restructuration de l’emploi et sur la gentrification: le cas de Montréal’, Cahiers de géographie du Québec 31(83): 205–24. Rose, Damaris. 1996. ‘Economic Restructuring and the Diversification of Gentrification in the 1980s: A View from a Marginal Metropolis’, in Jon Caulfield and Linda Peake (eds), City Lives and City Form: Critical Research and Canadian Urbanism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 131–72. Rougé, Lionel. 2005. ‘Les “captifs” du périurbain. Voyage chez les ménages modestes installés en lointaine périphérie’, in Guénola Capron, Geneviève Cortès and Hélène Guétat-Bernard (eds), Liens et lieux de la mobilité. Paris: Belin, pp. 129–44. Rousseau, Max. 2014. ‘Redéveloppement urbain et (in)justice sociale: les stratégies néolibérales de “montée en gamme” dans les villes en déclin’, Justice Spatiale | Spatial Justice 6. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://www.jssj.org/article/redevel oppement-urbain-et-injustice-sociale-les-strategies-neoliberales-de-montee-engamme-dans-les-villes-en-declin. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Savage, Mike, James Barlow, Peter Dickens and Tony Fielding. 1992. Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle-Class Formation in Contemporary Britain. New York: Routledge. Savage, Mike, Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johannes Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Sam Friedman and Andrew Miles. 2013. ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment’, Sociology 47(2): 219–50. Simon, Patrick. 1994. ‘La société partagée: relations interethniques et interclasses dans un quartier en rénovation: Belleville, Paris 20e’, Ph.D. dissertation in sociology. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Simon, Patrick. 1995. ‘La politique de la ville contre la ségrégation, ou l’idéal d’une ville sans divisions’, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 68–69: 26–33. Slater, Tom, Winifred Curran and Loretta Lees. 2004. ‘Gentrification Research: New Directions and Critical Scholarship: Guest Editorial’, Environment and Planning A 36(7): 1141–50. Smith, Neil. 1979a. ‘Gentrification and Capital: Practice and Ideology in Society Hill’, Antipode 11(3): 24–35. Smith, Neil. 1979b. ‘Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People’, Journal of the American Planning Association 45: 538–48. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge. Smith, Neil. 2002. ‘New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy’, Antipode 34(3): 427–50. Smith, Neil. 2003. ‘La gentrification généralisée: d’une anomalie locale à la “régénération” urbaine comme stratégie urbaine globale’, in Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen (ed.), Retours en ville. Des processus de ‘gentrification’ urbaine aux politiques de ‘revitalisation’ des centres. Paris: Descartes et Cie, pp. 45–72. Tassé, Cyprien, Thomas Amossé and Mathieu Grégoire. 2013. Libres ou prolétarisés? Les travailleurs intellectuels précaires en Île-de-France. Rapport de recherche [Research Report] 82. Noisy-le-Grand: Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi (CEE). Tissot, Sylvie. 2007. L’Etat et les Quartiers. Genèse d’une catégorie de l’action publique. Paris: Seuil. Tissot, Sylvie, and Franck Poupeau. 2005. ‘La spatialisation des problèmes sociaux’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 159: 4–9. Uitermark, Justus, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Reinout Kleinhans. 2007. ‘Gentrification as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvlied, Rotterdam’, Environment and Planning A 39(1): 125–41. Veschambre, Vincent. 2008. Traces et Mémoires urbaines. Enjeux sociaux de la patrimonialisation et de la démolition. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Walks, Alan, and Martine August. 2008. ‘The Factors Inhibiting Gentrification in Areas with Little Non-Market Housing: Policy Lessons from the Toronto Experience’, Urban Studies 45(12): 2594–625. Zukin, Sharon. 1982. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pa rt I

STRUCTURES

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entrification is now an international process. Yet it cannot be reduced to ‘macro’ factors, such as deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy, the structuring of a ‘global culture of gentrifiers’, the international diffusion of urban entrepreneurialism, the globalization of the real-estate market, or the financialization of urban production. While these clearly go some way towards explaining the breadth of the phenomenon, they remain insufficient to account for its pathways. In Part  I, we endeavour to show that while gentrification is shaped by global forces and structural effects, it remains rooted in spatial and temporal contexts that explain sometimes profound differences – in terms of temporality, of the actors involved in the process and the instruments (of planning, communication) that they use, of the supply of gentrifiable housing, of the gentrifiers’ backgrounds, of the effects of the process on business and the urban landscape, and so on. These contexts are far more than neutral spatial frameworks for gentrification processes, which would allow or account for some variation, but ultimately remain anecdotal in the light of the dominant models we have presented earlier. For instance, in some cities in decline, gentrification is in no way the outcome of some inevitable process, trickling down from international metropolises to regional ones and then midsize cities and cities in crisis. In ‘losing cities’, no spontaneous supply or demand for gentrification exists. How, then, are we to explain that it occurs there? This requires a change of perspective: in these cities, gentrification should be considered as a new political solution to the economic crisis, defended by a local system of actors who respond to incentives (for instance, the availability of public or private funds, or the circulation of urban redevelopment models) and constraints (such as the failure of other strategies or specific electoral demands). In short, while the gentrification of postindustrial cities does have roots in macroprocesses (such as deindustrialization, in the case of cities in crisis), it

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also depends on local interests. This is shown in Chapter 1: in Roubaix, gentrification policies were the result of the gradual structuring of a coalition for attracting new middle-class residents, especially through the creation of a loft housing market that enjoyed broad support from public authorities. There, gentrification was made possible not by the sudden appearance of deterritorialized real-estate development corporations, but by the specific conditions of Roubaix’s real-estate market in the 1990s and the presence of actors with local roots who championed this social evolution. However, apart from cases of exceptional operations, the production of a gentrification supply also depends on the availability of a stock of vacant, dilapidated and cheap buildings, conducive to large-scale intervention on the built environment. Contextualizing the analysis of gentrification thus requires examining the local conditions for the emergence of the process on a given territory. This is not only a matter of scientific rigour: this is the effort that needs to be made to address gentrification processes in a way that reflects their full complexity, and to move beyond the existing dominant descriptive models, which are sometimes unsuited to accounting for the real economic, political and social implications of gentrifications in some cities and urban areas. Thus, each city has a more or less high ‘potential for gentrification’, resulting from a heterogeneous set of facilitating and impeding factors: gentrification-friendly public policies, the presence of specific economic actors, a conducive housing market, as well as the demand for a specific type of real-estate product and urban morphology. On the last aspect, Chapter 2’s analysis of gentrification in Paris and Lisbon shows that not all segments of older housing stock are as intensely or similarly attractive. Attractiveness depends on architectural composition, quality of construction and urban layout. This analysis proposes to situate gentrification in the context of real-estate valuation mechanisms. A property’s potential for gentrification, and by extension its price, may vary widely depending on its layout, location within the building, the building’s location in the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood’s location in the urban space (not to mention, obviously, the city’s place in the national, or even international urban structure). Lastly, there are social, economic and political contexts, but there are also spatial and temporal ones. Another reason why gentrification processes are not identical in all cities is that populations of ‘gentrifiers’ are not necessarily similar in space or time. Chapter  3, which compares generations of gentrifiers in Lyons’ Pentes de la Croix-Rousse neighbourhood and in the Bas-Montreuil neighbourhood (Paris region), showcases the diversity of these ‘gentrifiers’, residents whose backgrounds appear to owe at least as much to time or place as to the ‘degree of maturity’ in the process. In other words, the gentrifiers’ backgrounds vary depending not only on the neighbourhoods, but also on their generation – as the national economic situa-

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tion, the real-estate market, the job market and the dominant values and ideologies can differ widely at different times. This was shown, for instance, by Loretta Lees in the case of New York City’s Brooklyn Heights, which was home to a first wave of gentrifiers in the 1960s, and has since the mid-1990s witnessed the rise of a new generation of ‘super-gentrifiers’, who became wealthy from working in finance and in executive positions in the high-tech service sector rather than artistic or intellectual professions, and who are ready to pay far more to live in that part of Brooklyn: in that case, yesterday’s gentrifiers become today’s gentrified. These generational effects also help us understand why, in some categories of less well-off gentrifiers, buying a home in a low-income (peri)central neighbourhood is no longer an enthusiastic impulse, but rather a reaction to social insecurity – gentrified housing works as a guarantee, a way to make one’s trajectory ‘more secure’ against the backdrop of an increasingly unstable job market, and by extension an increasingly unstable future.

CH A P TER

1 FROM I N DUSTRY TO R E A L ESTATE Creating the Gentrification Supply

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Max Rousseau

F

ollowing the influential work of Neil Smith, many researchers perceive the recent period to be characterized by the international diffusion of strategies aimed at gentrifying cities. To explain this phenomenon, they generally emphasize the role of the multinational corporations that are active on the real-estate market, now allegedly able to deploy their ‘supply’ of gentrification on a global scale, and the internationalization of ‘good practices’ in the field of urban policy (resulting from a variety of factors, such as the rise of networks of cities in which experiences are shared, the increasingly prominent role of consultancy firms working globally and the new forms of ‘remote government’ from the national or supranational level). Yet this analysis in terms of internationalization is not valid everywhere. In particular, it does not help us understand why in many (post)industrial cities in decline,1 gentrification has been for the past fifteen years or so seen as the main ‘solution’ to economic and social problems. These cities indeed appear to be losers of globalization: they are generally viewed as repulsive by the large international developers who contribute to producing the gentrification supply in ‘global’ cities and in smaller cities that are considered ‘safe’ sites of investment owing to their solid economic base. In cities previously dominated by industrial activities and port operations where gentrification-inducing strategies are observed – in France,

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apart from Roubaix, the subject of this chapter, Saint-Etienne, Mulhouse and Marseilles are enlightening cases,2 particularly in that they struggle to actually attract middle-class residents – these strategies are maturing against a background of lingering economic and social crisis, in which urban elites have less room to manoeuvre as they are faced with the failure of redevelopment strategies based on attracting firms and creating jobs. In many cases, these costly strategies, relying on urban marketing, large prestige projects (such as sports facilities, festivals and congress centres) and the creation of business districts and offices, have not yielded the expected results in terms of bringing in companies and jobs. In this race for investment, shrinking cities also face competition from their own periurban belts, which are increasingly frequently appealing to middle-class residents and businesses. This combination of factors accounts for the success of policies aimed at ‘upgrading’ the urban population over the past fifteen years or so. In this context, Richard Florida’s theory, which has been largely diffused worldwide, has enjoyed a warm welcome among the elites of industrial cities in decline (Rousseau 2008), suggesting as it does to transform ‘as if by magic’ dense urban areas with old buildings, formerly seen as obstacles to economic redevelopment, into assets on which to capitalize in order to rebuild a thriving economy. The growing success of this thesis also reflects the influence of a ‘culture of gentrifiers’ in the production of the city, a paradoxical phenomenon in the sense that the middle class has been numerically underrepresented since many of its members have left. Several researchers have pointed to the role of the press in the global diffusion of this culture: they argue that under the media’s influence, in particular with the publication of rankings of ‘best cities’, urban quality of life has become a new discourse of reference in urban policies, despite divergences in opinion as to what the term actually means in practice. This process impacts the representations of urban governments, particularly in cities that face a persisting decline and still appear to be very much fighting an uphill battle in the heightened interurban competition. There are also economic interests in favour of a ‘top-down’ renewal of urban population. Since the 1990s, many shrinking cities have witnessed a change in local governance: among the most active private actors within the coalitions that steer urban policy, the interests of the real-estate market have tended to prevail over those of the manufacturing sector. The theory of the two circuits of capital provides an excellent starting point to understand this trend. According to Henri Lefebvre (2003), the capitalist economy rests on two sectors: the primary sector of the manufacturing industry, trade and investment banks, and the secondary sector of the real-estate market. Thanks to developers, real-estate agents, homeowners and specialized banks, the secondary sector takes over when the primary sector experiences a crisis,

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to ensure high rates of return on invested capital. Applied to the case of the city of Roubaix, which is the focus of this chapter, this theory sheds light on how the new urban policies implemented in a shrinking city can provide an exit for capital assets trapped by the industrial crisis. This is not meant to suggest that during the era of accumulation based on industrial production, local industrials did not concern themselves with the production of the city: on the contrary, the fact that employers built many homes for workers in Roubaix shows that the city then partook in the ‘urban Fordist compromise’. What changed after the industrial crisis is that the making of the city became a directly profitable sector. This triggered a revolution in the urban vision of local capitalists: urban spaces were no longer, as they were under Fordism, a mere ‘condition’ of production (Harvey 1985), but, to use David Harvey’s terminology, a genuine ‘element’ of accumulation. The Fordist era now appears as a parenthesis in the history of the urbanization of industrial cities, and neoliberal urbanization, which began in the early 1990s, is to be related to the liberal urbanization at work during the era of industrialization (Rousseau 2012). The two periods, however, differ in two ways. First, in the nineteenth century, the urbanization of industrial cities was mostly about the capture of ground rent. On the other hand, the new wave that began in the 1990s has been more speculative: generally, developers of luxury housing units in places such as Roubaix, Sheffield or Montreuil are keen to sell their products as quickly as possible in order to unload the risk onto owners. This phenomenon was highlighted by the 2008 international financial crisis, when real-estate bubbles burst in fragile cities and many local homeowners found themselves trapped. Second, the targets of urbanization have changed – from the working class to more solvent groups under post-Fordism, particularly young service employees. This is not a self-evident orientation in cities where the working class has historically held sway. As Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero (2015) show in their study of the conversion of the neighbourhood of Bicocca (Milan) from a site of production to a hip postindustrial district by the Italian industrialist Pirelli, the struggle over the definition of the use of industrial sites is not a mere outcome, but a crucial element in urban redevelopment. As it happens, this struggle is not solely the result of the involvement of globalized actors of finance in the city: its parties are mostly local actors (municipalities, firms, social groups), some following an upward trajectory and others a downward one in the great post-Fordist upheaval. To understand the genesis of the policies favouring gentrification, we need to go back to the turn of the 1990s, at the time when the industrialists who were still active in cities were looking for new circuits of accumulation. In Roubaix, which is France’s poorest major city in terms of residents’ incomes, the gradual structuring of a growth coalition aiming to introduce

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middle-class residents, in part by developing a loft market with extensive support from public authorities, was the result of two phenomena: the establishment of a new social group in the city centre and the refocusing of local capitalism on Roubaix’s real-estate market. GENTRIFICATION AS A ‘SOLUTION’ In the 1970s, as the crisis of Roubaix’s textile mono-industry worsened, the textile bourgeoisie, which had been instrumental in the creation of Roubaix’s working-class neighbourhoods, began investing in luxury homes outside of Roubaix, for instance in the neighbouring municipality of Bondues, which then became one of the wealthiest in the region. Employers also turned to financing numerous luxury homes for executives, also outside of Roubaix, a city that was at the time deemed ‘nongentrifiable’. This redeployment of investment flows further contributed to the exile of many members of the stabilized working-class populations and of the more privileged social categories, who were replaced by poor residents, often with an immigrant background. Combined with the decline of local industry, these trends strongly impacted land value and led to a growing rent gap, as investments moved out of Roubaix massively and capitals flowed into the neighbouring suburbs and the nearby new town of Villeneuve-d’Ascq. Throughout the 1980s, due to the redevelopment strategy pursued by the municipality and the chamber of commerce, urban policies focused on support for business real estate to the detriment of residential real estate, and as a result the rent gap between Roubaix and neighbouring towns continued to grow rapidly (Rousseau 2010). In the late 1980s, a handful of independent professionals and privatesector executives, many of whom resided in Vieux-Lille (Lille’s old town), whose gentrification was then well underway, moved into the centre of Roubaix and restored bourgeois residences. They soon came to clash with the centrist mayor of the time, André Diligent, whose redevelopment strategy focused on the destruction of industrial wastelands and the construction of new buildings to host businesses. These early gentrifiers created an association devoted to preserving Roubaix’s architectural heritage. The first president of this association explains: I’ve never really agreed with Diligent, although he did restore a dialogue in the city. … This discourse I’m still hearing today: ‘you have to give people work, so you have to get companies to come’, I already found it laughable then, … because you don’t force companies to come. … Sure, you can try to attract them, but, you know, between a city that offers you a magnificent 15-hectare grassed plot, etc., and a city that offers you a rotten industrial wasteland, few will choose the second solution; you have to be realistic.

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Figure 1.1. The first signs of gentrification in Roubaix: rehabilitation of city-centre houses began in the 1980s. © Max Rousseau.

Another member of the association recalls: There was a team of kind of enlightened people who lived in Vieux-Lille, who were starting to feel a bit cramped … And there was beautiful housing in Roubaix. These people created the association in the late 1980s … They were bourgeois who managed to change city hall’s outlook, about it being easier to raze things rather than to think about how to enhance them.

This association took the form of a network of actors with an interest in the promotion of local heritage. Apart from this concern for heritage and culture – which are traditionally valued by the urban middle classes – the network was also founded on land and real-estate interests. The founding members of the association, which in practice operates more like a club, are a notary, whose office is located in Roubaix, and who became the association’s first president; a property investor; an executive at the chamber of commerce (an essential body of urban governance); and an architect with a practice in Vieux-Lille. The association also had close ties to the local textile industry bourgeoisie from the start. Executives from the retailer La Redoute, which was then the biggest local company, gravitated around the group’s initial core. They were eager to promote the image of the city to facilitate their own development. There were also architects and real-estate developers, several of whom were also from prominent local textile families. In this ‘losing city’, gentrification did not result from the attraction of international investors, but simply from an exit strategy for local capitals trapped by the crisis of the manufac-

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turing sector. Gradually, the defence of the city’s architectural heritage was no longer the only thing at stake; a small group of actors looking for profitable investments on the second circuit of capital also tried to capture a highpotential market. As one of the members acknowledges: ‘there’s a network of frank camaraderie. There can also be ulterior motives, though … Things came out of nothing, and interests began gravitating around those things. It ended up justifying quite a lot of things; no point in kidding ourselves about that’. The association’s ambiguity, between the promotion of Roubaix’s architectural heritage and the desire to reinvest in land and real-estate markets that had until then been left untouched by the urban redevelopment policy, sparked several internal conflicts pertaining to several municipal projects. Despite this ambiguity, and its initially very small membership, the association’s lobbying was effective: it quickly managed to impose its heritage- and culture-oriented line and clashed with the municipality in the throes of economic decline, which was sceptical as to the effectiveness of the actions it proposed. As a founding member of the association noted: André Diligent did not believe in the heritage- and culture-oriented discourse at all … He was just about getting people jobs … So [he] was tempted to marginalize the association. The bobos didn’t exist then. But that’s what this was about for him. What he meant was, ‘but who are these people anyway?’. Okay, some of them had come to live in Roubaix, but they meant nothing to him at all.

In its muted fight against André Diligent, the heritage preservation association received the support of Roubaix’s main active firm – La Redoute. The association developed a sophisticated strategy to push its demands, seeking increased media exposure (by speaking out in public, publishing articles, handing out awards, etc.). It also managed to fund local initiatives aimed at conferring a ‘symbolic collective capital’,3 centred on the promotion of lofts, which then resonated with the influx of artists in industrial wastelands – ‘pioneers’ of gentrification who began to be pushed out by rising prices in the Lille urban area in the mid-1990s. It also actively supported the project of creating a museum in Roubaix, a then politically sensitive subject in a city that one of the project’s main promoters described at the turn of the 1990s as being a ‘non-audience for museums’, with a ‘very low sociology’ and devoid of ‘organized cultural practice’. WHEN PRIVATE INTERESTS GREW CLOSER TO THE MUNICIPALITY A diversified economy and strong political leadership are two safeguards against the control of local power by private interests. When René Vandierendonck succeeded André Diligent in 1994, Roubaix met neither of these

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conditions. The failure of the economic diversification strategy pursued by the former mayor left the city dependent on the mail-order sector – the only economic sector that was still healthy. Vandierendonck, who had become the mayor almost by default following Diligent’s resignation during the course of his term, did not quite appear to be a genuine leader. Still, he had one key asset going for him: the evolution of Lille Urban Community’s strategy at the turn of the 1990s. Whereas in the 1980s the urban community (an intermunicipal body covering the Lille–Roubaix–Tourcoing conurbation) had invested little in the northern part of Lille’s urban area – a state of affairs that had sparked a violent conflict between Diligent and Lille Urban Community – the 1990s heralded political changes within the urban community that gave the mayor of Roubaix the resources he needed to envision a new strategy. Its outlines were drawn by the ‘pioneers’ of gentrification: in his quest for a means to quickly redevelop the city, Vandierendonck made the pragmatic choice of supporting the approach of the heritage preservation association, which consisted in steering urban policies towards the enhancement of architectural heritage and cultural development. Considered a condition for urban economic growth, the takeoff of the land and real-estate market through heritage promotion gradually became a new urban policy objective. Also from an economic perspective, some municipal departments sought to attract the ‘creative class’ to the city to favour its redevelopment and boost tax revenues that had decreased owing to the urban crisis. Lastly, from a political standpoint, gentrification was expected to be a more reliable way to bring down the city’s unemployment rate than support for training or labour-intensive firms, whose results tend to be more uncertain. As soon as he took office, the new mayor named one of the heritage association’s founders his deputy for culture. This deputy mayor quickly became a key actor in the development of Roubaix’s heritage policy. He stopped the destruction of abandoned factories, and adopted a number of measures to rehabilitate architectural heritage so as to boost the real-estate market’s attractiveness. These included the creation of two protection areas for urban architectural and landscaped heritage in 2000, spanning nearly all of the municipality, and real-estate restoration programmes as part of the grand projet de ville (major urban project) covering Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing. At the time, Roubaix’s heritage policy also resonated with the state policy of preservation of nineteenth-century heritage: during the summer of 1998, around thirty buildings in Roubaix were registered on the national supplementary inventory of historical monuments, an essential development for the urban branding strategy pursued by the new municipal team. These listings rewarded the deputy for culture’s efforts to change the image of the city. The aestheticization/heritagization of Roubaix’s architecture went further during the 2000s – for instance, the renovation and colouring of facades

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Figure 1.2. Roubaix’s La Piscine museum: a ‘Trojan Horse’ for gentrification? © Max Rousseau.

were systematically subsidized and the city was given the label Ville d’art et d’histoire (Artistic and Historic City) in 2001. The U-turn since the policy of systematic destruction of wastelands under the first entrepreneurial turn (Diligent’s term) was now complete. Lastly, the deputy for culture made sure that the museum project would come to fruition; it eventually opened in 2001. This inauguration brought private investors back to Roubaix. In 2004, a new luxury real-estate programme was completed, and numerous small and medium-sized businesses moved in (architecture, communications, consulting, publicity firms, etc.) in entirely rehabilitated mansions within a stone’s throw of the museum and the railway station. These firms benefited from the tax exemptions offered in the city centre’s urban free zone. But their staff numbers are small, which often means they do not need to hire local workers. This exemplifies the ambiguity of the new redevelopment

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strategy – the middle classes are admittedly coming back to Roubaix, but the creation of wealth resulting from their return seems to be only marginally profitable for the resident population. THE EMERGENCE OF A LOFT MARKET AND THE EXTENSION OF GENTRIFICATION The rent gap is intensively exploited by local private actors. The emergence of a local loft market has been considered by the municipality both as a component and a result of its heritage-oriented redevelopment strategy. The industrial wastelands, which used to be the main targets of the urban redevelopment policy, are now turned over by the municipality to local actors of the land market, including in particular real-estate agencies. One of them, which is specialized in luxury homes, has played a pioneering role in setting up the loft market in Roubaix. Its owner asked the mayor to intercede with the urban community in order to prevent the demolition of a factory located alongside the canal and the scheduled construction of a car park in its place. He then bought the building, rehabilitated it and divided it into lots that he immediately put up for sale. Eight of the ten new owners are not from Roubaix. The agency was presented with a ‘trophy for the safeguarding of heritage’ awarded by Roubaix’s heritage preservation association for this rehabilitation. For a few years, the agency held a virtual monopoly over Roubaix’s loft market. After a shaky start, the new supply met with a growing success: the agency reports having placed two hundred lofts on the market between 2004 and 2006 alone.4 The offer of lofts in Roubaix profits from the city’s new ‘hip’ image and attracts actors of the second cycle of gentrification under the stage model, that is, the middle-class groups who are most suited – for economic and/or cultural reasons – to ‘taking the risk’ of moving into the city’s working-class neighbourhoods. Roubaix’s loft market was booming by the mid-2000s. Potential profits attracted new developers, the number and scope of projects increased, and the phenomenon spread to increasingly less-central neighbourhoods. Yet, the expansion did not threaten the local character of the production of lofts: overall, the new actors of Roubaix’s luxury real-estate market came from the Lille urban area. The real-estate agency that sparked the phenomenon retained a monopoly over the marketing of new projects. Among the new producers of such gentrifiable homes, there are former industrialists who found in the exploitation of the rent gap a new source of profitable investments, as well as banks. The regional bank ScalbertDupont, for instance, started out dependent on the local textile industry but had already begun diversifying its activities a long time ago. It has played

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an important role in the expansion of Roubaix’s loft market, particularly by offering loans to future homeowners during the open house days for major real-estate developments. With solid roots in Roubaix, where it operates three agencies, it also contributes to funding the ‘cultural solution’ aimed at promoting the image of the city: it is one of the sponsors of La Piscine – a museum of art and industry located in a former Art Deco swimming pool – and funds temporary exhibits and the purchase of new works. The expansion of the loft market and the surge of interest in Roubaix’s city centre among real-estate developers have been warmly welcomed by elected representatives. For instance, on the occasion of the national heritage days (Journées du patrimoine), the Roubaix tourist office offered a guided tour of the city’s lofts named ‘I loft Roubaix’. The municipality’s support for the boom of the loft market also involved an effective lobbying effort at national level: on the initiative of Roubaix’s finance department, an amendment proposed by the Socialist Party MP and mayor of the adjacent municipality of Wattrelos, voted in 2008 by the National Assembly, authorized a 30 per cent drop in property taxes (taxe foncière and taxe d’habitation) for lofts. According to the MP, the goal was to ‘take into account the social mixing effort and the contribution in terms of urban planning made by buyers of lofts in sensitive urban areas’.5 The amendment in fact showed that the municipality was quite eager to bring in the types of owners targeted by Roubaix’s supply of gentrifiable housing, that is, young first-time buyers from the ‘new middle class’, from outside Roubaix, whom they wanted to attract even at the cost of lowering local tax resources. Under the combined effect of new transport infrastructure resulting from the support of the urban community (a second metro line) and the city’s new ‘hip’ image, the exploitation of the rent gap accelerated and the now industrialized local loft market was opened to a new wave of gentrifiers. For these gentrifiers, Roubaix (as well as Tourcoing) now offers much more affordable housing than Lille, whose housing market is highly strained. A niche market, lofts were supposed to make Roubaix’s entire real-estate market take off. Additionally, as they placed the city on the investors’ mental map, they favoured an increase in the prices of other types of real estate (bourgeois houses, as well as workers’ apartments and houses, which make up the bulk of the city’s real-estate supply). Also, lofts are a source of immediate profit for builders: unlike most other properties, most lots are purchased on the day they are put on the market. By the mid-2000s, a bare loft (without fittings) would sell for €1,200 per square metre on average in Roubaix, compared with €2,000 in gentrifying neighbourhoods of Lille. Overall, this type of product brings in young, employed first-time homeowners, who buy gross floor areas of around 100 square metres, which is within the average for developments on the market. Buying a ‘bare’ loft, in addition to con-

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Figure 1.3. Former textile factory converted in 2009 into around sixty loft apartments, in the neighbourhood of Le Pile, close to the centre of Roubaix. Since the economic crisis, a third of the building has been owned by a social housing landlord. © Max Rousseau.

ferring social distinction – although less so since the relative standardization of the supply after the market took off – enables them to lower the cost of interior design. However spectacular, this gentrification – the first outcome of the redevelopment strategy – remains limited to a few neighbourhoods in a largely pauperized city. Its contribution to introducing social mixing is ultimately very limited: a recent study has shown that although Roubaix’s loft dwellers are appreciative of the municipality’s heritage enhancement policy and of the generally improved image of the city, they still develop intricate strategies to stick among social peers and avoid local schools, and more broadly they only forge very distant ties with their adoptive city (Miot 2016). The second outcome is the growing influence of exchange value in the motivations for buying a home and the return of intense real-estate speculation. Indeed, the takeoff of the loft market has marked a new juncture in the history of the city’s urbanization. As real-estate prices quickly rose, the transformation of relationships to ownership played an important role in the development of the new market: the marketing of lofts increasingly emphasizes the property’s exchange value – the sellers systematically highlight opportunities for capital gain upon resale. The city’s change of image, resulting from the new urban policies, has been instrumental in the emergence of a speculative bubble. Initially limited to resident owners within the

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Figure 1.4. Derelict houses near the textile factory, Le Pile neighbourhood, Roubaix. Forty per cent of inhabitants of Le Pile live below the upper poverty threshold. © Max Rousseau.

framework of a planned residential strategy, speculation on lofts started intensifying in the mid-2000s following the arrival of outside investors who purchased such properties for the purposes of a short-term financial strategy. This influx, which would have been unthinkable a few years before, was welcomed by the municipality, who saw it as a sign of Roubaix’s newfound attractiveness. As of late 2009, Roubaix’s recent loft-living boom had resulted in the marketing of one thousand lofts. Many other operations were planned, including several large-scale projects, until the city was caught up by the financial crisis and began facing a rapid decline in prices that trapped many buyers and investors at the turn of the 2010s, illustrating how fragile redevelopment strategies focused on real estate can be in weakly attractive cities (Miot 2012b).6 CONCLUSION In 1986, Neil Smith called gentrification ‘a frontier on which fortunes are made’ (Smith 1986: 34). Many researchers have followed in his footsteps and produced monographs that highlight the role of major public and private actors in producing a gentrification ‘supply’. Yet they have mostly focused on a specific type of city: large metropolises, where the phenomenon is most visible and most obvious. Despite its interest, this focus on ‘global cities’ and

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Figure 1.5. The end of gentrification? A planned development of loft apartments in Roubaix city centre, initiated in 2007 but regularly postponed since the economic crisis. © Max Rousseau.

their counterparts has caused trends unfolding elsewhere to be somewhat neglected, especially in shrinking cities, although they form an increasingly large group of cities in the Global North (and, more recently, in the Global South as well). Drawing on the example of Roubaix, I have tried to show how a gentrification supply can also develop in such cities, but that it relies on rather different mechanisms and actors. In Roubaix, the process has been mainly fuelled by a network of actors situated in the urban area, who often stood to benefit from the takeoff of the real-estate market for various reasons and have been able to anticipate developments in other neighbourhoods in the metropolis (including Vieux-Lille) and influence redevelopment policies to fit their own purposes (through support for large employers in the 1980s, and later to the influx of middle-class residents and small service-sector businesses). This network also includes industrialists who found in real estate a new profitable venture after the textile crisis. In sum, the production of a gentrification supply results from the confluence of these economic interests and the interests of a municipality seeking to revive the badly depressed activity of a city that had become repulsive to investors. Another factor is the adoption by the urban community, at the turn of the 1990s, of measures supporting the ‘rebirth’ of city centres in the northern part of the urban area, which were hit the hardest by deindustrialization. The urban community provided actors in Roubaix with indispen-

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sable public investments to take advantage of the rent gap (cultural policy, development of public spaces, and most importantly transport policy), reconnecting it to the metropolis symbolically and physically (with the second metro line). The new strategy of redevelopment and public investment, aiming to make a city that was repulsive to the middle classes prettier and more accessible, has been crucial, giving the producers of the gentrification supply the demand that they needed to make a profit. This demand was motivated both by push factors – the saturation of the real-estate market in well-connected parts of the urban area – and pull factors – the appeal of owning a loft in terms of ‘lifestyle’, in a city whose image overall seemed to be improving. This municipal strategy did not preclude the existence of other strategies. Indeed, in addition to supporting the production of a loft supply, Roubaix remained the leading producer of social and ‘very social’ housing in the Lille urban area in the 1990s and 2000s, and pursued a policy aimed at facilitating access to homeownership for local middle-class households. In Roubaix, as in many other cities, gentrification is tightly enmeshed with other sociospatial processes, including pauperization processes. Support for the production of a gentrification supply by the municipal governments of shrinking cities – a frequently observed phenomenon over the past decade – raises two important questions. The first is about social justice – to be more specific, about the fallout of this redevelopment strategy for the established local populations in a city which, despite sporadic gentrification, currently remains France’s poorest big city. Indeed, in the 2000s, the acceleration of price rises in a real-estate market that had long been sluggish – an acceleration that was correlated neither with a sudden influx of demand motivated by use value nor with a sudden increase in the average quality of housing in the city – was a subject of concern for some members of the population, who were more and more opposed to a municipal strategy that they considered ‘elitist’. The second question concerns the effectiveness of gentrification-boosting policies in fragile cities: owing to the massive influx of capitals, the market in Roubaix has witnessed an increasing disconnect between supply and demand. As a result, a speculative bubble has emerged, the second consequence (alongside gentrification) of the ‘urban solution’ that pulled local capitalism out of the industrial crisis, with the support of urban policies. The recovery of Roubaix’s real-estate market has thus been counterbalanced by a growing volatility. This transpired with the sudden drop in prices in 2008, which trapped buyers who were hoping for capital gains upon resale, including (and especially) in the market’s midrange segment, constituting the bulk of the city’s real-estate supply (workers’ houses and apartments).

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The theory of the two circuits of capital, which emphasizes the perpetual creation and re-creation of (a few) winners and (many) losers, ultimately applies perfectly to the case of this fragile city: long after the textile industry crisis trapped a large part of its population (low-level entrepreneurs and workers) who were unable to get out at the time when huge fortunes were being built in the city, Roubaix’s real-estate market, having become highly speculative, trapped the latest newcomers in turn, once the initial profits were made. Notes 1. Research on postindustrial cities in decline, or ‘shrinking cities’, has been a rapidly growing international branch of urban research since the 2000s. The concept of shrinking cities is used in reference to cities that face a variety of hardships owing to their decreasing attraction: demographic losses, pauperized populations, dilapidated housing stock, underused facilities, increased competition from periurban areas, etc. This phenomenon of urban decline, which is more and more pronounced in countries of the Global North (particularly the US, Germany and Japan) but has also recently begun to occur in the Global South, calls for an adapted political response. Yet, in France, no genuinely specific policies have been devised to address it – ‘urban’ problems are considered within the framework of the politique de la ville (urban policy), which targets areas whose characteristics are different. 2. Among other examples, see Jourdain 2008 and Miot 2012a. 3. This concept is borrowed from David Harvey (2008), who himself based it on Pierre Bourdieu’s work. 4. Source: Le Point, 16 March 2006. 5. Source: La Voix du Nord, 4 January 2009. 6. Despite its efforts to attract middle-class residents, the city still predominantly attracts poor households. See Miot 2012b.

References Harvey, David. 1985. The Urbanization of Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David. 2008. ‘L’Art de la rente: mondialisation et marchandisation de la culture’, in Géographie de la domination. Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, pp. 23–56. Jourdain, Silvère. 2008. ‘Un cas aporétique de gentrification: la ville de Marseille’, Méditerranée 111: 85–90. Kaika, Maria, and Luca Ruggiero. 2015. ‘Class Meets Land: The Social Mobilization of Land as Catalyst for Urban Change’, Antipode 47(3): 708–29. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003 [1970]. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miot, Yoan. 2012a. ‘Face à la décroissance urbaine, l’attractivité résidentielle? Le cas des villes de tradition industrielle de Mulhouse, Roubaix et Saint-Etienne’, Ph.D. dissertation in urban planning and development. Lille: Université Lille-1.

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Miot, Yoan. 2012b. ‘La ségrégation socio-spatiale dans la métropole lilloise et à Roubaix: l’apport des mobilités résidentielles’, Géographie, Economie, Société 14(2): 171–95. Miot, Yoan. 2016. ‘La localisation résidentielle des créatifs, une localisation urbaine? Une réflexion à partir du cas de l’agglomération lilloise’, in Christine Liefooghe, Dominique Mons and Didier Paris (eds), Lille, métropole créative? Nouveaux liens, nouveaux lieux, nouveaux territoires. Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, pp. 255–76. Rousseau, Max. 2008. ‘Richard Florida in Saint-Etienne? Sociologie de la “classe créative” stéphanoise’, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 105: 112–19. Rousseau, Max. 2010. ‘Gouverner la gentrification. Différentiel de loyer et coalitions de croissance dans la ville en déclin’, Pôle Sud 32: 59–72. Rousseau, Max. 2012. ‘Post-Fordist Urbanism in France’s Poorest City: Gentrification as Local Capitalist Strategy’, Critical Sociology 38(1): 46–69. Smith, Neil. 1986. ‘Gentrification, the Frontier, and the Restructuring of Urban Space’, in Neil Smith and Peter Williams (eds), Gentrification of the City. London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 15–34.

CH A P TER

2 TH E E X ISTI NG BU I LT ENV I RONMEN T How Urban Morphologies Inform Gentrification ‘Potentials’

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Marie Chabrol and Matthieu Giroud

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n 2001, architect and urbanist Andrés Duany, who cofounded the Congress for the New Urbanism (1993), waxed ironic about the means to curb gentrification in the conservative magazine The American Enterprise, published by the American Enterprise Institute think tank: Can anything be done to prevent gentrification? Yes, there is one proven technique that holds down price: Give people bad design. Because gentrification is essentially a process of real estate seeking its proper value, the places that revive are inherently attractive enough to be sought out by the affluent. The places that resist gentrification are those where the housing is poorly designed or the quality of the urban space is mediocre. Thus the most surefire technique for permanently preventing gentrification is to provide dismal architectural and urban design. … Modernist design, sadly, has become a proven technique for keeping housing in the hands of the poor. (Duany 2001: 36)

Obviously, Duany, one of the staunchest critics of modern urbanism in the United States, is being sarcastic here. Yet, he puts his finger on a dimension of gentrification that has rarely been addressed with sufficient finesse in research on the subject, although it is evidenced by all the maps showing the spatial diffusion of gentrification – namely, the role played by the existing housing stock in the progress of gentrification.

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Of course, much has been written about the attraction of older properties for some gentrifiers, and the latter’s ability to renovate, transform and accordingly appropriate them. Yet the fact that not all the segments of the older housing stock are equally attractive, or attractive in the same ways, often goes unmentioned. Whenever their morphological features differ (in terms of date of construction, materials used, components, equipment, exposure, location in the neighbourhood), housing units, and by extension buildings and blocks in the same neighbourhood, do not have the same plasticity, and as a result their potentials for appropriation by gentrifiers vary. Observations conducted on various fieldwork sites for this book – particularly in La Goutte d’Or (Paris), Alcântara (Lisbon) and Berriat–Saint-Bruno (Grenoble) – point to the importance of the influence of architectural composition, the quality of the construction and the layout of the urban fabric on the paces and spatial forms of gentrification, and accordingly by contrast on forms of popular continuities at work in residential space. Based on a collective study of several older central or pericentral French neighbourhoods (in Paris, Montreuil, Versailles, Lyons and Montpellier), sociologist Claire Lévy-Vroelant found that ‘the heterogeneity of the supply of housing among the older stock, when it has endured, is a factor of social mixing and of strong mobility’ (Lévy-Vroelant 2001: 54). However, our own observations also show that the possibility of physically transforming the housing stock (by substantially reshaping it as opposed to just performing maintenance or improvement work) does not mechanically bring about social change. From one neighbourhood to the next, the same type of housing will not have the same value and trigger the same kind of demand. In what follows, we must be mindful of taking into consideration the local housing markets and the metropolitan dynamics of gentrification (Chapter 4). In the same neighbourhood, and accordingly on the same local housing market, the relation between plasticity of housing and social change is not deterministic. Two other contextual dimensions, also stemming from structural dynamics – urban policies and past social practices – must be taken into account. The property’s location in the city (in terms of accessibility), the neighbourhood or even the building, as well as the state of the ownership structure (availability of housing for home ownership; complexity of inheritance situations), undoubtedly influence a property’s likelihood of being appropriated by new middle- and upper-class residents. We find precisely that a property’s ‘potential’ for gentrification can be assessed by looking at the intersection of these three dimensions – architecture, location, ownership – of urban morphology. In the process we shed light not only on the paths followed by gentrification, but also, implicitly, on how working-class continuities operate in residential space, as well as on the

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underlying inequality of housing conditions. Evidencing these mechanisms and the complex processes at work requires painstaking observation work of concrete situations on micro scales such as the flat, the building or the street. The interview excerpts reproduced and the situations described here are in no way anecdotal; on the contrary, they illustrate deep overarching trends that this chapter attempts to unveil. THE VARYING ARCHITECTURAL POTENTIALS OF OLDER NEIGHBOURHOODS By definition, gentrification is a process through which a neglected urban space, building or property is conferred a certain value, which reflects what it is but also what it could become. Although it is very difficult to pinpoint because it may vary heavily in different contexts, a property’s architectural potential can be defined as what one can do with the property in question (to transform it) with the resources at one’s disposal. This raises the question: what type of housing can be considered to have ‘potential’, by whom and when? Several conditions must be met, especially pertaining to the architectural and plastic workability of the existing construction and the legal possibility of transforming it. For instance, is it physically possible to tear down a wall, introduce openings or safely convert attic space? To turn a place of business into a home, or a home into a business? Is this allowed by ownership and planning regulations? Would this be economically viable for investing? These are key structural factors, but another fundamental contextual element is involved: the perception of the housing stock, as a result of which at a given time what used to be considered as devoid of potential (a worker’s dwelling, industrial or business premises) starts to be seen as transformable, liveable, and valuable for residents, like the New York City lofts studied by Sharon Zukin (1982) in the 1960s and 1970s, built in former factories. The heterogeneous housing stock of central working-class neighbourhoods and their surroundings offers transformation opportunities to those who have the requisite financial resources and/or skills. In effect, we met more young architects or decorators on tight budgets than investors who called upon the services of an interior designer. In La Goutte d’Or – more specifically in the Château Rouge sector – Marc, a self-taught decorator and actor, is one of them. Formerly residing in the south of France, he decided to relocate to Paris permanently in 2001 and bought a 37 m2 two-room flat that had long remained vacant for 300,000 francs (i.e. 45,000 euros, a small sum even at the time). Marc put in a lot of his time and 15,000 additional euros to transform it entirely to fit his tastes: he tore nearly all the walls down,

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redid the floors, switched the locations of the bathroom and the kitchen, and removed the fireplaces to set up storage units. The old, basic two-room flat was transformed into a large one-room space, which was photographed by a home decorating magazine in 2007: ‘That flat had been empty for over thirty years. Everything had to be renovated, but it was very healthy. So I was able to redo it exactly as I wanted to’. When he discusses the transformation, Marc equally highlights the flat’s potential and his own vision of the space, his skills and the time at his disposal to remake it: It actually took me a year to redo it on my own. I’m an actor by trade … and I’ve always done some renovation here and there, small stuff. Odd jobs in people’s houses, paint jobs. So when I bought this property, you know, I’d been dreaming about it for quite some time, I’d already made lots of plans in my mind. The way I wanted the bathroom, the way I wanted the space to look like, sort of… But I really had a feeling for the place.

Marc resold the flat six years later for 200,000 euros (a capital gain of nearly 140,000 euros). He believes that he was there at the right time, but also that he saw and took advantage of a potential that others would not have seen or known how to exploit. Many gentrifiers, including some of his neighbours, indeed found themselves mired in renovation projects whose scope and cost they had failed to anticipate (converting an attic they had bought back from the co-ownership, tearing down a partition wall, switching bathroom and kitchen, etc.). The architectural potential must also be assessed at the level of the building as a whole, its structure and layout (thickness of the walls, façade, materials, orientation) and opportunities for transformation (adding floors or extensions, merging flats). Applicable regulations must also be taken into account (do co-ownership rules allow the removal of load-bearing walls?), as well as the co-owners’ dispositions and financial resources: are they in favour of transformation projects that require a vote? Do they have the resources to fund renovation work for the building? These constraints mean potentials vary from one building to the next as well as from one period in time to the next. In the entire Goutte d’Or area, the very unequal quality of the buildings, most of which were constructed in the nineteenth century, remains a key factor. This is first because the lower-quality and less well-maintained buildings are the most run-down, and have either been demolished since the 1980s, or are still effectively part of the social housing stock. Conversely, those built with better materials (such as cut stone), with higher architectural standards (polished façades, balconies, high ceilings, large communal areas) or which are airier (with gardens or inner courtyards that let the light in) are considered easier to promote and were among the first to be appropriated by gentrifiers. This is the case of the streets surrounding the neighbourhood church. The housing development in that area is the

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result of one of the nineteenth century’s frequent bursts of speculation (rapid urbanization/construction of buildings and investment properties), but the constructions there look different from elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Designed by the same architect, this sector is more cohesive and has polished façades. The neighbourhood also has a few single-family houses, most notably in the street called Villa Poissonnière, where the houses are fronted by individual gardens on both sides of a paved alley that has now been partly privatized by residents. It should be noted that single-family houses (found in Paris’s outer arrondissements, and especially in the inner suburbs, as in Montreuil) are often easier to appropriate and transform than flats, which require authorization by the building’s co-owners. In the case of houses, the main constraint comes from urban planning regulations. Home extensions (by adding a porch or an additional floor) are frequent; this stock of small, often self-built single-family houses is also a factor that encourages gentrification. This is also the case for business premises (shops, workshops, former factories), which can be adapted for the purposes of a wide array of projects and be attractive options for people who are willing to invest in extensive renovation work, within the bounds of what they can afford. However, they cannot be appropriated by private individuals when they are particularly big – large sizes tend to be an obstacle to gentrification, as long as public authorities and/or big investors do not intervene. The distribution of different types of housing and accordingly of architectural potentials on the scale of a neighbourhood thus strongly influences the spatial forms of gentrification. From one neighbourhood to the next, urban fabrics with varying degrees of complexity and consistency offer different conditions for the accomplishment and diffusion of the gentrification process. In neighbourhoods like Château Rouge in Paris or Berriat–SaintBruno in Grenoble, rapid, unplanned urbanization at the turn of the twentieth century and multiple uncoordinated operations of renovation beginning in the 1960s have been instrumental in producing an extremely intricate mix of generations and types of construction within individual city blocks. Conversely, in the neighbourhood of Alcântara (in Lisbon), the urban fabric consists of much more homogeneous clusters of old constructions spread over several blocks. Its urban fabric was strongly shaped by the local bourgeoisie’s investments in the early twentieth century, at the time when the main industries moved in, as well as by the laissez-faire approach of public authorities in the face of the massive influx of workers from the north of Portugal who ended up having to build their own homes. In the 1950s and 1960s, the action of the Lisbon municipality, under the heel of Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship, was also a decisive factor in the large-scale demolition of some of these self-built areas and in the mass production of low-quality

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standardized buildings largely inspired by the principles of modern architecture, whose architectural potential now appears very small. As evidenced in these examples, the making of an urban fabric, and therefore the distribution of different types of old housing, with varying abilities to be transformed and appropriated by gentrifiers, are the products of a history where both deep-seated macrostructural trends and local circumstances have an impact. The legacy of this historical process and the hierarchy introduced by gentrifiers and the market between old properties on the basis of their architectural potentials are two of the key factors at work in the spatialization of gentrification. In practice, in older neighbourhoods like La Goutte d’Or and Berriat–Saint-Bruno, one can observe the spatial coexistence at the level of the same building, block or street of converted and dilapidated properties, reflecting very small-scale forms of cohabitation between middleand upper-class residents and working-class residents. Social coexistence does not occur on the same scale in Alcântara – one rather finds it in certain places within the neighbourhoods, for instance the traditional retail centres and those more recently built during the course of renovation programmes. However, ‘morphological’ features make the local spatial forms assumed by gentrification more complex, as the following two sections will demonstrate, first by documenting the importance of the location of properties within the building and the neighbourhood, and then by examining the role of the real-estate ownership structure. VARIATIONS IN POTENTIAL RELATED TO THE LOCATION OF PROPERTIES WITHIN THE BUILDING, THE NEIGHBOURHOOD AND THE SURROUNDING URBAN SPACES The location of properties within their building, neighbourhood and urban environment can have a wide array of impacts on their architectural potential. It is often a key factor explaining why some properties undergo significant transformations at a given time while others do not. In the case of Château Rouge, for instance, there is no comparison between a ground-floor courtyard flat, which receives no light and is close to heavy foot traffic, and a light-filled, noise-free flat a few floors up. The commercial activity and the noise on the ground floor of a building clearly do not have the same effects depending on whether one lives on the first or fifth floor, facing the street or the courtyard. Marc’s aforementioned flat is located in one of the neighbourhood’s busiest streets, but it faces the courtyard and is free from the surrounding noise:

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I liked facing the courtyard; it was quiet. That was what I liked about it too, I suppose. I really have strong memories of it, in the summer you have all that noise, that hustle and bustle in which you don’t hear any French spoken, you feel like you’re somewhere else, it’s great. And then I’d cross, and bam! I was in the courtyard and it was completely quiet. It was really nice.

Such oppositions between lower/higher floors, street/courtyard, near/far from commercial activity are very significant within buildings, especially in parts of the neighbourhood where construction was optimized in the nineteenth century. In Château Rouge, the comparison of the trajectories of two entirely identical courtyard-side flats (both 47 m2, both with three rooms initially) in an old building (from the 1880s) is quite enlightening. The first-floor flat has been occupied since 1986 by the same owner, Mrs Nastasia, a pensioner aged around seventy with a Russian background. The flat has not been subjected to any major transformations since it was built. Although it faces the courtyard, it is rather noisy because it is located right above the entrance door. It is also quite dark, with no direct daylight coming in: three singleglazed windows face the inner courtyard; two others face a smaller (4 m2) courtyard and the wall of the building behind hers. Mrs Nastasia is forced to keep the lights on during the day in winter and summer alike. The sixth-floor flat was purchased in 2007 by Alice, a 37-year-old human-resources executive who has been living there ever since. Its location on the top floor makes it a ‘bubble’ of silence: she can hear only the sound of the birds on the roof. The flat was transformed by the previous occupants, who tore down a wall between two small rooms to create a large living room, and added a skylight in the roof. While several double-glazed windows also face the building’s inner courtyard, as in Mrs Nastasia’s place, the flat receives a lot more light, thanks to its higher location and to the opening in the roof. Furthermore, two windows offer an unobstructed view of the Paris rooftops to the east. Having a view of the city and the urban landscape matters in gentrifying neighbourhoods; they have a decorative, scenic quality (Charmes 2006). In Château Rouge, where constructions are very dense, and courtyards are narrow and devoid of greenery, only the higher floors may provide such scenic views over Parisian rooftops, the neighbourhood church and especially the Sacré-Cœur basilica, which sits atop the nearby hill of Montmartre. Location within the neighbourhood is also a significant factor accounting for the uneven progression of gentrification. The proximity of urban wastelands, of noisy activities and of social housing must be taken into consideration when one seeks to understand the different trajectories experienced by otherwise similar properties, at the level of a neighbourhood, block or building. In Château Rouge, retail areas are unequally perceived. On the one hand, these businesses help make the neighbourhood livelier and may have an attractive or picturesque image. Their proximity is convenient for resi-

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Figure 2.1. A first-floor flat, where the lights have to be kept on all day long, La Goutte d’Or, Paris, 2008. © Bertrand Chabrol.

dents, who frequent them on a daily basis or as a backup plan. On the other hand, when their density is very high and their customer base very large, they cause discomfort (by making the streets noisy, cluttered and dirty) to the occupants of nearby buildings. In the closest buildings and in the properties located right above such business premises, these negative impacts of commercial activity have several effects. They can bring down the value of properties, although in a tight real-estate market they are no more difficult to sell than others. As these properties are less sought after because of their location, they are the ones where working-class residents tend to stay the longest. Locational potential is also an important factor when the sale price is set. Whether they have been renovated or not, the higher, quieter properties with clear views sell for higher prices than ground-floor properties, as they have more potential for enhancement (even when the building does not have a lift), and because their physical distance from the street allows their occupants to distance themselves socially. As a rule, in all gentrifying neighbourhoods, the close proximity of cultural facilities (theatres, cinemas), of greenery or transport infrastructure (tram or metro stations), as well as the specificities of the retail supply (Van

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Criekingen and Fleury 2006), make certain streets or areas more valuable than others. This proximity can indeed be anticipated by gentrifiers, who are well informed on the development projects in the works within or close to the area of the city in which they are investing, such as new public transport connections (new tram or metro lines) and upcoming cultural or leisure facilities. This ability to anticipate change is also found in some of the older residents, as in the case of the families of workers and craftsmen in the construction sector (encountered in Berriat–Saint-Bruno, in La Goutte d’Or, and in Lyons’ Croix-Rousse), which have often been established in the neighbourhood for a long time. These families own flats, former industrial premises or workshops – sometimes entire buildings – and attempt to benefit from the locational potential of their properties to renovate them and put them back on the market, thereby contributing to the gentrification of their neighbourhood. The locational potential of a home must be considered on the level of the building, of the street, and of the part of the neighbourhood in which it is situated, but also on the level of the urban area as a whole, to account for broader proximities. THE ROLE OF THE REAL-ESTATE OWNERSHIP STRUCTURE IN THE POTENTIAL FOR TRANSFORMATION In some cases, we find that properties with identical architectural and locational potentials are not transformed and reinvested in the same ways by the middle and upper classes. The dynamic of the real-estate ownership structure at the metropolitan level is a key factor in the intensity of social change in gentrifying neighbourhoods. First of all – this might seem obvious, but it is still worth restating – for new residents to appropriate properties, there need to be vacancies. Property vacancies and their return to the market give us insights into the spatial diffusion of gentrification and its temporality, especially when this phenomenon relates to generational effects. Indeed, in a neighbourhood with an ageing population, the departure or death of numerous elderly residents is a factor that is conducive to an influx of new inhabitants – regardless of the conditions in which they come to the neighbourhood (as landlord in the case of sale or occupation by an heir, tenant, guest, etc.). The socioeconomic backgrounds of these new inhabitants may vary considerably: they may be entirely similar to those of the outgoing residents, or on the contrary be downgraded when the neighbourhood or the property has lost value, or upgraded when gentrification is at work (Lévy 1998). Beyond the effects of demography on housing vacancy, the very structure of realestate ownership can fuel or otherwise slow down gentrification.

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Figure 2.2. Buildings in Rua Coelho, Alcântara, Lisbon, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

Figure 2.3. Garden side of the buildings in Rua Coelho, Alcântara, Lisbon, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

As the following example will show, gentrification plays out at the intersection of these three dimensions of urban morphology – architectural, locational and ownership. Here we look into the heart of a street of the Alcântara neighbourhood (Figures 2.2 and 2.3) to gain close-up insights into its mechanisms, paces and some of its spatial dynamics. Alcântara’s Rua José Dias Coelho is lined with buildings that were also constructed in the nineteenth century as Lisbon’s port and industry expanded considerably. There are in this street four identical residential buildings reproducing the same architectural model, influenced by the Pombaline style.1 These buildings have been undergoing diverging renovation processes at the impetus of residents or nonresident landlords, which shows in

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the urban landscape in a succession of adjoining buildings whose façades have been rejuvenated (Nos. 26 and 30) or have deteriorated markedly (Nos. 20 and 28).2 The originality of this situation owes much to the transition period experienced by ownership structures in Portugal. Retrospective analysis of the ownership structure of these four buildings sheds light on the dynamics of transformation currently at work. Designed for investment and capital gain, so-called vertical ownership (owning an entire building) was for a long time the dominant model of land and real-estate appropriation in Portugal. Initially, ownership of the street’s buildings was split between two families: one owned Nos. 26, 28 and 30; the other owned No. 20. Currently, only Nos. 20 and 28 – those that have not been renovated – still belong to the same families. Nos. 26 and 30 were progressively sold flat by flat and became joint-ownership properties. As of 2005, most flats in these two buildings were occupied by their new owners. Almost all of them had been sold, either to upper-middle-class newcomers or to former tenants who became owners. This illustrates one of the effects of the public ownership support policies implemented from the late 1980s up until the 2008 financial crisis, which consisted in favouring access to bank credit and setting up a subsidized loan scheme. That policy also coincided with the progressive termination of the rent freeze and prohibition on evictions that had been effective in Lisbon since 1948. As numerous properties returned to the market, following the death of often elderly tenants, rental values increased drastically. This led many households to give up on a now unfavourable rental market to acquire their homes, thereby having to repay banks, which, during the worst of the economic crisis in the late 2000s, did not think twice about ordering many properties to be seized. Rua Coelho is thus home to the cohabitation of two logics of ownership – one inherited, and the other changing rapidly. No. 20 is still fully owned by the Y family (Figure 2.4). Its occupants are mostly family members, housed free of charge or for very small sums, and older tenants who are still protected under the law on rent freezes. The building is also used by an informal network of retirement homes: two flats have been summarily converted to accommodate a dozen elderly co-tenants. This borderline illegal arrangement allows the owners to increase the rather small amount of rent they get from the building – the lack of rent revenue largely accounts for its dilapidated state. A well-identified, although still debated process is at work here (Topalov 1987; Bonneval 2011), as in many buildings of Lisbon’s older central neighbourhoods: the resources derived from ‘frozen’ rentals are considered insufficient by owners to undertake substantial maintenance or renovation work, which causes many buildings to fall slowly but surely into disrepair. The end of the rent-freeze scheme, against a backdrop of strong

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Figure 2.4. Ownership structure, physical transformation of homes and social change: the example of Alcântara’s Rua Coelho, Lisbon, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

economic growth and accumulation of capital, boosted the residential economy and real-estate profitability (Chapter 1). The X family, who initially owned three buildings in Rua Coelho, exemplifies this process. Struggling financially and dealing with inheritance, the family had to sell No. 30 – which was then quite run-down – urgently, and therefore for a fairly low price in light of its potential value. This sale gave an opportunity for stable tenants to purchase their homes, thus ensuring a degree of continuity in the occupation of the building. At the same time, it also allowed vacant flats to be filled by new households, all from the middle and upper classes. The building’s communal areas were renovated with the agreement of all the owners after six years of negotiation. The coexistence of the new, well-off residents and of the economically more fragile former tenants in the building largely contributed to this long delay. The solution they came to consisted in opening a joint bank account and setting up a loan scheme between co-owners. As a result, formally, the renovated building contains both converted properties and homes which have remained in their original state. Things are different at No. 26: the building was entirely renovated before being sold. Part of the funds from the previous transaction had gone back into extensive renovation work in the building and in the individual flats, at a time when its occupation did not pose much of a problem (several flats were vacant or occupied by very old tenants). The real-estate strategy pursued was quite different: in

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this case, the objective was to ensure as much profitability as possible, and to make significant capital gains by selling each home at the high price allowed by the booming market. The social effects of this strategy were much more pronounced: a few years after the sale, residents were all newcomers from the middle and upper classes, and most owned their home. Beyond the specificity of that individual situation, this example again reflects the impact of the ownership structure and its changes on the paces and forms of gentrification. These changes can be explained by major macroeconomic trends (the consolidation of a residential economy), significant policy shifts (the deregulation of the real-estate market and promotion of private ownership) and profound cultural changes (the shift from the vertical ownership model to horizontal ownership). However, they are also strongly dependent on local contexts (local housing markets) and on the situations and economic strategies of landlords. The number of units and the influence of ‘slum landlords’ must also be taken into account. Some landlords earn more by providing very steeply priced rentals to households who are otherwise excluded from the private rental market (undocumented workers, immigrant families) than by putting them back on the market after renovation. Also, some landlords in neighbourhoods that are in the process of being regenerated adopt a wait-and-see approach, and cease putting any money into maintaining their properties, letting them decay without any concern for the well-being of the occupants who sometimes stay there for many years. Lastly, both public and private actors may adopt stalling strategies, for instance by acquiring a few units and subsequently stopping maintaining the building in order to buy the other units on the cheap. The combination of all these elements results in complex, sometimes seemingly paradoxical situations, in which the ownership structure and the owners’ intentions accelerate social change in some cases, and hinder it in others. CONCLUSION There is no sense in analysing gentrification without considering the built environment in which it takes place. Indeed, in all its forms, it plays a key role in the paces and forms of the process. When architectural, locational and ownership conditions are fulfilled, gentrification can spread quickly. When one of these conditions is not met, gentrification can be greatly constrained, and as a result slowed down or stalled. Our point here is not to argue that the influence of urban forms and structures should be considered a law governing whether the process is possible and how it unfolds. These forms do not matter in and of themselves; what matters is the meaning conferred on them by societies at a given time in their history and the trajectory

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of the cities they inhabit and produce. The built environment influences gentrification only because it is a social product, the outcome of several eras, of different (economic, political and architectural) cycles, and of its perception by certain social groups, at a given point and in specific circumstances. However, the working classes are not condemned to live in slums everywhere and at all times if they want to stay in their neighbourhood, even when it is gentrifying. Attributing the presence of the more modest populations solely to the existence of an older, run-down housing stock would be a gross oversimplification. First, this would underestimate what historical urban sociology studies have taught us on traditional forms of occupation in older housing stock and on the ability of the working classes to transform their homes to make them less inconvenient and better suited to their needs. Furthermore, as we will see in Chapter 7, in some gentrifying neighbourhoods working-class inhabitants manage to implement residential or propertymanagement strategies that give them access to non-dilapidated fractions of older housing stock or to self-renovated properties. Also, we should not neglect the political efforts made by some municipalities to produce quality social housing in such places, and to allow struggling households to live in restored older properties. Public schemes to renovate older properties and the introduction of rent-regulation schemes have not mechanically resulted in the eviction of the more vulnerable populations everywhere in the short or long term. Whether they are based on affection, on solidarity or – more often than not – on shared interests, the ties sometimes forged between landlords and tenants can act to counterbalance the market’s predatory rationality and the failure on the part of public authorities to sufficiently regulate the social outcomes of their policies. Obviously, we should not underestimate the varying amounts of realestate market pressure or the social relations of domination that largely contribute to determining the living conditions of working-class residents. Still, all the above elements show that in some circumstances these residents can draw on a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the local dynamics at work or on their ability to mobilize technical, social and sometimes economic skills to stay in their neighbourhoods and improve their living conditions.

Notes 1. Pombaline architecture takes its name from the Marquis of Pombal, who played a prominent role in the reconstruction of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake (particularly in Baixa, the lower part of the city). It is characterized by a relatively spare neoclassical style and by its rationality. 2. This is similar to findings reported by Francesca Sirna (2004) with regard to Rue de la République in Marseilles.

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References Bonneval, Loïc. 2011. ‘Le contrôle des loyers empêche-t-il l’investissement dans l’immobilier?’, Métropolitiques, 12 November. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https:// metropolitiques.eu/Le-controle-des-loyers-empeche-t-il-l-investissement-dans-limmobilier.html. Charmes, Eric. 2006. La Rue, village ou décor? Parcours dans deux rues de Belleville. Paris: Creaphis. Duany, Andres. 2001. ‘Three Cheers for “Gentrification”’, The American Enterprise 12(3): 36–39. Lévy, Jean-Pierre. 1998. ‘Dynamiques du peuplement résidentiel’, Sociétés contemporaines 29: 43–72. Lévy-Vroelant, Claire. 2001. ‘Les investissements matériels dans le logement’, in JeanYves Authier, Bernard Bensoussan, Jean-Pierre Lévy and Claire Lévy-Vroelant (eds), Du domicile à la ville, vivre en quartier ancien. Paris: Anthropos, pp. 51–75. Sirna, Francesca. 2004. ‘Quand le classement des uns fait le déclassement des autres’, in Pierre Fournier and Sylvie Mazzella (eds), Marseille, entre ville et ports. Les destins de la rue de la République. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 120–35. Topalov, Christian. 1987. Le Logement, une marchandise impossible. Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (FNSP). Van Criekingen, Mathieu, and Antoine Fleury. 2006. ‘La ville branchée: gentrification et dynamiques commerciales à Paris et à Bruxelles’, Belgeo 1–2: 113–34. Zukin, Sharon. 1982. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CH A P TER

3 ON TH E DI V ER SIT Y OF GEN TR I FI ER S Structural Effects and Contextual Effects

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Anaïs Collet

T

he question of the sociological backgrounds of gentrifying residents and of their motivations for moving into working-class inner-city neighbourhoods has been traditionally central in studies on gentrification. It is a prominent subject in a number of pioneering works – particularly in the first attempts at modelling the phenomenon, the famous ‘stage models’ of the late 1970s. Often simplified, those models are more refined and detailed than might be assumed. They combine variables on the socio-occupational characterization of households and elements for the analysis of the conditions and rationales of their property transaction. Their authors, Phillip Clay (1979) and Dennis Gale (1979), evidenced a first group of gentrifiers composed of ‘pioneers’ working in the arts, ready to take risks, to renovate their home themselves, and pursuing a nonconformist lifestyle in a socially mixed environment. A second group of ‘pioneers’ is made up of young executives and holders of intellectual occupations who are reassured by the presence of the first group and move with their families into homes that they pay to have renovated. At this point, some real-estate agents and speculators realize the neighbourhood’s potential and begin to promote it and to perform smallscale renovations; the media and banks start to welcome such initiatives. The third phase can be identified as that of the ‘invaders’, with mass arrivals of households from the salaried or independent upper middle classes. These

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households no longer only move into older properties that need to be rehabilitated; they may occupy new properties built by a developer or the public authorities as part of large-scale renovation projects. Real-estate prices then increase rapidly. The neighbourhood acquires a reputation in the media and among bankers and better-off households as a safe place to invest. The newcomers in the last phase, called the ‘consolidators’, have enough resources to cope with the rising prices. They are older, wealthier and more conservative households, working in the business sector or in top-level executive positions, who seize the opportunity of a worthwhile speculative transaction. During this phase, private interests again coincide with those of public authorities, who are eager to put a positive ‘label’ on the neighbourhood, for instance by redefining it as a historic neighbourhood. These models are built around successive typical profiles of gentrifiers, characterized, especially in Clay’s work, by their degree of aversion to risk (the economic risk pertaining to a real-estate investment in a neighbourhood whose rise in value is uncertain, and the risk of tensions relating to cohabitation with social groups whose lifestyles are different) and, in Gale’s work, by the combination of type of household composition, educational level, average income level and type of occupation. The role of the public and private actors who structure the real-estate market is mentioned, but this model tends to assign a predominant role to a logic of invasion/succession inspired by the Chicago school, according to which gentrifiers, owing to their sociological backgrounds, are the ones who progressively change the nature of the neighbourhood and make it attractive to other social groups. These stage models have therefore helped to convey the idea that gentrification is a linear, self-generating process – as if it were driven by a force of its own. They have also reinforced the oversimplified systematic perception of artists as ‘pioneers’ of gentrification processes, lending them a positive image of trailblazers, whereas private-sector executives are perceived as less adventurous and greedier ‘invaders’. Empirical observation indeed challenges these representations: in 1984, Damaris Rose rightly pointed out that a neighbourhood’s gentrification was the result of multiple logics rather than of a single causal process (Rose 1984). The analysis of concrete cases shows that a wide variety of residents may be called ‘gentrifiers’ for one reason or another; their profiles seem influenced at least as much by place and time as by the ‘degree of maturity’ in the process. Depending on whether a neighbourhood is highly central or suburban, on its housing stock and on the urban policies conducted within it, the ‘pioneers’ of gentrification may be private-sector executives, teachers or artists, and the ‘invaders’ may be single individuals or families. Also, the gentrification processes that began in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s did not involve the same types of gentrifiers as the historical processes of the 1960s and 1970s,

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if only because the generation of young residents do not live in the same economic and urban environment as their elders. Given the duration and complexity of processes of urban change, these different types of gentrifiers in effect generally coexist for some time, rather than replacing each other mechanically. Lastly, these residents may all be called ‘gentrifiers’ insofar as they are all middle or upper class and come into these neighbourhoods with lifestyles, expectations and projects that reflect that social position. Yet they have varied relationships to their new homes and neighbourhoods and different ways of gentrifying. In other words, to understand the profiles of the gentrifiers, their motivations to move in and their ways of inhabiting the neighbourhood, we need to look closely at the effects of local contexts (location, housing stock, local urban policies) and of the social, economic and urban structures within which they operate at the local and national levels: trends in the structure of employment and qualifications, in the social division of space, in the realestate market. Only a combined examination of all the above parameters can help us understand which types of residents can be attracted by which neighbourhoods, and for what purposes. This also enables a shift from a descriptive approach to an explanatory one, leading to a better understanding of the drivers of gentrification and the concrete and specific forms it takes. This chapter implements this approach by conducting a comparison between two markedly different cases of gentrification, in Lyons’ Pentes de la Croix-Rousse and in Bas-Montreuil. The former is a hyper-central neighbourhood consisting exclusively of collective housing in a large provincial city; the latter is located in the inner suburbs of Paris and has its share of single-family houses and workshops. The two neighbourhoods also have very different urban and political histories. In the Pentes, young, educated households (or in the course of being educated) began arriving in the late 1960s; in Bas-Montreuil, the population did not start changing until the mid1970s. The main difference between the two lies in the respective paces of their gentrification: the availability of numerous very cheap vacant properties in the Pentes explains the very quick change in the residents’ backgrounds from the late 1970s onwards; in Bas-Montreuil, factories slowly closed one by one, which was not as conducive to a swift appropriation of the neighbourhood. More broadly, deindustrialization, the growth of the service sector, new urban policy trends and swings on the real-estate market did not affect the two neighbourhoods in the same way. As a result, the transformations they experienced, though they may overall fall under the ‘gentrification’ label, were fairly different. The residents who moved into the two neighbourhoods in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s unsurprisingly had notable similarities in their backgrounds – their social position, roughly defined by high levels of cultural capital and less high levels of economic capital,

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justifies the use of the word ‘gentrification’. Yet artists, executives, families, students, those who rent and those who buy to invest or speculate do not occupy the same place or succeed each other in the same way. We need to untangle the effects of structural and contextual, global and local factors that shape the two processes of gentrification as we look at the backgrounds of the residents involved and the rationales for their move into the neighbourhoods studied. Stage models will be put to the test in these two cases on the basis of statistical sources. We used data from the population censuses of 1990, 1999 and 2006, in particular concerning the residents of each neighbourhood who lived in another municipality at the time of the previous census;1 from notarial documents featuring information on the profiles of homebuyers and the characteristics of the properties acquired for two control years (1998 and 2007); and from interviews with gentrifiers who moved into the two neighbourhoods at various times. First, we put forward evidence that structural trends in employment and qualifications, at the national and metropolitan levels, explain the profiles of the new residents just as much as changes specific to each neighbourhood. We then show that the real-estate markets in both neighbourhoods, which are affected by metropolitan trends that are in some cases inflected by municipal policies, also explain the profiles of homebuyers in the two neighbourhoods at various times and the logics of their investments. Lastly, at an even more local scale, we show that the urban morphology of the neighbourhoods also largely accounts for differences between the types of households they attract and their ways of gentrifying and living in the neighbourhood. PERIOD- AND GENERATION-RELATED EFFECTS: TRANSFORMATIONS IN SKILLED EMPLOYMENT IN THE SERVICE SECTOR AND BACKGROUNDS OF GENTRIFIERS Gentrification processes always reflect a growth of the service sector and a rising share of qualified individuals in society; both trends have accelerated for around fifty years, thereby mechanically increasing the number of potential gentrifiers. However, we need to look at the local variations and the temporalities of this broad shift to understand the variety of backgrounds of gentrifying residents and their residential projects. Specifically, period- and generation-related effects upset the chronology of gentrification; this is visible both in Bas-Montreuil and in the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse when one looks in particular at the place of artistic occupations and the evolution of gentrifiers’ real-estate strategies.

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Artists: Increasingly Numerous ‘Pioneers’ While models of gentrification systematically depict artists as the pioneers of these processes, here statistics show that in chronological terms they are not particularly trendsetters in either of the neighbourhoods under study. This can be seen as a period effect, resulting from a transformation of the social structure at a given time, concerning in particular the social space where gentrifiers come from. In Bas-Montreuil, the ‘gentrifiers’ of the 1980s – meaning the new residents listed in the 1990 census and belonging to the upper or middle classes – were first and foremost senior executives and holders of intermediate occupations in the private and public sectors, in health and social work, schoolteachers, lecturers and scientists. The number of information, arts and performing-arts professionals who moved into the neighbourhood during that period was not particularly high. By contrast, over the following decade, their number tripled, to the extent that they made up over a third of the new residents within the category of ‘executives and higher intellectual professionals’ who moved during the 1990s. The number of public-sector executives and teachers who moved in decreased and the other categories of gentrifiers kept arriving in similar proportions. The number of middle- and upper-class newcomers did not increase from one period to the next. Gentrification did not accelerate; it continued as much as a result of these arrivals as of the departure of working-class households (and, to a lesser extent, of their less numerous arrivals). Though their numbers remained stable from the 1980s to the 1990s, the backgrounds of gentrifiers changed, with a new and massive influx of information, arts and performing-arts professionals in the 1990s. In the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, they were not as numerous: only 10 per cent of gentrifiers in the 1990s were information, arts and performing-arts professionals (compared to 17 per cent in Bas-Montreuil). However, the proportion of these professionals among the newcomers also increased here: their numbers more than doubled between the 1980s and the 1990s. All of the other upper and middle categories also saw their numbers increase, but at a slower rate. This rise also contradicts the commonplace representation of artists as pioneers of gentrification. This does not mean they did not play a leading role in the physical and symbolic transformations of these places, but it must be noted that their proportion was smaller in the early stages of the process than in the second phase. Most importantly, their share increased simultaneously in the two neighbourhoods, which suggests that the profiles of gentrifiers do not solely depend on the stage in the gentrification process. The concurrent growth in the proportion of information, arts and performing-arts professionals in the two neighbourhoods, even though gentri-

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fication was an older and faster process in the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, reveals a period-related effect. Employment in cultural occupations did indeed expand sharply in the 1990s – by 19 per cent, whereas overall employment only rose by 4 per cent (Patureau and Jauneau 2004). This dynamic, which was largely due to the growth of the audiovisual and performing-arts sectors, was particularly keenly felt in Paris and its immediate environs, which are home to the headquarters of TV channels, national press groups, and many audiovisual companies and publishing houses (1.7 per cent of the French working population work in cultural occupations; 4 per cent do so in the Paris region). The profile of gentrifiers in the 1980s seemed to partly result from global transformations of the social structure in the previous two decades – with the rise of upper and middle categories spurred by the explosive growth in the numbers of teachers, health and social-work professionals and engineers. The shift observed in the 1990s reflected a national trend whereby the group of information, arts and performing-arts professionals experienced the most rapid numerical growth. Clearly, to understand the profile of gentrifiers, we need to take into account trends in the structure of employment as much as the logic of succession induced by transformations in the neighbourhood. However, we need to be careful not to replace the simplification of the stage model by another form of simplification consisting in deducing the profile of gentrifiers from the profile of the middle and upper classes at a given moment in time. Interviews also remind us of the limitations of an approach focused on socio-occupational categories: the ‘information, arts and performing-arts professionals’ who moved in during the 1980s were not the same ones as in the 2000s. An example of this is the cohabitation in a Bas-Montreuil street of a sculptor living on 700 euros a month, who arrived twenty years ago to share a communal working and living space, and of a director of photography for TV, who earns 4,000 euros a month, and came to Montreuil to invest in real estate and have a loft worthy of a catalogue. Job Insecurity, Social Downgrading, Depoliticization and Relationships to Housing Relationships to housing and resettlement rationales also change from one period to the next. On that front as well, however, the neighbourhood’s progressive upgrading does not explain everything. Admittedly, as gentrification progresses, the reduction of risk pertaining to the residential choices and real-estate projects of gentrifiers partly explains the rise of investment-based rationales. But the latter owes at least as much to transformations in the economic and social conditions encountered by the different generations (Mannheim [1928] 1952).2

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In the two neighbourhoods under study, a distinction can be made between at least two generations of gentrifiers who do not have the same outlooks on their living environment or the same lifestyles. In both places, the gentrifiers of the 1970s and 1980s belonged to the baby-boomer generation. Born before 1955, they enjoyed particularly favourable economic conditions when they entered the labour market (Chauvel 2002). They developed a hedonistic ethos that departed from the culture of their original social circles and that of their parents’ generation. Self-fulfilment was important to them, whether it was achieved through work, leisure or activism. Quitting a job they did not like was not a worrying prospect, as it was relatively easy to find work then. That generation also witnessed the establishment of youth as a distinct social age, a time for the definition or redefinition of social aspirations that were less determined by social background and intergenerational transmission than previously (Galland 2009). Finally, it was characterized by an intense politicization, through the student movement in particular: May 1968, the war in Algeria and the rise of nuclear power were some of the subjects on which students might have been expected to take a stance then. These few roughly outlined structuring elements explain why gentrifiers in the 1970s and 1980s were largely young people for whom material security was not a great concern, who were eager to get involved locally and, in some cases, propose political projects for the neighbourhood. Working-class neighbourhoods like the Pentes or Bas-Montreuil, where free and cheap properties were available, were spaces for individual and collective experiments of all kinds. Affordable accommodation allowed them to take time to find their way – which could entail resuming or extending their studies, seeking fulfilment through art or activism, or opting for an atypical pace of life or family setup. Access to large premises made political experiments possible, for instance in small self-managed groups of residents, co-ops, meetings or collective activities. They were rather undemanding when it came to the properties themselves: the main thing that mattered was to have affordable space, whether as an owner or a tenant, and an environment conducive to encountering friends and fellow activists and tolerant of unconventional lifestyles. The generation born in the years from around 1965 to 1975 experienced a very different youth, marked by the political disillusions of the 1980s and much more difficult conditions of entry into the labour market, as the youth unemployment rate two years after graduating now fluctuated between 20 and 33 per cent (as opposed to 4 per cent maximum for the previous generation). The idea that work should be fulfilling had spread, but employment and working conditions had deteriorated. The growth of public employment stopped. In the cultural sector, this resulted in outsourcing towards the private sector or requirements to shift from salaried work to freelancing. In the

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field of public policy, associations now saw their staff numbers expand and their work become increasingly professionalized. As Robert Castel noted, ‘work may not have lost its importance, but it has lost much of its substance, from which it used to draw much of its power to protect. The generalized mobility of work situations and professional trajectories places uncertainty at the heart of the future in the world of work’ (Castel 2003: 80). There was also more and more uncertainty as to the future pensions of these workers with irregular careers. Amid this backdrop, for those who could afford to do so without getting into too much debt, buying a home was a way to secure their trajectory and limit the impact of work-related uncertainty by at least ensuring their housing and building assets in the process. The real-estate market also called for this in new ways: the real-estate bubbles of the early 1990s (in the Paris area) and the 2000s showed tenants and would-be owners that they were not immune to a dramatic increase in prices. They had to ‘settle the question of housing to be able to focus on something else’, as one interviewee in Montreuil put it. In the two neighbourhoods, the gentrifiers of the 1990s and 2000s were more eager than their elders to become homeowners; inherited property became an increasingly discriminating variable. The slowdown in economic growth also had the effect of ending the phase of strong likelihood of upward social mobility for baby boomers (Peugny 2013). The increasingly frequent downward trajectories can shape a distinct relationship to one’s living environment, which is placed at the service of an effort to re-establish one’s social position. Nearly half of the gentrifiers I met in Bas-Montreuil were in such a situation. They came from the traditional bourgeoisie or from the ‘new middle classes’, had less stable and less well-paid jobs than their parents, and their real-estate purchasing power was weakened by rising prices: they were threatened with residential downgrading in addition to social downgrading. Having to turn to undervalued neighbourhoods, they tended to be eager to compensate by putting effort into their home, which had to be exceptional in some sense – by having a garden, a large terrace, a very large surface area, unique character and so on – to bring value to its residents. Renovation and decoration work became more important. THE EFFECTS OF REAL-ESTATE MARKETS: THE PACES OF GENTRIFICATION AND RATIONALES OF PROPERTY PURCHASES Changes in the global social structure and their local variations partly account, as we have seen, for the profiles of the ‘gentrifying’ residents and the underlying logics of their moves into former working-class neighbourhoods.

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The functioning of local real-estate markets likewise influences the pace of gentrification as well as the backgrounds and motivations of gentrifiers. The overarching trends affecting the entire urban areas of Paris and Lyons combine with the effects of local policies designed to support or counter them. The Housing Stock: Global Market, Local Policies The urban areas of Paris and Lyons have not experienced the exact same real-estate trends since the 1980s. Additionally, housing and real-estate policies have been fairly different in the Pentes and in Bas-Montreuil; lastly, the two neighbourhoods occupy different positions in their respective housing markets. Comparison suggests that the combination of these three levels exposes local real-estate markets to more or less rapid gentrification. In the 1990s, in response to the general sluggishness of the real-estate market, local policies were fairly effective, resulting in the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse in a notable acceleration of gentrification, and in Bas-Montreuil, on the contrary, in the moderation of urban and social change. In the 2000s, on the other hand, the market played a very powerful role, which also had different effects in the two neighbourhoods that can be attributed to a greater extent to their respective places in local housing markets. In the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, after elected representatives rallied to the idea of protecting and renovating older buildings rather than demolishing them in the late 1970s, the prevailing policy in the 1980s and 1990s mainly aimed to put old, dilapidated properties back on the market and upgrade the historic neighbourhood. During those years, the neighbourhood’s housing stock was particularly attractive to would-be buyers: owing to its working-class character and the presence of unrenovated old properties, it remained cheaper than the surrounding city-centre neighbourhoods until the turn of the 2000s. At the same time, it benefited from the symbolic upgrade of historic inner-city neighbourhoods and, most importantly, received new attention from public authorities with the implementation of a number of policies to support the renovation of older properties (with several OPAH [opération programmée d’amélioration de l’habitat; scheduled housing-improvement scheme] rehabilitation programmes in succession starting in the 1970s, and the classification of a sector as a PRI [périmètre de restauration immobilière; real-estate refurbishment area] in the mid-1980s) and to enhance heritage (such as the creation of a zone for the protection of architectural, urban and landscaped heritage in 1994 and the neighbourhood’s inscription on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1998). All of the above boosted the symbolic upgrade of the existing housing stock, highlighting the neighbourhood’s distinctive architecture in the form of the canut buildings and flats (named after the silk workers, or canuts, for whom they were built), which

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became prized properties. On the other hand, the construction of social housing units became practically impossible. In the early 1990s, several buildings that had not yet been renovated were squatted, not to house alternative lifestyle projects, as in the two previous decades, but rather in the name of the fight against intensifying real-estate speculation. Michel Noir’s right-wing (RPR; Rally for the Republic) municipality promoted luxury real-estate ventures and also supported the police as they forced squatters out. Prices and rents, which had increased very quickly in the 1980s (without yet catching up to those recorded in the surrounding neighbourhoods), made a 40 per cent leap in the neighbourhood’s central sector, where the majority of renovation projects took place, in the 1990s, whereas the market was overall sluggish in the rest of the city (Bonneval 2008). After the older housing stock was profoundly transformed over those two decades (with some big property owners making large-scale grabs), the increase in prices was particularly steep in the Pentes in the 2000s (from 900 euros per square metre in 1998 to 3,000 in 20073), thanks in part to the efforts of Gérard Collomb’s left-wing (PS; Socialist Party) municipality to restore public spaces and boost tourism. By the early 2000s, the Pentes was a booming neighbourhood, whose centrality and heritage value were undeniable; over 60 per cent of the working residents there now belong to the upper and middle socio-occupational categories. Although in 1975 the social structures of the two neighbourhoods were comparable (with three-quarters of blue-collar workers and employees in the working population), the transformation was far slower in Bas-Montreuil. The policies conducted in this former working-class suburb pursued much more varied objectives than in the Pentes. In response to the economic crisis that broke in the mid-1970s, the Communist municipality initially started to bring new activities into the former industrial spaces, bearing all the cost of the conversion of many of them for the service sector. At the same time, it attempted to dissuade speculation, especially in the area adjacent to the bourgeois municipality of Vincennes, by exercising its pre-emptive rights. Faced with depopulation, the increasing dilapidation of the housing stock and impoverishment, it encouraged OPAH rehabilitation programmes while also building new social housing units. These measures were designed to meet a repopulation objective set out by the then deputy mayor for urban planning (and subsequently mayor from 1984 to 2008), Jean-Pierre Brard, in 1983: ‘retaining the older population, having new populations come in to ensure the neighbourhood’s rejuvenation, significantly decreasing the number of immigrant workers’ (Toubon et al. 1990: 8). While the older buildings were thus for the most part left standing and renovated and the suburb’s identity was progressively highlighted, there was no genuine heritage enhancement policy in place, much less any effort to develop tourism. At any rate, the renovated buildings (flats in small investment properties that did not have



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the architectural value of the canut buildings) and the newly built social and affordable housing units did not constitute a particularly attractive housing stock. Only the industrial premises and single-family houses might have exceptional potential given extensive renovation. However, the professionals in that sector (property dealers) were not particularly welcomed by municipal authorities, who were concerned with avoiding a price boom on the real-estate market. Indeed, until the late 1990s, prices barely fluctuated – the town remained unaffected by Paris’s 1991–1992 real-estate bubble. Only in the early 2000s did they begin rising sharply along with prices in Paris, and gentrification suddenly accelerated. The Backgrounds of Property Buyers and the Rationales for Their Purchases Fluctuations on real-estate markets and the ways in which they are supported or countered by public authorities thus influence the pace of gentrification, but so do the backgrounds of the actors in these markets and their relationships to housing units as real-estate properties. In the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, renovation grants in the 1980s and 1990s made tenants more vulnerable in the short and medium term (in the absence of mandatory rent caps and the scarcity of checks within the framework of the OPAH programmes). However, it allowed owners – whether they were long-term older residents, their heirs, or younger working-class, middle-class or bourgeois buyers – to remain in their home or to sell it for a profit a few years later. These upgrades put some of them on the path to an upward residential trajectory. However, they also encouraged speculation, by investors who received tax exemptions in PRIs, or people who inherited several properties or even entire buildings that they renovated in superficial and standardized ways, thereby accruing profitable rental property assets. Such speculative behaviours became increasingly frequent in the 2000s, against the backdrop of a nationwide rise in prices, which was particularly steep in Lyons. The gentrifiers of the 1980s, who were now quite familiar with the neighbourhood and had observed its evolution, now had more resources, and they were not the last to make investments in rental properties and to speculate – for instance, by buying a studio apartment for their children, a room in their building or a flat to rent out to young newcomers. By 1998, one out of four property buyers in the Pentes already lived in the neighbourhood (as tenants or owners); as of 2007 this proportion was 30 per cent. The proportion of business executives and intermediary occupations among buyers also increased (particularly for engineers and technicians), to the detriment of public-sector executives, teachers, and information, arts and performing-arts professionals.

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Figure 3.1. Exposed beams and floor tiles: rehabilitation works in progress in a canut apartment, in the Croix-Rousse area, Lyon, 2007. © Anaïs Collet.

During this process, the market became polarized around the canuts, the neighbourhood’s typical properties, which were increasingly in demand. From the early 1990s onwards, prospective buyers among the gentrifiers sought out these buildings and homes characterized by their stone stairways, high ceilings, exposed beams and tiled floors. Endowed with symbolic and economic value, they constituted a safe investment and a distinctive home. In the 2000s, competition was tough over the last canuts that had yet to be renovated: those who struggled with the work complained about the inadequate efforts of their predecessors and strove to highlight the historical elements in these places, even if this sometimes meant incurring the cost of sourcing missing beams or tiles from elsewhere. In Bas-Montreuil, the real-estate market in the 1990s fit the descriptions of the first stage of gentrification in Clay and Gale’s studies: on average, prices remained very low compared to those of the adjacent twentieth arrondissement but the upper and middle classes – especially from Paris – were already overrepresented among buyers. Unsurprisingly, they bought properties that were a little bigger and more expensive than average, but also often older. Comparison with their peers who chose to remain in Paris and buy prop-

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Figure 3.2. Urban fabric of Bas-Montreuil: single-family houses with gardens, small industrial premises and low-rise apartment buildings, 2009. © Anaïs Collet.

erty in the twentieth arrondissement is particularly enlightening here: those who turned to Montreuil spent similar amounts on average, but for far bigger flats or houses. This logic is accentuated for yet-to-be-converted industrial premises, which at that time attracted many Parisian holders of intellectual and artistic occupations, who spent similar amounts of money but acquired vast amounts of floor space. Some properties became emblems of the neighbourhood’s nascent gentrification and of the ‘bargains’ that could be found there: the small workers’ houses, within their long and narrow back gardens, and especially the former factories converted into lofts, featured prominently in the property sections of magazines. However, in the context of the price hikes of the 2000s, these ‘atypical properties’ became rare and very expensive. By 2007, the market reflected the neighbourhood’s rapid gentrification. Prices per square metre had tripled; a quarter of the buyers were executives or holders of intermediate occupations; the proportion of Parisians among them had increased, as had the proportion of people from Montreuil, especially executives and holders of intermediate occupations – likely early gentrifiers making a second purchase. The profiles of the sellers had also changed even more markedly, with a very sharp decrease in the number of pensioners, entirely compensated by the rise in the number of upper- and middle-class professionals. At the same time, the data suggest a change in buying rationales, which were now less about making a good real-estate deal and more about simply managing to find a home. As prices in Paris were

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Figure 3.3. In Bas-Montreuil, former industrial premises converted into a home, 2009. © Anaïs Collet.

extremely high, buying property in Bas-Montreuil was a means to acquire a slightly bigger home than in Paris (although the gap was now narrower), but also, and crucially, to spend far less. The properties acquired by Parisian executives and holders of intermediate occupations were in effect less exceptional than in 1998 when related to the average of the transactions made in the neighbourhood: average prices were barely higher and surface areas were similar. While the stage model provides a useful initial blueprint for analysing the real-estate markets of gentrifying neighbourhoods, we can see here that there are numerous variations from one specific setting to the next, in particular regarding the role of public authorities and the backgrounds of investors and speculators. National and even international trends also have contrasting impacts depending on the neighbourhood’s position in the urban fabric. The spectacular surge in prices in the 2000s thus seems to have resulted in an influx of increasingly elite populations and in the spread of real-estate investment practices in the highly central, heritage-oriented neighbourhood of the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, whereas in Paris’s inner suburbs it led to an extension of gentrification to increasingly less-specific neighbourhoods and properties.

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THE EFFECTS OF URBAN MORPHOLOGIES: FAMILY SETUPS, PROFESSIONAL OCCUPATIONS AND LIFESTYLES The diversity of gentrification processes also owes much to differences in the location and housing stock of the neighbourhoods in question. Admittedly, by definition, these neighbourhoods are older and centrally located in their urban area, but merely observing this is not enough to describe and comprehend them. There are all sorts of old urban areas and various forms of centrality in the city; these spatial and morphological configurations give these neighbourhoods their functions and relative places in the city, and make them attractive to different segments of the population. In the 2000s, the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse was a neighbourhood of young and childless professionals, which was relatively quiet during weekdays, and a place for going out on nights and weekends. Bas-Montreuil was a much more familyoriented gentrifying neighbourhood, as well as a neighbourhood where people worked from home or in dedicated spaces – it was harder to find places to go out at night there, at least until the late 2000s. Central and Young vs Peripheral and Family-Friendly: Stages of Life and Everyday Practices Until the 1970s, the population in the Pentes was older than in the rest of the city. From 1975, it became significantly younger, clearly as a result of an influx of young people from outside the neighbourhood: almost half of the people who moved in during the 1980s and 1990s were aged 15 to 29. The neighbourhood’s location – within close proximity to Lyons’ political, cultural and retail centre but somewhat protected from heavy traffic owing to its topography – and its housing stock – older, small collective housing units – made it a particularly attractive neighbourhood for students and young people moving out of their parents’ homes. Gentrification was accordingly not a familial phenomenon there. In 2006, 53 per cent of households in the Pentes were single-person households; fewer than one in four households had one or more children; and the proportion of couples, with or without children, was the lowest in Lyons. The neighbourhood became specialized in accommodating students (like other areas of Lyons) and especially highly educated young people. This specialization accelerated in the 2000s and had effects on local life. The pace of social life, business life and nightlife, together with ways of acting and interacting in public space, largely reflected the presence of these young childless graduates. For the young gentrifiers I met, the point of moving into the Pentes was indeed to enjoy their youth and, if possible, to make a worthwhile real-estate investment. Whether living alone, as couples or in flatshares, they generally

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work but are trying to prolong a student lifestyle while enjoying higher incomes: living one day at a time, without planning for the future, making time for nights out and leisure activities, with dense networks of friends that replace family, which is kept at a distance. The Pentes make such a life possible in the heart of the city’s cultural and nightlife scene, and in a neighbourhood where they are among their peers and can easily meet them in places that they like – unpretentious bars, community cafes or concert venues. When asked about where they go out, they readily list a number of places; the list of their leisure activities is long. Bas-Montreuil, owing to a location that is relatively central on the scale of the urban area but peripheral in relation to Paris and its housing stock, is home to a much more family-oriented form of gentrification. The housing stock is more heterogeneous than in the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, but it has the specificity of including a significant proportion of individual houses. Although these houses are often small, they have a garden or a yard and are more conducive to extensions than flats. Indeed, the proportion of large homes has kept increasing during the course of the neighbourhood’s gentrification, not least because of the extensions of houses and the merging of small flats. The profiles of the households who moved into the neighbourhood reflected its attractiveness to families, with a far lower share of 15–29-year-olds than in the Pentes, and far more thirtysomethings and families. Overall, a third of the neighbourhood’s households include one or more children. The aspirations and needs of these gentrifiers are obviously not the same. A key concern for the gentrifiers I spoke to was to achieve a transition towards family life without giving up too much on the professional and social fronts. They accepted to go and live in Montreuil because they needed a larger home for their children, easier access to the outdoors and a quieter environment than in Paris (from which most of them had moved out), but also because, despite being outside of Paris’s administrative limits, the neighbourhood is connected by the metro. Looking for a large home in the suburbs is also a way for women to reconcile their family and professional lives, which often entails freelancing. For these gentrifiers, making a home for one’s family should not mean compromising the parents’ social life: the children often share a bedroom in order to leave a room for communal use or in some cases for visiting friends – including Parisians whom they invite over to spend the weekend. Still, soon after the move, family life prevails and dominates concerns and relationships with the neighbours and the city. Children are at the heart of social encounters between neighbours and at school, and accelerate the development of new friendships. As they discover the neighbourhood and the city, these gentrifiers are particularly interested by activities and places dedicated to children. Unsurprisingly, they are also concerned with matters of education; they gather information about schools and sometimes become active in networks of parents.

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The Concentration of Certain Professional Circles and Its Effects on Local Life Montreuil’s gentrifiers are also particularly present in their neighbourhood, including during weekdays. The high numbers of artists and freelancers in the cultural sector obviously has to do with this. It is a result, as we have seen, of employment trends in the Paris region but also of specific features of the neighbourhood that reinforce their concentration (in proportion, they are found twice as much among residents who moved into the neighbourhood during the 1990s as in the general population of the Paris region). The first of these features relates to its urban morphology, which it inherited from its industrial history: very large numbers of small industrial premises started becoming available in the 1980s and, unlike the large warehouses and factories of other sectors in the inner suburbs, they were accessible to private citizens, artists and freelancers eager to work there and to live there discreetly. The neighbourhood’s tradition of craftsmanship and manual labour also made it attractive, allowing cabinetmakers, jewellers, stage decorators, costume designers, sculptors, musicians and video artists to make noise and dust without upsetting the local social order too badly. The neighbourhood’s geographical location also made it attractive to professionals in the cultural sector. While quite far from Paris’s touristic centre, it is near an emerging professional hub for those people working in film, photography, graphic design or publishing. Having chosen an alternative position in their professional field (by specializing in documentary filmmaking, art photography, independent ‘auteur’ design or activist publishing, freelancing rather than being salaried, and holding an artistic or technical function rather than a commercial one), their centre of Paris is in the east, in the tenth and eleventh arrondissements, around Place de la République, only a fifteen-minute trip from Bas-Montreuil by metro. In these professional circles where networking is vital, word of mouth further contributes to making Bas-Montreuil a neighbourhood of artists and technicians of film, theatre, photography and design. This overrepresentation of freelance, part-time cultural professionals, authors and artists who work from home or live in their workshops has had an impact on the transformation of the neighbourhood. Being very present during weekdays, in the cafés or picking their children up from school, they meet easily and sometimes end up launching professional collaborations. These professionals, particularly visual artists and craftspeople, also have a strong capacity to appropriate and transform places materially; they have skills and tools, and are less apprehensive than other residents when it comes to tearing down walls, changing flooring, installing a bay window or building a staircase. They also have know-how when it comes to working on places symbolically, that is, on the definitions, images and representations asso-

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ciated with them: among our interviewees, one filmmaker was shooting a documentary about the neighbourhood; another was making drawings highlighting the suburb’s architecture; others – journalists and publishers – were making a magazine about the town, promoting the places, initiatives and people they liked. The transformation of the neighbourhood’s image is accelerated by these temporal, material and symbolic investments. Artists in the broader sense do play a specific role in gentrification, but arguably not so much as ‘pioneers’ chronologically speaking, but rather by their dual presence as residents and workers and through the range of resources at their disposal to appropriate new places. However, the aforementioned local specialities, so to speak, have tended to fade away in recent years. Many architectural firms, design agencies and workspaces for young freelancers have opened in the upper part of the Pentes, populating the ground floors and breathing life into the neighbourhood on weekdays. Bas-Montreuil has for its part become attractive to young professionals who work in Paris during the day and offers them places to go out and hip cafés open at night. Beyond the local factors that initially shape the evolutions of the urban fabric and population, gentrification might ultimately be a source of standardization of urban landscapes. CONCLUSION The stage models developed in the United States in the 1970s provide a valuable starting point as we seek to identify the actors of gentrification and the underlying logics of these processes. However, being inspired by Chicago-school sociologists and their writings on the invasion and succession of social groups in the city, they tend to exaggerate the autonomy of urban change. In actual fact, this change is structured, in terms of pace, actors and rationales, by external factors, which we have examined here, ranging from the most global to the most local: changes in the national and local social structures; fluctuations and organization of the metropolitan and local real-estate markets; characteristics of the urban fabric and location of the neighbourhoods. Each of these dimensions influences the profiles of gentrifiers and their residential choices, real-estate investments and ways of living in the neighbourhood in manners that differ according to time and place. This observation has implications that go beyond theory; for instance, it suggests that policymakers should not analyse urban change without considering the impact of transformations in social and economic structures in the city.

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Notes 1. It was unfortunately impossible to consider the data on the new residents in 2006, as the census technique changed after 1999. 2. According to Karl Mannheim’s ([1928] 1952) definition of sociodemographic generations, a generation is formed by individuals with a common situation in terms of social condition and economic and social opportunities, and who share historically situated thinking patterns. 3. Source: notarial data, 1998 and 2007 (Perval database).

References Bonneval, Loïc. 2008. ‘Les Agents immobiliers: place et rôle des intermédiaires sur le marché du logement dans l’agglomération lyonnaise (1990–2006)’, Ph.D. dissertation in sociology. Lyons: Université Lumière Lyon-2. Castel, Robert. 2003. L’Insécurité sociale. Paris: Seuil. Chauvel, Louis. 2002. Le Destin des générations, structure sociale et cohortes en France au XXe siècle, 2nd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Clay, Phillip L. 1979. Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-Class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods. Lexington: Lexington Books. Gale, Dennis. 1979. ‘Middle-Class Resettlement in Older Urban Neighborhoods: The Evidence and the Implications’, Journal of the American Planning Association 45: 293–304. Galland, Olivier. 2009. Les Jeunes. Paris: La Découverte. Mannheim, Karl. [1928] 1952. ‘The Problem of Generations’, in Paul Kecskemeti (ed.), Karl Mannheim: Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 276–320. Patureau, Frédérique, and Yves Jauneau. 2004. ‘L’emploi dans les professions culturelles’, Notes de l’Observatoire de l’emploi culturel 30. Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Peugny, Camille. 2013. Le Destin au berceau. Inégalités et reproduction sociale. Paris: Seuil. Rose, Damaris. 1984. ‘Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Development of Marxist Urban Theory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1(1): 47–74. Toubon, Jean-Claude, Annie Sevin, Annick Tanter and François Jacob. 1990. Le Projet de quartier du Bas-Montreuil, ses effets sur le milieu industriel. Paris: Ministère de l’Équipement – Plan Urbain/Institut d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme de la Région Île-de-France (IAURIF)/Le Champ Urbain/Association de Travaux de l’Urbanisme et Technique (Arturbatec).

Pa rt I I

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entrification is intrinsically linked to urban policies and their evolutions since the 1960s. This is especially the case now that competition between global cities has become the rule (Harvey 2001) and that neoliberal theses permeate urban planning (Lees and Ley 2008). These interactions between urban policies and gentrification in central neighbourhoods have been questioned since the early writings on the phenomenon. The potentially incentivizing character of policies with regard to the gentrification of central, low-income areas has been a concern both in the scholarly literature (Fijalkow and Préteceille 2006)1 and also, more recently, in political and media debates, in France and other Western countries (Baillergeau et al. 2008).2 Generally it has been shown that gentrifying neighbourhoods, at a given point in their trajectory, are targeted by large public investments, in most cases creating the conditions for the process to take root or accelerate. These investments are made within a (local and national) regulatory framework that defines, so to speak, the rules of the game that local actors play. Do urban policies contribute, deliberately or not, to supporting or even boosting gentrification in central low-income neighbourhoods? How do locally engaged public actors position themselves with respect to ongoing gentrification processes? Do they seek to profit from them to transform these neighbourhoods deemed to be in crisis or, conversely, do they work to fight gentrification and its social effects, particularly regarding the eviction of lower-income residents? Answering these questions is no easy task: it appears difficult to make a distinction between urban transformations that directly or indirectly relate to public interventions on space and those induced by private actors (residents, business owners, developers, etc.), as both forms nurture each other. Also, in many ways, the social, symbolic, urban and economic revaluation produced by ‘spontaneous’ gentrification coincides with the effects sought after by policymakers (Bidou-Zachariasen

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2003). While the social policies pursued in these neighbourhoods have distinct goals (promoting social mix, citizens’ participation, preserving heritage, etc.), ultimately they contribute to reshaping the city according to a representation of the city that reflects an idealized urban society (dense, mixed in its functions and social and ethnic makeup, conducive to the development of stronger social bonds, etc.), which largely overlaps with the typical sociospatial configuration of gentrifying neighbourhoods, characterized by the four dimensions – centrality, density, historicity and diversity – listed in the introduction to this volume. In light of this, some have no qualms in discussing the existence of ‘gentrification policies’, meaning urban strategies using gentrification as a fullfledged tool of local public policy, aimed at the social, economic and urban mutation of devalued neighbourhoods. The phrase deserves discussion, although its meanings may vary depending on who uses it, and ideological divides exist within scientific, media and political circles. For instance, for those mostly inclined to see its ‘positive’ effects (on the housing stock, the retail offer, social morphology, etc.), the gentrification of central areas must be actively pursued – because they believe it leads to the diversification of the urban population, helps to change and stimulate the local economy, and complements actions designed to produce and rehabilitate social housing. This position, which often involves downplaying or denying the phenomenon’s adverse effects outright, is legitimized all the more as it is closely related to the consensual idea of ‘social mix’ in the discourse and practices of policymakers. It is argued that the working-class inhabitants who reside in gentrifying neighbourhoods enjoy not only better living conditions, but also better chances of social, economic and cultural ‘integration’, thanks to the exchanges and dialogue that are expected to result from their spatial proximity to middle- and upper-class residents. In reality, gentrification also leads them to be evicted from their homes and, more broadly, it fuels geographical inequalities by reducing the proportion of affordable private and public housing, increasing the risks of tension and conflict between different social groups and making businesses more expensive as they adjust to the tastes and lifestyles of the middle and upper classes. When used by those who call attention to such effects, the phrase ‘gentrification policies’ reflects an extremely critical stance towards those who initiate and amplify the process, especially public authorities (Atkinson 2002).3 Since the 2000s, gentrification has increasingly appeared to public authorities as an infallible means of rehabilitating dilapidated low-income neighbourhoods. The broad international success enjoyed by Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) is an emblem of this new trend. Policymakers and operational decision makers have embraced his theses sometimes to the extent of treating them as a miracle cure. According to

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this approach, urban regeneration should be based on a strategy explicitly designed to attract middle- and upper-class members of the service economy. The standardization of the tools used to implement this strategy has been well documented (Le  Blanc et  al. 2014), impacting the types of operations and spatial interventions pursued, the coalitions of actors capable of carrying them out and the forms of financial arrangements used to fund them. Standardization is also evidenced in the key role granted to the production of representations and images and to urban marketing to promote targeted neighbourhoods, and in the process initiate upmarket dynamics. As we will see, drawing on the cases of El Raval in Barcelona, La Goutte d’Or in Paris and Bas-Montreuil, gentrification feeds off these circumstantial representations, and as it digests them it may also in turn strengthen or update them. As a product of an international circulation of urban policy concepts and ‘good practices’, and of the individuals who promote them (consultants, political actors, representatives of international organizations), gentrification becomes a ‘ready-made way’ of thinking about the city, a ‘recyclable conception of the city’ (Gintrac and Giroud 2014), contributing to its homogenization. The recourse to new-build gentrification – a phrase referring to the construction of new housing for wealthy residents in the wake of large-scale demolition or the redevelopment of vacated industrial sites (Davidson and Lees 2005; Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008) – evidences this process of standardization of central, lower-income areas and of the approaches to their redevelopment. Sheffield is a case in point: within the framework of a second entrepreneurial public-policy turn, demolitions/reconstructions and ‘megaprojects’ have been effective imported tools for moving the city upmarket. Still, we have to be careful in distinguishing the conditions of the provision of gentrification as a ‘miracle cure’ for public policy, the ways in which it can be implemented locally, and its actual effects on urban populations and spaces. Cross-examination of the cases addressed here suggests nuancing the scenario of standardization implied by the idea of ‘gentrification policies’. Many factors relating to local contexts contribute to blurring local policies, their implementation and their effects in central low-income neighbourhoods. The unequal sensitivities of local public actors (politicians and technicians) to neoliberal theses on the redevelopment of inner cities may result in contradictory engagements. Not all public actors have the intention, much less the cynical desire, to drive working-class residents out of central neighbourhoods in the name of attractiveness and interurban competitiveness; many sincerely believe that they will be able to contain the decline or curb gentrification. Also, there can be strong interferences between the policies pursued at the metropolitan level or significant variations in the ways in which structural mutations, such as those triggered by economic

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crises, are felt locally. Lastly, residents may contribute to redefining urban policies or nuancing their effects, through their everyday relationships to their neighbourhood, their participation in public debates and consultation procedures or their mobilization in struggles (Bacqué and Fijalkow 2006). Notes 1. Up to the early 2000s, variations in approaches to these interactions can be observed depending on national research production contexts: French studies were essentially focused on the effects of urban policies, whereas English-language studies looked at market dynamics. See Fijalkow and Préteceille 2006. 2. See the comparative study on social-mixing policies and their connections with the gentrification of historic neighbourhoods in the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium, funded by the French Ministry of Infrastructure: Baillergeau et al. 2008. 3. For an overview of the main arguments dividing the ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ gentrification camps in the scientific field, see Atkinson 2002. The author synthesized findings from over a hundred scientific papers and books on the social impact of gentrification between 1964 and 2001. The ‘pro-gentrification’ arguments are: stabilization of declining areas, rehabilitation of real estate, increased real-estate values, reduced vacancy rates, increased local fiscal revenues, encouragement and increased visibility for further development, reduction of suburban sprawl, increased social mix, and decreased crime. The main ‘anti-gentrification’ arguments include: displacement of the poorer residents through rent/price increases, psychological costs of displacement, community resentment and conflict, loss of affordable housing, homelessness, commercial/industrial displacement, increased cost and changes to local services, displacement and housing demand pressures on surrounding poor areas, loss of social diversity, and increased crime.

References Atkinson, Rowland. 2002. Does Gentrification Help or Harm Urban Neighborhoods? An Assessment of the Evidence-Base in the Context of the New Urban Agenda. Working Paper 5. Glasgow/Bristol: Economic and Social Research Council – Centre for Neighbourhood Research. Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, and Yankel Fijalkow. 2006. ‘En attendant la gentrification: discours et politiques à la Goutte  d’Or (1982–2000)’, Sociétés contemporaines 63(3): 63–83. Baillergeau, Evelyne, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Peter van der Graaf and Lex Veldboer. 2008. Les Politiques de mixité sociale dans l’Europe du Nord (Belgique, Pays-Bas, Suède). Paris: Editions du PUCA. Bidou-Zachariasen, Catherine (ed.). 2003. Retours en ville. Des processus de ‘gentrification’ urbaine aux politiques de ‘revitalisation’ des centres. Paris: Descartes et Cie. Davidson, Mark, and Loretta Lees. 2005. ‘New-Build “Gentrification” and London’s Riverside Renaissance’, Environment and Planning A 37: 1165–90.

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Fijalkow, Yankel, and Edmond Préteceille. 2006. ‘Gentrification: discours et politiques urbaines (France, Royaume-Uni, Canada)’, Sociétés contemporaines 63: 5–13. Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York : Basic Books. Gintrac, Cécile, and Matthieu Giroud (eds). 2014. Villes contestées. Pour une géographie critique de l’urbain. Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires. Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Le  Blanc, Antoine, Jean-Luc Piermay, Philippe Gervais-Lambony, Matthieu Giroud, Céline Pierdet and Samuel Rufat (eds). 2014. Métropoles en débat: (dé)construction de la ville compétitive. Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest. Lees, Loretta, and David Ley. 2008. ‘Introduction to Special Issue on Gentrification and Public Policy’, Urban Studies 45(12): 2379–84. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. London: Routledge.

CH A PTER

4 A R E PRO - GEN TR I FIC ATION POLICI ES R E A L ? An Evidence-Based Inquiry

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Matthieu Giroud and Hovig Ter Minassian

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hether gentrification has been turned into public policy (Van Criekingen 2013) has become a recurrent question in French-, English- and Spanish-language studies on gentrification, which have tried to analyse and criticize the ‘set of public actions mobilized for the purposes of the appropriation (or reappropriation) of working-class neighbourhoods by nonresident inhabitants and users (regular patrons, tourists, conference delegates, etc.) with a higher position in social relations’ (Van Criekingen 2013). This has also been a concern in debates surrounding local development (or redevelopment, as in the cases of Sheffield and Roubaix) through the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Inspired by the writings of Charles Landry (1995) and Richard Florida (2002), numerous urban policies have been designed to promote the creative economy. These policies can be considered conducive to gentrification as they are precisely aimed at attracting members of the middle and upper socio-occupational categories who work in the CCIs (Florida 2015).1 One of the most polarizing theses that have been put forward in the course of these debates was developed by British geographer Neil Smith. Based on research on New York City with a political economy approach, he argues that gentrification is the result of a competitive ‘global urban

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strategy’ (Smith 2002). In a globalized, financialized economy, he explains, public policies across the world rely on real-estate investments and on the production of neoliberal urbanism to encourage the return of members of the upper class to the inner cities, to the detriment of the working-class residents who already live there. Smith sees the role of public policies as central in consolidating gentrification in some neighbourhoods, and spreading it to other parts of the city or the wider urban area. By setting up real-estate promotion programmes, funding housing rehabilitation, the revitalization of public and consumer spaces, and by drastically deregulating the urban property market, municipal public authorities create conditions that are conducive to private investments by financial corporations, business groups and developers in the housing sector. Ultimately, Smith argues, such urban strategies cause major inequalities in access to housing in these neighbourhoods. Smith notes that the case of New York City should not be considered as a paradigmatic example of this global urban strategy to promote gentrification. He also points out that contextual effects at the level of a city must be taken into account to understand the specificities of a gentrification process. At the same time, he calls for gentrification to be considered the ‘figurehead of metropolitan change in city centres’ (Smith 2003: 58), attesting in many cases to the presence of a ‘crucial urban strategy implemented by municipalities, working together with the private sector’ (Smith 2003: 60). In his view, beyond the terminological variations within a language or a country, the initiatives designed to ‘regenerate’, ‘requalify’, ‘revitalize’ or ‘rehabilitate’ inner cities launched in North America and Europe, as well as in Latin America and Southeast Asia, show that transnational urban strategies of gentrification are indeed at work. Without calling into question the legitimacy of this interpretation of public policies, which has inspired a large number of studies on a diverse array of cities such as Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Sheffield, Roubaix, Saint-Etienne and Mulhouse (Clerval and Fleury 2009; Loopmans 2008; Miot 2013; Rousseau 2008; Uitermark, Duyvendak and Kleinhans 2007), here we believe it is necessary to distance ourselves from it to a degree. First, in some cases, it is difficult to demonstrate that an urban strategy is clearly pursued in the name of gentrification: local elected officials do not always express themselves as explicitly as those studied by Van Criekingen (2013) in Brussels. Furthermore, in analytical terms, Smith’s approach does not always make it possible to distinguish between the intentions and the effects of the policies under study. Hence, we do not consider the existence of public policies in support of gentrification as a postulate, but rather as the interpretative result of our study. Instead of pondering the existence of gentrification policies, we set out to examine the concrete effects of various – sometimes similar – contemporary urban strategies implemented by European munic-

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ipalities (Fijalkow and Préteceille 2006). With Neil Smith’s thesis in mind, we consider what aspects of public policies may encourage, speed up or slow down the emergence and diffusion of gentrification processes. Based on our research in three cities – Grenoble, Lisbon and Barcelona – we will first strive to show that, in order to establish that local policies are part of a broader political strategy to support gentrification, it is necessary to make a detailed, long-term analysis of the tools used by urban authorities and, most importantly, of their effects on the social landscape in the neighbourhoods under consideration. The idea that there is such a thing as a ‘toolbox’ that can be used to ‘manufacture gentrification’ must be nuanced. Indeed, similar public policy tools – for instance, regarding housing, local businesses and cultural facilities – may have different social and urban impacts in different local settings. However, public policy should not be scrutinized solely at the neighbourhood level. There are multiple relevant levels of analysis of gentrification as policy, as we will show by examining the effects of metropolitan urban strategies on the forms and temporalities of gentrification in some older neighbourhoods. GENTRIFICATION POLICIES IN DISGUISE? On the basis of what public actors have to say about them, it seems difficult to talk about ‘political strategies of gentrification’ in the three cities considered here. On the contrary, in some cases – Barcelona in particular – public actors have clearly supported urban renewal policies aimed at solving the urban crisis in historic neighbourhoods while avoiding their gentrification (PROCIVESA et al. 2003).2 While taking their word at face value would be naïve, we believe this raises a problem in the interpretation of public policies, and in particular in their interpretation as gentrification strategies or projects. How can we establish the intentions of public actors who do not openly use the word ‘gentrification’? In particular, there is a risk of preconstructing the findings of a political discourse analysis. On the other hand, we should keep in mind that some urban policy objectives are left unexplained and not publicly discussed, and that behind certain discourses and practical measures relating to intervention in public space that are couched in the language of humanist values and social mix, there are population distribution mechanisms whose implications are not only economic (in terms of proportions of solvent households, for instance) but also political (in terms of potential voters). In the face of this lack of empirical material, we have thus focused our attention on the social and urban effects of the urban policies implemented since the 1980s rather than on their legitimizations.

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In Grenoble, the neighbourhood of Berriat–Saint-Bruno is one of the parts of the city in which municipal policy has been most intensely pursued, beginning in the early 1980s. None of the measures taken, first by Alain Carignon’s right-wing (RPR) team, from 1983, and subsequently by Michel Destot’s socialist (PS) team, in the mid-1990s, directly referred to gentrification as such; yet, in reality, they were highly instrumental in the process. Carignon’s action was characterized by an intensive effort to reconquer a working-class neighbourhood in the throes of crisis and turn it into a new urban hub liable to boost Grenoble’s international exposure. The route taken to achieve this consisted in radically changing the neighbourhood’s image, which entailed a major physical overhaul of the urban fabric. Multiple tools were used. These included the construction of Europole, a large business district hosting offices, high-end housing and various other amenities, developed within the framework of a zone d’aménagement concerté, or ZAC (joint development zone), and the deregulation of the real-estate market by revising the local land-use plan (plan d’occupation des sols) and raising the floor-area ratio (coefficient d’occupation des sols), thereby officially ending the public development controls put in place by the previous (socialist) municipal administration led by Hubert Dubedout (1965–83). At the same time, Carignon’s municipality boosted private investments in renovation and high-end housing, relying on a well-oiled rhetoric of modernity and breaking with the past. Targeted large-scale renovations led to the demolition of many industrial sites and older buildings, and to the eviction or relocation of lower-income populations (often of foreign origin) to estates in outer districts that could better accommodate large families. While such trends had been observed since the 1960s, they had resulted from different rationales. Between 1982 and 1990, the neighbourhood’s steady population decline since the 1960s was finally reversed. Over the same period, the proportion of senior executives and independent professionals increased sharply (from 9 to 15 per cent) while the proportion of manual workers fell markedly (from 33 to 20 per cent, below the municipal average). In the mid-1990s, the Socialist Party’s return to the helm in Grenoble coincided with a renewal of the forms of action in, and official representations of, the neighbourhood, admittedly due in part to the change in political leadership and the desire to mark a departure from the action of the previous mayor (who would later be convicted on corruption charges), but also due to new recognition of the area’s industrial heritage and the growing popularity of the ‘social mix’ theme in public policy. Even though the municipality essentially continued to promote the requalification (upgrading) of the neighbourhood – by extending Europole and supporting private initiatives to diversify the housing supply – Destot’s team, in contrast to Carignon’s,

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emphasized the need to re-create social ties and make sure that poorer populations were not driven out of the neighbourhood, instead of focusing so much effort on attracting the middle and upper classes. It used tools that pertained to the built environment (an ‘OPAH’3 housing rehabilitation programme in line with Dubedout’s policy actions; listing industrial buildings as heritage sites), to public spaces old and new (regulations relating to the creation of shopping centres and to accessibility) and the link between inhabitants and their neighbourhood by setting up participatory structures (neighbourhood councils, support to neighbourhood community groups). It also strove to ‘restore social links’ – a fashionable watchword of urban policy – not only by enabling low-income populations to stay in the neighbourhood (with mandatory social housing units in some new private constructions in accordance with the 2000 ‘SRU’ law4 on urban solidarity and urban renewal, and support to operations conducted by social landlords), but also, and perhaps more importantly, by promoting a new rhetoric that stressed the centuries-old (social, cultural, functional, morphological) ‘mix’ of the neighbourhood. Berriat was depicted as a ‘model of mix in Grenoble’, in a roundabout effort to revive a deeply rooted local political tradition present since the Dubedout years: that of the powerful social movements that sought to bring the social classes closer together in the city. These years saw a political hybridization of sorts in the relationship to the neighbourhood and to its working-class presence: on the one hand, the municipality pursued operations that were disconnected from the local context (projected onto other scales, and targeting international executives); on the other, it strove to spotlight the neighbourhood’s industrial history and working-class presence by emphasizing the extremely ambiguous figure of the neighbourhood as a ‘model of social mix’. Yet, ultimately, these political choices and tools only ended up helping to sustain gentrification. The social change that had begun over the previous period continued: for instance, between 1990 and 1999, the proportion of senior executives and independent professionals increased (from 15 to 21 per cent) while the proportion of manual workers continued to decrease (from 20 to 12 per cent). However, over the same period, the proportion of clerical workers remained stable (around 23 per cent), and the number of social housing tenants rose by 7 per cent per year. Gentrification coincided with other social processes, which was confirmed by a 2008 report by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE), noting that visible signs of job-related precarity and poverty could still be observed in the neighbourhood (Berthelot 2008). In Barcelona, public policies targeting the Ciutat Vella district, the historic heart of the city, followed a fairly similar trajectory – with one key difference: urban strategies changed while the same left-wing majority remained in office. After the fall of Franco’s regime in the mid-1970s and the

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adoption of a new constitution in 1978, the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) would in 1979 win the first free democratic mayoral elections held since 1936, and stay in power until 2011. In the course of over thirty years in office, under four different mayors, a number of distinct urban policy phases can be observed, particularly in Barcelona’s older neighbourhoods. The first phase, from the democratic transition to the mid-1980s, was devoted to rebuilding the dialogue between residents and their elected representatives. This raised two major challenges: restoring citizens’ trust in the local political apparatus, and confronting the urban crisis in the older neighbourhoods (depopulation, buildings in very poor condition, job losses). The ‘reconstruction of Barcelona’ (Bohigas 1985) involved the relaunch of a social housing policy in the central neighbourhoods, street upgrades, and multiple small housing renovation projects and new public spaces to reintroduce venues for social mixing. The second phase was marked by the organization of the 1992 Olympic Games and the ensuing recession, at the helm of a forceful personality, mayor Pasqual Maragall (1982–97). It combined large-scale urban projects, sometimes at the expense of residents’ more practical expectations (Comellas i Colldeforns 1995),5 and the promotion of urban heritage in the historic neighbourhoods – most notably, almost all of Ciutat Vella was designated an àrea de rehabilitació integrada (ARI; integrated rehabilitation area) and several rehabilitation plans were launched (plans especials de reforma interior or PERIs; special inner-city reform plans). This was a first step in the privatization of urban public policy, emphasizing a global territorial-marketing policy, with less concern for the expectations of residents in lower-income neighbourhoods. This strategy was pursued further in the third phase, from the late 1990s to the May 2011 municipal elections. Successive mayors Joan Clos (1997–2006) and Jordi Hereu (2006–11), both members of the Catalan Socialist Party, sought to turn Barcelona into a globally recognized metropolis, relying on large-scale urban projects (such as the International Forum of Cultures, the Diagonal Mar shopping centre, the 22@ project) and emphasizing the knowledge-based economy, information and communication technologies and biotechnologies. In these successive public policies, gentrification was rarely invoked as a repopulation strategy. Yet it did emerge in the mid-1990s in parts of the districts of Ciutat Vella (La Ribera) and Poblenou (around the Olympic Village), and then spread to other parts of the city. More recently, there has been a trend towards the polarization of the two population extremes in Ciutat Vella. Between 1991 and 2001, despite fluctuations, the working population remained stable, albeit with a redistribution of socio-occupational categories. The working-class residents were still there (making up nearly 60 per cent of the working population in Ciutat Vella),6 but the middle classes lost ground (from a third in 1991 to under 25 per cent of the active popula-

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tion in 2001) to the upper classes. By 2001, there were as many upper-class residents as middle-class ones (18.7 per cent of the working population), where there were virtually none in 1991. These examples show that long-term public policies in the central neighbourhoods strongly boost gentrification. Whether they have relied on the rhetoric of the creative economy, of modernity or social mix, public authorities have clearly acted in support of the structural dynamics that lead the upper classes to be repositioned in the older central neighbourhoods at the expense of lower-income residents, and change the housing supply in those areas. This applies equally to local authorities that have been eager to implement Richard Florida’s theories on the creative economy and to progressive municipal teams that launched policies some thirty years ago, most likely in all good faith, to ensure decent housing conditions for lower-income households. In Grenoble, Hubert Dubedout’s policy was seen as a model of municipal socialism. In Barcelona, the municipal team that took office in April 1979 had a particularly progressive discourse. This was both because it intended to mark a sharp departure from the urban policies of the Franco years, which had been disastrous for the working classes, and because some of the most prominent actors in the urban struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, including members of civil society (architects, leaders of neighbourhood community groups), had risen to local power. The medium-term or longterm effects, sometimes over several decades, of the tools implemented to upgrade older neighbourhoods and of their uses by local authorities deserve to be examined. As we observe the public policies pursued during each period and their social and urban effects, we notice continuities that transcend political and partisan divides. It can hardly be argued that there is a dogmatic opposition between a pro-gentrification right-wing policy and a pro-social-mix left-wing policy. Still, there have been shifts – occasionally radical ones – between the policies conducted by different municipalities and at different times. In Grenoble, while the Carignon municipality had openly sought to attract the upper classes, the Destot team was far cagier on the subject. Additionally, references to the ‘social mix’ model have always been ambiguous, even when they were mobilized – if only initially – to keep lower-income populations in a neighbourhood undergoing a process of social upgrading, and not only to bring upper-class residents into a working-class neighbourhood. It is also worth noting that these political strategies do not target exactly the same parts of the housing stock and the same types of gentrifiers: the individuals attracted by ideas of innovation and breaking with the past are not the same as those who are attracted by notions of authenticity and social mix. These shifts suggest that if there is such a thing as a political gentrification strategy, it should be discussed in the plural.

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THE AMBIGUOUS AND VARIABLE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC POLICIES This book argues that gentrification is not a monolithic, inevitable process. Regarding urban policy, this leads us to distance ourselves from those who claim that there is a ready-made programmatic policy model that public authorities can use at any time to boost, accelerate or keep gentrification going. In this sense, we concur with Mathieu Van Criekingen (2013) in his critical assessment of Neil Smith’s global urban strategy: Its value lies in its ability to clearly evidence how contemporary gentrification is rooted in the structured rationales of urbanization in neoliberalized capitalism. However, it analyses the general underpinnings of that agenda rather than the specific ways in which it is implemented in distinct urban settings. The fact is that analysing contemporary urban policies from the angle of gentrification has little relevance if, in a given urban context, the existence of a gentrification strategy is simply conceived as the copy of a single model, necessarily developed remotely. While the context of competition between cities is essential to any understanding of the generalization of such strategies, it requires agents (elected representatives, urban development agencies, real-estate developers, business entrepreneurs, interest groups, etc.) to mobilize, gather enough resources and construct a set of ideas and projects around which they can reconcile their own interests, produce a corpus of shared discourses, and form lasting alliances around a programme of gentrification in a number of spaces. None of these conditions are a given. They are always subject to negotiations rooted in specific social and power relations, and embedded in local histories.

Indeed, the analysis of urban policy tools should first be tested at the local level. Our observations across several sites show the extent to which a given policy tool can have different effects on populations or social makeups from one setting to another. We will demonstrate this by focusing on a few examples of tools frequently used by public authorities in the fields of housing, retail and cultural amenities. Regarding housing, recourse to urban renewal, that is, the demolition and reconstruction of buildings in historic neighbourhoods, can be motivated by very different objectives depending on the city. Strongly criticized in English-language urban sociology and radical geography scholarship (particularly in Neil Smith’s work), urban renewal is often perceived as a classic means of driving out lower-income residents, thus boosting or supporting gentrification. In Grenoble and Lisbon, urban renewal has been used for such purposes, specifically to produce high-end housing designed for middle- and upper-class households. In Grenoble, the socialist administration led by Michel Destot did very little to slow down the urban renewal process, which was in some cases extended and supported by public authorities (for instance, with the finalization of the Europole project in 2007) and in other

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specific cases directly involved private developers. In both types of cases, the resulting properties, designed mostly for first-time buyers and short-term furnished rentals (apartment hotels), meet high standards of comfort: they are large, light-filled, secure and often come with a balcony or patio. In these urban renewal programmes, social housing projects are in the minority, although, thanks to the 2000 SRU law, the municipality was able to impose a minimum requirement of 25 per cent of social housing in ZAC programmes and 20 per cent in some private programmes. In Barcelona’s historic neighbourhoods, the use of urban renewal has been more ambiguous. It bears pointing out that, with regard to social housing, the Francoist years were characterized by a stalling strategy (López Sánchez 1986) in the city’s central neighbourhoods and the construction of social housing ‘polygons’ (large housing estates located in almost all cases on the outskirts of cities, in neighbourhoods lacking amenities and public transport links), in a bid to push away the seditious working classes. When democracy returned to Barcelona, urban renewal made the production of social housing units in the central neighbourhoods possible. At the same time, it reflected an effort to ‘clean up’ (in Catalan, esponjar) the unsanitary older urban fabric. Overall, some 2,000 social housing units were delivered between the early 1980s and the late 2000s in the Ciutat Vella district – the vast majority following demolition/reconstruction operations rather than rehabilitation. The municipality of Barcelona regularly invoked the scarcity of older properties, the excessively dilapidated state of historic buildings, the need to create new public spaces and amenities, as well as the excessive cost of rehabilitation, to justify the de-densification of the city’s historic neighbourhoods. Yet this social housing policy was arguably ambivalent. On the one hand, it clearly showcased the socialist municipal team’s effort to mark a departure from the previous period when it came to power in 1979, and to demonstrate that housing was one of its main concerns. On the other, these good intentions arguably masked a lack of ambition and a desire to exercise a degree of ‘social control’ over the historic neighbourhoods. In fact, there were far fewer constructions than demolitions. For instance, around La Rambla del Raval, one of the key sectors in the urban renewal programme of the 2000s in Ciutat Vella, nearly 800 housing units were reportedly demolished (some of which were admittedly vacant), and only 143 new social housing units were constructed, meaning that many of the residents were not relocated in the same area. Urban renewal operations were particularly intense in neighbourhoods considered unsafe – hotbeds of prostitution or drug trafficking. Lastly, the new housing supply remained largely inadequate to meet demand as prices skyrocketed. While social housing units still made up 60 per cent of properties constructed each year in the early 1980s, this proportion fell to just 10 per cent in 2001, despite an acceleration in

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construction (Díaz Rodríguez 2003). Up until the late 1990s, Ciutat Vella remained the most affordable district in the municipality of Barcelona (€850 per square metre, all housing types combined, compared to a citywide average of €1,289) (Ajuntament de Barcelona 1993). By 2007, the price average had exceeded €5,000 per square metre, making Ciutat Vella one of the five most expensive districts in the Catalan capital. Ultimately, in Grenoble, Lisbon and Barcelona (in the last case, from the return of democracy to the present), urban renewal programmes did not so much profoundly alter neighbourhoods’ populations and social makeups as regulate the working-class presence as part of an effort to produce social mix. In one case (Barcelona), there was a genuine attempt to ensure a portion of lower-income residents were able to remain in a neighbourhood whose housing stock was progressively hit by the rise of real-estate prices, while promoting its social normalization by targeting particular types of tenants for the new social housing units (essentially students and elderly people). In other cases (Grenoble and Lisbon), the influx of upper-class individuals was encouraged by the provision of a supply of new properties in a historic neighbourhood. As in the field of housing, some policies designed to boost neighbourhoods’ business sectors and introduce cultural amenities can have multiple or unexpected effects depending on the context. As is the case with urban renewal, policies targeting business and encouraging local economic activity are routinely seen as a preferred form of action by public authorities to reshape the identity, representations and, by extension, uses of a neighbourhood. Business policies can be interpreted as effective levers for gentrification (Van Criekingen and Fleury 2006).7 Yet the link between business revitalization policies and gentrification is not always a mechanical one. In Grenoble, for instance, measures taken to promote Berriat’s retail sector combined the preservation of the shopping centre along the neighbourhood’s main thoroughfare (Cours Berriat), in close proximity to most of the new amenities and renovated buildings, and a façade restoration programme. These measures did not result in the opening of businesses tailored to suit the needs of middle- and upper-class residents and visitors. On the contrary, the most dynamic businesses in recent years have been operated by immigrant entrepreneurs, most of whom have long been established in the neighbourhood (since the 1970s) – they are the ones who have been most successful in taking advantage of these policies, as well as of the new Europole business district, for instance by opening fast-food establishments for the site’s schools and universities. This locally structured network of immigrant entrepreneurs was able to anticipate the changes resulting from successive renovations. As will be further documented in this book, this entrepreneurial dynamism has had a strong impact on the neighbourhood’s social image, by offering a va-

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riety of commercial resources to a large North African customer base from various central and peripheral areas of Grenoble. Just like business policies, cultural policies and the construction of dedicated amenities can serve as tools of gentrification. Roubaix’s heritage policies are an example of this. In the case of Bilbao, sociologists Lorenzo Vicario and Pedro Manuel Martínez Monje even refer to the social transformations caused by such urban strategies as a ‘Guggenheim effect’ (Vicario and Martínez Monje 2003). These cultural amenities play a dual role: first, they encourage private investment in neighbourhoods that these large-scale projects have revitalized; second, they alter the practices and representations of the neighbourhoods in question (Degen 2003). In Barcelona, in the early 1980s, the public authorities launched a programme to build new cultural amenities that followed two rationales: the first was local and consisted in attending to the needs of residents; the second was metropolitan and aimed to bolster the Ciutat Vella district’s status as the city’s main touristic area. The signature project of the programme was the contemporary art museum (MACBA), designed by renowned architect Richard Meier and inaugurated in 1995 in the northern part of El Raval. Also worth mentioning is the metropolis’s new exhibition hall, which opened in 2004 at the eastern end of the Poblenou district to host the Universal Forum of Cultures. This project was heavily criticized by neighbourhood community groups, politicians and academics. The Barcelona municipality was berated for failing to adequately consult with local residents, and for the contradiction between promoting alter-globalization discourses in the Universal Forum of Cultures and entrusting large commercial developers with the urbanization of the Diagonal Mar neighbourhood. Ultimately, the new cultural offer has helped to change the image of the historic neighbourhoods and introduce new flows of students, tourists and other ‘cultural consumers’ who now rub shoulders with El Raval’s traditional populations and migrants of foreign origin. This has further increased the contrast between the new shops geared towards customers with high levels of cultural capital and the thriving ethnic businesses resulting from the influx of members of North African, South Asian and South American communities since the late 1990s. The contextual effects we have just briefly surveyed have tended to be analysed at the neighbourhood level. However, to understand the nature of political support for (or opposition to) gentrification, the metropolitan level must also be taken into account, as well as the local forms and paces of the process. Changes of scale are necessary when looking into the political factors that may influence the gentrification of a historic neighbourhood in one way or another. Here, a change of spatial scale is necessary, in line with a dynamic approach to the city that also calls to take into account the effects of public policies conducted outside the gentrifying neighbourhood under

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study. This may mean examining the in situ effects of policies implemented ex situ, for instance in other neighbourhoods, but also those of urban strategies devised for and from a wider scale – namely, the metropolitan level. THE EFFECTS OF METROPOLITAN STRATEGIES ON LOCAL GENTRIFICATION Such metropolitan strategies can be seen as spatially targeted responses to economic neoliberalization by public authorities. Often, they are synchronically implemented on multiple, large-scale urban fronts. Yet, at the metropolitan scale and depending on urban contexts, they can have radically different effects. In Grenoble, the large-scale developments designed to affirm the city’s investment in the field of nanotechnologies (including the Minatec innovation campus inaugurated in 2006 north of Berriat–Saint-Bruno) and some policies intended to improve local quality of life (extending public transport networks, environmental measures, work on public spaces and the built environment, etc.) have tended to sustain gentrification in Berriat– Saint-Bruno. Owing to its location (close or well connected to the workplaces of executives or engineers) and the residential opportunities it offers in a strained local real-estate market, Berriat–Saint-Bruno has served as a property stock for housing the executives targeted by the new economic and planning policies. By contrast, in Barcelona and Lisbon, the multiplication of operations at the metropolitan level has appeared to help slow down the gentrification process in districts such as Ciutat Vella or Alcântara, by transferring it to other neighbourhoods. The case of Lisbon is an example of political support for gentrification in a neighbourhood (Alcântara) as a feature of a highly ambitious metropolitan project of urban promotion and competitiveness. Indeed, during the 1990s, Lisbon was depicted in the national and European media as the European capital of construction work. To put things simply, up until the crisis of the mid-2000s, the public policies implemented in Lisbon’s urban space with private partners, reflecting a consistent urban entrepreneurialism approach, concerned four main embedded areas: launching large-scale structural metropolitan projects and building new modern amenities (the city hosted the 1998 World Expo and subsequently made the Parque das Nações district into a new freguesia [civil parish] with a business district, large-scale tourist facilities and over 25,000 residents); clearing substandard housing and slums (via a national programme for slum renovation, and relocation and housing renovation schemes); promoting a renewed, diversified residential supply geared towards the middle and upper classes, favoured by a political and banking climate that facilitated homeownership and real-

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estate investments; and developing an extensive motorway network and transport infrastructure. This action on multiple fronts, made possible by a heavy reliance on both private investments and EU funds, aimed to enhance the Portuguese capital’s international competitiveness and attractiveness. The expected economic development entailed both opening up the country to foreign capital (after several decades of protectionism) and a radical rebranding of Lisbon as a modern, prosperous metropolis, constantly in flux. Against such a backdrop of large-scale urban change and multiple metropolitan projects, the redevelopment of Alcântara was only one action front among many others, which ultimately had a major impact on forms of intervention and especially the pace of their implementation, which was much slower than anticipated. The scheduling and effective implementation of extremely publicized planning projects in Alcântara (considered of great structural and strategic importance by the public authorities), which arguably doubled as potential tools for a political strategy of gentrification, were indeed greatly disrupted and called into question in the early 2000s. A costly, ambitious project designed by Portuguese architect Siza Vieira was even dropped altogether after several months of public debate. The project consisted in building three mixed-use (60 per cent homes, 40 per cent offices) 105-metre-high towers (a cylinder, a cuboid and a pyramid) in a former industrial zone. These towers would have largely exceeded the size limitations that applied in Lisbon at that time, and would have radically altered the entire city’s landscape in the name of urban competitiveness and attractiveness. The project met with major resistance (demonstrations, petitions, spectacular protests) from Alcântara residents and some local elected officials, but also from Lisbon’s population as a whole. The local authorities ended up backtracking fairly quickly, probably out of concern for the scale of the protests and the lack of support from public opinion. Still, the main reason for such a quick and definitive about-face lay in the broader context of the transformation of the metropolis – especially considering other urban projects were under way elsewhere in the capital: at that time, public authorities foregrounded the city’s numerous other assets and architectural and urban projects to gain international exposure. After shelving Vieira’s project, Lisbon City Council commissioned Portuguese architect Frederico Valsassina to work on an alternative development plan for Alcântara’s industrial wastelands. The resulting comprehensive plan was made public in 2005 under the name of the ‘Alcântara XXI’ strategic plan. Its objective was to ‘convert and redevelop a significant space in the city’ – to build a new metropolitan hub complete with upscale properties, businesses and offices, with the collaboration of international architectural luminaries like Jean Nouvel. Despite its ambitious scale, the new project did not elicit a great deal of reaction among the local population. The proposed

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shapes, architectural aesthetic and conceptions of public spaces appeared to be much less radical than the three-towers project, and in line with changes already under way in Alcântara or elsewhere in the capital (for instance, on the World Expo site). Still, the project’s fate was eventually fairly similar to the Vieira towers. While the destruction of the old industrial buildings, the soil cleanup and rubble removal did begin in late 2004, work quickly stopped, and had not resumed ten years later. The economic crisis that began in 2008 might have sealed the project’s fate, but in 2005 public authorities had curbed their ambitions and frozen the project due to the multiplicity of operations and its impact in terms of budget and partnerships. Additionally, the metropolitan strategies at work on this wide array of action fronts have had a very significant impact on the redistribution of residential spaces in Lisbon, as well as on the presence of middle- and upperclass visitors in the neighbourhoods in question. The diversification of the upscale housing stock (both new and rehabilitated, lofts, etc.) in the central neighbourhoods and in the more attractive peripheral spaces has helped make the housing market more flexible and considerably increase opportunities for homeownership or real-estate investment for these social groups. Residing – as well as investing and speculating – in Alcântara, for instance, was from then on only one among many other options. In effect, competition grew between the neighbourhoods liable to attract the middle and upper classes, which inevitably impacted the forms and paces of the social change at work in these places. In Alcântara, this metropolitan competition undoubtedly goes some way towards explaining the relative slowness of the gentrification process. In Barcelona, the public policies implemented within the framework of metropolitan strategies might also have contributed to inducing competition between gentrifying neighbourhoods. The Ciutat Vella district is now increasingly identifiable as dedicated to tourism and recreation, owing to the promotion of its urban heritage, the creation or modernization of cultural amenities and museums and the redevelopment of the waterfront. Conversely, the municipality perceives the Poblenou district as the future home of the ‘creative class’, an explicit reference to Richard Florida’s theses, and has developed it as such since the early 2000s, in particular with the ‘22@’ project (Ballester 2013). The municipality intends to create a ‘digital city’ by building a technology cluster in a part of Poblenou, bringing together universities and businesses with a strong emphasis on media, information and communication technologies and medical technologies. The project spans 115 blocks in Poblenou, which brings its total area to over 200 hectares. It includes the construction of new areas designed to host offices, homes and community amenities. The municipality is in charge of preparing the land for development, via a semipublic company; private actors are entrusted

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with land and housing development. Despite the slowdown of projects due to the macroeconomic context of crisis in Spain, the 22@ project can be considered an attempt to open a new front for gentrification in a new neighbourhood of Barcelona, and thus probably – at least, this is our hypothesis – slowing down the process in Ciutat Vella. With a better reputation and upmarket housing units in close proximity to potential jobs, Poblenou is now probably more attractive to executives and upper-class buyers than other historic neighbourhoods such as those of Ciutat Vella. Urban strategies devised for and on a metropolitan scale may thus, in certain contexts, yield unexpected or contradictory local effects. In fairly large ‘competitive’ cities characterized by the multiplicity and intensity of urban action fronts and by an open housing market for the upper classes, these contradictions sometimes substantially curb gentrification in some historic neighbourhoods (with the caveat that this is difficult to quantify). CONCLUSION Instead of assuming the existence of explicit gentrification strategies or ‘gentrification policies’ in Grenoble, Lisbon and Barcelona, we set out to analyse the effects of the urbanism and urban planning tools implemented since the 1980s on the social geography of the neighbourhoods under study. The first finding is that many urban policies, conducted at different times, contribute to the emergence of gentrification processes without explicitly intending to do so. The public policy tools that create the right conditions for boosting or accelerating gentrification are varied; their combination may reflect multiple strategic rationales. However, in some cases, public policies can help to slow down a local gentrification process. These contradictory effects can be the result of insufficient knowledge of local specificities (in terms of urban morphology, structure of social networks, etc.) but also of the coexistence of multiple scattered action fronts at the metropolitan level. In other, alltoo-rare, cases, public authorities may intentionally use their powers to slow down gentrification. There are tools to control or limit gentrification, such as caps on rent and land prices, and the systematic pre-emption of properties whose prices exceed authorized limits. Yet setting up such schemes requires local authorities to take an explicit political stand against the prevailing neoliberal dynamics that are turning cities into vast markets instead of making them spaces for living together in solidarity, and into prime locations for capital accumulation instead of venues for coproduction and social justice. Lastly, in some contexts, the citizens themselves have a deep understanding of what is at stake in urban strategies and the gentrification processes that occasionally result from them. In Barcelona, for instance, collectives

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mobilized against various urban projects in Ciutat Vella and Poblenou combine the fight against specific projects with a broader fight against land and property speculation and with the denunciation of gentrification processes. The crisis of trust in the mayoral team probably explains its crushing defeat in the May 2011 municipal elections.8 These mobilizations would have to be resituated within the long-term history of the major urban struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Barcelona and of the local protests against various urban projects implemented in the 1980s and 1990s. In the meantime, it might be argued that one of the specificities of the most recent conflicts lies in the appropriation of the term ‘gentrification’ by mobilized citizens (in the form of graffiti or protest slogans, for instance). In Barcelona, such mobilizations do not reflect a simple fear of change or of disruption to living environments; they are genuinely denouncing the social changes that these urban transformations have brought with them. The fight against gentrification is the expression of a variety of criticisms levelled against the contradictions of metropolitan urban policy, whose objectives are sometimes ambiguous, particularly as the economic crisis worsens social inequalities and makes access to housing more difficult. Notes 1. Richard Florida himself has been loaning his expertise to local governments that seek to implement such strategies. Probably to reassure the public actors who hire him, he explains that the impact of these policies on gentrification should be reduced, or that gentrification and displacement should be considered not as consequences but as ‘symptoms of the scarcity of quality urbanism’ (Florida 2015). 2. See the 2003 book copublished by the municipality of Barcelona, which discusses the achievements of the semipublic company Promoció Ciutat Vella SA (PROCIVESA), created for the purposes of implementing the rehabilitation policy in the city’s older neighbourhoods (PROCIVESA et al. 2003). 3. OPAH: opération programmée d’amélioration de l’habitat – ‘scheduled housingimprovement scheme’. 4. In French: loi n° 2000-1208 du 13 décembre 2000 relative à la solidarité et au renouvellement urbains, commonly referred to as the loi SRU (‘French law no. 2000-1208 of 13 December 2000 relating to urban solidarity and urban renewal’). 5. See, for instance, the food collection campaign ‘Aquí hi ha gana!’ (‘Here, there is hunger!’) organized in the winter of 1987 in the midst of preparations for the Olympic Games to denounce the deep poverty of Ciutat Vella residents (Comellas i Colldeforns 1995). 6. This is arguably equally due to the fact that gentrification was not fully completed in Barcelona’s central neighbourhoods, and to the intense foreign immigration they have witnessed since the late 1990s. By 2011, immigrants of foreign origin made up 41.6 per cent of the entire population of the Ciutat Vella district. 7. On the relation between gentrification and business dynamics, see Van Criekingen and Fleury (2006).

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8. The municipal elections held on 22 May 2011 saw the Partit del Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) register a historic defeat after thirty-two years at the helm of the municipality of Barcelona. Comparison of the 2007 and 2011 election results shows an increase in the number of voters for the centre-right party Convergència i Unió (+54,717 votes) and the right-wing Partido Popular (+80,360 votes), but also and most importantly the collapse of the PSC’s voter base (–203,330 votes), arguably reflecting a defiance, if not a disappointment in the urban policies implemented over the preceding decades, which the increasingly numerous protests against the municipality’s many urban projects might have heralded. That defeat followed another setback in the early regional elections of 2010 in Catalonia, which witnessed the return of Convergència i Unió (CiU) at the helm of the autonomous community, led by the PSC since 2003.

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Miot, Yoan. 2013. ‘Renouveler l’habitat des quartiers anciens dans le cadre de la “politique de la ville”: la gentrification comme horizon? Les exemples de Mulhouse, Roubaix et Saint-Etienne’, Métropoles 13. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https:// journals.openedition.org/metropoles/4777. Promoció de Ciutat Vella SA (PROCIVESA), Ajuntament de Barcelona, Jaume Casanova Escussol (ed.) and Martí Abella i Pere (ed.). 2003. Ciutat Vella, ciutat construida: Promoció Ciutat Vella 1988–2002. Barcelona: El Cep i la Nansa Edicions. Rousseau, Max. 2008. ‘“Bringing politics back in”: la gentrification comme politique de développement urbain?’, Espaces et Sociétés 132–33: 75–90. Smith, Neil. 2002. ‘New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as a Global Urban Strategy’, Antipode 34(3): 427–50. Smith, Neil. 2003. ‘La gentrification généralisée: d’une anomalie locale à la “régénération” urbaine comme stratégie urbaine globale’, in Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen (ed.), Retours en ville. Des processus de ‘gentrification’ urbaine aux politiques de ‘revitalisation’ des centres. Paris: Descartes et Cie, pp. 45–72. Uitermark, Justus, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Reinout Kleinhans. 2007. ‘Gentrification as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam’, Environment and Planning A 39(1): 125–41. Van Criekingen, Mathieu. 2013. ‘La gentrification mise en politiques. De la revitalisation urbaine à Bruxelles’, Métropoles 13. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://jour nals.openedition.org/metropoles/4753. Van Criekingen, Mathieu, and Antoine Fleury. 2006. ‘La ville branchée: gentrification et dynamiques commerciales à Paris et à Bruxelles’, Belgeo 1–2: 113–34. Vicario, Lorenzo, and Pedro Manuel Martínez Monje. 2003. ‘Another “Guggenheim Effect”? The Generation of a Potentially Gentrifiable Neighbourhood in Bilbao’, Urban Studies 40(12): 2383–400.

CH A PTER

5 G E N T R I F I C AT I O N A Matter of Images and Representations

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Anaïs Collet, Lydie Launay and Hovig Ter Minassian

Gentrification is not only a matter of availability of housing. It is also to a large extent a matter of images and representations. Gentrified neighbourhoods have all seen their representations change: previously considered as ‘rough’, ‘old’, ‘dirty’ or ‘repulsive’, they become ‘hip’, ‘charming’, ‘lively’ or ‘authentic’ – terms that sometimes refer to the same reality, but with a new veneer. In most cases this is an effect of objective transformations: public spaces have been embellished or redesigned; new buildings have been constructed; the population has changed; the businesses and their activities have, too. But there is a circular causality at work here. Sometimes the evolution of perceptions of a neighbourhood will bring about changes in its aspect or population, owing to decisions taken by households (going there for drinks, moving in), by elected representatives who, when they perceive a neighbourhood differently, may alter their interventions in it, or by the entrepreneurs who decide to invest there. These collective representations of places are therefore both products and drivers of change. How do they change? How can we explain why an ill-reputed, unattractive neighbourhood may be considered attractive and desirable a few years later? Obviously, at a given time, there is not a single way of seeing and perceiving a neighbourhood. Be they individual or collective, representations

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are plural: they are specific to social groups or professional circles sharing ways of seeing, perceiving and judging places and their inhabitants on the basis of tastes, dispositions, values or common interests, as well as degrees of familiarity with the space in question. These representations are also forged according to the preoccupations of each individual and are likely to steer their decisions, about moving into a given neighbourhood or not, sending one’s children to school there, opening a business, opting for a specific urbanplanning, housing or economic-development policy, and so on. Lastly, they derive from images conveyed by a variety of media; through words, photographs, drawings or videos, a vision of these places is made tangible, neglecting some aspects and emphasizing others. These images are particularly crucial because they both convey a certain representation of a space and lend it legitimacy – when a text or photograph is published and disseminated by respectable institutions, people tend to believe there is at least some truth to it. They derive credit from the authority or legitimacy of the medium in question (TV news, national daily newspaper, municipal magazine, etc.) and reflect the efforts of some actors endowed with the required resources to alter the existing shared representation of a place. While all the actors, visitors and residents of a neighbourhood have a representation of it (which may converge or diverge with others), not all of them have the same capacity to impose their vision on others, particularly through the production of images. This chapter investigates how collective representations of gentrifying neighbourhoods change; in particular, an effort is made to assess the role of public authorities in those changes (Sedel 2009; Bonneval 2011).1 Are municipalities involved in the production of new representations of their older lower-income neighbourhoods? For what reasons? Do they manufacture and disseminate images liable to steer the decisions of households or entrepreneurs and encourage specific forms of gentrification? If so, do they do it on purpose? What images and materials do they rely on? Insofar as they orient the choices of residents and of the actors of urban development, these representations can become important stakes in urban policy. Rarely are they considered in isolation; the production of a particular vision of a place generally goes hand in hand with more concrete interventions (such as the construction of luxury homes, façade renovations, improvements to roads and public spaces, new cultural facilities, etc.). This vision of a place generally comes with watchwords such as ‘promoting social diversity’ or ‘enhancing the local heritage’. Put into words and images in exhibits, poster campaigns, features in the local press or in the city’s communication materials, it gives meaning and legitimacy to all of these operations. In many ways, this chapter extends the previous text’s examination of gentrification policies. However, it will also devote attention to image-boosting pol-

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icies that fail to have the intended impact and to the contributions of other actors, which may converge or diverge with those of public authorities. Based on the cases of El Raval in Barcelona, La Goutte d’Or in Paris and Bas-Montreuil in the inner Parisian suburbs, we highlight divergences even within left-wing municipalities in terms of representations of old working-class neighbourhoods and of ambitions to change these spaces. In the city’s historic core, the municipality of Barcelona has resorted to an aggressive policy of symbolic upgrading via large-scale urban operations. The City of Paris’s actions to change representations of La Goutte d’Or have been more scattered over time and less coordinated, reflecting a search for compromise as it highlighted various facets of the neighbourhood’s social life. The significant changes in the representations of Bas-Montreuil were, on the other hand, the outcome of varied initiatives that were generally inspired by a few powerful motifs formulated in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the crisis of the industrial and working-class suburbs. This particular example shows that transformations of the representations of a neighbourhood are not always intentional. We will also see that even when change is explicitly sought after, there is no such thing as a turnkey strategy that can be imported ‘as is’ from one neighbourhood or city to the next. Representations, tools and media diverge according to local contexts, political majorities, and available reference frameworks; the multiplicity of actors involved in urban change also creates variations. In Barcelona, public authorities and private investors alike chiefly targeted the urban landscape and the building stock. In La Goutte d’Or, the change promoted by the municipality was focused on the promotion of social mixing. Lastly, in Bas-Montreuil, public authorities and inhabitants foregrounded the neighbourhood’s cultural resources and history in a joint effort to rehabilitate its ‘popular’ heritage (‘popular’ here meaning ‘of the people’)2 that sheds light on the ideological shifts of the Communist left. BARCELONA: TRANSFORMING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE TO CHANGE THE IMAGE OF THE CENTRAL NEIGHBOURHOODS The tools for producing images of lower-income neighbourhoods vary according to the times, contexts, as well as the material and symbolic resources at the disposal of the actors. In Barcelona, the promotion of the urban landscape and heritage served as a means to change the representations of the historic neighbourhoods, by encouraging the development of cultural and urban tourism.

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The Promotion of Urban Heritage at the Service of a Local Marketing Policy In Barcelona, the promotion of heritage and tourism largely contributed to the public authorities’ aggressive policy to change the image of the central neighbourhoods. As Sophie Savary (2005) showed, the lower-income neighbourhoods of the historic centre had for a long time been subject to ambivalent representations: they were depicted as places of political and revolutionary agitation, whose residents did not think twice about taking up arms to defend the Republic during the 1936–39 civil war, as a hotbed of prostitution and trafficking, a violent and dangerous place, and finally as an industrious working-class area, the neighbourhood of workers, theatres and nightclubs – at odds with the quiet, bourgeois neighbourhoods of the Eixample in the minds of many. By the late 1970s, the public authorities began tackling the challenge of promoting a much more uniform and positive representation of the city and of its central neighbourhoods more specifically – a challenge that became even more crucial in the lead-up to the 1992 Olympic Games, and which remains important today. In 2005, a stretched canvas placed on a wall near Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (which had opened ten years before) introduced a new verb in the form of a pun to refer to ‘living in El Raval’ or ‘frequenting El Raval’. It reflected an effort to change the neighbourhood’s image, to create a trend that would facilitate the return to the older neighbourhoods of younger, more educated populations with more purchasing power (Figure 5.1). While seemingly inconsequential, the stunt showed that the Barcelona municipality admitted that offering renovated homes was not enough to bring the middle and upper classes back to a neighbourhood that was for a long time considered to be of ill repute. It needed to advertise a much more positive perception of El Raval, which entailed promoting the urban landscape itself. Heritage has been one of the main drivers of such physical and symbolic transformations. It became the means to ensure the touristic redevelopment of the Ciutat Vella district, particularly in the Raval neighbourhood, while meeting its need for urban regeneration. In the late 1980s, the public authorities committed to a large-scale heritage enhancement policy, largely supported by several programmes of regeneration of old neighbourhoods, aid to private renovations, and urban landscape enhancement. In the most intense regeneration period, the 1990s, nearly 800 million euros of public investments, including nearly half by the city, were made to improve roads and public spaces, renovate public facilities and modernize infrastructure. Private funds amounted to the very low proportion of 10.6 per cent of the

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Figure 5.1. Manufacturing El Raval’s new identity, Barcelona, 2005. © Hovig Ter Minassian.

total sums invested at the beginning of that period. Yet their share has increased since the mid-1990s; it had reached 39.8 per cent of the overall investment in 1997. The regeneration policy was implemented in partnership with private-sector actors, involved either in the mixed-economy company that took on the regeneration programmes in the old centre, including powerful banks like the Caixa or BBVA, or as recipients of public subsidies for the renovation of private houses and buildings. While public funds mostly served to renovate and create facilities and infrastructure, private-sector investments mainly aimed to develop business and tourism and boost the real-estate market – sectors with a strong growth potential. In that sense, public authorities achieved their objective: their own large-scale investments in turn encouraged private-sector investments. The resulting urban landscape may thus be considered both an outcome and a factor of gentrification: it reflects the reality of the gentrification process at work, but at the same time helps to accelerate it by making the neighbourhood more attractive – a fact elected representatives are well aware of, as is evidenced by the campaign ‘Barcelona, posa’t guapa’ (‘Barcelona, make yourself pretty’). Launched in 1986, it was meant to promote the embellishment of the urban landscape in view of the 1992 Olympic Games, and was extended afterwards. It consisted in a series of conventions signed by public

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actors and various private-sector companies to fund the enhancement of the urban landscape (façade renovations, rationalization and standardization of commercial signage). The campaign was only one of many tools employed by the municipality to enhance the urban heritage, and more broadly to make the central neighbourhoods – especially El Raval and La Barceloneta – desirable again. The enhancement of the city’s urban heritage or history has taken different forms in different neighbourhoods. In the Poblenou district, for instance, the area’s industrial history has been highlighted to support a largescale programme designed to transform part of the neighbourhood. Entitled ‘22@’, it combines urban renovations, the construction of offices, social and luxury housing units and a premium on high-tech and knowledge-based activities. The promoters of this project (the municipal company 22 ARROBA BCN, created in 2000) are keen to point out that, since the nineteenth century, Poblenou has been the economic powerhouse of the Barcelona urban area if not of Catalonia as a whole, and has largely contributed to the metropolis’s urban development. Its promoters thus present the choice of locating the project in that particular neighbourhood as a logical one; they have reconstructed a historical continuity between the textile and metallurgical factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the knowledge production factories of the twenty-first – sometimes at the cost of tearing down old factories on the grounds of their ‘functional obsolescence’. Is Changing the Image of a Neighbourhood Enough to Attract Gentrifiers? Have these actions had an impact on gentrification processes in Barcelona’s central neighbourhoods? It is still too early to tell in the case of Poblenou, but at any rate, in the Ciutat Vella district, they have visibly contributed to boosting tourism, through the promotion of heritage and the creation of new cultural facilities, and to bringing back visitors and students to the centre. The pressing debate in Barcelona now concerns how to curb excessive touristic development and its effects (the overabundance of tourism rentals, closures of small shops, use-related conflicts); this was a prominent issue during the 2015 municipal campaign.3 Collective representations of these neighbourhoods have also changed, particularly regarding El Raval, which for a long time had a negative image. Academic studies (Martínez i Rigol 2000) have shown that the ‘pioneers’ of gentrification who moved into the neighbourhood in the 1990s, meaning the new predominantly middle-class residents whose socioeconomic backgrounds contrast with those of the older working population and with the South American, Indian and Pakistani immigrants, were initially surprised to find that the neighbourhood’s

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everyday life did not match the representations they had before they came. In other words, the neighbourhood was not as shady and dangerous as they feared. The return of the middle classes to El Raval, however, remained a limited phenomenon for a long time, but it is difficult to say whether this is because representations of that part of the old centre did not change entirely. According to real-estate agents we met there in the mid-2000s, some homeowners who resided south of Carrer de l’Hospital, in an area that was for a long time known as a hub of prostitution and drug trafficking, did not hesitate to sell their property to move to the north side of the street. Despite repaved streets, the construction of a student residence and more radical urban renewal operations (such as the opening of La Rambla del Raval, complete with a new four-star hotel), until now the middle classes have not massively reclaimed that part of the historic centre. Conversely, the areas that escaped marginalization or even experienced gentrification were precisely ones like La Ribera, whose image was more positive owing to their richer architectural heritage and to the presence of upper- and middle-class residents there at least up to the early twentieth century. In that sense, the degradation of that heritage and the exile of that population during the twentieth century only constituted a parenthesis in the neighbourhood’s global trajectory; it still enjoyed positive representations that facilitated the gentrification that began in the 1980s. LA GOUTTE D’OR: NORMALIZING LOWER-INCOME NEIGHBOURHOODS BY PROMOTING SOCIAL MIXING In the case of La Goutte d’Or, the neighbourhood’s representations only changed in the 2000s, although there were early signs of this in the late 1990s. This change can be observed both in institutional discourses (of political and community actors, local and national media) and in the discourses of some long-term residents and more recently arrived ones. When a left-wing coalition rose to municipal power in 2001, the evolution of the neighbourhood’s representations was one of the instruments and stated goals of its strategy of promotion of social mixing. Changing representations of this stigmatized area meant boosting its symbolic and economic value by seeking a ‘return to the norm’, meaning transforming it in accordance with the standards and values of the wealthier households that the municipality seeks to attract, while retaining its ‘popular’, multicultural quality. This strategy was not unanimously approved. Against the background of widespread embourgeoisement in Paris, the neighbourhood tends to be seen as one of the city’s last working-class bastions to be defended.

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A ‘Ghetto’ or a ‘Popular’ Parisian Neighbourhood? The Shifting Representations of the Area Beginning in the 1980s, the transformation of the negative representations of La Goutte d’Or raised high expectations among locally involved actors – political and institutional representatives, business owners, associations and residents alike. However, these expectations were based on widely variable, sometimes opposing views on the neighbourhood and on how it should change. Since the late nineteenth century, La Goutte d’Or had been a place of settlement for migrants, with populations from the French countryside, Southern Europe and then Africa and Southeast Asia housed in very precarious conditions. Having remained a lower-income area throughout the century and home to many immigrants, especially from former French colonies, the neighbourhood progressively earned a reputation as a ‘ghetto’. While activities linked to the informal economy, starting with prostitution and drug trafficking, are undeniably still thriving there now (Halfen, Vincelet and Grémy 2007), fears and stigmas around the area and its residents conveyed the idea that the neighbourhood had become a no-go area since the 1980s (Bacqué and Fijalkow 2006). This negative and declinist vision of the neighbourhood justified the implementation of the first urban policy programmes. The ‘ghetto’ became the main term used in the discourses of local public actors to refer to the neighbourhood and analyse its evolution, a representation then also conveyed in the local and national media. A piece in Le Monde (‘La Goutte d’Or au quotidien’, 13 December 1993) described the neighbourhood as ‘Paris’s new ghetto’, with its ‘spontaneous trade in dubious hygiene conditions, leading to the proliferation of rats, mice and cockroaches’, its ‘local ecosystem’ composed of ‘African prostitutes’, ‘traffickers and clandestine workshops’, and ‘drug users, whose used syringes litter the neighbourhood’s staircases’. Beginning in 2001, public authorities pursued the objective of diversifying the neighbourhood’s population, selecting retailers and public facilities to make it more attractive to better-off populations. As the head of cabinet of the deputy mayor in charge of housing who devised and implemented this strategy until 2012 explains, the municipality wished to ‘break the ghetto’ and ‘turn La Goutte d’Or into a normal neighbourhood, un quartier populaire de Paris’. However, upon being asked what his view of a ‘popular’ neighbourhood is, he referred to the Abbesses area of Montmartre, a neighbourhood whose gentrification is already quite advanced. These negative discourses on La Goutte d’Or’s population converge with those of other institutional actors working for the city council, the arrondissement council, the National Urban Renewal Agency (ANRU) or the Paris police prefecture,

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as well as with those of business owners who moved to the neighbourhood in the early 2000s in anticipation of its imminent transformation, and of residents involved in associations that develop social control strategies in the name of improving their living environment. In all cases, the idea of a ‘return to the norm’ that was a staple of these discourses was encouraged through the promotion of a greater amount of social mixing, but also if not mainly of ethnic mixing. The reference to the ghetto has had an impact on the urban policies conducted in the neighbourhood, but also on residential choices and the practices of its populations. It operates as a territorial stigma whose symbolic strength tends to block out the other, more positive representations conveyed by residents and members of associations involved in the neighbourhood. As the director of the association La Goutte Verte, who owns a flat in the neighbourhood, points out: ‘it’s bothersome because it tells other people in Paris that they shouldn’t come to this neighbourhood’. Without denying the challenges raised by the presence of populations weakened by unemployment, drug addiction, family breakdowns and so on, these actors place more emphasis on the neighbourhood’s dense social fabric and its rich ethnic and religious diversity, which they argue is the backbone of its social cohesion and integration. In the national press, Michel Neyreneuf, the eighteenth arrondissement’s deputy mayor in charge of urbanism and former president of the association Paris Goutte d’Or, whose action in the 1980s brought an end to the policy of systematically demolishing buildings and massively relocating residents outside the neighbourhood, claimed: ‘La Goutte d’Or is not a ghetto. It is a deeply original corner of Paris, with its own history and where life is quieter and happier than people think’ (Ambroise-Rendu 1993). However, these more positive discourses reflected some ambivalence regarding the fact that welcoming new, better-off populations might cause the neighbourhood to lose its working-class and multiethnic character. While representations on the current state and future of La Goutte d’Or vary, there is a growing consensus on the need to make them change, by promoting the neighbourhood’s working-class heritage, following the model of the quartier-village (the neighbourhood as a village). Social Mixing at the Service of the Neighbourhood’s Revitalization For the Parisian municipality, transforming representations of La Goutte d’Or has gone hand in hand with public policies implemented in the neighbourhood as part of a citywide promotion of social mixing. These concerned three main sectors: housing, business, and the creation of new public facilities – plus the redesign of public spaces such as Boulevard Barbès. The underlying idea behind this effort is that the influx of middle-class resi-

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dents enables a ‘territorialized management of the working classes’ (Tissot 2005: 69), thanks to the virtues of social control and education by example attributed to social mixing (Tanter and Toubon 1999; Bacqué et al. 2011), and a change in the neighbourhood’s image by sending the message that La Goutte d’Or is ‘safe’ again. The twofold goal of promoting social mixing here is thus to ‘civilize and control’ local populations, as is done elsewhere in France and in other countries (Uitermark, Duyvendak and Kleinhans 2007), but also to change the neighbourhood’s image. A municipal operations officer in the Château Rouge sector explains this in the following terms: ‘With our interventions on housing, businesses, and public spaces, the goal is to create a better image of the neighbourhood for Paris as a whole … The social challenge here is about reappropriating this neighbourhood entirely and that’s what the municipality is trying to do – a quartier populaire in the heart of Paris’. The rebalancing of the housing supply constitutes the cornerstone of this revitalization strategy, involving the renovation or demolition and reconstruction of dilapidated and unsanitary properties to produce a diversified supply of subsidized homes (meaning social and intermediary housing). Using a variety of sources of funding and the municipal housing allocation procedures, the municipality aims at a ‘top-down’ elevation of the neighbourhood’s social structure. To achieve this, it introduced a housing allocation policy called tiers mixité (literally, the ‘mixed third’), which consists in reserving a third of available housing for middle-class tenants, more specifically those considered as ‘key actors of the city’.4 The architecture and quality of these buildings were also placed at the service of this revitalization strategy. As the head of cabinet of the deputy mayor in charge of housing explains, to attract new populations, ‘you need to have big names in the field of architecture. Image is not only about words, you also have to see the difference visually’. To accompany this social transformation, the municipality has also been trying to change the neighbourhood’s commercial fabric through its mixed-economy company in charge of development. Whereas in many gentrifying neighbourhoods, municipal strategies aim at revitalizing a loose commercial fabric, the policy implemented in La Goutte d’Or rather consists in devitalizing the flourishing cheap ethnic business targeting populations from the African continent. To do this, the municipality conducts a ‘counterprogramming policy’, using procedures for the selection of businesses located on the ground floors of renovated or new buildings and the pre-emption of commercial leases. In 2002, the new buildings of Rue des Gardes, rebranded as a ‘fashion street’, housed stylists and designers, some with ethnic inspirations. Other businesses such as a wine merchant and an African bookshop also opened, but have been struggling. Additionally, the

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municipality has also been working on the ‘Five Continents Market’, a project aimed at partially relocating the neighbourhood’s African business to the border between the eighteenth arrondissement and the adjacent suburb of Aubervilliers. This has been the subject of long and difficult negotiations with the municipality of Aubervilliers; the project has also elicited much resistance from ethnic business owners represented in the Château Rouge traders’ association. They see this strategy as a way of ‘chasing’ them out of a neighbourhood whose accessibility and popularity ensure their financial prosperity. In any event, it is part of an effort to adjust the local supply to the expectations of the middle-class residents who have recently moved into the neighbourhood, to reduce the effects of the gap between the changing sociology of the residents and the slower changes in the commercial fabric. The neighbourhood’s revitalization also involves the development of cultural facilities (FGO-Barbara music and arts centre, Louxor cinema), to offer a wide range of multicultural events to foster social mixing. A much-discussed example of this was the creation of the Institut des Cultures d’Islam. Located in Rue Léon, in the heart of the neighbourhood, this centre is the result of an effort to provide a venue for the creation and diffusion of contemporary cultures in Muslim words. It generated considerable debate until it opened in 2013. Opponents argued that including a prayer hall in a publicly funded cultural facility raised the question of freedom of speech and art, in addition to breaching the 1905 law on the separation of Church and state. The project’s supporters, beginning with the mayor of Paris at the time, Bertrand Delanoë, and his counterpart in the eighteenth arrondissement, Daniel Vaillant, saw it as a means to improve the Muslim populations’ conditions of worship while recognizing their presence in local life, and to put an end to street prayers.5 In their view, the prayer hall was a ‘reasonable accommodation’ (Germain 2010) in the public management of the religious question. While these venues appear to attract very varied publics, coming from the neighbourhood and from other Parisian districts, and even from the suburbs as well, their programming is intended to meet the expectations of populations with high levels of cultural capital, who rank among the biggest consumers of cultural events, and of the populations from more modest backgrounds who are less likely to frequent these places. When the Gentrification of La Goutte d’Or Becomes a Subject of Debate The recent social and symbolic urban transformations of La Goutte d’Or, which have turned it into a place that is considered safe to live and to invest in,6 have been at the heart of broader public debates on the relations between public policy and gentrification of working-class neighbourhoods, against the background of the overall embourgeoisement of Paris. Admit-

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tedly, the revitalization strategy pursued in La Goutte d’Or has intensified gentrification, by transforming places according to a specific representation of lower-income neighbourhoods – that of the socially mixed and multicultural quartier-village – that ties in with the views of the recently arrived middle-class households we met during the fieldwork. However, it would be reductive and partly wrong to consider this convergence as the product of a real gentrification policy, as the analysis of the divergent stances of local actors does not allow us to establish its intention. Indeed, while the person in charge of the area at the Paris social housing company from 2001 to 2007 claimed that the city conducted a ‘policy of reconquest’, elected representatives in the neighbourhood argued that gentrification in La Goutte d’Or was simply a part of the city’s overall embourgeoisement process, for which private investors were solely responsible. It is difficult to say to what extent this stance reflects a deep-rooted commitment to the project of a ‘fairer and more solidary Paris’ (Mairie de Paris 2003) defended by the left since 2001, or is merely political posturing. In any case, it appears politically perilous for these actors to recognize the gentrifying impact of their policies, which ultimately contribute to driving some of the lower-income residents out of the neighbourhood. Yet gentrification is far from presented as a negative process for the city’s ‘social rebalancing’ – quite the opposite, in fact. Not only is it thought to be partly monitored through subsidized housing, but it is also alleged that the diversity it produces supplies the ingredients necessary for a ‘good mix’. This reflects the ambivalence inherent in this revitalization strategy that draws on the promotion of social mixing. These debates have been particularly relevant lately as new consumer spaces targeting the middle and upper classes have opened, reflecting an influx of new investors on the neighbourhood’s fringes. For instance, Brasserie Barbès, which is located in the southern part of the neighbourhood, at the intersection of Boulevard Barbès and Boulevard de la Chapelle, received much local and media exposure when it opened in the spring of 2015. With its refined decor, combining the codes of the Parisian brasserie and of industrial design (metal beams, factory floodlights, etc.), and fairly high prices, it stands in sharp contrast with the few modest surrounding bars, which prompted pundits to question whether La Goutte d’Or was the right place for such a venture. They asked if this was a sign of the neighbourhood’s gentrification, and whether this was a positive or a negative development. One of many press articles,7 Slate’s ‘Comment la Brasserie Barbès a ouvert le procès de la gentrification parisienne’ (‘How Brasserie Barbès put Parisian gentrification on trial’) (Cassely 2015), does an excellent job of documenting the contrasting stances on the impact of the gentrification of La Goutte d’Or, a neighbourhood often described as one of the ‘last remaining bastions’ of Paris’s working classes.

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MONTREUIL: RESPONDING TO THE CRISIS WITH A NEW OUTLOOK ON A WORKERS’ SUBURB Montreuil displays a perhaps even more striking case of rebranding, which has been even more necessary for its gentrification. Located in Paris’s former ‘red belt’ of inner suburbs, in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, which is notorious for its quartiers sensibles (underprivileged, ‘sensitive’ areas), it had nothing to attract the intellectual bourgeoisie of Paris in the late 1990s. From Paris, it was mainly seen as one of those suburbs filled with large estates housing generally poor populations of foreign origin, large families crammed into small apartments, unemployed youths, mothers who do not speak French, and so on. Despite the initiatives of dynamic associations to organize cultural exchanges, it was not a good place to live. This was the representation conveyed by the press until the late 1990s, in any case.8 ‘Cités’ (social housing estates, ‘projects’), ‘ghettos’, ‘struggling neighbourhoods’ were terms frequently used by journalists who described the town. From a ‘Problem Suburb’ to a ‘Working-Class Faubourg’: Changing Representations in the Press A review of the press based on a search for occurrences of ‘Montreuil’ in the main daily and weekly press titles between 1995 and 2008 shows that another image of the town emerged in the early 2000s – a much more positive one, seemingly entirely disconnected from the old image. It appeared first in lifestyle magazines, solely in connection to Bas-Montreuil, a neighbourhood that had at that point been seldom mentioned in articles. A ‘paradise’, ‘Eden’, ‘promised land’, ‘Eldorado’ – completely new words were used to describe this part of the town that adjoined Paris, implicitly referring to the romantic image of the North American frontier. Many artists moved in; they interested and fascinated journalists. These articles, which inspired each other, were increasingly numerous between 2000 and 2003 and diffused an entirely new image of the neighbourhood. It was presented as a ‘Parisian extension’, a ‘twenty-first arrondissement of Paris’, a contemporary heir to twentieth-century cultural hubs like Montmartre, Montparnasse and SaintGermain-des-Prés. It was also sometimes compared to certain hip neighbourhoods of Berlin and New York, because of its factories that had been converted into lofts. Yet, in other articles, it was claimed to have a ‘touch of the country’, or to be a ‘timeless’ faubourg (a term that typically describes modest nineteenth-century inner suburbs), with its workers’ houses and gardens. It also occasionally embodied a mythical, friendly and peaceful ‘global village’, where the diversity of backgrounds was approached in culinary terms rather than with the usual talk of social struggles. These were var-

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ied and sometimes contradictory images, but at any rate they were quite far removed from the infamous quartiers sensibles of the 1990s (Collectif 1997). Aside from the proximity of Paris and the presence of the metro, which were necessary but not sufficient conditions for the ‘twenty-first arrondissement of Paris’ label to apply, these new images mainly drew on three defining features of Bas-Montreuil (as opposed to the town as a whole; only that one neighbourhood was highlighted), which were quickly spotted by journalists: its urban fabric typical of a faubourg, with workers’ houses and factories in the process of being converted; the presence of many artists, especially in the visual arts, theatre and film, and of their places of work; lastly, an objectively highly mixed population in terms of geographical and social backgrounds. These new images were also conveyed through more institutionalized channels – particularly by very active cultural venues managed or supported by the town (municipal cinema, live music venues, theatres, culture houses, children’s book fair) and using historical narratives placed at the disposal of the public and journalists that highlighted the presence of the first film studios in the town in the early twentieth century or the old horticultural activities whose traces are still visible in the urban fabric. Social Mixing, Film and Market Gardening: Inventing the New ‘Popular’ Neighbourhood This multifaceted new representation was not the outcome of an easily identifiable, carefully thought-out and implemented municipal strategy. Admittedly, the municipality actively participated in the production of new images of the town through a variety of media, but this was not so much a planned, concerted and deliberate effort as the legitimization of choices on urban projects and on the town’s planning and development and of a new form of governance and relationship to constituents devised as responses to the industrial and urban crisis experienced by Montreuil since the late 1970s. One should bear in mind that between 1976 and 1987 the town lost roughly 60 per cent of its industrial jobs, located for the most part in Bas-Montreuil (Toubon et al. 1990). Factory closures caused buildings to become abandoned and deteriorate, leading to a sharp population decline (around 10 per cent in the neighbourhood between 1975 and 1999). A new project for the neighbourhood’s transformation was proposed under the aegis of JeanPierre Brard, who was deputy mayor for urbanism and then mayor from 1984 to 2008. Beyond the extremely violent economic and urban crisis that had hit the neighbourhood since the mid-1970s, it also had to address the weakening of the French Communist Party (PCF) at national level, and of municipal communism as a local political agenda and form of management. First based on a predominantly economic approach to the neighbourhood,

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the urban project for Bas-Montreuil then progressively came to reflect the new mayor’s support for the ‘refounders’ movement within his party and his support for the watchwords of the national urban policy (Tissot 2007). The earliest measures, which helped to give the neighbourhood a new image, concerned economic activity. While reaffirming the neighbourhood’s ‘industrial vocation’ (in a nod to its Communist identity), the municipality tried to attract new production operations combining the manufacturing and service sectors, for instance in office and computer equipment, and then high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with high added value and requiring little space, allowing a progressive conversion to an economic specialization. A network effect, encouraged by selection upon the commercialization of new business premises, progressively transformed the neighbourhood into a hub for jobs in the image and animation sectors. This specialization drew on the reference to the ‘local tradition’ of film, which was rediscovered for the occasion: in the early twentieth century, the neighbourhood had indeed been home to the motion picture studios of Méliès (1897–1913) and Pathé (1904–29). This ‘tradition’, highlighted in the municipality’s communications outlets, did not singlehandedly account for the influx of graphic design and consultants to government and industry companies, but it reinforced the idea of a local speciality and made the town attractive to cultural-sector professionals. Another source of change in the neighbourhood’s image was the urban policy turn of the 1980s: at the same time as the municipality shifted its efforts from the large housing estates to Bas-Montreuil, the preference for large new real-estate operations gave way to an approach favouring more occasional intervention and improvement of the existing housing stock. As large estates fell out of fashion and older neighbourhoods were revitalized, the ageing streets, buildings and shops of Bas-Montreuil, which admittedly do not have the historical value of provincial old towns, at least had the advantage of not looking like the housing estates associated with social problems in the collective psyche. The renovation of old buildings was encouraged by several quite successful ‘OPAH’9 rehabilitation programmes. The new social housing units were constructed in small buildings designed to fit alongside the older ones, to ‘avoid the HLM image’, as the former manager of the semipublic company (société d’économie mixte) in charge of these constructions explicitly put it (a reference to the widely used abbreviation for habitations à loyer modéré, i.e. social housing units in France). By partly renewing the population, these two housing policy orientations were expected to change the image of the neighbourhood (Lévy 1992; Bacqué, Fol and Lévy 1998). The urban planning department thus embraced the new watchwords of urban reform: social mixing, but also functional mixing. The entanglement of factories and homes was highlighted as a distinguishing feature of a fau-

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bourg’s urban fabric, requiring preservation and promotion. The municipality was quite eager to communicate on its new projects;10 a journalist for Le Moniteur Manuel Delluc referred to this functional mixing as a ‘precious specificity of the identity’ of ‘Montreuil’s industrial tradition’ (Delluc 1993: 16). Interviewed in the specialized press, the planner in charge of revising planning documents went so far as to describe it as the outcome of an avantgarde urban policy that managed to resist the pressure of zoning in the 1960s. He stated the new mantra of the municipal team: ‘Our idea is to preserve and accentuate mixing in this territory. The town has been built progressively; the urban landscape has a strong identity here. Montreuil is more than a suburb – it is a city in the suburbs’ (Pellegrini 1992: 104).11 The promotion of the early-twentieth-century faubourg consisted in erasing the suburb of the postwar years and finding other features of the town’s identity in a more distant past. This is also what drove the municipality to support local history associations, and to commission history publications and a study on the history of Montreuil. Conducted by a landscaper, this study played an important role in shaping new representations of the town, evidencing its horticultural past by pointing to still visible traces of peach-growing – the distinctive whitewashed walls, separating long plots, were, according to the study’s author, Michel Corajoud, a formidable ‘landscape potential’, hidden by aggressive postwar urbanization. Sylvie Tissot deftly showed how the (re)discovery of ‘peach walls’ served the new image of the town promoted by the municipality: since the achievements that had once been the pride of Communist representatives were now largely discredited by the shared diagnosis of the ‘suburban crisis’, a new historical narrative was put forward, which downplayed the golden years of municipal communism and found other working-class figures to highlight (Tissot 2007). Farmers and market gardeners, just like the early inventors of cinema and the makers of special effects, made the town look more attractive without betraying its working-class identity. Montreuil’s New Image: A Local Translation of National Watchwords While Jean-Pierre Brard’s successive municipal teams did not develop a deliberate, coherent image strategy, they were nevertheless active in producing and disseminating images, narratives and figures that deeply transformed the representations usually associated with the town. Film, horticulture and a new definition of the populaire, downplaying social conflict and highlighting cultural diversity and citizen participation, were the three pillars of this symbolic production – reflected by the names given to the three flagship municipal cultural institutions: the Méliès cinema, the Maison Populaire and a concert venue called La Pêche (‘The Peach’). These changes were

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made in response to injunctions and watchwords formulated at the national level, particularly in the field of urban policy (whose main ingredients were, and are still today, mixing, participation and the promotion of historical heritage) but also among the Communist Party’s ‘refounders’. To understand how a Communist municipality came to promote an urban model that was not that of its voters and that was actually more conducive to going along with a sociological change if not encouraging it, we need to put aside the knowledge acquired for the past twenty years or so and consider the economic, political but also ideological context of the late 1980s and 1990s. The violent industrial crisis that shook Western Europe and the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe dismayed Communist policymakers. In addition to all this, they saw their municipal management model crumble as businesses left their cities, and had to come up very quickly with other solutions to face the urban crisis in their working-class neighbourhoods. Against such a backdrop, it made sense that some of them progressively came to draw on the service sector or on the cultural industry as long as they provided jobs, and that they embraced the urban policy watchwords that may have drawn on the condemnation of the large housing estates they had once promoted, but offered them avenues and most importantly resources to reinvent their action in struggling neighbourhoods. This is also why they were fairly sympathetic to the arrival of a few middle-class households that at least had the merit of taking an interest in the places they moved into and of bringing resources and energy to get involved. These elected representatives were not familiar with the early English-language studies on gentrification and did not see things that way. They were aware of potential sociological changes, but considered this posed little risk and were primarily concerned with bringing jobs and residents back to their cities. They could not anticipate the real-estate boom of the 2000s and its powerful accelerating impact on urban change, leading to a population renewal so intense that they lost their mandates. In fact, when Jean-Pierre Brard and his team started noticing those changes, particularly after the publication of the 1999 census figures and the 2001 municipal elections, which showed both the onset of ‘gentrification’ (a term used by a municipal civil servant during a departmental meeting in 2003) and the growth of a green electorate in Bas-Montreuil, they refocused their preoccupations and actions on the town’s lower-income populations and neighbourhoods. The ball was already rolling, however, and the rise in Parisian real-estate prices would soon give it more momentum. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, the town’s urban projects did not all play to the image of a gentrified or gentrifiable neighbourhood: they included the construction of numerous social housing units, the demolition of factories

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and the construction of new office spaces in vast joint development zones (ZACs), as well as attempts at urbanizing the former site of the peach walls. Still, there was a clear convergence between the representations conveyed by the Communist municipal majority12 and those of the early gentrifiers – teachers, journalists, engineers and artists who moved into Bas-Montreuil in the mid-1980s. This convergence can be explained first by the success of reformist ideas on the left in the face of the collapse of the Communist Party and of industry, and secondly by the influence of the former activists of the 1968 generation in urban policies tackling the social and urban crisis in the postwar suburbs (Tissot 2007). At any rate, the first gentrifiers, as they attempted to adapt their environment to their tastes and to put their political beliefs into practice, reinforced the symbolic work initiated by the municipality. In their homes, they strove to highlight the industrial architecture and the faubourg identity and to erase anything reminiscent of a suburban house. Rendered walls, rose bushes, bars on windows and wallpapers were banished, replaced by metallic beams, bay windows, waxed concrete floors and unruly vegetation. In their descriptions of the neighbourhood, they referred to a wide array of categories – the small town, the village, the country or the metropolis – except for the suburb. They also encouraged the municipal team to go further – in particular in its efforts to safeguard faubourg-style architecture, the promotion of the town’s industrial legacy, the protection of peach walls and the support of arthouse cinema (Collet 2012).13 As a result, after frequent oppositions, informal cooperations were in quite a few cases developed between some associations and gentrifying inhabitants and elected representatives, on generally consensual topics such as the fight against poor housing, support for social mixing in schools and the democratization of access to culture. CONCLUSION: CHANGING THE NEIGHBOURHOOD’S IMAGE, CHANGING THE NEIGHBOURHOOD In industrial towns and cities in crisis like Montreuil in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in cities facing a housing crisis like Barcelona and Paris and neighbourhoods dealing with the challenges of multicultural cohabitation like La Goutte d’Or, the transformation of images and representations of places ultimately pursued varied objectives: attracting private capital or jobs, bringing (back) middle- and upper-class categories to these neighbourhoods, developing touristic and commercial activities, as well as reducing crime, normalizing cohabitation, promoting a model of vivre-ensemble [a recently fashionable French catchphrase meaning roughly ‘social cohesion’] and of

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the quartier-village that meets the expectations of public authorities, and sometimes boosting gentrification. Various forms of transformation of images and representations are nevertheless embedded in contexts that are specific to each of the places under consideration and follow different temporalities. As we have seen, the actors in those changes, as well as their resources and objectives, vary. Furthermore, not all of them act as part of a deliberate strategy to transform representations of the neighbourhood. Accordingly, situations vary, from the aggressive policy orchestrated by the municipality in Barcelona to the convergence of actions led by a variety of actors in Montreuil or to the social mixing and upgrading strategy at work in Paris. Obviously, these changes are also not specific to the municipal policies conducted in the cities under study here. They are part of broader trends, such as in France the rise of heritage policies, the popularity of discourses on citizenship and vivre-ensemble, the imposition of the ‘social mixing’ watchword, the social construction of the figure of the quartiers populaires and the reinforcement of metropolitan attractiveness. As Yankel Fijalkow and Edmond Préteceille note, ‘gentrification appears largely determined by the way in which quartiers populaires are described’ (Fijalkow and Préteceille 2006: 9). According to some authors, these changes are also part of a strategy of ‘territorial marking’, a way to strengthen their appropriation of central neighbourhoods for some social groups newly present in the housing stock and influential in the political choices made in these neighbourhoods (Veschambre 2008). This is probably also an effect of the transformations of the bourgeoisie and the rise of one of its fractions, situated on the left side of the political spectrum and defending visions of the city that are alternative to those of the technocrats in power at the national level until the early 1980s and of the local Communist representatives. It is, however, far from ideologically hegemonic, and we need to look closely at the discourses and actions of local public authorities to get a sense of the variety of policies being implemented. Lastly, as we have seen, these actions can be initiated by public actors, often in a logic of integration to other policies (on housing, businesses, culture, etc.) but also by private actors and residents using local resources. Whether these transformations reflect deliberate strategies for a discussion on the intentionality of gentrification policies or the convergence of diffuse actions with multiple goals (expanding cultural or touristic activities, filling the gaps in infrastructure, pacifying cohabitation, promoting the multiethnicity of neighbourhoods, etc.), they reflect to a large extent the dominant representations of the city and of its desirable evolutions, and in that sense actively contribute to its gentrification.

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Notes 1. The roles played by journalists and real-estate agents in shaping changes of collective representations of places and their effects on the practices of households and elected representations are just as worthy of investigation. This has been done by Julie Sedel (2009) with regard to journalists and Loïc Bonneval (2011) with regard to real-estate agents. 2. Translator’s note: in French, the word populaire is used primarily in this sense of ‘of the people’, and is frequently used as a synonym (or sometimes a euphemism) for ‘working-class’. 3. On 24 May 2015, the municipal election in Barcelona was won by the platform ‘Barcelona en Comú’, supported among others by the Podemos party, which had emerged in January 2014 in the wake of the Indignados movement and of popular protests against the austerity policies enforced in Spain since the 2008–9 economic and financial crisis. The new mayor Ada Colau had campaigned against the excesses of mass tourism in the Catalan metropolis. 4. A result of the transfer of the British ‘Key Workers’ public-policy category, the concept of ‘key actors in the city’ (acteurs clés de la ville) was developed over the entire decade of the 2000s by the Parisian municipality. It refers to workers whose presence within the city boundaries of Paris is considered indispensable, owing first to their contribution to the city’s optimal functioning and second to their alleged capacity to serve as ‘link-actors’ (acteurs-relais) of social mixing. See Launay (2014). 5. Every Friday during worship in the neighbourhood’s mosques, attendance would spill over into the nearest streets, as many men could not find room inside the buildings, which were too small to house all the worshippers. This occupation of streets for religious reasons caused many local and national public debates, particularly in 2010, when a far-right fringe group tried to organize a ‘wine and saucisson’ event via Facebook, which activists responded to by organizing a ‘halal and mint tea’ event of their own. Both were prohibited by the Paris police prefecture. The event was intended to denounce street prayers on the grounds that they were a breach of the laicity principle and reflected the ‘excessive’ presence of Muslim populations in the neighbourhood and in French society as a whole. It was exploited by political actors affiliated with the Front National (FN). The party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, compared these prayers to ‘Nazi occupation’; a statement for which she faced trial before a criminal court. 6. Since the early 2000s, many articles in the press have highlighted the neighbourhood’s multicultural dimension, as in Figaroscope in January 2002 (‘Carrefour des cultures’, meaning ‘a cultural crossroads’) or in the real-estate section of the 12 November 2002 issue of Les Échos (‘Barbès redevient fréquentable’, meaning ‘Barbès becomes hospitable again’), which describes the advantages of this still-affordable working-class neighbourhood that it says has been ‘reconquered by public authorities’. 7. Among other examples, see Télérama, 23 May 2015, ‘Brasserie Barbès: Repaire de bobos ou brasserie populaire?’ (Brasserie Barbès: a bobo hangout or a brasserie for the people?) and Youen Tanguy (2015) in Les Inrockuptibles, 22 August 2015, ‘Pourquoi la Goutte d’Or résiste-t-elle à la gentrification?’ (Why is La Goutte d’Or resisting gentrification?).

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8. Daily newspapers included in the press review: Le Figaro (1996–2008); Le Monde (1987–2008); Libération (1995–2008) and Le Parisien (1998–2008). Weekly magazines: L’Express (1993–2008); Le Point (1995–2008); Le Nouvel Observateur and its Parisian supplement L’Obs de Paris (2004–7). Other titles were consulted more occasionally (Elle; L’Humanité; Marianne; Paris-Match; Zurban). 9. OPAH: opération programmée d’amélioration de l’habitat – ‘scheduled housingimprovement scheme’. 10. A dozen articles were published between 1985 and 1998 in press outlets specialized in urbanism, generally in connection with studies commissioned by the municipality; they exclusively focused on older areas of the city and legitimized the policy of revitalization of the faubourg and its functional and social mixing. 11. Michel Steinebach, quoted in Pellegrini (1992). 12. Jean-Pierre Brard gave up his PCF membership in 1996, but remained affiliated with the Communist group in the National Assembly. His majority remained composed of members of the PCF and subsequently of the Front de Gauche until 2008. 13. See Collet (2012) for an analysis of the residents’ symbolic and practical ‘gentrification work’.

References Ambroise-Rendu, Marc. 1993. ‘Paris la Goutte-d’Or retrouve la fierté’, Le Monde, 25 July. Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, and Yankel Fijalkow. 2006. ‘En attendant la gentrification: Discours et politiques à la Goutte d’Or (1982–2000)’, Sociétés contemporaines 63(3): 63–83. Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, Yankel Fijalkow, Lydie Launay and Stéphanie Vermeersch. 2011. ‘Social Mix Policies in Paris: Discourses, Policies and Social Effects’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2): 256–73. Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, Sylvie Fol and Jean-Pierre Lévy. 1998. ‘Mixité sociale en banlieue ouvrière: enjeux et représentations’, in Nicole Haumont and Jean-Pierre Lévy (eds), La Ville éclatée. Quartiers et peuplements. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 161–73. Bonneval, Loïc. 2011. Les Agents immobiliers. Pour une sociologie des acteurs des marchés du logement. Lyons: ENS Editions. Cassely, Jean-Laurent. 2015. ‘Comment la Brasserie Barbès a ouvert le procès de la gentrification parisienne’, Slate, 1 June. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https:// www.slate.fr/story/102167/brasserie-barbes-malaise-gentrification. Collectif. 1997. Ces quartiers dont on parle. En marge de la ville, au cœur de la société. La Tour-d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube. Collet, Anaïs. 2012. ‘Montreuil, “le 21e arrondissement de Paris”? La gentrification ou la fabrication d’un quartier ancien de centre-ville’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 195: 12–37. Delluc, Manuel. 1993. ‘Montreuil, éloge de la mixité’, Le Moniteur Architecture 40: 16–17. Fijalkow, Yankel, and Edmond Préteceille. 2006. ‘Gentrification: discours et politiques urbaines (France, Royaume-Uni, Canada)’, Sociétés contemporaines 63: 5–13. Germain, Annick. 2010. ‘La religion dans l’espace public en contexte multiethnique: des accommodements raisonnables au zonage’/‘Religion in Public Space in a MultiEthnic Environment: Reasonable Accommodations in Zoning’, Le Pont/The Bridge, 11 January.

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Halfen, Sandrine, Catherine Vincelet and Isabelle Grémy. 2007. Toxicomanie et usages de drogues à Paris: état des lieux et évolutions en 2006. Report. Paris: Observatoire Régional de Santé d’Île-de-France/Observatoire Français des Drogues et des Toxicomanies. Launay, Lydie. 2014. ‘Le logement des Acteurs clés de la ville et des Key Workers à Paris et à Londres, un instrument de régulation du peuplement urbain?’, in Fabien Desage, Christelle Morel-Journel and Valérie Sala-Pala (eds), Le Peuplement comme politique(s). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 195–216. Lévy, Jean-Pierre. 1992. ‘Politiques locales de l’habitat et valorisation des quartiers anciens’, Les Cahiers de l’IATEUR 12–13: 321–37. Mairie de Paris. 2003. Programme local de l’habitat. Paris. Martínez i Rigol, Sergi. 2000. ‘El retorn al centre de la ciutat: la reestructuració del Raval entre la renovació i la gentrificació’, Ph.D. dissertation in geography. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Pellegrini, Emmanuelle. 1992. ‘L’urbanisme à Montreuil: itinéraire d’un précurseur’, Cahiers de l’IAURIF 102: 99–104. Savary, Sophie. 2005. ‘Imaginaires d’une ville: Barcelone par ses paysages. Une étude géolittéraire’, Ph.D. dissertation in geography. Paris: Université Paris-1 Panthéon– Sorbonne. Sedel, Julie. 2009. Les Médias et la banlieue. Lormont/Paris: Le Bord de l’Eau/Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). Tanguy, Youen. 2015. ‘Pourquoi la Goutte d’Or résiste-t-elle à la gentrification?’, Les Inrockuptibles, 22 August, online. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://www .lesinrocks.com/actu/pourquoi-la-goutte-dor-resiste-a-la-gentrification-90053-2208-2015. Tanter, Annick, and Jean-Claude Toubon. 1999. ‘Mixité sociale et politiques de peuplement: genèse de l’ethnicisation des opérations de réhabilitation’, Sociétés contemporaines 33–34: 59–87. Tissot, Sylvie. 2005. ‘Une “discrimination informelle”? Usages du concept de mixité sociale dans la gestion des attributions de logements HLM’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 159: 54–69. Tissot, Sylvie. 2007. L’Etat et les Quartiers. Genèse d’une catégorie de l’action publique. Paris: Seuil. Toubon, Jean-Claude, Annie Sevin, Annick Tanter and François Jacob. 1990. Le Projet de quartier du Bas-Montreuil, ses effets sur le milieu industriel. Paris: Ministère de l’Équipement – Plan Urbain/Institut d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme de la Région Île-de-France (IAURIF)/Le Champ Urbain/Association de Travaux de l’Urbanisme et Technique (Arturbatec). Uitermark, Justus, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Reinout Kleinhans. 2007. ‘Gentrification as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam’, Environment and Planning A 39(1): 125–41. Veschambre, Vincent. 2008. Traces et Mémoires urbaines. Enjeux sociaux de la patrimonialisation et de la démolition. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

CH A P TER

6 MOV I NG UPM A R K ET A Neoliberal Strategy of Urban (Re)Development

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Max Rousseau

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ecent studies on ‘gentrification policies’ have overall focused on the transformation of specific policies (housing, culture, planning, urban marketing, etc.), the reorientation of the central state’s role in managing lower-income neighbourhoods or the influence of theories of local economic development, which lead local public actors to aim at attracting privileged social groups (the ‘creative class’ and similar groups). By contrast, very little research has been done on the governance of gentrification. I use this term deliberately here; while it may have acquired normative overtones (as in the ‘good governance’ promoted by the World Bank), the word remains useful to assess recent changes in urban power (Le Galès 1995), characterized by the relative weakening of elected governments and the rise of actors coming mostly from the private sector. This chapter examines how the overall shift of urban power towards governance has corresponded with the rise of gentrification policies; how an urban strategy for moving the city upmarket was gradually devised (Rousseau 2014); and lastly how the city has changed against a background of structural urban fragility and successive (economic, social, political and realestate) crises. To do so, I study the shifting alliances between private and public actors based on a mutual interest in the implementation of a ‘vision for quality’ – a euphemism referring to the ambition to refashion city centres

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to have them fit the tastes of the more privileged social groups – in a city in the throes of a long and painful economic restructuring. Here the focus on northern British cities has great heuristic value owing to a context that has been particularly conducive to the implementation of gentrification policies. In the UK, studies on gentrification focused for a long time on London, a global city where the process began spontaneously. Research on gentrification in the country’s other big cities only emerged in the early 2000s, because the process started later there: most UK researchers consider gentrification to be a process that trickles down from London, its national ‘incubator’ (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008). This trickle-down effect has produced a consequence that is of particular interest in this chapter: indeed, it explains why the gentrification of British regional metropolises, particularly in the North, where the economic and social impact of deindustrialization is still being felt and where gentrification was not bound to happen, is a process that is primarily the outcome of government policy, at central and local levels alike. For instance, as Darren Smith has shown regarding the case of Leeds (Smith 2005) – but the observation may apply to many other British university towns and cities – gentrification often involves ‘studentification’, which is itself boosted by policies supporting the development of academic courses. Smith made an intriguing generational comparison, arguing that universities serve as ‘gentrification factories’ that play the same role as the countercultural movements of the 1960s–1970s in the first wave of gentrification analysed by the classic authors. The central state’s urban renovation policies, aimed at revitalizing the real-estate market in areas that are repulsive to private investors, are also frequently considered ‘gentrification policies’. In his analysis of the effects of the New Labour government’s highly controversial Housing Market Renewal Initiative (2002) in Liverpool, Brendan Nevin shows that strategy to be problematic not only because it contributes to driving away local residents (owing to the weakness of the effective demand for gentrification) but also and chiefly because it supports a housing supply that is largely out of touch with the residents’ incomes (Nevin 2010). Yet Manchester, the North’s main metropolis, might be called the regional laboratory of gentrification, as it has been the target of the earliest, most diversified and most far-reaching gentrification policies – among many examples, it used a line of argument that drew heavily on the ‘creative class’ theory to secure the decentralization of part of the BBC in the mid-2000s (Christophers 2008) – and it has been particularly attractive to the elites of nearby big cities, such as Sheffield (Béal and Rousseau 2008). The city of Sheffield is a particularly valuable case study for this chapter, as it provides a prime example of how urban policies have shifted from the defence of the working class’s interests to an effort to move upmarket by attracting the more privileged social groups (young workers in the

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cutting-edge service sector, international students, tourists). During the postwar decades of prosperity, Sheffield was called ‘the most proletarian city in Europe’, owing to its overwhelmingly working-class population, which voted massively for a Labour city council whose role consisted in turning its demands into urban policies, under the strict control of the party’s activist base. Sheffield’s local government was thus the perfect example of the Fordist compromise whereby the workers’ movement was entrusted with some power (often urban power) in exchange for accepting the rules of industrial capitalism (particularly, the productivity gain enabled by the scientific organization of labour). Effectively, in Sheffield, the postwar decades were the apex of the Fordist urban policy par excellence – namely, the mass construction of public housing by the municipality, aimed at the city’s working-class residents. URBAN CRISIS AND GENESIS OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY In Sheffield, this system collapsed at a later stage than in many other industrial cities: the city’s economy, which was almost entirely based on the steel industry, did not begin facing a violent crisis before the turn of the 1980s. This delayed crisis goes a long way towards explaining the nature of subsequent redevelopment strategies. The lag was due to the city’s industrial specialization. Steel long remained a key industry for the central state, partly because it was a direct provider to many other industries, and partly because it was indispensable to ‘hard politics’ (war, which relies on arms production) (Mann 1997). The 1967 nationalization of the steel industry by the Labour government (resulting in the creation of the British Steel Corporation) led the state to fund the preservation of jobs in the sector at a loss during the 1970s. Thus, Sheffield’s elites believed they were spared from the painful transformations experienced by neighbouring cities (Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds), being the ‘steel city’. The election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which had an immediate impact on the steel industry, was a brutal wake-up call: in the early 1980s, unemployment soared as successive privatizations caused multiple job cuts. Urban elites in the public and private sectors alike were not ready to face the new competition from other northern cities, which had already launched their entrepreneurial conversion by targeting new economic activities. The rapid destruction of the city’s economic base and the pauperization of much of the population initially led to a radicalization of urban government, as the city council fell to the New Urban Left, a political movement that directly represented the working class that had been hit very hard by

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deindustrialization (Le Galès 1990). Opposing the ‘ossified’ management of Labour’s old guard, the young New Urban Left councillors devised a local redevelopment strategy and used municipal resources to preserve workers’ jobs, by subsidizing training courses and supporting the development of co-ops with an innovative instrument, the Employment Department. This alternative to the neoliberalism of the central state and its corollary, urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 2014),1 ended in failure in the mid-1980s. Three factors explain this failure: first, the decline of municipal resources, related to the city’s overall decline; second, the central government’s adamant opposition, which resulted in increased control over the municipality’s tax policy; third, the collapse of the working class, which used to be the New Urban Left’s base. The latter’s misfortune led to a new shift in the city’s trajectory, as private interests began to be introduced into urban power in the mid-1980s. The first entrepreneurial phase that ensued was characterized by the search for a new compromise between the municipality, which was eager to pursue economic development, and the private sector, which sought to play a part in the formulation of urban policies. That compromise was based on a precarious balance between, on the one hand, the pragmatic acceptance of relying on private capitals for redevelopment, and on the other, the preservation of the interests of the increasingly pauperized working-class urban population. The resulting new redevelopment strategy relied on the implementation of a large-scale policy aimed at improving public perception of the city. In 1989, Sheffield gave the green light to the construction of the biggest shopping centre in Britain, Meadowhall (inaugurated the following year), on the outskirts of the city. In 1991, it hosted the World University Games, for which several world-standard stadiums were built. The first entrepreneurial phase also saw the creation of the Sheffield Development Corporation (SDC), an urban development corporation (UDC)2 that was granted local-authority prerogatives over the regeneration of the steel area east of the city, the Lower Don Valley. The SDC was a major player in Sheffield’s entrepreneurial transition. While its creation originally met with hostility in the Labour city council, local authorities gradually came to accept its control over the industrial valley; as they worked alongside the SDC, city technicians ended up embracing the new methods it promoted. In retrospect, the SDC arguably acted as a Trojan horse for urban entrepreneurialism. The projects and policies implemented by local authorities in the late 1980s reflect an effort to erase the city’s industrial identity and its recent ‘red’ period. The public–private partnership that now steered Sheffield’s redevelopment attempted to project the image of a dynamic city, open to outside investments and ready to turn the page on steel. The Labour activist base agreed that there was a need to boost the sense of ‘pride’ of residents in the shrinking city, and believed these flagship projects would have a positive im-

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pact on local employment. However, these hastily formed projects turned out to be costly in both economic and political terms. The construction of the stadiums plunged the municipality into heavy debt, and the opening of the shopping centre struck a fatal blow to shops in the city centre. Facing a mounting political crisis (as the policies designed to enhance the city’s image were increasingly challenged, city-centre retailers threatened by the suburban shopping centre mobilized, and the central government was hostile to the ‘centrism’ of this first entrepreneurial phase), Sheffield’s governance underwent a new change in the early 1990s. Against the background of faltering voter support for the Labour Party, a new restructuring of urban power saw the municipality lose its leadership over the definition of urban policies. The new partnership expanded the role of the main local stakeholders, including the chamber of commerce, the universities, the managers of the new sports amenities and local real-estate interests. Whereas in the first, ‘centrist’, entrepreneurial phase the priority was to preserve jobs, in the new ‘neoliberal’ phase the emphasis was placed on growth. The objective of the redevelopment strategy changed, from attracting new firms to quell the rise of unemployment to bringing in new populations. In terms of urban policy, this resulted in heightened redevelopment in the city centre, which was now considered a showcase for the competitive city. THE ROOTS OF STRATEGIES FOR MOVING UPMARKET: CHANGING URBAN GOVERNANCE The public policies used for redevelopment purposes were now negotiated by a new public–private partnership within which the council became ‘an important stakeholder among others’ – the ‘others’ being the chamber of commerce, the chamber of trade, the SDC and the city’s two universities. Concerning the city’s relations with the central government, this reconfiguration of urban power was immediately effective: the city was now rewarded by the competitive grant programmes of John Major’s Conservative cabinet, and subsequently of Tony Blair’s New Labour cabinet. The alignment of urban governance with the recommendations of the central government then further weakened the local authority, as these programmes meant decentralizing the implementation of projects and entrusting them to new neighbourhood councils, which created technical agencies that dispossessed the local authority from its long-established control over urban expertise (Booth 2004). The new redevelopment strategy was strongly influenced by the city’s two universities, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam Univer-

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sity, which became two central players in urban governance. Founded in the early twentieth century, the University of Sheffield brought over 5,000 jobs and 26,000 students to the city. Enjoying a fairly good reputation, it boasted a long tradition of academic excellence. Its campus is located in the western part of the city centre, where its area of influence lies, with many student-oriented accommodation facilities and shops. The University of Sheffield developed a certain interest in the city’s image, but not to the same extent as Sheffield Hallam University, whose more recent creation explains its interest in the redevelopment strategy. Previously a mere training institute under the umbrella of the local authority, Hallam became an independent university in its own right in 1992. Its main campus is located east of the city centre. Unlike the University of Sheffield, Hallam University initially proposed short programmes aimed at students with working-class backgrounds. It gradually sought to expand its range by developing longer programmes and welcoming traditional academic disciplines, while diversifying its offer of short courses. As tuition fees kept steadily rising and the competition between universities (over the students that could afford these fees) and housing costs heightened, Hallam University was initially clearly disadvantaged, seeing as it had no genuine tradition of research. Still, it had a considerable asset in its vice-president, who was very active in the city’s main partnership bodies and had close ties in the Department for Education after Tony Blair’s election. To understand the rise of universities in urban power, we must examine the way in which the UK’s higher education and research market is structured. British universities face intense competition over students in an increasingly internationalized market. As they bring in considerable numbers of young people, they are crucial resources for a city. For both Sheffield universities, especially Hallam, attracting students with a privileged social background, from abroad in particular, is of the utmost importance. A diagnosis rapidly transpired: the dilapidation of the city centre, its downmarket stores and the poor populations who frequent it are serious handicaps for a city that seeks to get the attention of wealthy parents, especially from other countries. Lastly, the influence of universities is further increased by the difficult economic transition faced by the city: the collapse in the number of private-sector workers has not been compensated by service-sector firms. Additionally, unlike the universities, which by definition are solidly established, the main service-sector firms that came to Sheffield in the mid-1990s are actually merely subsidiaries whose headquarters are located elsewhere. These firms only relocated back-office functions in Sheffield, owing to the presence of low-cost manpower there. As a result, they do not have much of an interest in local affairs.

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TOWARDS A ‘VISION OF QUALITY ’ FOR THE CITY CENTRE In policy terms, this changing governance produced an immediate effect: the refocusing of the development strategy on the city centre. The targets of redevelopment in the city centre also markedly changed: the 1988 strategy ‘A city centre for people’ was succeeded in 1992 by a new strategy eloquently entitled ‘2010, a vision of quality’, which in turn led two years later to the project of creating an easily identifiable ‘Heart of the City’. The urban redevelopment project experienced two distinct phases: a first phase of exclusively public funding until the turn of the 2000s, followed by a second phase of mixed investments. Heart of the City illustrates the rise of the technical departments that characterized the second entrepreneurial turn in Sheffield. The project found its roots in the reflection of a handful of local-authority managers, who had internalized the principles of property-led regeneration during the period of collaboration between the local authority and the SDC. Yet, where the latter had remade the image of the Lower Don Valley by drawing on the model of large North American metropolises (large sports amenities, shopping and leisure centres, etc.), the new city centre of Sheffield was clearly inspired by the continental model of the dense city, with the creation of public squares and of an urban décor meant to reflect the ‘quality of life’ associated with Latin Europe. On the other hand, few projects draw on the city’s architectural heritage and on the preservation of industrial memory. The repurposing of the docks and of the canal quays, historical industrial parts of the city, as venues for consumer-oriented activities (a Hilton hotel was constructed) was an exception: focused on the enhancement of built heritage and of the multiple traces of the area’s industrial past, the renovation was a classic example of the importation of a ‘good practice’ for waterfront redevelopment, largely implemented in North American and British postindustrial cities in the 1990s. The making of Sheffield’s new city centre, seen through the lens of the genesis of the Heart of the City project, illustrates the diffusion of the new conception of urban development promoted by the UDC in the technical departments of the local authority: private funds are supposed to facilitate the action of the private sector instead of replacing it. Initially, the project met with hostility in the Labour group, which was concerned by the potential cost of this new flagship project for the municipality. The conflict was resolved when New Labour took over the central government and released the state funds necessary for the implementation of the project’s first phase, thereby limiting the risks of subjecting the municipality to excessive debt. The project managers secured the consent of Labour councillors who were traumatized by the outcome of the World University Games, in ex-

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change for the solemn promise that the new city centre would not be funded by the local authority. The ‘urban solution’ of the second entrepreneurial phase was ultimately greenlighted by the majority of the council: the three core structures of Heart of the City (the winter gardens, an art gallery and a public park) were effectively financed by nonmunicipal public funds. Hallam University, which benefited from urban improvements in the vicinity of its main campus, also gave a small contribution to the funding of these projects. The young university was then embarking on a strategy of real-estate accumulation in the eastern part of the city centre. However, the vision of ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ promoted by the actors who steered the redevelopment of Sheffield has not been without effects on the social uses of the city centre. FROM ‘PIONEERING’ PROJECTS TO THE MATURATION OF THE STRATEGY FOR MOVING UPMARKET In the main British towns and cities, unlike on the European continent, the centre is a space that is traditionally devoted to industry and trade, and seldom to housing. In Sheffield, under the Fordist era, the city centre was characterized by a high degree of social mixing. Its re-creation for the use of well-integrated groups in post-Fordism was therefore an unprecedented occurrence in the history of the city, whose genesis I will now recall. The shift dates back to the early 1990s, at a time when business declined and insecurity grew as a result of the rapid increase of crack consumption in the inner city. By 1992, the local daily newspaper Sheffield Star already set the tone for the city centre’s redevelopment with a front page that read: ‘police have swooped on street traders, beggars and drunks in a bid to clean up Sheffield city centre’. Yet the numerous measures intended to improve security in public spaces only resulted in displacing the hard drug trade towards the surrounding hills in the north of the city. At the same time, the public– private partnership began advertising Sheffield as ‘the safest city in the UK’. This would be one of the key features of the new image of the city promoted during the second entrepreneurial phase: for the universities, whose overall strategy is heavily impacted by competition, the reactivation of Sheffield’s old image as a ‘provincial’ city where crime levels are low turned out to be a precious asset to reassure worried parents. Two local entrepreneurs created the conditions for the settlement of ‘pioneers’ in the city centre in the early 1990s, by converting industrial buildings into high-end student residences (Rousseau 2009). At the time, the city council had not yet given up hope that industry would come back to the neighbourhood, and responded very warily. But the first high-end student residences were built anyway, as a result of pressure by Hallam University.

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Many accommodation facilities, essentially geared towards the student population, were built over the following years, raising three main issues for the municipal council: the architectural quality of the new buildings; the unhappiness of small firms operating in the cultural industries with Hallam University’s real-estate accumulation strategy in the eastern part of the city centre; and the emergence of NIMBY-type conflicts,3 as city-centre residents grew increasingly aggrieved by the noise pollution resulting from alcohol consumption. By 1997, the city council changed its strategy and adopted a proactive policy aimed at encouraging housing construction projects in the city centre. Several factors account for this about-face. First, according to the developers, the success of the first real-estate projects completed in the city centre convinced members of the council. Then, many young executives in municipal departments, including the powerful new chief executive, saw in the influx of the new middle class in the city centre a crucial resource for the city’s redevelopment. In Sheffield, the influence of the theory of redevelopment through the attraction of the ‘creative class’ has also been fuelled by the rise of the two universities within the field of urban governance. Additionally, the nearby cities of Leeds and Manchester, both heavily scrutinized by Sheffield’s urban elites, also began experiencing a ‘return to the city’ at the time. Lastly, the national context played an important role: in 1999, the Labour government adopted a national policy entitled Towards an Urban Renaissance (Urban Task Force 1999),4 aimed at stimulating the repopulation of the city centres in the main English urban areas to combat urban sprawl and relaunch their economy. This strategy pursued by the UK central government explains the shift in Sheffield’s city-centre redevelopment project towards an approach based on moving upmarket. Up until then, the city council’s lack of interest in the quality of the accommodation built in the city centre – for the most part, student residences – was due to the fact that the city was in no position to impose its conditions on developers. The decisive impulse to improve the quality of the new constructions – and by extension to boost gentrification in the city centre – came from the creation of an agency aimed at coordinating the regeneration of the city centre, Sheffield One, by the central government in 2000. It took the form of an urban regeneration company (URC), that is, a light structure tasked with the temporary mission of coordinating the redevelopment of the urban area by promoting architectural quality and granting a large role to the private sector. The new ‘urban solution’ for the city centre materialized in 2001, when Sheffield One’s masterplan implemented the ‘vision of quality’ that had been imagined for the city centre in 1991 (Figure 6.1). Public investments served to attract private interests eager to profit from the property price gap in the

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Figure 6.1. A vision of ‘quality’: large billboard in the centre of Sheffield. © Max Rousseau.

city centre of Sheffield. In 2004, the council’s Urban Design Compendium clearly stated that improvements of the streetscape and the street furniture were designed to enable Sheffield to become ‘a city that rewards quality development projects with a high return on investment’ (Sheffield City Council 2004). While the project’s first phase was exclusively financed by public funds to create a ‘quality urban environment’, the second phase was largely financed by private funds. This ‘privatization’ of the redevelopment of the city centre was immediately controversial. For instance, in 2002, the council announced its decision to grant a building permit for a four-star hotel to the British luxury hotel company Macdonald. The project comprised 156 luxury rooms, a vast conference and banquet hall, a lounge bar and a pool. It targeted a clientele of tourists and conference attendants in a bid to ‘upgrade’ the centre of Sheffield by offering luxury accommodation that could compare with that available in Leeds and Manchester, as well as provide demand for future high-end restaurants and bars in the city centre. The announcement of the hotel’s location near the winter gardens sparked controversy, as this put it right in the midst of the main public

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Figure 6.2. The Peace Garden, in the very centre of Sheffield. This public garden is the first project of the ‘Heart of the City’ urban renewal policy. In the foreground, back to the camera, is a ‘city centre ambassador’, a public agent whose role is to provide information to visitors about amenities in the city centre, as well as ensure a security presence in the public space. © Max Rousseau.

projects of Heart of the City. The council, which was bitterly reminded of its promise to recreate ‘a city centre for all’, responded by telling the local press that it was ‘too late’ to back down and that the city stood to lose two hundred jobs and 20 million pounds’ worth of private investments, which would have to be compensated by an increase in local taxes. Yet, during public meetings, another very close location had been proposed for Macdonald’s luxury hotel, just opposite the winter gardens. According to one of the interviewees, Sheffield One management had immediately turned down the proposal on the grounds that the location in question was too close to the welfare office, and that ‘hotel guests would never want to be near poor people’ (Figure 6.2). With the creation of Sheffield One (which became Creative Sheffield in 2006 after the development agency merged with the city’s marketing agency), it was the turn of Sheffield’s city centre, after the Lower Don Valley, to partly escape democratic control in the name of the implementation of a ‘vision of quality’. Indeed, the change of political majority in the council had no impact whatsoever on the realization of the ‘urban solution’ for the city centre. Asked whether the leadership of the Liberal Democrats between 1999 and 2002 had changed the general strategy of redevelopment for the city centre, an executive in the technical department of the local author-

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ity replied unequivocally: ‘No, because there are representatives from both sides, Liberal Democrats and Labour, on the board of Sheffield One. So the development policy wasn’t affected’. To be specific, the redevelopment strategy aimed at moving the city centre’s commercial and residential offers upmarket, in ways that I will now examine. DOWNTOWN SHEFFIELD, INC.: THE SETBACKS OF THE STRATEGY TO MOVE THE RETAIL OFFER UPMARKET Sheffield One’s inflexibility concerning the location of the four-star hotel resulted from the agency’s diagnosis that the bad shape of the city’s economy was in part due to the inadequacy of the offer of services and retail in the centre. One of the URC’s main missions was to redevelop the shopping offerings in the city centre, at a time when shops had been badly hit by the opening of the Meadowhall shopping centre. Crucially, not all kinds of shops were sought after: the key to the operation was to distinguish the city centre from the shopping centre – a heritage of the first entrepreneurial phase – by focusing on the quality of the public space to attract a new type of consumer. As the chief executive of Sheffield One says: The New Retail Quarter is part of the city, it is high-quality, designed by different world-class architects; it is aiming at the top end of the spend profile, and you can shop in a very high-quality environment. … Because if we are to compete with Meadowhall, then we have to differentiate ourselves from them. Meadowhall and the city centre can be complementary; Meadowhall can’t attract the wealthy younger shoppers nor the wealthy older shoppers. … They are shopping in Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham. So there is a deliberate push to make the offer very attractive to these sorts of people.

For his part, the director of the shopping centre also argues that Meadowhall’s mid-range offer can complement the more upmarket offer in the city centre: Big brands like Armani, Prada, etc., they don’t go into the shopping centres. … Initially, we tried to bring in those big brands. But our location was too out of the way for that type of shops, they weren’t interested. They like the city-centre locations. But then, and until now, Sheffield’s city centre didn’t attract big design brands like those because it had to be physically regenerated first.

However, the effort made by Sheffield One executives to ‘make the offer very attractive to these sorts of people’ who did not find what they were looking for in Meadowhall faltered owing to the actual use of The Moor, the city’s traditional shopping street. While the street had been ‘swooped’ of beggars, and the intense hard-drug trafficking had moved towards pericen-

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tral areas in the early 1990s, the standards of the shopping offer, which now mostly consisted of discount places, had dropped with the pauperization of its traditional clientele of workers. The Moor’s redevelopment as part of a broader project for a New Retail Quarter was presented as a major concern by Sheffield One. However, the upmarket shift of the retail offer through the attraction of private capitals rapidly came up against the real-estate crisis, which plunged the project into uncertainty and showed in retrospect that the risks taken by public–private partnerships are ultimately only assumed by local public actors. In addition to the owners of shops that had closed to make way for the interminable construction work for the new neighbourhood, in the end Sheffield’s city employees and residents were the ones who paid the price for the setbacks of the city centre’s retail development. THE SUBPRIME CRISIS AND THE UNCERTAINTY SURROUNDING THE NEW RETAIL QUARTER After numerous changes to the Moor development project, in the late 2000s it was decided that the private sector would be entrusted with the full renovation of an eight-hectare area for an estimated cost of 500 million pounds, with 4,200 expected jobs for the city. The megaproject, which was initially supposed to be delivered in 2010, involved demolishing several buildings, creating 80,000 m² of retail space (including 25,000 m² for a high-end John Lewis department store), building an indoor market housing the old markets destroyed by Sheffield One, and attracting around a hundred new shops. A ten-storey car park with two thousand spaces was also planned, as well as a health centre, various leisure amenities and two hundred new apartments. However, the international real-estate crisis sparked by the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market led to successive delays in the construction work, and the project soon took a turn for the disastrous. In November 2008, the developer announced that the beginning of construction was postponed indefinitely in a report published at the London Stock Exchange, even as many shops had been closed before the demolition of buildings. The city centre was again in danger of becoming a ‘ghost town’. As the Sheffield Star ran a ‘Disaster’ headline, the city council’s chief executive made an emergency announcement stating that the project would proceed, drawing on public funds provided by the central state.5 Yet the election of a Conservative/Liberal Democrat government coalition at national level caused the last funding tap for the project to be turned off: within the framework of the austerity policy triggered by the bailout of British banks, in the summer of 2010, the central government announced that 12 million pounds that had been earmarked for the redevelopment of retail in Sheffield’s city centre would

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not be paid after all. In 2013, the council ended up rescinding its partnership with the developer in charge of the project and launched a new call for proposals, as construction of the New Retail Quarter remained at a standstill. Construction of the Moor’s indoor market (the project’s biggest selling point, along with the John Lewis store) also experienced setbacks of its own. The site had been sold off to RREEF, Deutsche Bank’s real-estate investment fund, which was expected to build the new market and rent it to the council on a 35-year lease. As the real-estate crisis raged, RREEF demanded that a third of the retail space be rented out before construction began, and ultimately asked the council to provide 16.5 million pounds’ worth of construction funding. With the local authority facing mounting debt, 8,500 city employees were laid off in September 2010, and RREFF sold the site of the future indoor market to the Lloyds investment fund, Scottish Widows. AN INCREASINGLY UPMARKET RESIDENTIAL SECTOR IN THE THROES OF THE BURST OF THE REAL-ESTATE BUBBLE Initially, the residential component of the redevelopment strategy implemented by Sheffield One seemed more effective than the retail component. It led to a marked increase in the quality of new residential constructions from the mid-2000s, as developers perceived a high demand for products such as lofts. The city council’s eagerness to attract well-to-do populations was evidenced by the fact that Sheffield did not meet the requirements of the government directive demanding 20 per cent of social housing – the city’s position was that ‘we believe that there is currently a more than sufficient stock close to the city centre to meet affordable housing needs’ (Sheffield City Council 2004). Also, the strategy of maximizing land and real-estate prices for the purposes of attracting investors relied on the sale of public housing units, which made the supply of available housing scarcer. This explains why, when the city council’s chief executive left his post in late 2007, Sheffield Star readers made a bitter assessment of his tenure – one of them noted that ‘it seems ironic that Bob Kerslake would be granted a senior position in Westminster on housing in the country when he has destroyed so many houses here in Sheffield’.6 An ambitious strategy to move the residential offer upmarket thus succeeded the previous pragmatic policy focusing on attracting students – even though studentification remained a key part of the redevelopment strategy. In 2004, a study by the real-estate agency Frank described Sheffield’s city centre as a ‘rising star’ on the national market, with prices up by 15 per cent over the previous year. At first, this sudden increase in city-centre real-

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estate prices resulted in a sharp surge of interest for the new flats among middle-class workers. Investors were then also attracted, not by the use value of these units, but solely by their exchange value and the prospect of short-term capital gains. From that point on, the rapid escalation of prices was primarily the result of a local speculative bubble, artificially inflated by Sheffield One’s strategy. In the late 2000s, the residential redevelopment strategy for Sheffield’s city centre was threatened by the global economic downturn owing to the large share of purely speculative capitals involved: three decades after the city’s productive economy, its new residential economy now came undone because of the global circulation of capitals. In the summer of 2008, Sheffield was the British city that experienced the sharpest decrease in real-estate prices – down 17 per cent within a year.7 The real-estate crisis heightened resentments pertaining to the general evolution of the redevelopment strategy. The city became increasingly instable politically; the council’s majority swung to the Liberal Democrats in 2008, and back to the Labour Party in 2010. The setbacks in the construction of St Paul’s Tower illustrate both the failure of the redevelopment and the obliviousness of the councillors who promoted the ‘vision of quality’. The 101-metre-high, 32-storey tower, located in the immediate vicinity of the city’s main railway station and Hallam University, was the cornerstone of the second phase of the Heart of the City project, funded by the private sector. A building permit was granted in late 2005 to the developer City Lofts, one of the main promoters of the ‘urban renaissance’ advocated by New Labour. Two-thirds of the flats at what is now considered ‘Sheffield’s poshest address’8 were sold off-plan. Construction began in the summer of 2007, at an estimated cost of 40 million pounds. However, in July 2008, as the British real-estate market collapsed, City Lofts went into administration. Construction went on under the supervision of the new administrator, the consulting firm Ernst & Young, but the quality of the tower’s external cladding then decreased significantly, as during the construction process the initially planned smooth glass was replaced by basic colour panels. Considering that the coalition of public and private actors that steered Sheffield’s redevelopment promoted a ‘vision of quality’, this new low-cost strategy quickly became indefensible, and representatives of the developer were summoned by the council, who accused them of putting on ‘cheap, shabby’ cladding. A council member declared: ‘We cannot endorse this. It would be an insult to every resident in the city’.9 Ultimately, the council demanded that Ernst & Young halt construction until an agreement was reached on the revision of the original plans. The tower was eventually delivered with a two-year delay, in the summer of 2010, at a time when the local real-estate market was experiencing a severe slump.

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Figure 6.3. A Sheffield art squat denounces the land acquisition strategy of Hallam University in the city centre (the squatters have since been removed). © Max Rousseau.

CONCLUSION In Sheffield, as in many cities facing a brutal economic restructuring, strategies aimed at ‘moving upmarket’, consisting in rebuilding the city centre to meet the needs of privileged social groups, found their roots in so-called structural effects (the violent crisis of the city’s industrial economic base, followed at the turn of the 1980s by the constraints imposed by the neoliberal central government) combined with contextual effects (the failure of the first ‘socialist’ redevelopment strategy, and then of the first entrepreneurial phase, geared towards the struggling resident population). Such strategies must be considered urban incarnations of neoliberalism because they emphasize growth, or the return to growth, over employment. They follow a pattern of targeting areas perceived to be crucial for urban development, bringing in public funds to foster tension in the market and attract private investors and members of privileged social groups, who will supposedly use these spaces in varied ways. These are thus not ‘mere’ residential gentrification policies, as these targets also include transitory populations (students, tourists). Also, these targets of redevelopment are not supposed to ‘only’ reside in the central spaces that have been rebuilt to fit

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preconceptions of their tastes; they are also expected to consume (cultural activities, shopping, shows, bars and restaurants, sports, etc.). Under this approach, the employment of residents and the fate of neighbouring areas become secondary concerns for public policy. They are left to fend for themselves in the free market, expected to benefit from the effect of economic activity caused by the new uses of the city centre, which are supposed to ‘trickle down’ to residents thanks to the creation of low-paying jobs (in sales, personal services, security, etc.) (Rousseau 2008). This faith in the market is what makes these strategies clearly neoliberal. The international diffusion of such strategies over the past two decades has been especially fuelled by a global transformation of urban governance, characterized by the relative decline of the role of urban governments and the rise of a range of actors sharing an interest in attracting privileged social groups. These powerful actors, all involved in intense international competition within their respective markets (universities, developers, cutting-edge firms, etc.) tend to form coalitions to take over urban power. They jointly develop a vision of redevelopment that emphasizes quality, a euphemism to refer to what is actually a genuine strategy for moving the city upmarket, mainly in the retail and residential sectors. This vision is all the more difficult to criticize as it is outwardly depoliticized. In effect, changes in the political majority of Sheffield’s city council have in no way altered the implementation of the upmarket strategy, partly because of Labour’s gradual conversion to neoliberalism, and partly because of the maturing of the partnership-based approach in which the municipality is only one actor among others. Also, these coalitions generally propose a consistent argument, which can be difficult to challenge for weakened urban societies in places that have suffered a violent crisis. As a result of this, in many cases, only new crises are conducive to opening a space for protest liable to introduce cracks into the discursive edifice built around upmarket strategies. This is indeed what has happened in Sheffield. On the whole, up to the crisis that broke out in the late 2000s, few dissident voices had been heard against the efforts to rebuild the city centre to fit the tastes of a wealthier population. For instance, the conflict between the small businesses operating in the city centre’s ‘cultural district’ and Hallam University, resulting from the latter’s strategy of land and real-estate purchasing for student residences in that area, was gradually resolved through collaboration on joint projects. But as the local market collapsed, shedding light on the fragility of the upmarket strategy, controversy eventually came with the publication in late 2009 of a University of Sheffield report on inequalities in the city, commissioned by the former leader of the council under the New Urban Left. The report, whose very title, A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffield Project (Thomas et al. 2009), conveys dismay in the face of the emergence of a two-tier city,

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was highly critical of the city’s recent management. It showed that residents of poor neighbourhoods were far more likely to leave the education system at an early stage, to live in smaller accommodation, to turn to crime and to die earlier than their counterparts in wealthier neighbourhoods. It ends on an even darker note, discussing the recession, the rise to power of the Conservative government, and the abandonment of the traditional local policy aimed at ‘bridging the gap’ between rich and poor. After more than three decades of urban entrepreneurialism, these conclusions arguably apply to many struggling cities, in which the question of social justice is again becoming increasingly pressing.

Notes 1. Introduced by critical geographer David Harvey (2014), the concept of the ‘entrepreneurial city’ refers to the rise of private interests in urban power and the shift in urban policy from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. 2. Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) were one of the main tools of the Thatcher government’s controversial urban policy. They were bodies in charge of redeveloping urban areas in crisis. To do so, they took over the prerogatives of municipalities in the field of planning, even though their leaders were not elected. This policy reflected the wariness of the Conservative central government towards northern England’s Labour municipalities, which it accused of inertia and incompetence, particularly when it came to attracting private investments. The Urban Development Corporations were designed to enhance the ‘leverage effect’, as the effectiveness of public investments was assessed on the basis of their ability to leverage private investments. 3. The acronym NIMBY stands for ‘not in my backyard’ and refers to opposition by residents to local development projects that they see as potentially harmful. 4. The report was called a ‘gentrifiers’ charter’ by critical geographer Loretta Lees. 5. Sheffield Star, 29 January 2009. 6. Sheffield Star, 19 December 2007. 7. This was a higher decrease than in other postindustrial cities where such strategies were implemented on a large scale: Belfast (–11 per cent), Birmingham, Manchester and Coventry (–9 per cent). 8. Sheffield Star, 12 November 2008. 9. Ibid.

References Béal, Vincent, and Max Rousseau. 2008. ‘Néolibéraliser la ville fordiste’, Métropoles 4. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://journals.openedition.org/metropoles/3502. Booth, Philip. 2004. ‘La concertation en trompe-l’œil. Le cas de Sheffield’, in Bernard Jouve and Philip Booth (eds), Démocraties métropolitaines. Quebec City: Presses de l’Université du Québec, p. 124.

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Christophers, Brett. 2008. ‘BBC, the Creative Class, and Neoliberal Urbanism in the North of England’, Environment and Planning A 40(10): 2313–29. Harvey, David. 2014. ‘Vers la ville entrepreneuriale. Mutation du capitalisme et transformations de la gouvernance urbaine’, in Cécile Gintrac and Matthieu Giroud (eds), Villes contestées. Pour une géographie critique de l’urbain. Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, pp. 95–133. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. London: Routledge. Le Galès, Patrick. 1990. ‘Crise urbaine et développement économique local en GrandeBretagne. L’apport de la nouvelle gauche urbaine’, Revue française de science politique 40(5): 714–35. Le Galès, Patrick. 1995. ‘Du gouvernement des villes à la gouvernance urbaine’, Revue française de science politique 45(1): 57–95. Mann, Michael. 1997. ‘Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State?’, Review of International Political Economy 4(3): 472–96. Nevin, Brendan. 2010. ‘Housing Market Renewal in Liverpool: Locating the Gentrification Debate in History, Context and Evidence’, Housing Studies 25(5): 715–33. Rousseau, Max. 2008. ‘“Bringing politics back in”: la gentrification comme politique de développement urbain?’, Espaces et Sociétés 132–33: 75–90. Rousseau, Max. 2009. ‘Re-imaging the City Centre for the Middle Classes: Regeneration, Gentrification and Symbolic Policies in “Loser Cities”’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33(3): 770–88. Rousseau, Max. 2014. ‘Redéveloppement urbain et (in)justice sociale: les stratégies néolibérales de “montée en gamme” dans les villes en déclin’, Justice Spatiale | Spatial Justice 6. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://www.jssj.org/article/redevel oppement-urbain-et-injustice-sociale-les-strategies-neoliberales-de-montee-engamme-dans-les-villes-en-declin. Sheffield City Council. 2004. Sheffield City Centre Urban Design Compendium. Sheffield. Smith, Darren P. 2005. ‘“Studentification”: The Gentrification Factory?’, in Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge (eds), Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism. New York: Routledge, pp. 72–89. Thomas, Bethan, John Pritchard, Dimitris Ballas, Dan Vickers and Danny Dorling. 2009. A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffield Project. Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group report. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Department of Geography. Urban Task Force. 1999. Towards an Urban Renaissance. London: Spon Press.

Pa rt I I I

INHABITANTS

G

entrification is often presented as an inevitable process, sweeping across low-income neighbourhoods like a tidal wave. Their inhabitants, it is said, have no other choice but to leave, to be replaced by other socially better-endowed individuals. These inverse flows are thought to come with a radical change in the uses of the neighbourhood, as well as some of its functions, particularly commercial and cultural functions. While there is no denying that relations of domination matter in gentrifying neighbourhoods, we have shown in Parts I and II that, both in structural and political terms, not everything always happens as it is supposed to in the theoretical models. This third part will focus on inhabitants – residents and regular visitors alike – and, in doing so, pay more attention to the practices and discourses of those who constitute the city on a daily basis, in order to gain a better understanding of what endures, what changes, what resists, and what generates unease or tensions. This approach first allows us to qualify the idea that gentrification is an exclusive process, in which everyone’s roles are defined once and for all. Gentrification and pauperization may coexist in the same neighbourhood – with, for example, the influx of new upper-class inhabitants alongside the continued arrival of low-skilled first-time migrants, or the transformation of housing with the elevation of residents’ social backgrounds and the continued presence of affordable businesses. This has been observed, for instance, in Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella district and in Lisbon’s Alcântara neighbourhood. This leads to microsegregations that are only perceptible at very local scales (Authier 1995). Gentrification is neither a global process that detracts from all the others, nor one whose necessary outcome is the exclusion of all former populations and activities. The condition of buildings, the diversity of properties and the commercial structure in a neighbourhood may allow economically less-endowed populations, who are often more vulnerable to the

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changes induced by metropolization, to remain in their homes or move into and/or frequent the neighbourhood – although this admittedly sometimes comes at the cost of considerable sacrifices (in terms of housing conditions within the neighbourhood or the journey time required to continue to frequent the neighbourhood). Château Rouge, in Paris, is an emblematic case of this – but similar observations can be made elsewhere, for instance in Grenoble’s Berriat–Saint-Bruno neighbourhood, and, again, in Alcântara. These continuities cannot be perceived without considering the capacity to act, react and adapt of all inhabitants, including those who might be assumed to be the least well-equipped to resist gentrification (Giroud 2007).1 Therefore, while we should not neglect the considerable limitations imposed on the residential choices and urban practices of working-class individuals, we should also refrain from indulging in a pessimistic vision that overlooks their resources and skills. This approach also enables us to overcome binary oppositions between the so-called gentrifiers and gentrified, by emphasizing the multiple roles of inhabitants – both residents and users of the neighbourhood – and the variety of their viewpoints and practices. Second, focusing on the inhabitants of gentrifying neighbourhoods allows us to tear down analytical borders by accounting for all scales at which practices occur and impact space, both within the neighbourhood and beyond. Several tools are particularly useful in this regard. Studying the ‘systems of places’2 specific to each individual – meaning the set of places in which their practices unfold on a daily basis (for work, shopping, outings, etc.) and where their friends and loved ones reside – provides an understanding of how inhabitants experience and transform the city. Their practices contribute, for instance, to the social composition of cities and to the different atmospheres and paces of urban life. Residential trajectories (meaning the set of all places where an individual has lived since their birth, and their residential projects) give us a sense of why individuals move into a neighbourhood at a given time, but also why they leave or struggle to live their everyday lives there. When applied to the inhabitants of the Goutte d’Or–Château Rouge area of Paris, this approach sheds light on all factors influencing relationships with their places of residence with respect to their experiences before, after and outside of the neighbourhood. Analysing both these residential trajectories and individuals’ everyday mobilities shows that relationships to the neighbourhood vary widely from one inhabitant to the next. Lastly, examining social trajectories enables us to grasp the full ambiguity and complexity of these relationships to the neighbourhood and to other inhabitants, on the scale of a street, a building, or even a single storey. Indeed, living in a gentrifying neighbourhood brings its fair share of ambiguities and paradoxes; this is the third key insight yielded by this inhabitant-oriented approach, obtained by comparing the myth of the

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working-class neighbourhood and its inhabitants – perceived from afar as a friendly place built on solidarity – with the reality on the ground. Here, representations of the city play a significant role, especially that of the neighbourhood as a ‘village’, a notion which spread in the 1970s from sugarcoated images of traditional working-class neighbourhoods. Postwar studies of Lyons’ Croix-Rousse district, the Jeanne d’Arc area (scheduled for demolition) in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement and Bethnal Green in east London – each the subject of sociological research in the mid-1960s – revealed evidence of the close intertwining of family, work and friendship ties that support an intense local social life, multiple and varied forms of occupation of public spaces, and numerous manifestations of solidarity between neighbours (Mayol 1980; Coing 1966; Young and Willmott 1962; Topalov 2003). Yet many readers of these studies forget that these practices are often rooted in the lack of opportunities for social and geographical mobility, cramped and uncomfortable homes, and poverty as a shared condition, and that they frequently involve tensions and social control. The mythical ‘neighbourhood as a village’ is supposed to have historic buildings, a social and ethnic mix, a friendly and close-knit atmosphere, many local activities and ‘authentic’ people and interactions: it reflects a fantasy image of the city, and by extension of society, characterized by diversity, lack of conflict, interpersonal relationships and constant communication (Bidou 1984). Obviously, this aspiration is bound to result in disappointment and disillusionment. Without indulging in miserabilism, it is worth keeping in mind that old working-class neighbourhoods were also quite often places where people were trapped, which puts into perspective the positive perceptions of gentrification and emphasis on its positive externalities by certain actors (public authorities, business owners, as well as some residents). The question here is: what is at stake in the cohabitations and interactions between residents and users from different social backgrounds? Gentrification always involves, at least at transitional junctures, a diversification of the population and therefore forms of copresence between inhabitants whose resources, ways of life and expectations differ. These may be beneficial, but to whom? This question is far from settled, and further empirical research is still required to move beyond often ideology-laden discourses.3 Some scholars and elected officials explain that cohabiting with the middle and upper classes is beneficial to the working class, or even that this has socializing values. Conversely, others contend that all actions aimed at improving public spaces or bringing in economically better-endowed inhabitants will necessarily have adverse effects for existing inhabitants. Again, we believe that moving away from such a binary debate, and drawing extensively on fieldwork and on the analysis of inhabitants’ practices and discourses, is the best heuristic approach for understanding how these

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mixes are experienced in their full complexity and ambiguity. Incumbent residents are often effectively waiting for their living environment to change for the better. When these changes do not occur, they see this as a lack of consideration by policymakers for spaces and populations that they believe are viewed as worthless. At the same time, and without this being a paradox, they may feel like they are being invaded by new neighbours who are always fixing up their places, co-owners who vote for costly building renovations, and businesses whose prices effectively exclude them. Copresences can be perceived in a positive light, or even eagerly awaited, but they cause tension because they have a strong impact on the resources and habitus of all involved. Furthermore, things are not necessarily all that simple for gentrifiers either. Far from always feeling dominant or vested with a social mission, many find themselves unprepared for dealing with the considerable gap between their fantasy view of the historic working-class neighbourhood and the reality of everyday life there, with poverty and immigration-related issues constantly in the foreground. While their experience of proximity with economically and culturally less-endowed social groups can be positive, they may also internalize it as social downgrading, or feel like impostors – making them feel uneasy and leading them to question their own place in society and in the urban space. Similarly, in this case, studying social and residential trajectories and paying attention to different stages in the life cycle is essential to our understanding of the considerable differences between these experiences and perceptions of mixing and of the relationships to others, beyond the gentrifiers/gentrified categories. School choice is undoubtedly where this confrontation with alterity is the most intense and where forms of resistance are strongest – various deliberate or uneasy avoidance strategies are pursued, and some leave the neighbourhood altogether when the time comes to choose a school. Education and extracurricular activities remain key issues in gentrifying neighbourhoods, as schools are subject to very high expectations. Once again, however, let us not indulge in a black-and-white approach to gentrifying neighbourhoods: the question of school choice is by no means restricted solely to these areas (van Zanten 2009; Authier and Lehman-Frisch 2013).

Notes 1. See also the ‘REV’ research project: ‘Rester en (centre-)ville: résistance et résilience de la ville ordinaire dans quatre quartiers de villes capitales (Paris, Lisbonne, Bruxelles et Vienne)’ [‘Staying in the City (Centre): Resistance and Resilience of the Ordinary City in Four Neighbourhoods of Capital Cities (Paris, Lisbon, Brussels and Vienna)’], coordinated by Yankel Fijalkow and Claire Lévy-Vroelant, and funded by the Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (PUCA) within the framework of its

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call for research projects on the subject of ‘La ville ordinaire et la métropolisation’ [‘The Ordinary City and Metropolization’]. 2. The ‘systems of places’ concept builds on a number of studies on mobility and living spaces, including the 2003–5 research workshop ‘Pratiques spatiales non résidentielles et recompositions des territoires urbains’ [‘Nonresidential Spatial Practices and Reconfigurations of Urban Territories’], coordinated by Jean-Pierre Lévy and Françoise Dureau, who also edited the workshop’s final report (Lévy and Dureau 2005). 3. See, for instance, the debate in the French daily newspaper Libération between geographers Anne Clerval and Jacques Lévy in October 2013: Anne Clerval, ‘Habiter Paris est un signe clair de domination sociale’ [‘Living in Paris is a Clear Sign of Social Domination’] (Calvet 2013); Jacques Lévy, ‘A Paris, le niveau de mixité est de loin le plus élevé’ [‘In Paris, the Level of Social Mix is By Far the Highest’] (Vincendon 2013).

References Authier, Jean-Yves. 1995. ‘Formes et processus de ségrégation dans les quartiers anciens centraux réhabilités. L’exemple du quartier Saint-Georges à Lyon’, Sociétés contemporaines 22–23: 107–25. Authier, Jean-Yves, and Sonia Lehman-Frisch. 2013. ‘La mixité dans les quartiers gentrifiés: un jeu d’enfants?’, Métropolitiques. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https:// metropolitiques.eu/La-mixite-dans-les-quartiers-gentrifies-un-jeu-d-enfants. Bidou, Catherine. 1984. Les Aventuriers du quotidien. Essai sur les nouvelles classes moyennes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Calvet, Catherine. 2013. ‘Interview. “Habiter Paris est un signe clair de domination sociale”’, Libération, 18 October. Coing, Henri. 1966. Rénovation urbaine et changement social. Paris: Editions Ouvrières. Giroud, Matthieu. 2007. ‘Résister en habitant? Renouvellement urbain et continuités populaires en centre ancien (Berriat–Saint-Bruno à Grenoble et Alcântara à Lisbonne)’, Ph.D. thesis in geography. Poitiers: Université de Poitiers. Lévy, Jean-Pierre, and Françoise Dureau (eds). 2005. Pratiques spatiales non résidentielles et recomposition des territoires urbains. End-of-contract report for the ‘Espaces et Territoires’ joint incentive action programme. Paris: Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche. Mayol, Pierre. 1980. ‘Habiter’, in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol (eds), L’Invention du quotidien. Vol. 2: Habiter, cuisiner. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 11–146. Topalov, Christian. 2003. Les Constructions savantes du quartier (France, Grande-Bretagne, Etats-Unis). Report for the Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (PUCA). Paris: Centre de Sociologie Urbaine (CSU). van Zanten, Agnès. 2009. Choisir son école. Stratégies familiales et médiations locales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vincendon, Sybille. 2013. ‘Interview. “A Paris, le niveau de mixité est de loin le plus élevé”’, Libération, 24 October. Young, Michael, and Peter Willmott. 1962. Family and Kinship in East London. London: Penguin Books.

CH A PTER

7 G E N T R I F I C AT I O N, PAU P E R I Z AT I O N, I M M I G R AT I O N One Process May Hide Another

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Matthieu Giroud and Hovig Ter Minassian

T

he social change triggered or accelerated by gentrification is often depicted as a binary opposition or a confrontation – the working classes are evicted and dispossessed, the middle and upper classes resettle and take over the city. Clearly, gentrification does reflect a competition for urban space that involves different social classes and, as such, can trigger economic and symbolic violence (Smith 1996).1 Yet the different forms of gentrification observed from one neighbourhood to the next also hinge on the intensity of other social processes (marginalization or ‘elitization’, development of mass tourism, arrival of immigrants, etc.), which can all operate in the same residential space and produce other forms of social and economic inequalities than those that characterize gentrification. In other words, gentrification is not all there is to the power and domination relations that play out in historic neighbourhoods between populations and users with different residential trajectories. This state of affairs requires a scale of observation that is finer than the city or the neighbourhood as a whole. Analytical frameworks are sometimes conditioned by the availability of data – especially statistical data. Such data, which are as a rule produced at the level of administrative entities (districts, municipalities, built-up areas, metropolitan areas, etc.), tend to fuel a generalizing discourse, which masks concerns that are specific to one neigh-

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bourhood in particular. The objective here is to dispense with an approach that reduces and restricts processes to certain neighbourhoods and reifies their qualities. Using the terms ‘bourgeois’, ‘gentrified’ or ‘gentrifying neighbourhood’ versus ‘working-class’, ‘low-income’ or ‘increasingly pauperized neighbourhood’ is a means of effectively and legitimately emphasizing the sociospatial inequalities that characterize them by highlighting their most visible trend. At the same time, this language produces a bias that makes it difficult to grasp the complexity of specific situations. As the sociologist JeanYves Authier points out, ‘behind the homogenizing image of the gentrified historic central neighbourhoods often conveyed by studies on gentrification or on segregation in the large (Western) metropolises, highly marked forms of social divisions of space and avoidance between cohabitating populations may exist’ (Authier 1995: 120). In contemporary big cities, historic central neighbourhoods are indeed characterized by multiple, simultaneously unfolding processes of social differentiation, sometimes at a very specific scale (such as a city block or an apartment building). Highly diverse residents and users share the space, with sometimes very different everyday relationships to the neighbourhood. Indeed, the residential space is probably where the ‘forms of coexistence of different populations and types of mobility’ resulting from such contracts are most acutely exposed (Lévy 2002: 200). It is also probably where the competition between social groups over the appropriation of such fundamental resources as housing and the neighbourhood plays out most ostensibly. With this in mind, we propose to adopt an approach that refrains from automatically favouring the analysis of gentrification or gentrifiers over that of other processes and groups of inhabitants. Based on the case of the Ciutat Vella district (Barcelona, Spain), we will show that gentrification is one process of urban change among others (pauperization, large-scale development of tourist and student accommodation, social upgrading without the arrival of new populations, etc.) and that gentrifiers are (new) inhabitants among others. In order to gain a firm understanding of how these contrasts are produced locally and of what they tell us about spatial competition for access to the city, we need to get as close as possible to individuals on the ground, both gentrifiers and incumbent residents, and to their everyday urban practices. We will seek to do this in our analysis of residents’ trajectories in Alcântara (Lisbon, Portugal) in the second part of this chapter. GENTRIFICATION: ONE PROCESS AMONG OTHERS Categorizing an area as a ‘gentrifying neighbourhood’ risks neglecting other social trends that may appear contradictory but which actually attest to the diversity of residential trajectories and spatial practices, as well as urban

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Map 7.1. Social dynamics in the district of Ciutat Vella (Barcelona) between 1991 and 2005. © Hovig Ter Minassian.

transformations at finer scales, such as city blocks or apartment buildings. In the case of Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella district, analysis of the sociodemographic evolution of its subdistricts since the early 1990s reveals a patchwork of juxtaposed processes, reminiscent of Jean-Yves Authier’s (1995, 2003) descriptions of the Saint-Georges neighbourhood (Lyons, France),2 and of Marie Chabrol’s work on Château Rouge (Paris, France) (Chabrol 2014). Ciutat Vella stands out in that it is simultaneously a gentrifying neighbourhood, one of Barcelona’s tourist hotspots, and a central home to many immigrants. We identified several types of processes at work in the Ciutat Vella district using multivariate statistical analyses (Groupe Chadule 1994)3 of demographic, social and economic indicators for the years 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2005. First, we did observe gentrification in the strictest sense of the term. In particular, this process characterizes certain blocks in the eastern part of the district (La Ribera and Casc Antic) as well as, more recently, the traditionally more working-class western part (El Raval). The district’s population increased in the 1990s, bringing with it an increase in social heterogeneity, owing to the arrival of new categories of population and the relative maintenance of the working classes. Heterogeneous social groups began to cohabit.

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This sociodemographic transformation has started to show in the urban landscape: properties have been rehabilitated, sometimes entire buildings, with the installation of double glazing and door codes. Many restaurants and bars are opening, geared towards a younger, better-off population than the traditional residents. Cultural offerings have also expanded, with the opening of art galleries and bookstores facilitated by the proximity of a number of university and cultural amenities. The spread of gentrification has not precluded a reverse phenomenon characterizing other parts of the district, which could be called ‘degentrification’: the replacement of upper-class inhabitants by middle- and working-class inhabitants, particularly in some traditionally bourgeois parts of Ciutat Vella. In the north of the Barri Gòtic, for instance, for several years, former wealthy residents, mostly of Spanish nationality, have opted to leave, in particular because of the transformation of the neighbourhood’s social and economic landscape: a perceived excessive development of tourism, the closure of traditional businesses, a significant influx of foreign immigrants, and so on. An identical process appears to affect blocks located in the northeastern part of Ciutat Vella, consisting in the replacement of Spanish middleand upper-class residents by mostly middle-class European (French, German or British) migrants seeking to invest in real estate in the historic city centre. While these European migrants are ultimately not very numerous, their proportions have increased, and this has helped to revitalize the realestate market in this sector of Ciutat Vella. Thirdly, some parts of Ciutat Vella continue to be affected by a marginalization process. Not only do they still remain predominantly working-class, but the sociodemographic crisis that pre-dated the rehabilitation policies of the 1980s and 1990s has appeared to endure and even worsen, especially in El Raval. This process is concomitant with an increase in the number of poor immigrants from South America, India and Pakistan: while foreign immigrants made up 17.7 per cent of Barcelona’s population in 2013, they represented 44.4 per cent of residents in the Ciutat Vella district. In these groups, the proportion of populations aged over 16 with no higher education sometimes exceeds 20 per cent (compared with an average of roughly 12 per cent for Ciutat Vella residents as a whole), and over two-thirds of the total active population are working class. Some other areas can be described as ‘shifting’. These are sectors where a change can be felt, without it yet being clear which trend it will ultimately reinforce. In some areas of El Raval, for instance, the sociodemographic composition remains very heterogeneous, but the arrival of new types of businesses and bars, benefiting from the opening or renovation of university facilities, and new patronage of the neighbourhood by student populations, could be signs that change is under way. A second hypothesis (which does

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Figure 7.1. Persistence of urban poverty in the neighbourhood of El Raval, Barcelona, 2012. © Hovig Ter Minassian.

not contradict the first) is that, in these areas, some among the incumbent population have been experiencing an upgrade in their social status, and accordingly in their living and housing conditions. Mathieu Van Criekingen and Jean-Michel Decroly have called this ‘incumbent upgrading’: an embourgeoisement that is not triggered by the influx of new populations (Van Criekingen and Decroly 2003; Préteceille 2007; Maloutas 2010).4 In any case, the uses of this part of the district are changing, as it is frequented by new categories of urban dwellers who come for their studies or leisure activities but do not necessarily reside there. Lastly, it is worth noting that part of Ciutat Vella displayed a significant degree of sociodemographic stability between the early 1990s and the mid2000s. Some areas have remained very working class, as is the case of most of El Raval. This social stability has not precluded a trend towards a younger population, concurrent with a resumption in demographic growth. Other parts of the historic centre have retained their bourgeois status, particularly in the Barri Gòtic and along Via Laietana, which acts as an internal border in the eastern part of Ciutat Vella. These sectors have remained traditional places of residence for middle- and upper-class populations. This fine-scale mapping demonstrates the multiplicity of social changes that have taken place in the Ciutat Vella district, at least up until the mid-

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2000s. The resulting picture differs from the stereotypical image of historic inner cities experiencing a widespread gentrification process: in this case, it is shown to apply to only part of Barcelona’s historic centre. The first sectors affected – for instance, in La Ribera, in the eastern part of the district – were precisely those that were not the most marginalized in Ciutat Vella in the early 1980s; they had retained a certain prestige, thanks partly to their rich architectural heritage. In this specific case, we can rightly speak of a return of the middle and upper classes to the inner city. The first neighbourhoods to be gentrified were not, therefore, the most dilapidated ones, but those that, among the most affordable areas, had the best image. How can we explain such a patchwork of sociodemographic processes? First, it must be noted that the inhabitants of Barcelona’s historic centre have seen genuine improvements in their living conditions since the 1980s, which has tended to blur the distinctions between working-class and wealthy neighbourhoods. These improvements did not systematically coincide with a significant renewal of the population. We should therefore make a distinction between two types of neighbourhoods: those in which upwardly mobile social trajectories are the result of improved living conditions for the incumbent residents; and those in which they are the result of the arrival of better-educated, higher-income new populations from outside the neighbourhood or the city. A third development has also been observed since the late 1990s, with a significant influx of foreign populations, often of nonEuropean and working-class origin, which can lead to a trend reversal (pauperization or social marginalization). In the late 1960s, drawing on the urban ecology theories developed by the Chicago school in the 1920s and 1930s, geographer Josep Olives Puig sought to clarify the relationships between processes of immigration and processes of physical and symbolic degradation, particularly in Barcelona’s central Sant Cugat neighbourhood (Olives Puig 1969). Jesús Requena Hidalgo’s more recent research adopted a similar approach to the study of several neighbourhoods of Badalona, on the northern outskirts of Barcelona (Requena Hidalgo 2003). These two authors show that, in general, contrary to frequent preconceptions on immigration, when immigrants move into a neighbourhood in large numbers, it is because that neighbourhood is already degraded. It is not immigration that triggers the area’s degradation, but the area’s degradation that makes it particularly conducive to accommodating immigrants, owing to the availability of affordable housing. In connection with the gentrification process in Ciutat Vella, foreigners thus play a dual role: on the one hand, they compete with potential gentrifiers over access to the remaining affordable properties in the historic centre; on the other, the presence of these foreign populations in the commercial and public landscape contributes to an image of the neighbourhood that may

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not be one gentrifiers are attracted to (Martínez i Rigol 2000). While it is true that social and cultural mix has often been an argument put forward by some gentrifiers for settling in working-class neighbourhoods, real-estate developers and representatives of community groups in Ciutat Vella noted on several occasions that foreign immigration tended to confer a negative image on the historic centre (owing, for instance, to the resultant lack of variety in the local commercial landscape). Ultimately, the gentrification that has gradually spread in Barcelona’s historic centre has not prevented the working classes from remaining in some areas, against a backdrop of very high levels of foreign immigration. The gaps between gentrifying blocks and increasingly marginalized ones have tended to widen. GENTRIFICATION IN THE MIDST OF A TANGLE OF RESIDENTIAL MOBILITIES A ‘gentrifying’ neighbourhood or district may thus also be one where far more contrasting realities coexist in terms of social dynamics and spatial differentiation. Indeed, residential mobilities in gentrifying neighbourhoods are in no way limited to the ‘return’ of the middle and upper classes to the inner cities and the exile of the poorest. Our point here is not to downplay the role of these two forms of mobility in the urban dynamics at work in central historic neighbourhoods, but to comprehensively demonstrate the existence of a broad range of residential mobilities that also contribute to urban change in their own ways. This plurality is, however, difficult to grasp in detail using classical statistical sources such as census data. For a finer analysis, a biographical approach to residential mobilities (Dureau and Imbert 2014) is a highly useful tool. Inspired by research by anthropologists and demographers in the 1960s, this approach looks not only at the characteristics of individuals at a given time, but also at their entire (migratory, residential, family and professional) histories, at the succession of key stages and junctures in their lives. Residential trajectories identified in this way give us insights into the presence of individuals in certain places as not only a choice made at a certain time, but also as a dynamic process. This process is influenced not only by the external (social, urban) constraints faced by the individuals in question, but also by the experiences acquired throughout their lives, and by other biographical events and (migratory, family, socio-occupational) trajectories. Such an approach was applied to residents of Lisbon’s Alcântara neighbourhood,5 and several typical trajectories were identified (Table 1).

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Table 7.1. The diversity of residential trajectories in Alcântara, Lisbon. © Matthieu Giroud. Newcomers

Moved into new luxury residence

Moved into renovated historic property

Returnees Moved into rundown historic property

Moved into rundown or averagecondition historic property

Incumbents

‘Immobile’

Shortdistance residential mobility

Neighbourhoodscale residential mobility

The first group identified consists of newcomers (Authier 1996). It includes individuals whose residential presence in the Alcântara neighbourhood is both recent and unprecedented: recent because they moved in less than ten years ago, when the municipal policy of urban regeneration was in its early stages, which involved the scheduling of a number of urban projects; and unprecedented in the sense that these individuals are Alcântara residents for the first time in their lives. Three subcategories of residents can be identified among these newcomers. The first two of these comprise many young households, single people and couples, with and without children, and who belong to the middle and upper strata identified in the first part of this book. Most are representatives or inheritors of a Portuguese ‘emergent class’ that developed following the country’s political and economic opening in the mid-1980s, and all have high levels of educational attainment and qualification. The first subcategory of newcomers live in secure luxury residences that were built at the turn of the 2000s as part of public and private renovation or densification operations. The second subcategory comprises residents who moved into renovated or soon-to-be-renovated historic properties. While these buildings are not the direct targets of public action, the decision to move into them reflects an awareness of the changes triggered by public programmes implemented nearby, as well as an ability to anticipate and take advantage of such changes as part of individual or familial economic strategies. Alcântara is an example of a neighbourhood where the first two classic phases in the gentrification process – the investment and action of ‘pioneers’ in older housing stock, and the acceleration of the process with the influx of ‘invaders’ in the wake of public and private interventions in the city – have virtually overlapped, over a very short, roughly ten-year, period. However, Alcântara is not only characterized by the arrival of new wealthy residents; individuals from less affluent social categories, closer to the neighbourhood’s traditional population, also moved into the area, into unrenovated, and sometimes even quite rundown (albeit restorable), older buildings.

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This third subcategory of newcomers, unlike the two others, mainly includes residents with low levels of economic capital and educational qualifications who are experiencing downward socio-occupational trajectories. Unlike the gentrifiers, whose presence in the housing stock is very localized, these individuals and the properties they move into are dispersed throughout the neighbourhood. Mechanisms of access to housing are far less individualized than for the gentrifiers, whose economic capital affords them both a wide range of choices within the available housing stock and residential areas and easier access to the institutional and market-based services for house-hunting (real-estate agencies, specialized press). Social networks are activated far more in poorer households’ efforts to find housing. Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s (1962) now classic urban sociology research emphasized the role of family and social networks in finding housing without being unduly disadvantaged by market forces, and called for recognition of their importance in the constitution of urban populations. Here, traditional population configurations tend to endure, even when the neighbourhood is experiencing dramatic transformations as a result of public and private interventions. According to Jean-Yves Authier (1996: 157–58): The physical turnover of people does not always mean that things are new: in other words, … the effects of residential mobilities are not unequivocal. Thus, a resident who is ‘new’ to the neighbourhood, because he or she moved in recently, may actually be very much like one of the ‘elders’ if his or her sociodemographic characteristics are comparable to those of the people he is replacing or to the neighbourhood’s other residents, or if he is ‘living’ like his predecessors or like his neighbours. … There is no mechanical link between mobility and change, nor, conversely, between immobility and things remaining identical.

These forms of continuity in matters of residential mobility (continuity of access to a particular type of housing; mobilization of informal access mechanisms, supported by a social network) and presence (comparable sociodemographic characteristics between newer and older residents) play a role in slowing down the change triggered by urban interventions and the residential mobilities of wealthier new residents, or at least in curbing this change by sustaining forms of social marking in the residential space of the historic neighbourhood. Such continuities are also produced by the second group observed, namely returnees, meaning people who have come back to Alcântara after living outside of the neighbourhood for significant periods of time. They have returned recently (in the previous five years), at a time when the neighbourhood has been strongly impacted by urban regeneration interventions, and thus have arrived at the same time as many of the newcomers described

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above. These are essentially young, working-class, unskilled households, sometimes experiencing social or family issues. In the vast majority of cases, they move into a dilapidated or average-condition historic property, but which is sometimes subject to a rehabilitation process, often based on mutual aid. These returnees are typically the children of long-term Alcântara residents. Their return to the neighbourhood thus has a strong intergenerational dimension and reflects an effort to move closer to family – an often decisive factor in individuals’ residential mobility choices. Because they have sustained a social network over the years and have repeatedly and regularly visited the neighbourhood, these returnees were able to secure and exchange information on the availability of housing and on whether certain landlords would be inclined to rent out their property. This process echoes the conclusions of sociologist Monique Vervaeke (1992: 168) on the workings of family networks in three older neighbourhoods of Lille, France: These networks for exchanging housing and information on vacant accommodation show that residents partly regulate and control access to the territory they occupy. The allocation of housing is part of a customary law system that is more complex than property rights. … This control over the allocation of housing is characterized by the resident taking the initiative and the landlord remaining passive. Residential cooptation renders fractions of the housing stock autonomous from the housing market as a whole. These allocation networks function on the basis of internal laws that are based on custom. They contradict analyses of the housing market as a transparent relation between market-regulated supply and demand.

Their return expresses a strong attachment to the neighbourhood, primarily because it is associated with strong social relationships, forms of sociability and interaction based on mutual acquaintances, solidarity, social proximity and family ties. The third and final group observed is composed of incumbents, who have been long established in the neighbourhood and are for the most part working class. Some are Alcântara natives and their entire residential trajectory has taken place there; others came to the neighbourhood during the course of their trajectory. In all cases, their residential presence is characterized by an early settlement, prior to the first political efforts to redevelop the neighbourhood, meaning they have been in the neighbourhood for at least fifteen years. This long-term presence means that these residents have an experience and knowledge of the neighbourhood and of how it has changed over the long term. The residential stability – at the neighbourhood level – of many residents reflects a unanimous choice to stay in Alcântara, albeit a choice governed by certain constraints. However, this stability is in many respects extremely relative, as it masks multiple forms of mobility, both active and passive. Indeed, this residential stability appears much more limited

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when a change of scale is implemented – if one looks, for instance, at the mobilities occurring within the neighbourhood itself, or if one adopts a different perspective consisting in no longer only looking at the movements of people, but also examining transformations in the local context or in the housing stock (redistribution of internal spaces, downgrading, change in occupation). Three subcategories of incumbent residents can be identified, depending on the nature of their residential mobility within the neighbourhood. The first subcategory is that of the ‘immobile’ residents, who have never moved since they settled in Alcântara. The simplicity of this geographic trajectory and this stability in terms of housing, however, mask a variety of situations – such as tenancy versus ownership, for instance. These residents, more than others, have had to deal with the gradual increase of the cost of living in general since the 1980s, as well as of basic food and household products. More than others, they must also contend, more locally, with the sharp increase in the prices of some neighbourhood businesses and services (an increase connected with urban regeneration and gentrification processes). In the case of tenants, ‘social precarization’ comes with a sharp deterioration of housing conditions over time. As landlords charge low rents for these cramped, rundown older properties, they are very rarely inclined to ensure they are adequately maintained. The situation is markedly different for owner-occupants. While the increase of some costs (everyday living costs, housing costs) has a negative impact on their living conditions and their housing conditions, transformations surrounding their property may have a promotional impact. As the geographer Jean-Pierre Lévy explains, the ‘regeneration and/or gentrification of historic inner-city neighbourhoods has had the effect of boosting the residential positions of some households, the very ones who in their biographical history were able to put social, political and/or financial capital to work to become owners of their own homes’ (Lévy 2002: 200). This applies, for instance, to some working-class households, who became owners at a time when their neighbourhood was degraded and devalued. The relatively low price of real estate, as well as the ability to secure financial support from friends and relatives in the form of informal interest-free loans, created the conditions for access to homeownership. In these cases, the revaluation of the neighbourhood within the city, produced by urban interventions or the arrival of new populations, has an indirect impact on the revaluation of a property, as well as on the symbolic and social promotion of a residential position. The second subcategory of incumbents includes residents who have moved at least once since they settled in the neighbourhood, but within a small perimeter. It reflects the existence of highly localized residential mobilities: such moves may occur within a small geographical sector such as a single street or apartment building. In most cases, these short-distance moves attest to an effort to improve one’s housing conditions without being

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uprooted – that is, without having to change one’s practices in the space surrounding one’s home. Very often, as evoked earlier, house-hunting strategies within the framework of this short-distance residential mobility are conducted outside the official housing market and economic capital plays only a secondary role in them. Again, one observes the crucial importance of social and/or family networks and of the ability to mobilize social capital in order to access housing. Moving into or buying a home always happens after a phase of preliminary discussions and informal encounters with the former occupants or the owners, and often involves the anticipation of the property’s future availability. Negotiation with the owners is done in more direct fashion than the traditional market form, enabling some private arrangements that may ensure the best possible value according to some authors. These small-scale mobilities, which show a population’s ability to redistribute itself locally and the housing stock’s ability to make this redistribution possible, also help to ensure the production of working-class continuities in Alcântara’s residential space. The third subcategory of incumbents consists of longtime residents who have moved at least once within the neighbourhood since they settled – not in the immediate vicinity of their previous home but within Alcântara as a whole. While this residential mobility and the choice to relocate reflect an effort to transform one’s living conditions and one’s relationship to the neighbourhood, the choice of staying in Alcântara also points to an intention to sustain a particular relationship to the city. The sociodemographic characteristics of these locally mobile inhabitants are, however, more varied than in the other groups. For example, some socially upwardly mobile incumbents manage to invest in a new luxury home in the neighbourhood; other, less wealthy individuals benefit from the construction of social housing units on the site of a former slum; lastly, others still have deliberately decided to move into an older property, of at least equivalent quality to their previous home, but located in the vicinity of one of the publicly renovated areas. In these cases, the access to the new property tends to follow the rules of the official real-estate market, and is much more conditioned by individuals’ economic capital. Such mobilities again illustrate the neighbourhood’s ability to retain part of its population. Yet they also reveal the active, sometimes ambiguous role played by some incumbent residents in their neighbourhood’s transformation. That some longtime residents move in the vicinity of a renovated area shows, for instance, their ability to anticipate change and future real-estate profits. The objective of taking advantage of ongoing revitalization is even more openly pursued by those who manage to invest in new properties either to live in or for speculation purposes, or who renovate former industrial premises (workshops) or inherited high-potential historic properties with a view to putting them back on the market.

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Alcântara’s current population dynamics cannot, therefore, be reduced to the effects of the gentrifiers’ residential choices. The residential strategies of many more or less ‘stable’ incumbent residents and returnees prove that some residential positions can be reproduced despite contextual changes. This reproduction, which involves the activation of social networks, demonstrates a strong capacity for retention in some areas, owing in some circumstances to the ability of residents to regulate and control the allocation of properties, the restructuring of the population, and, by extension, access to the territory they occupy. The fine-grained observation of such residential mobility practices enables us to demonstrate the scope and the level of the constraints weighing on residents and their residential (im)mobility. These constraints may obviously reflect situations of economic, social or political domination, but they can also be more concrete and derive from the morphology of the built environment or the configuration of the urban fabric. As we situate ourselves at the scale of individuals, their trajectories and their choices, we must not forget these constraints, nor as the relations of domination that have a considerable impact on mobility opportunities. CONCLUSION Against the backdrop of the sometimes stereotypical image of historic inner cities in the throes of widespread gentrification, we have attempted here to shed light on the diversity of processes under way in two neighbourhoods, in Barcelona and Lisbon, based on quantitative and qualitative empirical material. To account for a more complex reality in terms of the social division of space, coexisting divergent processes of social change, and the maintenance of inequalities in living conditions, we must be wary of hasty generalizations and adopt a broad scale of analysis. The coexistence of different forms of mobility observed in gentrifying neighbourhoods reflects deep social inequalities and a significant segmentation of residential practices – concerning paths of access to housing, residential opportunities, the ability to anticipate change, and so forth. In this light, gentrification appears to be a process that highlights various segregation mechanisms at work in historic urban neighbourhoods. These intertwining socio-urban dynamics also come to the fore in the representations of resident populations: in some cases, incumbent residents emphasize the ‘degradation’ of the neighbourhood, which they may associate with the arrival of new, more precarious groups of migrants, with a feeling of growing insecurity or incivility, or with the replacement of traditional food businesses by so-called ‘ethnic’ ones. Mostly, however, actors in the neighbourhood are well aware of the social effects of gentrification, and gen-

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trification is interpreted by incumbents and newcomers alike as the symbol of profound changes affecting the local living environment and the population, as a result of public policies. The members of local residents’ groups we met in Barcelona were clearheaded about the skyrocketing real-estate prices in Ciutat Vella (at least up to the 2008 economic crisis) and its effects on the residential geography of the city’s historic neighbourhoods. They also see through the stalling strategies adopted by some landlords: real-estate ‘mobbing’6 is a recurrent phenomenon. Observing mobility practices is also the occasion to emphasize residents’ ability to take on these outside constraints and power relations. The strategies implemented with a view to settling or remaining in a neighbourhood, which may entail the everyday avoidance of places frequented by gentrifiers, can thus be seen as one of several possible forms – intentional or otherwise, individual or collective – of resistance to gentrification among residents. At any rate, they affect the pace and linearity of the process such as it is described in the classic theoretical models.

Notes 1. See Neil Smith’s analysis (1996) of the urban conflict surrounding New York City’s Tompkins Square Park in the late 1980s. 2. Authier’s analysis (1995, 2003) of the spatial distribution of low-, middle- and high-income tenants and homeowners shows that ‘behind the image of a rehabilitated, revalued and gentrified neighbourhood – suggesting that its population is somewhat well-off and homogeneous – microsectors composed of subpopulations with highly diverse social characteristics stand out’ (Authier 1995: 117). Authier has also shown that in the 1970s the regeneration of the Saint-Georges area of Lyons’ old town came with an influx of populations with relatively diversified socioeconomic backgrounds, including what he calls ‘cultural’ first-time homeowners, ‘blue-collar’ first-time homeowners (from the upper fractions of the working class) and ‘new tenants’ (such as students). 3. Multivariate analysis seeks to describe and interpret observations pertaining to a wealth of data, either by identifying groups of individuals with shared features, or by forming groups of connected variables or indicators (Groupe Chadule 1994). 4. See also research by Edmond Préteceille (2007), on Paris, and Thomas Maloutas (2010), on Athens. Maloutas deftly shows how some working-class neighbourhoods upgraded without an influx of new populations, solely because the younger generations were able to improve their social position while staying in their parents’ neighbourhood. 5. Respondents resided in six different sectors within the neighbourhood, identified on the basis of field observations and cartographic analysis of census data (characteristics of the built environment, structure of housing stock, characteristics of households). 6. This phrase refers to an array of techniques designed to pressure tenants into leaving a dwelling, ranging from lack of maintenance to verbal and physical threats.

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References Authier, Jean-Yves. 1995. ‘Formes et processus de ségrégation dans les quartiers anciens centraux réhabilités. L’exemple du quartier Saint-Georges à Lyon’, Sociétés contemporaines 22–23: 107–25. Authier, Jean-Yves. 1996. ‘Mobilités résidentielles et effets de composition dans les processus de réhabilitation des quartiers centraux’, in Nicole Haumont (ed.), La Ville: agrégation et ségrégation sociales. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 143–61. Authier, Jean-Yves. 2003. ‘La gentrification du quartier Saint-Georges à Lyon’, in Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen (ed.), Retours en ville. Des processus de ‘gentrification’ urbaine aux politiques de ‘revitalisation’ des centres. Paris: Descartes et Cie, pp. 106–25. Chabrol, Marie. 2014. ‘Evolutions récentes des quartiers d’immigration à Paris. L’exemple du quartier ‘africain’ de Château-Rouge’, Hommes & migrations (1308): 87–95. Dureau, Françoise, and Christophe Imbert. 2014. ‘L’approche biographique des mobilités résidentielles’, in Christophe Imbert, Hadrien Dubucs, Françoise Dureau and Matthieu Giroud (eds), D’une métropole à l’autre. Pratiques urbaines et circulations dans l’espace européen. Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 33–80. Groupe Chadule. 1994. Initiation aux pratiques statistiques en géographie, 3rd edn. Paris: Masson. Lévy, Jean-Pierre. 2002. ‘Gentrification’, in Marion Segaud, Jacques Brun and JeanClaude Driant (eds), Dictionnaire de l’habitat et du logement. Paris: Armand Colin, pp. 199–201. Maloutas, Thomas. 2010. ‘Mobilité sociale et ségrégation à Athènes. Formes de séparatisme social dans un contexte de mobilité spatiale réduite’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 184: 2–21. Martínez i Rigol, Sergi. 2000. ‘El retorn al centre de la ciutat: la reestructuració del Raval entre la renovació i la gentrificació’, Ph.D. dissertation in geography. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Olives Puig, Josep. 1969. ‘Deterioración urbana e inmigración en un barrio del casco antiguo de Barcelona: Sant Cugat del Rec’, Revista de Geografía 3(1–2): 40–72. Préteceille, Edmond. 2007. ‘Is Gentrification a Useful Paradigm to Analyse Social Changes in the Paris Metropolis?’, Environment and Planning A 39(1): 10–31. Requena Hidalgo, Jesús. 2003. ‘“La peor casa en el peor barrio”. Barrios de inmigración y marginalidad en la periferia urbana de Barcelona. El caso de Badalona’, Scripta Nova: Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales 7(146). Retrieved 28 November 2021 from http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-146%28058%29.htm. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge. Van Criekingen, Mathieu, and Jean-Michel Decroly. 2003. ‘Revisiting the Diversity of Gentrification: Neighbourhood Renewal Processes in Brussels and Montreal’, Urban Studies 40(12): 2451–68. Vervaeke, Monique. 1992. ‘Les logiques familiales d’accès au logement’, in Eva Lelièvre and Claire Lévy-Vroelant (eds), La Ville en mouvement. Habitat et habitants. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 163–74. Young, Michael, and Peter Willmott. 1962. Family and Kinship in East London. London: Penguin Books.

CH A PTER

8 P O P U L A R CO N T I N U I T I ES I N G E N T R I F Y I N G N E I G H B OU R H O O D S The Presences and Practices of Nonresidents

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Marie Chabrol and Matthieu Giroud

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entrifying neighbourhoods are often associated with an image – of low-income, immigrant or shopping districts – that relates to the distinctive past of these spaces. This image, often based on the social backgrounds of a majority of inhabitants before gentrification (in the case of a quartier populaire) or on its dominant functions (in the case of a shopping district, for instance), can also be sustained on a daily basis by the continuity of presences and practices of populations who no longer reside there, or who have never resided there, but who continue to ‘inhabit’ the neighbourhood. This is precisely the case for the neighbourhoods under study in this chapter, which are characterized by their unfinished, incomplete gentrification processes (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008).1 We use the term ‘inhabit’ to refer to an investment in a place that goes beyond merely residing there in the sense of having a home and an address, and which involves the occupation of space through visibility in public areas (streets, parks and squares) and semipublic areas (restaurants, bars, cafés, shops, cinemas, etc.), as well as through specific (commercial, professional, social, etc.) uses induced by the characteristics of that place. In the neighbourhoods under study here, the presences and practices of ‘nonresidents’ (who we shall henceforth call ‘users’) may take on a distinctive dimension.

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This is first because they mark these spaces socially, which in turn has an impact on the permanent (re)construction of their image and, accordingly, of their reputation. Secondly, it is because they may give the impression that ‘nothing changes’ and mask significant residential changes – especially if some of the neighbourhood’s residents (the gentrifiers in particular) seldom ‘inhabit’ their neighbourhood and frequent other places that suit them better in their everyday lives. Thirdly, it is because the endurance of these presences and practices in a context of change where there no longer seems to be room for them can have various effects on the gentrification process, from enhancing the ‘popular’, ‘authentic’ or ‘exotic’ image of the neighbourhood for some residents (which can be seen as an accelerator of the process), to leading others to avoid the neighbourhood or even leave it (which may reflect signs of a slowdown of the process or a resistance to it). Our objective is to show that this collective occupation of space, producing popular2 continuities, results from the combination of highly diverse individual practices inscribed in likewise highly varied temporalities, relating to the continued possession of resources in these neighbourhoods (above all, economic and social resources, but also symbolic ones). The commercial fabric, which is sometimes out of step with the population of gentrifiers; the lively, multilingual atmosphere (Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck 2005);3 and the presence of community meeting places allow these neighbourhoods to remain welcoming places outside the domestic sphere. Taken collectively, these individual practices also result in clearly identified urban temporalities and the coexistence of populations and uses that have effects on the gentrification process. Drawing on the cases of the neighbourhoods of Alcântara (Lisbon), Berriat–Saint-Bruno (Grenoble) and Château Rouge (Paris), we use interviews and life stories to document the various ways in which people ‘inhabit’ places without residing in them, and analyse the motives of these individual returns and presences that inform the image and dynamics of these neighbourhoods on a daily basis.

INHABITING THE NEIGHBOURHOOD WITHOUT RESIDING IN IT As we look at everyday life in older gentrifying central neighbourhoods, we cannot only consider the forms and dynamics of settlement in the residential space. As we have just noted, the ‘inhabitants’, who set the tone in a given neighbourhood – meaning that through their presences, uses and behaviours they play a role in ‘marking’ it socially, setting the pace of everyday life and, by extension, shaping its identity – are not all residents. Consequently, the

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image of a neighbourhood often does not entirely reflect the reality of the social and residential processes at work there. The phrase ‘inhabiting without residing’, debatable as it may be, has the benefit of highlighting the practices of these user-inhabitants and their role in the production of specific forms of gentrification. It contains the idea, largely confirmed by our observations, that, in addition to forms of continuity of presences and practices identified in the residential space, there are other forms of continuity at play in public and private collective spaces too. The older populations are also those who have frequented the neighbourhood for a long time, long before the early signs of its gentrification. The cross-analysis of residential trajectories and of the sets of places frequented in everyday life reveals the existence of three different profiles of user-inhabitants among the older populations. The first profile is that of former residents of the neighbourhood who have chosen to move out and reside at some distance from the neighbourhood, but still continue to frequent it on a regular basis. The case of Angel, in Alcântara (Lisbon), illustrates this: Angel has resided since 1989 in a new apartment located on the southern outskirts of the Portuguese capital. She left Alcântara (the place where her parents and grandparents, who were blue-collar workers, came to settle in the early twentieth century) at the age of twenty, having given birth to her first child in 1998 and found a job as a cook. Her move was admittedly dictated by the transformation of the metropolitan real-estate market, characterized by the massive construction of affordable, sufficiently large homes in the suburbs, national policies supporting access to homeownership, and credit facilitation schemes in banks. Yet it also reflected a more personal desire to distance herself from a neighbourhood where intense social and familial control prevails. Angel has not moved since 1989, but she never stopped frequenting Alcântara, in almost ritualistic fashion, every day of the week: ‘It’s easier over there [in Almada, on the southern shore of the Tagus] to get a house … Anyway, I’m here every day [in Alcântara]! From lunchtime to nightfall … It’s the neighbourhood here! I was born here, I’m from here, I’m here! I’m an inhabitant of Alcântara!’ This creates a complex relationship between places: between home and the city, and between Alcântara and other neighbourhoods in the Lisbon metropolitan area. The daily return to the neighbourhood, however frequent, remains regulated and controlled. By switching places and neighbours, Angel ensures the continuity of her presence on a daily basis, while distancing herself from some of the tensions and pressures caused by the strict local social controls. Her example is in no way unique. In Lisbon, Paris and Grenoble, our observations and encounters show that many other ‘inhabitants’, former residents who left to move to the suburbs for reasons similar to Angel’s (access to a new, sufficiently

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large home, as either a homeowner or a social housing tenant), continue to frequent their old neighbourhood on a regular basis. This shows that in order to ‘stay’ in a neighbourhood – to continue to spend time there, to be present, in short to ‘inhabit’ the area – residing there is in fact just one of several possibilities. This also applies to the second type of profile, which differs from the first only with respect to the conditions leading to the move from the old neighbourhood to the suburbs. Specifically, many former residents were forced to leave by the upswing in the neighbourhood’s real-estate market – the violence that the mechanisms leading to such evictions can inflict has been well documented. Public policies conducted on the scale of the neighbourhood, leading to the destruction of some of the most dilapidated housing stock, but also on the scale of the urban area concerning social housing, are quite effective instruments when it comes to forcing people to move out. In any event, this is what transpires from the cases of Nadia, an Algerian homemaker, and Khaled, a construction worker, who were both interviewed in Berriat–Saint-Bruno (Grenoble). Both were forced to move out of the neighbourhood during the 1980s and into a peripheral neighbourhood composed of large housing estates. The departure of many North African households from the neighbourhood was the result of a combination of factors: the scarcity of affordable, large homes in the neighbourhood; the availability of several new social housing developments on the edge of town; and the nationwide implementation of a family reunification policy. In both cases, however, the move did not signify a complete eviction or dispossession from the neighbourhood: as Nadia explains, ‘we had to go and live in Mistral [a Grenoble neighbourhood containing large housing estates] because there was social housing there, and bigger apartments … but as far as I’m concerned, I’m still living here! I live here’. Khaled says: ‘I was single before! I needed to find a bigger place. It’s not the same when you don’t have kids. … My place used to be really small. When I have nothing to do, I always come straight here. We’ve known this place for years and years. We’re here and we didn’t just arrive today!’ Even when a move out of the neighbourhood causes frustration, as was the case for Nadia, or is experienced with resignation, as for Khaled, the old neighbourhood may remain a polarizing place, where one returns regularly, helping to ensure a form of popular continuity in the public space. The third type of user-inhabitants also play an active role in producing such continuities. These users have never lived in the neighbourhood in the sense that they have never had an address there or even been housed there temporarily, but they spend time in it on a daily basis. While the duration of their presence and the frequency of their trips vary widely from one individual to the next, they also ensure the continuity of practices that were

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Figure 8.1. Shops and restaurants in Château Rouge, Paris, 2011. © Marie Chabrol.

present in these neighbourhoods long before gentrification. This is particularly the case in neighbourhoods which play the role of hubs for lowerincome, immigrant-managed businesses, like Château Rouge in Paris (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). The specific character and density of these shops, the variety of products on offer, as well as their low prices, attract many AfroCaribbean customers who have never lived in the neighbourhood. Many reside in the outer suburbs, and regularly spend up to an hour on public transport to come and do their shopping: ‘because it’s the only place where we can find food from home’, according to Jacqueline (born in Haiti in 1960, a resident of Châtenay-en-France, a very small village about an hour north of Paris), who only frequents ‘two or three shops, always the same ones for the past ten years’; similarly, in the words of Manuel (born in Angola in 1965, a resident of Arthies, a village located over an hour to the northwest of Paris), it is because ‘these products are difficult to find where I live, there are no shops like this nearby’. Some spend time in the neighbourhood for work, to meet with friends and loved ones, or simply to feel ‘at home’ with their peers, as in the case of Souleymane, a 53-year-old heating engineer, born in Senegal and a private-sector tenant in the Val-de-Marne department (in the southeastern inner suburbs of Paris). He has never lived in Château Rouge,

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Figure 8.2. Shopping and meeting places in Château Rouge, Paris, 2011. Many patrons of the neighbourhood live elsewhere, sometimes travelling considerable distances. © Lydie Launay.

but has been going there two or three times a month, during the week or at weekends, ever since he came to France in 1979: ‘I’ve been coming here since the early days, for the Senegalese restaurants, for friends. It’s the atmosphere I’m looking for’. In addition to these practices of longtime regulars like Souleymane, there are also the practices of far more recent users who frequent the neighbourhood in the same manner and for the same reasons. Honoré, a 39-year-old man, came from the Congo a few months ago. He is living with friends of his in another part of Paris. He is waiting for administrative issues to be resolved; he is still largely unfamiliar with the city and goes to Château Rouge nearly every day: ‘I’m happy to come here and meet with friends and eat good typical food. I love this neighbourhood’. In the cases we have listed here, people come mostly out of habit. The neighbourhood’s streets, and crucially the local business fabric, constitute a place to stroll that allow these inhabitants to meet friends by chance, stop and chat informally. As we will see, these people often go to the neighbourhood alone because they know that they will stumble upon friends, relatives, acquaintances, distinctive atmospheres and familiar languages.

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‘WE DON’T COME FOR THE TRAFFIC; WE COME FOR THE SOULS’ As we have seen, the reasons for daily visits to a particular neighbourhood are multiple and often interlinked. The neighbourhoods in question are frequented not only for the many material, social, informational and symbolic resources they offer, but also for the conscious or unconscious attachment they elicit. These may seem like extremely common reasons for people to frequent the same place repeatedly, but our argument is that gentrifying neighbourhoods have, throughout their trajectories, offered specific resources to the inhabitants who have come to populate and frequent them. The neighbourhoods studied here, which date back to the nineteenth century, have since their creation fulfilled the function of welcoming people to the city, offering newcomers homes (modest and precarious as they may be), information and access to jobs. Defined and modelled by Chicagoschool sociologists as gateways into the city, these neighbourhoods have allowed generations of newly arrived immigrants (domestic, like the migrants from the agricultural regions of northern Portugal in the Alcântara, or foreign, like North Africans in La Goutte d’Or and Berriat–Saint-Bruno) to find a place to settle in the city, before in some cases leaving them to pursue their often upward social trajectory. This function of welcoming newcomers to the city has endured, especially in the most dilapidated sectors of the housing stock and through forms of solidarity such as temporary accommodation or flatsharing, even though urban renewal operations and the influx of middle-class populations, who buy and rent apartments in a tight real-estate market, necessarily reduce the available housing stock for lower-income households. Things are different for retail properties, where opportunities that vary according to urban settings have enabled the development of a retail supply that is geared to the needs of low-income, often immigrant populations, who may reside in the neighbourhood or not. In the case of Grenoble, the role of North African entrepreneurs largely accounts for these spatial and commercial dynamics (Figure 8.3). We primarily find members of families of entrepreneurs with a long history of presence in the Berriat neighbourhood, dating back to their arrival in France in the 1960s and 1970s, precisely at a time when retail properties were very cheap and therefore easily accessible. These families are now very powerful locally, owing to their dominance in this real-estate sector (they own the premises as well as the commercial leases), in trade, and in the importation of products that they redistribute to the other North African businesses in the city. As owners of part of the neighbourhood’s housing stock, these families allow other entrepreneurs to move in, often quickly and with flexibility. Arrangements are possible to

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Figure 8.3. Berriat–Saint-Bruno: retail offer targeting those on lower incomes and immigrants, Grenoble, 2005. © Matthieu Giroud.

facilitate their establishment; these may be financial (negotiated rents and payments; strategies to keep a business going between two tax inspections) or organizational (sharing premises, a lease and the working day between two different business activities). These business owners now coexist with other returning North African entrepreneurs (who are former residents and/or used to work in retail elsewhere in the city), as well as with newcomers armed with a pioneering entrepreneurial spirit, who often come from other cities. Such is, for instance, the case of a Parisian with Tunisian origins who chose to come to Berriat–Saint-Bruno after having discovered the neighbourhood’s business opportunities on the Internet. He came in 2002, at a time when gentrification was active and many renovations were still ongoing. Still, he mainly geared his activities to the needs of the lowerincome and immigrant or foreign-born populations; within a few years, he opened three call shops and an Internet café. Other North African entrepreneurs, especially in the restaurant business, clearly took gentrification into consideration as they developed their commercial activities. The objective for them is not to favour a particular customer base to the detriment of another, but to attempt to create places that are accessible to different social groups by making adjustments to their products, prices, interior decoration or atmosphere. These trajectories and strategies result in the consolidation, dynamization and diversification of the neighbourhood’s overall retail structure. Because these different forms and orientations of business involve multiple actors, exchanges and social relations, they also diversify the North African presence in the neighbourhood. These shops are not only one of the driv-

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ing forces of the daily presence of inhabitants from all over the urban area, who come to consume, shop or socialize there; they are also part of a much broader economic apparatus (Ma Mung 1996). They are places for work, for making arrangements and for more or less formal and legal economic opportunities, such as filling in for managers when they are in their home country for short stints; subletting a retail property for a fixed period; organizing informal trade; occasional undeclared hires; collective recruitment; passing on information on job offers; and so forth. All these opportunities attract a socially and culturally heterogeneous population. Lastly, depending on how long they have been established, some business premises can also serve the purposes of other activities, including religious ones. Clandestine places of worship have been located in the neighbourhood, in the back rooms of some shops. These religious activities attract individuals from all over the urban area, but also support the clandestine reception and accommodation of new migrants. Ultimately, these different functions – consumption, economic activity, social networks and opportunities for material and ideological guidance – allow the neighbourhood to remain a place that welcomes migrants, especially from North Africa, but also and most importantly a place that is home to a wide variety of popular uses. In addition to affordable niche shops, work (even for just a few hours) and informal information, these neighbourhoods have a network of associations that is far denser than in the rest of the city, often inherited from local struggles. In La Goutte d’Or in Paris, and particularly in the Château Rouge sector, the presence of associations supporting people in substandard housing and migrants, legal-aid offices, literacy classes and a café social continues the legacy of the Parisian urban struggles of the 1980s and 1990s (Fourcaut 1986; Faure 2000; Tissot 2011)4 in support of people in substandard housing, migrants and undocumented individuals (one of the neighbourhood’s most famous episodes remains the occupation of the local church, SaintBernard-de-la-Chapelle, by undocumented workers and local residents in 1996) (Fijalkow 2007).5 These associations are frequented by families and individuals, many of whom reside outside the neighbourhood. This is the case for Coumba, a 39-year-old Malian woman who works in the kitchen of a Paris day nursery. She resides in the neighbouring tenth arrondissement but attends three French classes per week on the premises of an association in La Goutte d’Or: ‘So this year I looked for French classes, all day, all year, but I didn’t find anything. I looked with my boss, didn’t find anything. And finally I found something here’, she says in hesitant French. Likewise, active members of associations sometimes come a long way to get involved. Many of them first started by looking for a cause or a form of association-based activity that suited them before choosing a place. Evelyne, the founder of the sociolinguistic workshop where Coumba attends classes, resides in a differ-

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ent, quieter and more bourgeois part of the eighteenth arrondissement, but is active, recognized and highly esteemed in Château Rouge: As I’ve been teaching classes for a very long time, I’ve ended up getting to know a lot of people. So when I come to the association, sometimes I need to allow more time because there might be women that I haven’t seen in a long time and who have children, so they’ll show me their children in their pushchairs, they’ll show me pictures, it takes time. Sometimes I have several students who stop and chat, so I introduce them to each other if they’re not acquainted. I know a lot of people, they come to ask me about classes, ‘When are they starting? When can we come to register?’, etc., ‘Do you still have room?’, so there’s that recognition, too.

Recognition, acquaintances and friendships, a multilingual atmosphere that recalls familiar memories: this all contributes to the construction of a very distinctive social space, which, elusive as it may be, is one of the most important amenities of these working-class neighbourhoods, despite the progress of gentrification. These atmospheres (often not found in peripheral residential neighbourhoods) are largely why people spend time there or are eager to come back despite the constraints of everyday life and sometimes long journey times. These neighbourhoods offer many opportunities for chance encounters, which are often eagerly anticipated; we met Amanda, a 46-year-old Togolese woman who resides in the western inner suburb of Nanterre, at Château Rouge market when she was shopping: ‘I come here because it’s fresher and less expensive and because you meet people you know from Africa or from the suburbs and who you haven’t seen in a long time’. Nostalgia for one’s country of origin also plays an important role in these visits to the neighbourhood, even when they are occasional: ‘It’s different from the other neighbourhoods in Paris, it’s like you’re in Africa’, explains Khalou, a 24-year-old Senegal-born man who lives with friends in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis (northeastern inner suburbs); similarly: ‘I like this neighbourhood, which reminds me of things that you can’t find elsewhere in France’ (Marcel, 55, born in Congo, resident of the Loir-et-Cher department, in the Loire Valley). As in other immigrant hubs, patronage of Château Rouge also reveals a need for these individuals to return to their roots (Guillon and Taboada-Leonetti 1986) that is adeptly summed up by Colette (a 49-year-old woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo who resides in the Essonne department, in the southern outer suburbs) when she says: ‘We don’t come for the traffic; we come for the souls’. This strong sense of attachment to a place often develops over the long term, and is rekindled on a daily basis by time spent with friends and acquaintances, colleagues and relatives, as in the case of Khaled, in Berriat– Saint-Bruno:

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I spend most of my time in the neighbourhood. Especially on Saturdays and Sundays, with my colleague at the market. And during the week, when I need to see someone. We’ll always run into each other at the Marseillais [a ‘PMU’ bar/betting shop], I know that! … Everyone knows us. Boudoudou’s there [a halal butcher’s shop, which attracts customers from the entire urban area]. Everyone comes here to shop. It’s been years and years. … It’s a question of habit! You’ll see colleagues, friends. … We’re attached to the neighbourhood. … My colleague, the one who was just talking, lives next door, I also have a colleague who works as a greengrocer at the market. As soon as he gets off work, we all meet. I also have a colleague who lives over there, across from the railway station. Another lives in Echirolles [a town in the south of the urban area], he’ll be around soon. We all see each other here, I guess.

These habits and forms of attachment are also parts of broader family histories, making the neighbourhood a place of individual and collective memory. In Château Rouge, specific practices have been linked to highly specialized commercial activities for several decades in some families. Twenty-five-year-old Abdoulaye has resided in the Hauts-de-Seine department (western inner suburbs) since he was born, with his Malian family. Every three weeks or so, he spends several hours in Château Rouge to make numerous food purchases, in exactly the same order as during his childhood: We’d go up to Château Rouge and we’d buy all kinds of exotic vegetables. Gumbo, alloco, aubergines, many different things. Once we were done with those, we’d go into another Château Rouge shop and buy big crates of frozen fish, or fresh fish at the [Rue] Dejean [street] market. If it was frozen, we’d get it directly from the Chinese. It depended on my father’s mood. Once we were done, we’d take a taxi from Château Rouge and go back home.

The only difference between now and Abdoulaye’s childhood is that he now goes there in his own car. Lastly, it should be noted that habit does not necessarily imply attachment: degrees of attachment may vary considerably, between individuals who have positive memories of the neighbourhood, who have friends and loved ones there, and others who go there more or less out of necessity, without necessarily forging ties or appreciating its atmosphere. This is the case of Agathe, a Kinshasa-born 25-year-old, who resides in Chessy (in the Seine-et-Marne department, in the eastern outer suburbs) and goes to Château Rouge twice a week for food shopping, almost out of obligation: ‘This neighbourhood is too rough for me; even if they gave me a nine-bedroom-apartment here, I’d never live here’. Victor (51, born in Togo, resident of Seine-et-Marne) also says: ‘I always make it quick when I’m in this neighbourhood, I find it too messy’. All of these presences derive from a set of factors and motives whose combination ultimately varies with each individual. These elements depend

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on the respective trajectories of the gentrifying central neighbourhoods, on the (migratory, residential, familial, professional) trajectories of the individuals in question, and on their groups of reference. But these presences and associated popular uses also produce a number of effects in return, on individual and collective identities on the one hand, but also, as we will see, on ongoing urban changes.

THE EVERYDAY LOCAL EFFECTS OF POPULAR CONTINUITIES To examine the everyday local effects of these visits and the resulting forms of occupation of collective spaces, a first avenue of research consists in investigating the older and newer residents’ representations of their neighbourhood. In the case of Berriat–Saint-Bruno in Grenoble, strikingly, the transformations generated by the multiple urban renewal operations and gentrification over nearly twenty-five years have not significantly altered its image as a low-income, (North African) immigrant neighbourhood. This image is not, however, uniform, and can be separated into three distinct representations. In the first representation, the North African presence is praised as an active component of a cosmopolitan popular neighbourhood, a symbol of social and cultural mixing in Grenoble. For a young couple of executives, who moved into the neighbourhood recently, this aspect strongly contributed to their choice of accessing homeownership in Berriat: ‘Our idea of it was that it’s an old neighbourhood, kind of working-class, that was beginning to change, take in a lot of dynamic, really nice stuff, and we like this idea of a population mix, a little bit of everybody, all the ethnicities together, the Arab neighbourhood over there, we liked that’. This representation structures the discourses of many of the neighbourhood’s gentrifiers, who quite logically act as conveyors of the image produced by the municipality since the mid-1990s, making Berriat the laboratory and showcase of the promotion of social and cultural mixing in Grenoble. Yet this representation of a cosmopolitan popular neighbourhood is also shared and conveyed by many longterm residents, which tends to show that traditional political divisions can be overcome by political strategies involving the production of local images. In the second representation, the conception of the ‘popular’ and of the immigrant presence is far less idealized. It is in particular defended by several long-term residents of North African origin, who arrived in Grenoble in the 1970s and 1980s. To them, Berriat has become a neighbourhood of blédards and clandos (slang words referring respectively to the perceived insularity of newer immigrants and their sometimes undocumented status), in refer-

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ence to the neighbourhood’s still active role as a gateway for immigrants, a place where people pass through and make temporary arrangements. These extremely derogatory words reflect a distancing between these residents and newer migrants, pertaining not only to the latter’s precarious administrative situations but also to their public behaviours, raising the question of whether they should be there at all, in their view. We collected evidence of intense competition between groups of immigrants for the occupation of key territories in the neighbourhood (where people meet, information is disseminated, odd jobs are offered), apparently being won by the most recent generation of migrants. This is at least what one Tunisian worker who came to Berriat in the late 1970s claims: We used to live the good life, a quiet life. … Now I kind of feel ill at ease; I no longer frequent the same places in the neighbourhoods. Because of the Algerians, the political refugees over there, the pickpockets. … That’s why I came here; over there I was kind of dragging my feet. I came here because it’s quiet, it’s more relaxed.6

The presence of immigrants is criticized even more harshly, with racist overtones, by many nonimmigrant inhabitants who have been present in the neighbourhood for a long time. According to one resident who has lived in Berriat for over sixty years, there has been a significant change: ‘The whole neighbourhood has been invaded by Arabs! The shops are all bought by the Arabs. The French no longer want to buy them. It’s a big change! The neighbourhood is changing, remember that!’ A shopkeeper expressed similar sentiments: How many Europeans do you pass on the street in the morning? There’s more and more Arabs. … My mistake was to buy this business in 1993. Things have changed quite a bit, and they’ve changed for the worse! The neighbourhood is losing value instead of gaining value! But you have to make a distinction between those shopkeepers who’ve been here a long time and those who are spreading, like the kebab places.

He ignores the fact that, in neighbourhoods like Berriat, the older retailers are also very often those who seek to adjust to ongoing changes by developing new business ventures, especially in the fast-food sector. This representation is ultimately structured by the North African presence in the commercial space and its impact on the neighbourhood’s current dynamic. In this account, the ideal scapegoats for the closure of traditional food businesses are close at hand – they are the North African entrepreneurs. The hypermarkets and megastores, located for the most part outside of the neighbourhood, are not criticized, even though many studies on the structural changes in commercial spaces have for the past thirty years or so unanimously pointed to the role of these big stores (and their successful Internet outlets) in the closure of many neighbourhood stores (Metton 1998).

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The fact that an image of a working-class, immigrant-populated neighbourhood can resist urban changes relating to gentrification and the diversity of individual experiences has an impact on urban dynamics. The persistence of such images, found in Château Rouge, in Alcântara and in some areas of Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella, should not lead us to overlook the modifications, constant reinventions and deep contradictions at work there. While evidently they reveal that not everyone likes or idealizes a ‘popular’ neighbourhood, these reinventions and contradictions show that tensions, in some cases very high, run across the different popular groups among long-term residents. This further confirms that this population, much like the gentrifiers, is in no way sociologically or socially uniform or homogeneous. However, these multiple reinventions, which are often mere expressions of various types of competition over space between different social groups (for commercial space, the occupation of public space, residential space, etc.), ultimately help to consolidate the ‘popular’, immigrant-populated image of the neighbourhood. This brings us to our last point: while the popular continuities constituted by daily visits and forms of collective occupation of local space have an impact on the social marking of places and on people’s representations, they also have an effect, which can be considered a form of power, on the projects of the actors of gentrification, and by extension on the paces and forms of the process itself. The persistence of such an image and of its underlying practices can also strongly limit or challenge some gentrification-related projects, be they residential, commercial or political. Many among the potential or actual gentrifiers have a problem with that lingering image. Some hesitate to finalize their investment and/or move out of fear that the neighbourhood will not change as quickly as anticipated. Others, who have already moved in, quickly claim they want to move out, even if that means not making the real-estate gains they initially expected, because they have not got ‘used’ to the neighbourhood. For instance, Amandine and Josué, a couple in their early thirties, moved to Château Rouge as homeowners, and sincerely thought they would spend a few years there. They left much earlier than they had planned: Amandine was not enjoying life in a neighbourhood that was very different from all the other places she had lived elsewhere in the country – she mentions being jostled in the street by African women ‘who never say sorry’ and more generally feeling a sense of being out of place (‘socially, nothing predestined me to end up in this neighbourhood’). The sense of insecurity, which is perceived very differently by different groups, and even by single individuals depending on the stage they have reached in their life, dissuades some gentrifiers from moving in and may lead others to move out. The neighbourhood’s new residents are not the only ones who ‘make a mistake’ by moving into popular neighbourhoods whose image remains

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socially very distinctive: business owners may see their entrepreneurial strategies fail for lack of customers; policymakers may have urban projects reconsidered owing to a lack of investors. In Château Rouge, the commercial diversification initiated by the public authorities strongly encouraged a bookstore to set up shop in the neighbourhood; it remained in business for under a year and was not immediately replaced. Other entrepreneurs failed because banks would not support them, refusing to fund projects in neighbourhoods that are still perceived negatively despite the progress of gentrification on the residential front.

CONCLUSION The people who ‘populate’ and ‘inhabit’ gentrifying neighbourhoods are not all residents. Through their more or less regular presence, these users gain access to the multiple material, social and symbolic resources that some gentrifying neighbourhoods still offer. The combination of their practices produces popular continuities that are visible in public and semipublic spaces, influencing the pace, social marking but also and most importantly the image of these neighbourhoods. These effects may interact with the gentrifying process, sometimes accelerating it, but generally subjecting it to additional constraints. To obtain a fine-grained understanding of the reasons and significance of these daily visits, in most cases made individually or sometimes in small groups, we need to consider several constitutive dimensions of ‘situations of mobility’ (Imbert et al. 2014). The first relates to the urban and social context in which these practices occur. The location and accessibility by public transport of gentrifying neighbourhoods in cities of varying size can have effects on whether these practices are even possible, even if the case of Château Rouge, an international commercial hub, suggests that the impact of these contextual factors should be qualified. The urban and social trajectories of many gentrifying neighbourhoods, which are intimately bound up with the timescales and tribulations of economic development, can also offer distinctive urban resources – for instance, in terms of business services, job markets, local associations and community organizations. The presence of family members, friends and acquaintances in the neighbourhood, be they residents or users, also has a strong influence on the social context of these daily visits. Obviously, the nature of these contextual factors varies from one neighbourhood to the next, in part depending on the form and intensity of the gentrification at work. In Alcântara, where residential gentrification remains very localized, daily trips are very often connected to visits to see family members who have remained in the neighbourhood. In Berriat–

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Saint-Bruno and Château Rouge, the family members who reside in the neighbourhood play a lesser role (in part because more of them were evicted from or chose to leave the area), or at any rate a much less important role than the social networks structured in public spaces and shops. We also need to understand how everyday practices were developed over the long term, by examining individual biographies. Coming back to a neighbourhood because you once lived there does not have the same significance as coming to a neighbourhood because you have recently discovered it: uses, habits and affects may differ considerably. We should therefore take care to interpret individuals’ relationships to their neighbourhoods dynamically, in light of their residential, familial and professional trajectories. Lastly, these practices in gentrifying neighbourhoods must be considered part of a broader system of mobility, which includes not only residential positions, but also all of individuals’ other everyday practices. Indeed, an individual’s presence in a given place indeed only makes sense if we know precisely where the person comes from and where they intend to go next (what for, and for how long?). By taking into account everyday practices and the popular continuities they produce, we can usefully complement approaches to gentrification that focus on forms of eviction of the working classes. That said, we should refrain from idealizing the role and power of these popular continuities by setting them in stone. Given that they depend on a combination of factors relating to the specificities of the urban trajectories of gentrifying neighbourhoods and of individual and social histories, we also need to accept that they can change over time, fade away or even disappear. N otes 1. In the ‘super-gentrified’ neighbourhoods observed in particular in the US and the UK, such presences are unlikely. As Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly explain in their book Gentrification (2008), ‘super-gentrification’ goes beyond the final stage of ‘maturation’ or ‘generalization’ of the process such as it is depicted in classic stage models. Occurring in already gentrified neighbourhoods, ‘super-gentrification’ concerns a globalized elite, often working in the banking and finance sectors and which, as a result of high incomes, can cope with the extremely high prices of a now entirely financialized real-estate market. 2. Translator’s note: ‘popular’ here means ‘of the people’. In French, the word populaire is used primarily in this sense, and is frequently used as a synonym (or sometimes a euphemism) for ‘working-class’. 3. Jan Blommaert, James Collins and Stef Slembrouck (2005) have shown how the multilingual atmosphere of cosmopolitan neighbourhoods (housing lower-income immigrants, albeit not exclusively) leads to a superimposition of highly diverse practices and social worlds in the same place. 4. More broadly, these structures can be seen as the inheritors of the social movements that emerged in many old workers’ neighbourhoods in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Taking the form of associations or collectives, they strive to perpetuate the ideal of an alliance between the working classes and the middle classes. Many studies by sociologists and historians on sociabilities in workers’ neighbourhoods have noted the ambiguities underlying this ideal. Behind statements of principle on mutual aid, solidarity and emancipation, logics of control and sometimes of domination of the working classes may be at work. These ambiguities are reminiscent of those observed in the action implemented by communist organizations to monitor everyday life (up until deindustrialization), which generated as many forms of control within the working classes as forms of group solidarity and autonomization. See, for instance, Annie Fourcaut (1986), Alain Faure (2000) and Sylvie Tissot (2011). 5. On housing and the fight against evictions during urban renewal operations in La Goutte d’Or in the 1980s, see Yankel Fijalkow (2007). 6. In interviews with some of the undocumented Algerian migrants who were the targets of these remarks, the processes of stigmatization and conflation of social groups appear even more complex, as is reflected by the account of a young Algerian who is present in the neighbourhood every day: ‘But you know, they always mix us up! You see over there, on that corner, you got kids selling hash. … They mix us up with them. … I’m clean. … They’re idiots. … They were born here, too! They don’t realize that what they’re doing is stupid. … They’ll realize later, dropping out of school and all that. … But the undocumented get lumped in with those guys’.

References Blommaert, Jan, James Collins and Stef Slembrouck. 2005. ‘Polycentricity and Interactional Regimes in “Global Neighbourhoods”’, Ethnography 6(2): 205–35. Faure, Alain. 2000. ‘Aspects de la “vie de quartier” dans le Paris populaire de la fin du xixe siècle’, Recherches contemporaines 6: 283–97. Fijalkow, Yankel. 2007. ‘Construction et usages de la notion de quartier-village. Village de Charonne et Goutte d’Or à Paris’, in Jean-Yves Authier, Marie-Hélène Bacqué and France Guérin-Pace (eds), Le Quartier. Enjeux scientifiques, actions politiques et pratiques sociales. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 75–85. Fourcaut, Annie. 1986. Bobigny, banlieue rouge. Paris: Editions Ouvrières/Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (FNSP). Guillon, Michèle, and Isabelle Taboada-Leonetti. 1986. Le Triangle de Choisy. Un quartier chinois à Paris. Paris: Centre d’Information et d’Etudes sur les Migrations Internationales (CIEMI)/L’Harmattan. Imbert, Christophe, Hadrien Dubucs, Françoise Dureau and Matthieu Giroud (eds). 2014. D’une métropole à l’autre. Pratiques urbaines et circulations dans l’espace européen. Paris: Armand Colin. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. London: Routledge. Ma Mung, Emmanuel. 1996. ‘Entreprise économique et appartenance ethnique’, Revue européenne des migrations internationales 12(2) : 211–33. Metton, Alain. 1998. ‘Espoirs et amertumes des commerces des centres-villes’, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 78: 47–54. Tissot, Sylvie. 2011. De bons voisins. Enquête dans un quartier de la bourgeoisie progressiste. Paris: Raisons d’Agir.

CH A PTER

9 R ES I D I N G I N A G E N T R I F Y I N G N E I G H B OU R H O O D The Importance of Trajectories and Mobilities

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Marie Chabrol and Lydie Launay

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ohabitation is a particularly important challenge in gentrifying neighbourhoods, where several generations of residents coexist, with differences in terms of age, duration of residence in the neighbourhood, socio-occupational category and lifestyle. These neighbourhoods also have diverse (commercial, residential, cultural) functions that involve individuals with likewise very diverse socioeconomic, cultural and demographic backgrounds. This diversity of populations and functions, observed at a given point in these neighbourhoods’ long-term history, is both the driver and the outcome of trends at work in the economic, commercial and residential fields, each following their own temporality, and each ultimately contributing to the overall evolution of the city. Gentrification, far from being a homogeneous phenomenon, assumes diverse forms and temporalities according to the urban context, which produces more or less significant divergences between the different dynamics at work. The Parisian neighbourhood of La Goutte d’Or is a particularly interesting case for analysing the different ways in which incumbent and newer residents appropriate their living environments: their home, building and neighbourhood. The neighbourhood has both private and social housing,

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but changes in the resident population have been more rapid in some sectors of the (private and public) housing stock than in others, leading to both varied and complex situations of copresence at different levels. For instance, unlike trends observed in other gentrifying neighbourhoods (e.g. in Colin Giraud’s [2014] work on the Marais in Paris and the Village in Montréal, and in Sharon Zukin’s [2009] work on New York1), the arrival of new residents has not triggered transformations in the commercial landscape around the classic ‘food–fashion–home’ triad (Zukin et al. 2009): the older African businesses remain prominent and highly popular. To understand these complex copresences and their social and spatial effects at all levels (floor, building, street, neighbourhood and surrounding spaces), we must consider residential trajectories (before and after residing in the neighbourhood under study) and daily mobilities within the neighbourhood and beyond. The objective is to show that these residential and everyday mobility practices have temporal and spatial effects on the gentrification process, on the ways in which it unfolds and consolidates, and on the gaps observed. They reveal in particular high levels of social inequality between the residents who have been living there for a long time and the newcomers, but also within these groups, affecting their ability to choose their place of residence – meaning staying in the neighbourhood or leaving – and the places they frequent on a daily basis, within the neighbourhood and beyond. Our methodology consists in cross-analysing empirical studies conducted during the ten years between 2005 and 2015 in the Château Rouge area of La Goutte d’Or in Paris. We focus on residential and commercial dynamics, practices and mobilities within the neighbourhood and beyond, both among incumbent and newer populations, among private- and social-sector landlords and tenants, with varied social characteristics. We recorded individuals’ residential trajectories, comprising all the places they have lived over the course of their lives, their residential projects and investments in other spaces, and their everyday mobilities within the neighbourhood and beyond. The value of this focus on trajectories is to demonstrate that what one has experienced before and what one aspires to, and whether one’s present situation is a choice or not, have a considerable impact in shaping relationships to places and neighbours. Conversely, by recording all the places frequented by individuals on a daily basis, we gain insights into a wide array of relationships to the neighbourhood (from the most positive to the most negative), into the adjustments made by some residents (who may, for instance, develop practices within the neighbourhood) and the efforts of others to occasionally ‘escape’ or leave for good.

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A MIX OF HIGHLY VARIED RESIDENTIAL SITUATIONS In La Goutte d’Or, as in the other neighbourhoods examined in this book, residents with highly varied residential and social trajectories coexist. Understanding how these long-term or newly arrived residents invest in their living environment means situating their current experience within their lifelong residential history. As the sociologists and geographers who penned the study Du domicile à la ville (2001) deftly showed with the notion of ‘residential relationships’, representations and social uses attached to living spaces (the dwelling, the building, the neighbourhood and other urban territories) depend on individuals’ ‘other social relationships, and on the configuration of their current residential contexts. They are also the product of the succession of individuals’ residential relationships to the places where they previously lived and of their residential projects’ (Authier et al. 2001: 4). Thus, what we are looking into here is the outcome of the intersection of the residential situations and experiences of residents of La Goutte d’Or at a given moment in time. The diversity of residential situations observed in both private and public housing relates to the structural features of the housing stock and to the neighbourhood’s trajectory. Moving to La Goutte d’Or in the 1990s, into a rundown private rented property or into subsidized public housing under the ‘PLAI’ (very low-income rental housing) scheme,2 is not the same as moving to the area in the 2000s and 2010s, into a renovated private rental property or ‘intermediate’ (i.e. affordable rather than low-income) public housing. It is worth recalling that the neighbourhood’s very heterogeneous housing stock, much of it dating from the nineteenth century, has experienced different urban cycles. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a devaluation cycle was characterized by the degradation of the built environment, an ageing and pauperized population, drug trafficking (the neighbourhood became a crack trafficking hub in the 1990s and 2000s) and an ‘Africanization’ of the area’s retail structure. The neighbourhood as a whole still has many business premises (one or two per building). From the late 1970s onwards, as small business plunged into crisis in France, retiring business owners struggled to find people to take over their activities and many stores became available, allowing African or African-oriented businesses to move into the streets of Château Rouge, close to the commercial hub of Barbès. Thus, a new African commercial hub began developing there in the 1980s. The upgrading of the area and early signs of gentrification came in the early 2000s as a result of a combination of factors: the widespread rise of real-estate prices in Paris, the ‘discovery’ of the neighbourhood’s potential – close to Montmartre, well connected to the rest of the capital by public transport (two metro lines, two

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major railway stations nearby, numerous bus routes) – and the availability of homes left vacant or for sale. In addition, multiform public initiatives pertaining to public spaces, commercial activities and housing pursued since the 1980s have played a role in transforming the neighbourhood and encouraged the influx of new residents. Since 2001, local public authorities have further pursued the large-scale transformation of the built environment by placing emphasis on the objective of social mix. This entails, first, producing more social housing units for middle-class residents,3 and second, implementing the ‘mixed third’ policy (Launay 2014) to ‘deghettoize’ the neighbourhood by facilitating middleclass settlement. However, the position of local public actors regarding the gentrifying effects of their interventions is ambiguous: these actors support the neighbourhood’s transformations but also acknowledge that, in the long run, it might prevent some populations from being able to remain in the area. The social housing stock is therefore expected to sustain a degree of social mix. The great variety of residential situations observed in the course of our decade of study is the product of this urban history. The coexistence of these very diverse residential situations leads to cohabitations at the neighbourhood or building level that are experienced and perceived very differently by newcomers and long-term residents. Moving into a new home and into a new neighbourhood is not only a new stage in a residential trajectory; it has an impact on individuals’ social position and redefines their relationships to others. Incumbent residents may also experience the settlement of new residents as an upsetting development. This fuels complex, sometimes ambiguous attitudes, especially towards the gentrification processes at work. This is shown by the example of a building complex constructed by the City of Paris in 1997, which is home to residents with highly varied social and residential trajectories. Managed by the City’s social landlord, it comprises 82 ‘PLI’ (intermediate rental) dwellings, split between three buildings forming an ‘L’ shape around a ‘contemplative garden’. The complex, built in an elegant, contemporary architectural style, has a majority of apartments with three rooms or more (48 units), as well as 14 studio apartments and 22 two-room apartments. It is located in one of the neighbourhood’s busiest, liveliest streets, where food and music stores that open late at night draw a large male population. It is also frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes, who use the communal parts of buildings and the few remaining squats to ply their trade. While the bulk of the building’s tenants still belong to the middle classes, larger and poorer immigrant families have increasingly moved in. Against the backdrop of this ‘manufactured mix’, the residents we encountered perceived the move into their new homes in different ways, with three main types of socioresidential positioning observed. First, for many

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immigrants who used to live in a substandard, overcrowded property in the neighbourhood, access to this new home is seen in a very positive light, as une chance – an expression frequently uttered by these residents, meaning both literally a chance to improve their lot and a lucky break. In some cases, this transition to more secure housing affords them new professional perspectives. Second, for many middle-class tenants, access to the home is an ‘opportunity’ or a ‘lifeline’. They see their living conditions improve while remaining in Paris proper – for some of them, in the kind of neighbourhood that they like. In all cases, their residential situation has stabilized. Third, access to the new home reflects a residential downgrading for middle-class tenants who applied for social housing after a breakdown in their trajectory (e.g. a member of the household was laid off, or a relationship broke down), who used to live in a more affluent neighbourhood and had no aspirations to live in this environment. Analysing residential situations in light of residents’ trajectories allows for a better understanding of the experiences and perceptions of cohabitation at the building and neighbourhood levels (particularly with regard to what is perceived as a constraint or a choice, and what is seen as a temporary or long-term situation), as well as the effects of these cohabitations on new mobilities. In a social housing development, for instance, Monique (a retired nurse) and her husband (the director of a declining consultancy firm) have had to move out of the Haussmann-style apartment they had been renting for thirty years in a bourgeois neighbourhood: the owner had decided to sell, and they were unable to make an offer. They ended up having to accept a social housing unit that does not meet their residential aspirations in terms of architecture or location (Monique considers the neighbourhood a ‘ghetto’). Her experience of this new residential situation is particularly painful because she considers herself a ‘captive’ in her home, owing to her age and the household’s declining income, and because she is forced to cohabit with immigrants – or people she views as such – from which she would like to distance herself. Conversely, for Nathalie and Christophe, a couple of psychologists in their forties, who used to live separately with their respective children in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis (northeastern inner suburbs), the new apartment is a genuine opportunity to rebuild a new family life outside of the infamous housing estates where they used to reside, in an immigrant, working-class area of Paris whose atmosphere they enjoy. They consider themselves particularly lucky to have been allocated this flat because they are well aware that they would have been unable to find something similar on the private market. They are considering purchasing an apartment in the neighbourhood. By contrast, Gnagalé, a thirtysomething cleaner, used to live with her family in a substandard property in the neighbourhood, from which she was evicted. In her own words, access to

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social housing in this neighbourhood was a stroke of ‘luck’. Thanks to her new home, she was able to pursue a career change and become a registered childminder. She has a very positive relationship to her apartment, in which she envisions staying for a number of years, and appreciates the diversity of her neighbours. She hopes that cohabitation with ‘French’ households will facilitate her children’s integration and education and regrets that growing numbers of African families have been moving into her part of the building. We found a second, somewhat representative example of the residential contexts observed in gentrifying neighbourhoods in a co-owned building dating back to the 1880s, in fairly good condition despite decades of insufficient maintenance, in the heart of the Château Rouge area. Made up of two 6-storey buildings facing the street and a courtyard, with a faux Haussmann-style façade, it comprises twenty-eight small apartments (ranging from one to three rooms) and four (even smaller) former maids’ rooms (chambres de bonne). As of the early 2000s, a majority of residents were co-owners, typically elderly people who had been in the neighbourhood for a long time and who experienced its loss of value as a downgrading. The other occupants were tenants, who were sometimes residentially vulnerable (African families sharing a studio, young Sri Lankan men subletting beds in shared apartments). Several other apartments were being squatted, by former tenants mired in disputes with their landlords, or individuals involved in crack trafficking and consumption, who were moved by force into vacant units in the building, which had very little security at the time. The arrival of new residents, which began in the early 2000s (young, childless, often single individuals, delighted to find such affordable properties in Paris proper), marked a turn in the history of the building’s population. Some of the tenants, especially illegally housed migrants, were quickly driven out by landlords who were more inclined to sell or to attract different types of tenants. All of the owners (whether they occupied the apartment or not) saw these arrivals in a broadly positive light, as they heralded changes in the forms of occupation of properties and communal areas and an increase in the building’s value. Many of these longtime owners then directly or indirectly contributed to gentrification by putting properties that had until then been illegally occupied or left vacant for long periods of time back onto the market, or sometimes by renovating them themselves to achieve the best possible resale or rental value. In doing so, they participated in an accelerated process of change that destabilized them, including those residing in the building – involving the departure of neighbours they had known for years, noise pollution generated by renovation work in the surrounding apartments on weekdays and weekends, new co-ownership projects that they could not always afford (façade restoration, major roof repairs, etc.), and new neighbours with lifestyles differing considerably from their own.

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Suzanne, a 75-year-old retired seamstress, has been in the building for fifty-five years and owns a three-room apartment. She says the neighbourhood was ‘good’ in the 1950s and 1960s, and found it hard to watch it decline over the subsequent decades. She saw the building’s overall upgrade as a positive development, and benefits from it; however, she lost her bearings somewhat, feeling completely foreign with respect to her new neighbours – ‘invaded’, even. She was one of the last few from her generation to still live in the building, and ultimately decided to leave too, to move closer to her children outside Paris. ‘Everything’s going faster! And I’m part of that now. I’m moving out because I don’t like the neighbourhood any more. Even in my building. … They’re young people. … A lot of men, a lot of women living on their own’. Her apartment was purchased by an engineer in his thirties, a first-time homeowner who immediately began to undertake large-scale work to renovate and transform it. One floor above, an apartment that used to be occupied by an elderly couple, who moved out after fifty years living there, was purchased by a young couple of architects, respectively from the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris and Versailles (two bourgeois areas). They stayed for two years, during which time they renovated the apartment completely and sold it on for a sizeable capital gain. Their interactions with other residents in the building remained minimal, except for two other couples of new residents with similar residential trajectories and projects (consisting in making a quick capital gain in order to be able to then invest in a neighbourhood that suits them better socially). While they did not feel close to their neighbours, their presence in the building remained a tolerable choice, as it was merely a springboard for a later investment and move into a neighbourhood that better matched their residential aspirations, closer to their family networks (Pfirsch 2009).4 These few examples showcasing a variety of residential situations observed in a gentrifying neighbourhood clearly show the intertwining of social mobility and residential mobility, and the impact of these trajectories on relationships of cohabitation. Likewise, it is necessary to look into what residents do in and outside of their neighbourhood, to understand their everyday experiences of the neighbourhood and why they choose, in some cases, to leave it behind permanently.

EVERYDAY PRACTICES THAT EXTEND BEYOND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD Residents’ daily practices and the places they frequent on a regular basis are situated both within the neighbourhood and largely outside it. In the case of La Goutte d’Or, these mobilities outside the neighbourhood are partly

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explained by the activities and large customer base of the African business hub, especially in the Château Rouge area. The everyday practices of nonresident populations, described in the previous chapter, lead residents whose needs are not met by the neighbourhood’s businesses or who seek to avoid crowds to make a number of adjustments. In Château Rouge, these stores oriented towards customers with African and Caribbean origins became more numerous than the more ‘traditional’ stores offering ‘European’ products in the 1990s. Owing to their specificities, to the wide variety of products they offer, and to the low pricing strategies adopted by their owners, as well as to the fact that the neighbourhood is very easily accessible by public transport and connected to other commercial hubs, they polarize the consumption practices of populations from outside the neighbourhood (90 per cent of whom have never resided there) (Chabrol 2013). These consumers, who reside elsewhere in Paris, in the urban area, in other parts of France or even abroad, are present in great numbers late in the day and especially at weekends, giving the place the image of an ‘African neighbourhood’. The vitality of these activities also makes it difficult for more traditional or hipper businesses to establish themselves (bars, restaurants, clothing stores geared towards new residents). In Château Rouge, commercial gentrification has not followed residential gentrification. The neighbourhood’s residents adapt to this context to a greater or lesser degree, depending on their lifestyle, their stage in life and their ability to travel within the city. Among those who adjust best, we find some of the populations who have been established here for many years, and whose everyday practices (food shopping, going to cafés, restaurants, their children’s school(s), associations, etc.) take place in the neighbourhood. ‘Everything is here’, they say, and therefore they only leave on rare occasions. These are mostly populations with an immigrant background, who also like the neighbourhood’s atmosphere for its familiarity and interpersonal ties. Some describe its transformation by focusing on the rehabilitation of housing and the more visible presence of ‘French people’, welcoming this change as a sign of improvement. Yet this strong connection to the neighbourhood should not be interpreted only as a choice. Other factors come into play, such as the high cost of transportation, which often comes up in the words of residents, like Alima here: ‘I do everything that’s in the neighbourhood, the benefits office, the post office … everything. When I was working I had a travelcard, but now I use tickets, they’re less expensive’. This 35-year-old cleaner on medical leave cancelled her public transport season ticket after she stopped working in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Some of the newer residents also adjust reasonably well to the new sociospatial context. A few are almost never in the neighbourhood, but this is not an issue for them, as most of their lives are elsewhere anyway (for instance,

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students, and people with two residences). Others frequent the exoticproduce shops, as well as the grocery stores and ‘traditional’ small businesses that have recently opened in the neighbourhood as part of the renovation operation launched by the public authorities. The presence of these stores is interpreted as a sign of an upgrade. It is appreciated because it makes it possible to do more shopping in the neighbourhood, but it also raises concern among those who fear that it will change too violently – as happened to the Abbesses area of Montmartre, a neighbourhood to which wealthier populations, attracted by the charm of Montmartre’s vibrant paved streets, began to flock in the 1980s, and whose streets are now full of tourists looking for an Amélie experience of Paris. These residents are attached to the working-class, multicultural character of La Goutte d’Or; some participate in local cultural and community activities (drama classes, literacy classes, etc.). However, the extent of their purchases within the neighbourhood often remains very limited. Adeline, a 30-year-old journalist, for instance, feels that ‘most of the businesses here aren’t for me. I can find everything I need nearby, but only if I leave [the neighbourhood]. … There’s a lack of certain things, but I don’t experience it as something that’s missing, in the sense that it doesn’t bother me’. These highly mobile residents combine practices in the neighbourhood, reflecting an effort to get involved there, with others taking place on a wider scale – in other Parisian neighbourhoods, at their workplace or where friends and relatives live. Those who find it harder to adjust to the new context include both newer and long-term residents, especially elderly residents with European origins, who were there before the traditional commercial structure started changing, much to their dismay, in the 1980s. They reduce their purchases in the neighbourhood to a handful of businesses (grocery stores, bakeries, tobacconists, pharmacies), and their discourse on the mismatch between the retail structure and their needs is rather negative, as in the case of the aforementioned Suzanne, 75: Now a French person can’t come here any more. They’d have nothing to choose from. Look, across the street, those butchers, they’re cheap, true. When you get three chickens or five chickens for ten francs or ten euros, I can’t say that’s expensive. But you know, what kind of meat is that? I for one don’t want to buy that. I’d rather not eat. But we have nothing left. … You only see shops like those. There’s nothing for us. Don’t tell me they’re there for French people. It’s Africa.

To these residents, the dominance of businesses perceived as ethnic is unfortunate and reflects a lack of social mix in the neighbourhood. They seldom frequent the neighbourhood’s cafés and restaurants and rarely if ever take part in cultural and community activities, which they consider to be aimed at residents with immigrant backgrounds, and from which they feel

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excluded. They have limited uses of public spaces, and often feel anxious about sharing these spaces, especially women and elderly residents, who often make sure to run errands at times when they will be able to avoid the crowds. Suzanne does her shopping early on weekdays and quickly returns home. She does not leave her apartment building at the weekend: ‘Oh yes, on weekends, don’t expect me to go out. I’ll just go downstairs and take the trash out, but in the neighbourhood, I’m not going out. And that’s because … I’m quite old and, you know, walking with the crowds…’. Others, often young women who have recently moved into the neighbourhood, deplore both the excessive masculinity of public spaces, which gives them the impression of standing out and being too visible as women, but also, paradoxically, the vibrant working-class life that unfolds in these spaces, which makes them feel like they are invisible and not where they belong. This is the case for 37-year-old Sophie, who owns an apartment that she bought on her own and that means a lot to her. She explains, laughing, that she ‘live[s] in Bamako’ and that she is proud to be living in such a special neighbourhood. Yet, after negative experiences with neighbourhood retailers as a woman, but also as a non-African, she no longer frequents them and feels a sense of unease: I went there back when I first lived here. And then I stopped going. … I’d buy fruit and vegetables, it wasn’t particularly cheap, and I found the boss of the … well, the greengrocer I went to, he was a bit too forward with me and so I didn’t fancy going back there. … He [the tailor] wasn’t very nice that day. He raised his voice and said I was a pain in the arse, because … because in any case the work I had him doing wasn’t rewarding financially. So I took my cloth back, said goodbye, and left. And I’m not going back. That’s it.

Sophie now does all her shopping elsewhere and, as in the case of Suzanne, her home is now a place to retreat to within the neighbourhood. Yet she does not experience this retreat – her ‘bubble’, as she calls it – as something painful or constraining since, unlike Suzanne, she leaves her apartment often, because she works, has habits elsewhere, and has financial resources. Analysing everyday practices allows us to move past the usual dichotomies between incumbent and newer residents and between gentrified and gentrifiers – groups that all appear highly heterogeneous when examined from this perspective. Lifestyles and everyday mobilities are far more differentiating factors. Those who better adjust are those whose lifestyles match what is on offer in the neighbourhood, or those who can get out of the neighbourhood whenever they want to find what they are missing there: stores that suit their tastes, places to go out, schools for their children, peace and quiet, space and so on. Some residents, mostly from immigrant populations, are active in the neighbourhood on a daily basis to such an extent that they only leave it on rare occasions, whereas others combine practices

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within the neighbourhood and beyond, in adjacent neighbourhoods, elsewhere in Paris, elsewhere in the region or even elsewhere in the country (for those who have a second home, for instance). These mobilities outside the neighbourhood are generally the result of habits and opportunities related to places frequented for other – professional, educational, social and familial – activities. For many residents, they are a way to cope with a sociospatial context that would otherwise be more difficult to bear. ‘On weekends, I need to get out of the neighbourhood, to clear my head. It’s probably normal when you live in a neighbourhood like this’, reports Lorraine, for example, a 38-year-old architect who had been renting an apartment for eighteen years at the time of the interview. She explained that she had stayed for such a long time because she spends nearly all of her weekends in her family’s country house near Chantilly (about an hour north of Paris). These necessary adjustments and the mobilities they involve are experienced and perceived in different ways by residents. For those who consider that they live in a ghetto, or who find it difficult to cohabit with people who are different from them, they are a way of escaping the neighbourhood’s sometimes suffocating atmosphere; for others, they are about coming back to an old neighbourhood that they miss. For instance, Monique, the previously mentioned tenant of an ‘intermediate’ affordable housing unit, returns to the north of Montmartre every day, because she knows the shopkeepers there and is still identified by them as a resident, which allows her to partly make up for her feeling of social downgrading: ‘I go and visit my old shopkeepers [in Rue du Poteau]. I lived there for nearly thirty years, you know … It’s as if I still lived there, people don’t know that I’ve moved to the other side of the boulevard [Barbès]. It’s better that way. At least, over there, I feel like everything’s the same as it used to be’. Others use these mobilities as a way of enjoying all the resources available in the surrounding areas (shops, leisure activities, etc.) and of doing some additional shopping. However, these mobilities can also turn into constraints for various categories of residents, such as the elderly, those with restricted mobility, young parents, and simply residents who end up growing weary of these constant adjustments and decide to move. Those among them for whom moving is impossible have the impression of suffering doubly from the realities of neighbourhood life. Beyond these highly varied practices within and outside the neighbourhood, the considerable diversity produced by gentrification may also trigger conflicts pertaining to ways of occupying space, including streets, both between newly arrived residents and incumbents and within both categories. Neyba, a Senegalese woman, has been living in the neighbourhood with her family since she arrived in France in the late 1990s. She obtained

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a social housing apartment after having lived in various squats and hotels in the neighbourhood. This 34-year-old mother, who aspires to ‘integrate’ into French society and to see her children climb up the social ladder, has regular arguments with men who litter and urinate in the street. As an African, she feels ashamed to be associated with such behaviour: ‘They point the finger at us even though some know that we’re decent, but I’m ashamed, I’ll tell you. The French people who see that, they’ll go: “Look at those Africans, see how they behave!”’ This further illustrates the point that residents’ aspirations have just as much impact as their social and cultural properties and their residential status on the way they live their everyday lives in the neighbourhood.

CONCLUSION As evidenced here in the case of La Goutte d’Or, the period of settlement in the neighbourhood sheds light on residents’ individual, social and residential trajectories, as well as on the ways in which these trajectories intersect with the neighbourhood’s own changing trajectories. However, in addition to this settlement period, respondents’ entire residential histories need to be examined, from the places they lived previously to their more or less well-defined plans and projects, to the context of their settlement in this particular neighbourhood, which may inform their current ways of inhabiting and cohabiting. Analysis of the residential situations of incumbent and newly arrived populations reveals a wide variety of ways of living in a gentrifying neighbourhood. These variations depend on residential histories, social trajectories, and on whether moving to the neighbourhood was a choice or a constraint. These ways of inhabiting gentrifying neighbourhoods are embodied in the everyday practices of residents within the neighbourhood and beyond. Both longtime and newer residents must grapple with the (numerous) departures and arrivals within their building, and more broadly within the neighbourhood, as well as with the presence and practices of the users of its African immigrant hub. They adjust to it with varying degrees of ease, by conducting part or all of their everyday activities in the neighbourhood or in other parts of Paris. The resident populations that find it most difficult to adjust do not overlap with those whose practices all take place elsewhere; furthermore, they are not all newcomers, as shown by the examples of residents who have lived in the neighbourhood for decades. These older, long-term residents are actually the least likely to be able to go to other parts of the city to make up for the mismatch between the neighbourhood’s retail and leisure offer and their needs. Here, jointly considering

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individuals’ residential and social mobilities and everyday mobilities proves valuable for the analysis of relationships to the neighbourhood. The spatial and social consequences of these cohabitations at different scales additionally call for the reconsideration of ideological discourses surrounding social mix and its alleged ability to reduce social distance and foster togetherness. In the light of the study presented here, we believe it is necessary to question such discourses celebrating social mix, conveyed in particular by local public actors who strive to promote it by intervening in domains such as housing, the commercial fabric and cultural activities, without taking into account the residential choices and past urban experiences that influence ways of living and coexisting in a place. La Goutte d’Or, which is often presented as a ghetto by these actors, is actually a place in which a great diversity of populations coexist. The diversity offered by this gentrifying neighbourhood effectively acts as far more than a socially rewarding backdrop for ‘older’ and newer resident populations. It is embodied in local practices and social relationships between different groups. An example is the involvement of middle-class residents in the neighbourhood’s community groups dedicated to assisting people in situations of poverty and precarity. This diversity also triggers social conflicts between new and more established populations, as well as between established residents with very different backgrounds, whose ways of appropriating and occupying space and social and residential aspirations may differ markedly. These findings point to the importance of considering experiences accumulated during residents’ entire lives: these experiences influence the ways in which they experience and make use of space at various levels, and correlatively, in which they coexist with other social groups. They reveal inequalities in individuals’ abilities not only to access certain resources but also to escape situations that some see as oppressive. Even within the middle classes, inequalities can be very marked if we consider the individuals’ living conditions, the places they frequent, and the social and economic resources at their disposal. Those who struggle most with living in the neighbourhood on a daily basis are those who have fewer opportunities to leave it temporarily. Conversely, some of those who reside in the neighbourhood for long periods of time effectively spend little time in it: they may have two homes, travel often for work, or go to their family’s country home or on weekend outings. In addition, middle-class residents are more mobile than some immigrant working-class residents, whose anchoring in the neighbourhood reflects the ‘model of local dependency’ described by Sylvie Fol (2009), consisting in the coexistence of a strategy of mobilization of local resources and a constraint (especially an economic one), and who are to a certain extent trapped within the neighbourhood.

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Notes 1. See also Ley 1996; Bridge and Dowling 2001; and Van Criekingen and Fleury 2006. 2. PLAI stands for prêt locatif aidé d’intégration (subsidized loan for very low-income rental housing). This refers to the type of funding allocated to build the housing units in question and, by metonymy, also to the type of housing itself (in this case, PLAI dwellings are intended for tenants on the lowest incomes). Other forms of funding/housing include PLUS (prêt locatif à usage social – loan for low-income rental housing), PLS (prêt locatif social – loan for affordable rental housing) and PLI (prêt locatif intermédiaire – loan for intermediate rental housing), all of which were introduced by the ‘SRU’ law on urban solidarity and urban renewal (loi relative à la solidarité et au renouvellement urbains). 3. Rental housing units explicitly intended for middle-class tenants are those belonging to the PLS (prêt locatif social – loan for affordable rental housing) and PLI (prêt locatif intermédiaire – loan for intermediate rental housing) funding categories. In both cases, rental prices are supposed to be affordable, i.e. higher than social housing rents but below private market rates. 4. These observations echo Thomas Pfirsch’s (2009) findings on the Neapolitan bourgeoisie, which highlight the significant spatial proximity of different generations in these families. Once children are married and professionally stable, they move in near their parents. Despite this conformity with the social model, they have also resided in gentrifying working-class neighbourhoods (during their studies or in the early stages of their professional careers).

References Authier, Jean-Yves, Bernard Bensoussan, Jean-Pierre Lévy and Claire Lévy-Vroelant (eds). 2001. Du domicile à la ville. Vivre en quartier ancien. Paris: Anthropos. Bridge, Gary, and Robyn Dowling. 2001. ‘Microgeographies of Retailing and Gentrification’, Australian Geographer 32(1): 93–107. Chabrol, Marie. 2013. ‘Qui sont les Africains de Château Rouge? Usages et usagers d’une centralité commerciale’, Métropolitiques. Retrieved on 28 November 2021 from https://metropolitiques.eu/Qui-sont-les-Africains-de-Chateau.html. Study updated in 2014. Fol, Sylvie. 2009. La Mobilité des pauvres. Paris: Belin. Giraud, Colin. 2014. Quartiers gays. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Launay, Lydie. 2014. ‘Le logement des Acteurs clés de la ville et des Key Workers à Paris et à Londres, un instrument de régulation du peuplement urbain?’, in Fabien Desage, Christelle Morel-Journel and Valérie Sala-Pala (eds), Le Peuplement comme politique(s). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 195–216. Ley, David. 1996. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pfirsch, Thomas. 2009. ‘Proximité familiale et organisation résidentielle de la parentèle dans les élites d’une ville d’Europe du Sud: l’exemple de Naples’, Articulo. Journal of Urban Research, Special Issue 1. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://journals .openedition.org/articulo/1052.

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Van Criekingen, Mathieu, and Antoine Fleury. 2006. ‘La ville branchée: gentrification et dynamiques commerciales à Paris et à Bruxelles’, Belgeo 1–2: 113–34. Zukin, Sharon, Valerie Trujillo, Peter Frase, Danielle Jackson, Tim Recuber and Abraham Walker. 2009. ‘New Retail Capital and Neighborhood Change: Boutiques and Gentrification in New York City’, City & Community 8(1): 47–64.

CH A PTER

10 N EG OT I ATI N G D I V E R S I T Y I N DA I LY L I F E Controlled Neighbourly Relations and School Choices

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Lydie Launay

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he diversification of populations in old working-class neighbourhoods is one of the most visible and most extensively studied manifestations of gentrification. As the process unfolds and takes root in the neighbourhoods in question, the diversity of residents’ sociological backgrounds increases with the arrival of better-off populations, often younger than the previously established residents, who may live alone, in a couple or with young children. Often, this diversification process is temporary, however. In the final stages of the process, the growing influx of middle- and upper-class residents leads to a narrower range of residents in sociodemographic terms, to the detriment of working-class residents, some of whom have immigrant backgrounds (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008). More or less simultaneously, transformations of the commercial sector, infrastructure and public spaces encourage the emergence of new urban practices by newer residents, which may or may not be compatible to varying degrees with those of longerestablished populations. This diversification of the population, which is welcomed or even eagerly awaited by policymakers and urban planners, has impacts on local social life. As it brings together populations whose social and residential trajectories differ, it impacts social coexistence and creates encounters, cooperation, alliances, but also friction, tension and conflict. In the scholarly literature,

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such coexistence is mainly approached through the lens of a gentrified/gentrifier dichotomy. Gentrifiers are depicted as pursuing social closure. Their intentions are presumed to be revanchist: they must want to reconquer city centres and progressively root out the poor and immigrants (or populations considered as such) (Clerval 2013). As this book demonstrates, this dichotomous approach obscures the complexity of the social relations at work in these neighbourhoods. First, as Sylvie Tissot shows in her work on Boston’s South End, middle- and upper-class newcomers do not always seek to force out poor and immigrant populations: diversity can be valued as an element of social distinction in comparison to traditional upper-class urban lifestyles (the presence of these populations is often best accepted once it has been scrutinized by the newcomers in an attempt to consolidate their local power by ‘respecting diversity’) (Tissot 2011). Also, the social relationships that are forged between these populations cannot be reduced to gentrified and gentrifier lifestyles because their socioresidential trajectories, social representations of the local territory and urban practices differ widely (Giraud 2014; Bacqué et al. 2015). The relationships of these populations to the diversity produced by gentrification are neither unchanging nor induced by this dichotomy. Rather, they vary according to the positions and social and residential trajectories of residents, and the meaning ascribed to their lives in their home, and more broadly in the neighbourhood. This chapter expands on the analysis of forms of coexistence in gentrifying neighbourhoods by focusing on a more local scale – that of the residential building. It shows that the forms of coexistence that arise against such a backdrop of social diversification may vary depending on context and social issues (de Rudder and Guillon 1987). Neighbourly relations are characterized by negotiation rather than a wholesale rejection of diversity. These negotiation processes, which reflect the ‘interplay of social and spatial proximity and distance’ inherent in urban life (Grafmeyer 1994), are explored here in a specific setting – namely social housing complexes in which the City of Paris accommodates working-class and middle-class residents in an effort to promote social mixing. Other studies, including those by Sylvie Tissot mentioned earlier, have shown that residents in the private market also have to negotiate diversity in gentrifying buildings, at least within the neighbourhood. Yet this necessity appears to be exacerbated in social housing for at least two main reasons. First, residents have very little leeway in choosing their place of residence, considering their limited number of opportunities – there may be years between offers of accommodation in some cases. Then, they must comply with the building rules common to all buildings owned by the social landlord, which means they are unable to use these rules as a tool for managing social life in the building; often this leads them to

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operate on the basis of implicit rules that replace those of the social landlord. In all cases, regardless of the nature of the ties forged between populations, forms of coexistence that have been imposed or chosen to various extents trigger processes of negotiation of legitimate norms and values, which are sometimes informed by rationales of social control (Toubon and Messamah 1990). MIXED REACTIONS TO DIVERSITY On the scale of both individual staircases and buildings, the City of Paris’s policy results in the coexistence of populations whose social characteristics and residential situations vary considerably. As the previous chapter has shown, social housing residents’ perceptions of their move into this working-class, multicultural neighbourhood vary according to their objective and subjective socioresidential trajectories. These trajectories may follow upward or downward gradients, under the effect of active mobility (due to a change of residence) or passive mobility (due to a change of neighbours) (Lévy 1998; Bacqué et al. 2011). They inspire different representations of the neighbourhood, which reveal variations in the ways in which residents define and label the populations in these buildings, based on multiple everyday operations of categorization. In La Goutte d’Or’s social housing buildings, many residents share a positive representation of the neighbourhood. Yet this representation is based on different rationales: some appreciate the neighbourhood’s growing diversity for the cultural richness it offers, while others value the social homogeneity that persists in their building owing to the fact that few people have moved since the building was inaugurated in the late 1990s. Discourses praising socioeconomic and ethnic diversity are voiced more often by working-class residents and those with immigrant backgrounds, whose recent arrival in the neighbourhood’s social housing buildings has contributed to changing their social makeup. These residents also share an experience of life in the neighbourhood before their access to social housing. Such is the case of Fatou, a Senegalese cleaner, who thinks that, ‘here, we have good mix of cultures’. These residents enjoy living close to other ‘Africans’, whose nationalities they can list accurately, and they are more specifically appreciative of the presence of those that they might identify as ‘whites’ or ‘French’ – they interpret this as a sign of the neighbourhood’s positive transformation. Middle-class families who have recently arrived in La Goutte d’Or, for their part, manifest their enjoyment of life alongside populations with ‘diverse backgrounds’; they openly relate their liking for working-class neighbourhoods to their left-wing political beliefs. Arnaud, a

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35-year-old special-needs teacher, says this diversity reflects a ‘real political effort to create a mix’, which in his view is a ‘barrier against the neighbourhood’s current transformation’, which he fears will root out poorer families, a phenomenon he has already witnessed once previously in his old neighbourhood, the Abbesses area of Montmartre. Despite their taste for working-class neighbourhoods, some residents did have some reservations when they had to make a decision about the offer of accommodation in this neighbourhood. Christophe, a 47-year-old psychologist, explains that he was afraid that some African men might make too much noise when they were in the street, from the early afternoon onwards and sometimes late into the night. Very soon, however, the tranquillity offered by his view of the building’s contemplative garden made this ‘damper effect’ a thing of the past. He now celebrates the neighbourhood’s diversity, which makes it a ‘vibrant and cosmopolitan’ place. In his view, this ‘happy’ cohabitation comes from the particular backgrounds of the building’s middle-class households, whose high levels of cultural capital (secured by pursuing higher education and travelling extensively around the world) encourage a greater tolerance of difference and a social effort to coexist with working-class and immigrant populations. This argument – the same advanced by local public actors to legitimize their social mixing strategy (Launay 2010) – does not always stand up to scrutiny. Other middle-class residents express more reluctance to cohabit with these populations and instead place emphasis on the strong social homogeneity in their part of the housing complex. In the words of Annie, a 57-year-old teacher: ‘I tell you, this building is a bobo building and there aren’t any problems. Next door, though, I don’t even know where to start [she points to an apartment located in the neighbouring building, where a large Algerian family lives]; just look at all that shit on the balcony and you’ll see who it is…’. For these residents, who consider themselves ‘captive’ in an African neighbourhood that they call ‘a ghetto’, ‘living among bobos’ is a way to share a set of norms and values that encourage good relationships between neighbours and help keep their living environment clean and tidy. Valérie, a 45-year-old accountant, explains: ‘I’m fine here because I know that people respect everybody, they respect the building, the communal areas. I think they’re people who come from the private market, they’re not people who’ve been in social housing their whole lives’. This prejudice towards the other groups in the building, which is largely shared by these residents, makes them worry deeply about the potential increase in the diversity of socioeconomic and in particular ethnic backgrounds in the neighbourhood whenever an older resident leaves – in the words of Annie: ‘I can tell you that we’re constantly waiting to know who’s going to move in next’. This greater diversity is thought to weaken the protection afforded by a social homogeneity that is enjoyed for its capacity to consolidate the legitimacy

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of the residents’ lifestyles on the scale of the building, as they cannot impose them on the neighbourhood as a whole. Aside from these middle-class inhabitants, some residents deplore their neighbours’ diversity because of the sense of isolation it fosters in them. This is the case for 36-year-old Sophie, who comes from a farming community in the rural region of Limousin, in central France. She perceives herself as too socially and culturally ‘different’ from ‘the Africans’ on the one hand and the ‘white bobos’ on the other; she prefers to keep to herself at home and to participate in activities outside the neighbourhood whenever the opportunity arises. She would have liked to have closer relationships with her neighbours, as she previously had in the social housing building where she lived with her parents ‘in the other part of the eighteenth arrondissement’, near the Porte de Clignancourt. But not all residents share this aspiration; some are much more aloof. In this social housing complex, as in the private apartment buildings, where they used to live, they adopt a reserved attitude and cordially ignore each other. This attitude is unrelated to their positive or negative perceptions of the neighbourhood’s social makeup; most of their social life goes on outside the residential sphere. SOCIABILITY BETWEEN NEIGHBOURS: FROM MUTUAL AID TO A CLOSED CIRCLE The forms of sociability between neighbours that have developed in the social housing complexes of La Goutte d’Or are mainly governed by rationales of social aggregation – that is, they bring together members of social groups that are similar or not too far removed. Nevertheless, this widespread social selectiveness does not systematically result in the creation of social enclaves. In other words, residents may tend to see more of their social equals, but this does not mean they necessarily reject others. To understand the sociological workings of these forms of sociability, we must adopt the same perspective as in the previous chapter, which means that they must be related to the residents’ socioresidential trajectories, and more specifically to the ways in which residents perceive their move into this social housing complex and neighbourhood with regard to their residential histories, and the different perceptions of the neighbourhood that these inspire. It appears that the residents who are most likely to forge relationships with socially different neighbours are also those who share a positive perception of the diversity present in their building, and beyond, in the neighbourhood. Lastly, the nature of these forms of sociability also obviously relates to dimensions that guide the construction of neighbourly relations in general – namely the socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds of the households, in particular the

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stage of life and the presence of children in the household, which favours the development of relationships between parents (Héran 1987). Over a period of twelve years, the residents of this social housing complex in La Goutte d’Or forged social ties that differ in intensity and nature. Some people are on friendly terms with their next-door neighbours for utilitarian purposes – they occasionally do favours for one another. Nathalie, for instance, enjoys her interactions with her next-door neighbours, especially Marion, a 50-year-old lawyer from Martinique, and her husband. She has entrusted them with spare keys to her flat (‘You never know; it might come in handy one day’) and would not think twice about lending them or borrowing everyday objects, but she does not want the relationship to go further. Like many middle-class families I encountered in these buildings, she is a proponent of a ‘good fences make good neighbours’ approach; she would rather keep her private life off-limits to the neighbours to limit risks of conflict. Some residents have developed dense networks not just in their building but also in the neighbourhood. This is especially the case for those with working-class North African or sub-Saharan backgrounds. They share the experience of migration and strong roots in the neighbourhood. They are very attached to La Goutte d’Or, where they have resided ever since they came to France. Not infrequently, the people they have met in the housing complex were also part of other networks (family, friends, work) in the neighbourhood. Awa and Mariam met four years ago when they were both living in a squat in the neighbourhood with their respective families. Both emphasize how important these local social networks have been in their paths towards finding employment and decent accommodation. This is also the case for Aïssata, a 33-year-old Guinean cleaner, who regularly asks her neighbour Gnagalé, who is also from Guinea, to help her with her French: ‘You have to help to fill the papers and you have to call. I don’t always understand so I ask help to call’. These encounters have blossomed into a friendship, as Gnagalé explains: ‘We’re friends. I often give her food when I’m preparing a big meal; she gives me food too. We exchange stuff culturally’. This bond is essentially forged on a shared culture, language, lifestyle and religion – every Friday, their husbands go to the neighbourhood mosque together – as well as on precarious socioeconomic conditions. While these residents have developed forms of neighbourly sociability informed by rationales of social aggregation, they still remain open to encounters with the other population groups in their building. The immigrant population groups seem particularly eager to interact with newcomers to the neighbourhood, in order to consolidate the projects of integration into French society they have devised for their children. As Aïssata explains: ‘I want them [her children] to both understand that we’re in France here, and that we’re not at home. And I prefer to act like the neighbours because they know how to be

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polite, how you should fit in, how you should be here’. In practice, she regrets that she is still unable to forge bonds with them – in her view, owing to her lack of proficiency in French: ‘I’d like to be good neighbours, but right now, the Whites and I just say hello, and that’s it’. This desire to open up to others also characterizes the neighbourly relationships of the newer middle-class residents. These newcomers, who share their satisfaction at living in this type of neighbourhood, have developed deeper forms of sociability on the basis of affinities ‘between middle-class people’ (in the words of Catherine, a 47-yearold dental assistant), but they enjoy regular contact with other residents. Marion, the lawyer mentioned above, attaches great importance to neighbourly relations, ‘regardless of communities and backgrounds’. She has friendly ties and regularly exchanges favours with an Algerian family whose lifestyle is criticized by other neighbours. When that family was accused of disrupting the neighbours’ peace, Marion spoke on their behalf to the other tenants and the building manager. She believes these conflicts are stirred up by racism, but feels relatively protected from it by the symbolic prestige her profession confers on her. She stresses the courtesy and politeness of the members of this family: ‘These people know how to conduct themselves’. Yet these relationships are limited to the building’s communal areas: the personal space of the flat is preserved by the ‘social filter’ (Grafmeyer 1998) constituted by the front door, which facilitates the monitoring of exchanges with other populations – particularly those who are lower on the social scale. Not everyone is similarly eager to open up to others, at least in the specific setting of the social housing complex. Some middle-class residents struggle with the idea of having moved into an ‘HLM’ complex (the widely used abbreviation for habitations à loyer modéré, i.e. low-income housing), and into this neighbourhood in particular. They distance themselves from the neighbours associated with working-class and immigrant communities, whom they criticize for their ‘lack of manners’. These residents, who consider themselves fairly tolerant, see this cohabitation as a form of social disqualification. However, as they do not wish to leave for a smaller flat elsewhere in the city, they seek to exercise strong social control by imposing rules for communal living that reflect their cultural model. The main subjects of conflict are the maintenance and use of balconies, terraces and the contemplative garden. The emergence of tensions and conflicts in social housing buildings whose populations have varied trajectories has been well documented in sociology since the publication of a classic article by Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Madeleine Lemaire (1970). In a gentrifying neighbourhood, however, upcoming social transformations may affect power relations within social housing complexes. For the time being, these residents, who see the arrival of immigrant families as a threat to the building’s tranquillity, attempt to exercise powerful

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social control. They may express their disapproval of residents who in their view are not complying with the rules of communal life in various ways: by glaring at them reproachfully from the balcony, putting a note in their mailbox, complaining to the complex manager or, as a last resort, making an oral remark on their use of communal areas or their lifestyle. One large Algerian family is, for instance, criticized for using their balcony as an additional room, which some residents feel is visually unbecoming. The family, exhausted by so many ‘warnings’, ended up keeping just a table and chairs on the balcony. Mostly they felt spied on and stigmatized by the neighbours. Samia, the mother, feels deeply ill at ease in her home, to the extent that she has asked to be relocated to another housing complex. This example clearly shows that when power relations are established between coexisting groups, the residents with the most social, economic and symbolic resources generally have the upper hand – in this case, the newer middle-class residents.

SCHOOL CHOICE: THE ULTIMATE DEFENCE AGAINST DIVERSITY? Recent studies on gentrifying neighbourhoods and other types of neighbourhood alike reveal the central role played by schooling in the production of urban segregation in metropolises like Paris (Oberti 2007; van Zanten 2009) and London (Butler et al. 2007; Bacqué et al. 2015). Parents deploy a variety of strategies to enrol their children in ‘good’ schools and, most importantly, to avoid disreputable ones, located in working-class neighbourhoods. However, not all social groups have the same economic, cultural and social capitals at their disposal to navigate the map of educational options and mobilize effective tools to avoid enrolling their children in their local state school (François and Poupeau 2004). These inequalities place working-class parents at a disadvantage and seem to have become more pronounced since the carte scolaire (school catchment area) system was relaxed in 2008; middle-class parents now invest even more in school-choice strategies (Oberti, Préteceille and Rivière 2012). The middle-class parents who have recently moved into social housing complexes in La Goutte d’Or are no exception. They are eager to encourage self-fulfilment through school, and even social success through excellence at school, and as such assign great importance to school choice, which sometimes leads them to adopt behaviours that contradict their political beliefs. The local schools, although they give children the opportunity to study in the neighbourhood until the end of collège (lower secondary school; ages 11 to 15), suffer from a bad reputation among these parents owing to the majority of children with immigrant backgrounds enrolled in them. Nathalie re-

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grets this: ‘She [her daughter] doesn’t go to the secondary school next door. No way – it’s not mixed there, you know. It’s completely segregated, with 80, 90 per cent of kids from African and North African families who are struggling at school’. In other neighbourhoods, diversity tends to be perceived positively in day nursery, less so in primary school and negatively from secondary school onwards. In La Goutte d’Or, a few parents enrolled their children in the neighbourhood’s nursery and primary schools, in a bid to help diversify the schools’ pupil populations. This was a short-lived experiment; they moved their children to different schools – diversity may have been a positive factor in terms of cultural openness, but they did not consider the standards of education sufficient. Arnaud says the primary school focused on ‘literacy rather than learning’, and removed his daughter from the school: Social mix only works the other way round. Like in Abbesses, where the school has roughly 12 to 15 per cent of families from [La Goutte d’Or] and it’s beneficial for everyone, especially for them. Then, they actually learn, whereas here, well… And you know, there’s nothing we can do, even if we send [our children] here, the proportions are the other way round. … It doesn’t work.

Arnaud’s account reflects the power of an assumption that is largely shared among these parents: that encounters with diversity can only be beneficial for their children when the immigrant populations are in the minority. In this sense, school choice becomes crucial, and in turn raises the issue of social reproduction (Bourdieu 1966). These parents deploy a variety of avoidance strategies that run counter to the policies implemented by the City, which sees mixed social housing as a means of diversifying the segregated schools of working-class neighbourhoods. Switching to the private sector1 is the most frequently used strategy, as it remains relatively accessible, despite the significant cost to families, and allows children to be educated in the neighbourhood. While this choice has nothing to do with any desire to provide their children with a religious education, it serves as ‘a fallback plan for many parents’, according to Viviane, a 40-year-old mid-level executive in a construction company. The headteacher of the neighbourhood’s private school says that pupils’ backgrounds vary widely in ethnic and religious terms, but are more homogeneous socioeconomically – their parents tend to be better educated. An alternative option to the private sector involves enrolling children in a different state school, in another area, where the pupil population seems more ‘balanced’ to them – that is, an area with fewer children of immigrants. Valérie sees this choice as a good compromise between her attachment to the French Republic’s state education system – where tolerance and opening up to other cultures are important values – and a good-quality education. Her daughter studies in a ‘European section’ (where certain lessons are taught in a foreign language):

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‘You can see that her girlfriends are from mid-level socio-occupational backgrounds, but there are also kids who are more working-class … She’s always been with people from other backgrounds, right, but that’s good’. Another strategy, which has been well documented by sociologists specializing in education, is to declare an address other than one’s home address to access schools outside one’s area of residence – especially prestigious schools. This is what Marion did, by entering the address of her law practice to have her son enrolled in a renowned secondary school in the nearby ninth arrondissement. Regardless of the strategy adopted by these parents, they all justify avoiding the neighbourhood’s state schools on the grounds that socioeconomic and especially ethnic diversity are insufficient or absent, and that this could be detrimental to their children’s education. By contrast, longer-established residents ‘automatically’ enrolled their children in the neighbourhood’s schools, without giving the slightest consideration to the existence of inequalities in schooling or to strategies for getting into ‘good’ schools. For Christiane, a 41-year-old Senegalese childcare worker, enrolling her children at the primary school located in her street seemed like the natural thing to do: ‘That way, they can walk to school, it’s easy’. She is considering subsequently enrolling them in the neighbourhood’s state secondary school, which is snubbed by middle-class parents. This school choice reflects a ‘logic of withdrawal’, to use Marco Oberti’s term, that is often observed in the lower fractions of the working classes. Many of the parents we surveyed in La Goutte d’Or were of foreign nationality, but most significantly had very little educational capital: having only attended school for a short time in other countries, they have a vague and partial vision of the French education system. However, unlike the trends observed by Oberti, these parents do not have a ‘disillusioned, disengaged relationship to school’ (Oberti 2007: 231) resulting from experiences of great precarity and domination; on the contrary, they placed high hopes in state education and were eager for their children to obtain qualifications that will enable them to get a job that will improve their material standing. Lastly, school choice is also a very important question for couples who have recently moved into the neighbourhood and are considering having children within a few years – these residents make up a significant portion of the middle-class households who live in the neighbourhood’s older buildings. Such parenthood plans incite some residents – in social housing and private housing alike (Chabrol 2011) – to reconsider their current residential situation. Some do not think twice about leaving the neighbourhood in order to be able to enrol their future child in a ‘better school’ – one with less diversity. These cases of flight from the neighbourhood attest to the crucial importance of school choice for middle-class parents who are otherwise deeply attached to their lives amid working-class and immigrant populations.

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CONCLUSION This chapter shows first of all that perceptions of the categories of population present in the immediate vicinity – the residential building – vary significantly according to residents’ social and residential trajectories, their relationships to the neighbourhood, and also the building’s social makeup, which creates contextual effects at a micro level. In-depth analysis of forms of sociability between neighbours sheds light on a variety of settings, from deliberate or forced withdrawal and rejection to exchanges and mutual aid between populations. Relationships can change over time, as events occur in the life of the neighbourhood, and involve cooperation and the development of closer bonds as well as distancing and stigmatization. Two main findings stand out, suggesting that we should be particularly careful not to overstate the distinction between gentrifiers and gentrified. First, it clearly appears that the newer middle-class residents are not the only ones who stick together; longer-established residents may also close in on their inner circles, albeit for different reasons. While for residents who have recently moved in, a tight-knit circle of sociability can be a way to form a ‘protective bubble’ in a neighbourhood where their lifestyles are to their great dismay far from dominant, the older populations in La Goutte d’Or’s residential buildings resign themselves to sticking to their closest peers as they find it difficult to forge ties with other neighbours. Furthermore, among the newcomers, some residents do not just celebrate diversity, they experience it with their neighbours. In doing so, however, they are careful to retain a degree of control over the framework of such interactions, so as to be able to distance themselves should the need arise. The variety of forms taken by neighbourly relations in these social housing buildings extend along a continuum between openness to complete closure to the people thought to be ‘other’. These forms may change over time, depending on sociospatial contexts and the spheres of social life in which these relationships exist. This is particularly evident in the analysis of parental behaviours regarding their children’s education. Negotiating diversity in the neighbourhood raises the thorny issue of the place of schooling, which is of particular concern to newly arrived middle-class parents. School choice ultimately constitutes the main factor of differentiation between older and newer residents: even when the latter value the diversity of the neighbourhood, they only accept it ‘under control’, through the filters of their front doors and, most importantly, school strategies whose mastery requires knowledge of the education system that others may not have. Accordingly, middle-class residents are clearly at an advantage in this game.

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Note 1. Translator’s note: in France, the vast majority of private schools are Catholic or other faith schools (as a result of the 1905 law separating Church and state, whereby religious instruction is not permitted in state schools) and almost all receive some public funding. They educate around 17 per cent of all schoolchildren in France. On average, the fees charged to parents are of the order of several hundreds of euros per year, rising to over a thousand euros per year for lycées (upper secondary schools; ages 15 to 18), although fees in Paris tend to be higher than average.

References Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, Gary Bridge, Tim Butler, Eric Charmes, Yankel Fijalkow, Emma Jackson, Lydie Launay and Stéphanie Vermeersch. 2015. The Middle Classes and the City: A Study of Paris and London. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, Yankel Fijalkow, Lydie Launay and Stéphanie Vermeersch. 2011. ‘Social Mix Policies in Paris: Discourses, Policies and Social Effects’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(2): 256–73. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1966. ‘L’école conservatrice. Les inégalités devant l’école et devant la culture’, Revue française de sociologie 7(3): 325–47. Butler, Tim, Chris Hamnett, Mark Ramsden and Richard Webber. 2007. ‘The Best, the Worst and the Average: Secondary School Choice and Education Performance in East London’, Journal of Educational Policy 22(1): 7–29. Chabrol, Marie. 2011. ‘De nouvelles formes de gentrification? Dynamiques résidentielles et commerciales à Château-Rouge (Paris)’, Ph.D. dissertation in geography. Poitiers: Université de Poitiers. Chamboredon, Jean-Claude, and Madeleine Lemaire. 1970. ‘Proximité spatiale et distance sociale’, Revue française de sociologie 11(1): 3–33. Clerval, Anne. 2013. Paris sans le peuple. La gentrification de la capitale. Paris: La Découverte. de Rudder, Véronique, in collaboration with Michèle Guillon. 1987. Autochtones et immigrés en quartier populaire. D’Aligre à l’îlot Chalon. Paris: Centre d’Information et d’Etudes sur les Migrations Internationales (CIEMI)/L’Harmattan. François, Jean-Christophe, and Franck Poupeau. 2004. ‘L’évitement scolaire et les classes moyennes à Paris’, Education et Sociétés 14: 51–66. Giraud, Colin. 2014. Quartiers gays. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Grafmeyer, Yves. 1994. ‘Regards sociologiques sur la ségrégation’, in Jacques Brun and Catherine Rhein (eds), La Ségrégation dans la ville. Concepts et mesures. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 85–118. Grafmeyer, Yves. 1998. ‘Logement, quartier, sociabilité’, in Marion Segaud, Catherine Bonvalet and Jacques Brun (eds), Logement et Habitat. L’état des savoirs. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 409–17. Héran, François. 1987. ‘Comment les Français voisinent’, Economie et Statistique 195: 43–59. Launay, Lydie. 2010. ‘De Paris à Londres, le défi de la mixité sociale par les “acteurs clés”’, Espaces et Sociétés 140–41: 111–26. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly. 2008. Gentrification. London: Routledge.

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Lévy, Jean-Pierre. 1998. ‘Dynamiques du peuplement résidentiel’, Sociétés contemporaines 29: 43–72. Oberti, Marco. 2007. L’Ecole dans la ville. Ségrégation – mixité – carte scolaire. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Oberti, Marco, Edmond Préteceille and Clément Rivière. 2012. Les Effets de l’assouplissement de la carte scolaire dans la banlieue parisienne. Final research report for the Haute Autorité pour la Lutte contre les Discriminations et pour l’Egalité – Défenseur des Droits (HALDE) and the Direction de l’Evaluation, de la Prospective et de la Performance du Ministère de l’Education Nationale (DEPP). Paris: Sciences Po – Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (OSC). Tissot, Sylvie. 2011. De bons voisins. Enquête dans un quartier de la bourgeoisie progressiste. Paris: Raisons d’Agir. Toubon, Jean-Claude, and Khelifa Messamah. 1990. ‘Coexistence et confrontation dans un quartier pluri-ethnique: le cas de la Goutte d’Or’, Sociétés contemporaines 4: 37–50. van Zanten, Agnès. 2009. Choisir son école. Stratégies familiales et médiations locales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

CO N C LU S I O N

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entrification is now a familiar term to the public and private actors of urban development and in civil society, and scholars do not have control over the many different uses of the knowledge they produce on the subject. Moreover, these uses are highly diverse: gentrification has been used in sweeping journalistic descriptions, cited as a miracle cure for redeveloping neighbourhoods considered to be without redeeming qualities, and as a foil for structuring ‘anti-gentrification’ movements. Although it has been watered down in many ways, the concept remains a key resource for analysing the segregation processes at work in contemporary urban spaces, the effects of public policies on inequalities and interactions between social groups, as well as the circulation of neoliberal models for economic (re)development. That being the case, gentrification also needs to be situated within broader, more structurally significant dynamics. Accordingly, we have considered gentrification first and foremost as an unequal social relationship of space appropriation. While it does impact specific places, actors and urban forms, this is also the case for other processes of urban change. Thomas Maloutas (2012) has shown that gentrification is far from being a concern in all major cities, in particular in Southern Europe, or in all central neighbourhoods. Using the notion of ‘contextual causality’ to express the diversity of situations and factors of sociospatial differentiation in Southern European urban areas, he observes processes other than gentrification and horizontal segregation (such as ‘vertical social differentiation’ in the central districts of Athens). Along similar lines, Sonia Arbaci (2019) has pointed out that in Southern European cities, historically characterized by multiethnicity and a lower spatial concentration of poverty, as well as more recently in some

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US cities such as San Francisco, Detroit or Chicago, social inequality does not necessarily go hand in hand with spatial segregation. These studies show that the sociospatial inequalities at work in big cities and unequal relations over the appropriation of space can take on different forms, gentrification being one of them among others, such as the construction of ‘gated communities’ targeted at middle- and upper-class residents on the outskirts of big cities, urban renewal operations (Epstein 2013) and urban planning projects driven by ‘sustainable development’ concerns (Béal, Charvolin and Morel Journel 2011; Boissonade 2011). While gentrification is sometimes described by elected officials or journalists as a change for the better in working-class neighbourhoods, it is worth bearing in mind that it significantly contributes to the reinforcement of forms of segregation at all levels (buildings, streets, neighbourhoods). These gentrification processes are rarely combated by public authorities – more often than not, they are monitored diffusely and sometimes even explicitly supported, giving free rein to real-estate markets. This is clearly evidenced by Mathieu Van Criekingen (2021), who demonstrates how discourses on deindustrialization and on the concentration of poverty are used by public authorities to justify extensive intervention in these neighbourhoods (demolitions, urban renewal operations) to reduce density and ultimately drive some of the residents out. By limiting the debate (and public interventions) to a simplistic choice between renaissance or ghetto, the actors of gentrification legitimize it as an entirely inevitable urban strategy (Clerval and Van Criekingen 2014). This is why the conditions of the struggle for the appropriation of urban space that is at stake there – and by extension the chances of each party prevailing – primarily relate to economic and social inequalities that are increasing from above in many countries (Piketty 2014). As it happens, in gentrifying neighbourhoods, inequalities in capital between individuals and households, which have been widening for some twenty years now, and inequalities in treatment on the part of those providing access to housing (private or rent-controlled landlords, real-estate agents, mortgage loan firms, etc.) have worsened. Beyond the economic and heritage-related dimensions of this issue, this struggle also plays out through the ‘interplay of proximity and distance’ (Grafmeyer 1994), in which social groups generally unconsciously partake. Residential and everyday practices impact the social marking and production of places, by reinforcing functional and social specificities, making these spaces more or less repulsive to some, and more or less attractive to others. Food is a good example of such practices of distinction. Pierre Bourdieu (1979) detailed the extent to which culinary tastes and eating habits are socially differentiated and contribute to the social marking of spaces and groups. In gentrifying neighbourhoods, the trends affecting

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food businesses and eateries doubly create exclusion, owing both to rising prices and to the products on offer and their presentation, which caters to the tastes of the upper classes. Sharon Zukin and Sylvie Tissot have documented this in their respective studies on changing trends in the food and restaurant industries in New York and Boston (Zukin 1995; Tissot 2013). The upgrading of the food products and restaurants on offer in these neighbourhoods is a reminder that gentrification sometimes draws on other processes of ‘elitization’ and exclusive appropriation of space (and fuels them in return), which makes its analysis even more complex. Among these processes, touristification, which is supported by the rise of platform capitalism and of alternatives to the traditional hospitality sector, plays a prominent role. In many European and North American cities, the phenomenon has reached dramatic proportions in recent years, to the point that some observers and scholars even refer to it as ‘gentrification 2.0’ (Vargas 2017) or as a new ‘battlefront’ of gentrification (Cócola Gant 2016). Indeed, many studies have found that short-term rentals on Airbnb or other online platforms are often located in gentrifying neighbourhoods (Blanco Romero and Blázquez Salom 2018). As a result, sometimes thousands of rentals have been removed from the traditional market (nearly ten thousand in 2015 in Barcelona alone; ibid.), putting further pressure on available listings and exacerbating the phenomena of direct eviction (where landlords repossess their properties to turn them into tourist rentals) and indirect eviction (resulting from rising prices, changes in the retail environment and changes in the uses of the neighbourhood). Lastly, as Agustín Cócola Gant notes, this also reflects a new strategy of capital accumulation, insofar as ‘the suppliers, far from being single families that occasionally rent out the homes in which they live, tend to be the same investors and landlords that were fuelling previous rounds of gentrification’ (Cócola Gant 2016: 112). In short, gentrification and touristification are similar in many respects. Should they be conflated, though? While they do share common features (the location of the properties in question, the background of the Airbnb property and hosts, etc.), we argue that they lead to different ways of inhabiting neighbourhoods (Arias Sans and Quaglieri Domínguez 2016). As we have shown throughout this book, gentrification is an inegalitarian social process of appropriation of space that produces specific ways of experiencing one’s accommodation and neighbourhood, which may differ from those observed in the case of short-term tourist rentals, even if some contemporary touristic outlets, including platforms such as Airbnb, boast that they offer an ‘immersive’ tourist experience, offering the opportunity to live like a local. The fact remains that, in their own way, gentrification and touristification both play a role in reshaping urban space by fashioning new urban patch-

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works and reducing, or even eventually ending, forms of working-class, immigrant appropriation of these neighbourhoods. Obviously, the fight is all the more uneven when vast urban development operations supported by public authorities intensify the gentrification of formerly low-income neighbourhoods. In such cases, everyday socioeconomic competition no longer exists; brutal exclusion mechanisms allow the better-endowed groups to gain control over these spaces. Lest we appear to paint an excessively gloomy picture of gentrification, we should also note that the cohabitations induced by such processes can also lead to forms of exchange and solidarity both for incumbent and the new populations (Giroud 2014). However, in gentrifying neighbourhoods, the coexistence of these two populations is undermined by variably diffuse, direct or strong forms of pressure. Many feel threatened by rising prices and the influx of wealthier inhabitants; this sense of a threat or of illegitimacy adversely impacts these exchanges. In the face of these sociospatial inequalities, city dwellers do not always remain passive. The gentrification processes at work in big cities elicit reactions that are sometimes structured by social struggles. There are at least two categories of resistance. The first takes the form of continuity in the uses and visits of long-established residents, or former residents, who continue to frequent the neighbourhood long after they have moved out. These more or less regular spatial practices can be interpreted as not always deliberate ways of ‘resisting by inhabiting’, by contributing to the permanence of certain functions in these neighbourhoods (e.g. commercial functions or functions relating to the reception and accommodation of newly arrived immigrants). The second form of resistance is the engagement of community organizations or collectives against real-estate speculation and gentrificationinduced segregation and exclusion, which seek to influence public policies. In the US, for instance, land trusts are nonprofit organizations that purchase land collectively for the sole benefit of the community (Martin 2007). Another example is the publication of real-estate listings in a minority language so as to filter out certain buyers (Dávila 2003). Likewise, in many European cities, nonprofits purchase homes in order to make them available to vulnerable populations, and collectives stage sometimes spectacular happenings (squats, marches) to raise public awareness of housing issues and put pressure on authorities. Such movements are still rare in France, but they exist in Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and most notably in the US and the UK. These group initiatives sometimes find a strong echo in political discourses, insinuating themselves into local electoral debates, as has recently happened in Germany and Spain.1 By spreading the idea that gentrification in historic neighbourhoods is one of many spatial manifestations of inegalitarian social relations, these movements have been contributing to radical

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changes in the social representations of a phenomenon previously seen as positive, and which is now one of the main objects of contemporary urban struggles over spatial justice. To address gentrification, public authorities also have a range of regulatory measures at their disposal. We will now venture a few concluding remarks aimed at nurturing future debates on gentrification, social mix and the role of public authorities, and, more broadly, the evolution of inner cities and the right to the city. First, regarding urban terminology, the terms ‘gentrification’ and ‘gentrifiers’ must be used by public actors and journalists with a full awareness of the processes at work – which must no longer be euphemistically depicted as simply the influx of ‘bobos’ or ‘hipsters’, which conveys a flippant, often truncated view of what is going on (overlooking impacts in terms of functionalities and on housing stock, for instance) and ignores the violence that characterizes social relationships in historic inner cities today. Regarding the fate of historic inner cities, a future involving processes other than gentrification does seem possible. Urban governments can force developers to earmark a certain percentage of new homes for vulnerable populations. Keeping social housing units available in inner cities remains an effective means of successfully retaining a diversity of inhabitants in neighbourhoods threatened with gentrification. Public authorities can also impose rent controls and work to curb brutal rent increases. In some European cities (e.g. Paris, Berlin), tools for this already exist, such as rent caps, whose primary goal is to ensure that lower-income residents remain in their homes. However, the implementation and actual effects of these rent caps are subject to debate. Beyond its still little-known (and likely different) impacts on various segments of the real-estate market, the scope of intervention is limited to the city level, and should be extended to wider urban areas so as to avoid a pendulum effect on housing in adjacent municipalities. Another crucial point worth exploring is supporting the functional mix in contemporary cities. Craftspeople, small manufacturers, and businesses other than international groups must be able to find their place in the city without always being perceived as anachronistic remnants, or sources of congestion, noise, odours and visual pollution. These activities generate jobs and facilitate social bonds and a sense of neighbourhood life. Why should (high-end) residential and (for-pay) recreational functions always be favoured over the functions that actually make a city and that are often readily celebrated and valued as heritage – once they have been driven out? As this book has abundantly demonstrated, pro-gentrification policies are in no way miracle cures to boost local economies and attract jobs and executives. The city should therefore be conceived as the locus of a plurality of uses and presences, whose resources are accessible to all, but also as a space that is

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open enough to accommodate the coexistence of diverse functions, practices, lifestyles and even tight-knit groups, without calls for standardization and the exclusion this necessarily entails. Ultimately, we are advocating for the return to the ‘right to the city’ claimed by Henri Lefebvre (1968). More broadly, where public policies are concerned, public authorities (elected officials and technicians) should be encouraged to stop viewing gentrification as a conduit for ‘social mix’, a term often laden with social assumptions and implicit goals. The temporary diversification of inhabitants’ backgrounds that comes with gentrification does not necessarily produce the explicitly or implicitly anticipated social mix, cultural encounters, economic emulation, social pacification or increased safety. Additionally, in many cases, this diversification is only a transitory stage before a standardization to the detriment of working-class residents. We need to stop invoking social mix and merely juxtaposing groups with different sociocultural backgrounds without being mindful of the contrasting effects of this juxtaposition on individual trajectories, and without designing places where concrete practices allow for genuine coexistence. There is still considerable work to be done to move away from naïve and socially situated visions of the uses of public space. Among the spaces that could serve as venues for genuine encounters and exchanges, schools play an essential role. The choice of school, as well as of educational and extracurricular activities, can be used as a means of distinction and of filtering children’s social relationships and acquaintances, even when the parents enrol them in the local state school (Authier and Lehman-Frisch 2013; van Zanten 2009). Conversely, schools can also remain a place where encounters between different social and cultural groups take place, provided that terms of access to schools and their management, including in terms of teaching practices, facilitate the mixing of children with different social backgrounds. While schemes intended to manage student flows and admissions, such as France’s carte scolaire and the UK’s school catchment areas, as well as the earmarking of additional funding for underprivileged neighbourhoods, may be used to maintain or promote some degree of social mix in schools, families have enjoyed increasing latitude when it comes to picking schools since the 1990s (Reay 2006; Oberti and Rivière 2014).2 We also need to do away with dominant stigma-laden representations of working-class, immigrant populations and their urban lifestyles: street trade and sociabilities are just as much part of the typical, or picturesque, qualities of a neighbourhood as the terraces of hip cafés. The presence of these populations is rarely seen as a factor that contributes to the cultural, artistic and economic value of cities, whereas the influx of middle-class populations remains perceived as necessary and unambiguously positive. In fact, the so-

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cial and ethnic homogenization of gentrifying neighbourhoods ultimately produces a standardized, bland, impoverished version of the city that is replicated all over the world. These dominant representations of ‘gentrification as a solution’, inspired by authors such as Richard Florida and relayed globally by the urban ‘technostructure’ (consulting and architecture firms, the sales departments of real-estate development groups, municipal and metropolitan planning departments, etc.), are particularly toxic in cities that have been destabilized by the decline of their industrial economic base, a few cases of which are addressed in several chapters of this book. In these cities, ‘moving upmarket’ has been a crucial public-policy goal for some twenty years now (Van Criekingen 2021), but this kind of language has turned out to be both unfair and counterproductive. It is unfair because it amounts to subsidizing the arrival of wealthier populations when the incumbent residents would have stood to benefit far more from such spending, in a context where local public resources are increasingly scarce. And it is counterproductive because these exogenous redevelopment strategies come up against competition from other cities that are better equipped to attract coveted populations. With hindsight, they have all too rarely resulted in the ‘rebirth’ of cities in decline, despite heavy public spending designed to foster an attractive environment for the middle classes. Local authorities’ reluctance to capitalize on the assets of incumbent populations and pursue endogenous redevelopment, and therefore to renounce the entrepreneurial approach consisting in attracting executives, high-end services and outside investments, may be a key problem, but other factors also need to be considered in the effort to reduce sociospatial inequalities. We have argued that gentrification must be considered both as a cause and a consequence of the global rise of inequalities. As such, it is thus embedded in far bigger economic, political and social mechanisms, and attempting to tackle the problem without addressing its causes would be a meaningless endeavour. Beyond inequalities in terms of income from labour, wealth inequalities partly explain the sharp rise of real-estate prices in the inner cities of large urban areas and the social selection that systematically ensues. Even if they are paid equally, first-time homebuyers will face very different situations depending on their families’ economic capital. Thus, levelling higher taxes on timeshare accommodation, inherited properties and donations would be a particularly effective tool against the spread of gentrification. Likewise, limiting mortgage loans would also curb the ‘arms race’ in the inner cities between first-time buyers, some of whom mortgage their entire futures, as professional and family trajectories become increasingly precarious. Indeed, the resulting obsession with homeownership has had many adverse effects, which we have attempted to highlight in this volume. One of

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them comes from the contradiction between the ‘desire’ for homeownership and recent job markets: an uncertain economy, like the post-Fordist economy we have been experiencing for some thirty years now, prompts households to shield themselves against the hardships of the rental market by attempting to become homeowners, while at the same time the fits and starts of contemporary careers call for fluid residential trajectories (Blanchflower and Oswald 2013).3 More modestly, this could also be achieved with an effective stimulus to the construction of housing units, as well as a reorientation in the way existing public housing stock is managed to better account for the fluidity of residential trajectories and aspirations. Additionally, rethinking local taxation could be a means to combat current trends towards sociospatial polarization – for instance, by facilitating equalization at the urban-area level. The events of 2020 and 2021 do suggest that gentrification could be curbed by factors other than the aforementioned processes and tools. The Covid-19 pandemic and the increasingly frequent occurrence of climate change-related disasters (heatwaves, massive wildfires, spectacular floods) have led to a greater awareness of the destabilizing effects of human activity on ecosystems. Metropolises have been more and more singled out for their vulnerability to such crises, owing to their population density, excess land development and food dependency. The schemes devised to combat the pandemic (lockdowns, remote working, curfews and the closure of places where people gather) and the indirect consequences of the crisis (shortages in supermarkets, slowdown of production and rising prices for many raw materials) have made this vulnerability palpable for urban populations and fuelled many discourses on ‘inhospitable’ cities. The resurgence of the image of the big city as a body that has become sick from excess growth (Fijalkow 2021) and of the representation of rural areas as places that nurture physical and mental regeneration (Dalgalarrondo and Fournier 2020) could foster, if not urban exile, at least a movement of deconcentration of those populations that have the means to move. More prosaically, however, the vast majority of urban dwellers will likely be dependent on the responses devised by the metropolises themselves, which in wealthy countries have been coming up with a variety of plans for ‘greening’ (‘cool-air islands’, urban farming, etc.) while continuing to build infrastructure and develop land at a rapid pace. Lastly, in rural areas that attract new residents, the crisis also appears to accentuate previously latent trends. Remote working, in its current state, still means maintaining ties with big cities. While at the time of writing the numbers were not yet available, it seems that the waves of property purchases by urban dwellers in declining small towns and remote rural areas that were reported in the summer of 2020 have not necessarily materialized as migrations. At this point, it cannot be said whether the public health crisis has

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intensified rural gentrification. While some forms of redevelopment might have occurred (with new demand for services, shops, etc.), we have instead witnessed what amounts to an accumulation of land and real-estate capital, enabled by the additional savings made during lockdowns and driven by a search for places to wait out new pandemics or avoid the worst effects of climate change. In the meantime, the use of short-term rental platforms ensures its profitability. While it is too early to ascertain whether these changes are genuine transformations or if they simply reflect the acceleration of ongoing trends, what effects will they have on gentrifying neighbourhoods? Those with the means to escape lockdowns and heatwaves in the city could leave; others may stay because they have access to the spaces and resources that alleviate these crises (bigger homes, patios and gardens, friendly neighbours, neighbourhood shops), while others still will be forced to stay owing to a lack of means – making the fate of these neighbourhoods uncertain. What is certain, however, is that we will remain very unequally armed in the struggle to appropriate desirable spaces.

Notes 1. In Spain, for instance, the 2015 local elections in Barcelona saw the rise to power of the citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comú, led by Ada Colau Ballano, a social activist with a history of engagement in the fight against tenant evictions and for access to decent housing, who became the city’s mayor. 2. See, in the case of England, Reay 2006; and, in the case of France, Oberti and Rivière 2014. 3. In the US, a recent study linked high homeownership rates and depressed local job-market conditions (Blanchflower and Oswald 2013).

References Arbaci, Sonia. 2019. Paradoxes of Segregation: Housing Systems, Welfare Regimes and Ethnic Residential Change in Southern European Cities. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Arias Sans, Albert, and Alan Quaglieri Domínguez. 2016. ‘Unravelling Airbnb: Urban Perspectives from Barcelona’, in Antonio Paolo Russo and Greg Richard (eds), Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place. Bristol: Channel View Publications, pp. 209–28. Authier, Jean-Yves, and Sonia Lehman-Frisch. 2013. ‘La mixité dans les quartiers gentrifiés: un jeu d’enfants?’, Métropolitiques. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https:// metropolitiques.eu/La-mixite-dans-les-quartiers-gentrifies-un-jeu-d-enfants. Béal, Vincent, Florian Charvolin and Christelle Morel Journel. 2011. ‘La ville durable au risque des écoquartiers. Réflexions autour du projet New Islington à Manchester’, Espaces et Sociétés 147: 77–97.

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Blanchflower, David G., and Andrew J. Oswald. 2013. Does High Home-Ownership Impair the Labor Market? Working Paper 13-3. Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics. Blanco Romero, Asunción, and Macià Blázquez Salom. 2018. ‘Marchandisation touristique du logement et planification urbaine à Barcelone’, Sud-Ouest européen 46: 9–22. Boissonade, Jérôme. 2011. ‘Le développement durable face à ses épreuves. Les enjeux pragmatiques des écoquartiers’, Espaces et Sociétés 147: 57–75. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La Distinction. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Clerval, Anne, and Mathieu Van Criekingen. 2014. ‘“Gentrification ou ghetto”. Décryptage d’une impasse intellectuelle’, Métropolitiques. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://metropolitiques.eu/Gentrification-ou-ghetto-decryptage-d-une-imp asse-intellectuelle. Cócola Gant, Agustín. 2016. ‘Holiday Rentals: The New Gentrification Battlefront’, Sociological Research Online 21(3): 112–20. Dalgalarrondo, Sébastien, and Tristan Fournier. 2020. L’Utopie sauvage. Paris: Les Arènes. Dávila, Arlene. 2003. ‘Dreams of Place: Housing, Gentrification and the Marketing of Space in El Barrio’, Centro Journal 15(1): 112–37. Epstein, Renaud. 2013. La Rénovation urbaine: démolition–reconstruction de l’Etat. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (FNSP). Fijalkow, Yankel. 2021. Récits de la ville malade. Essai de sociologie urbaine. Saint-Etienne: Créaphis. Giroud, Matthieu. 2014. ‘Les quartiers en voie de gentrification: pratiques solidaires dans des quartiers “contestés”’, in Max Rousseau, Vincent Béal and Guillaume Faburel (eds), Pratiques et politiques de la ville solidaire. Research report for Le Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture (PUCA) and the Délégation Interministérielle à l’Hébergement et à l’Accès au Logement (DIHAL). Paris: PUCA/DIHAL, pp. 65–74. Grafmeyer, Yves. 1994. ‘Regards sociologiques sur la ségrégation’, in Jacques Brun and Catherine Rhein (eds), La Ségrégation dans la ville. Concepts et mesures. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 85–118. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le Droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos. Maloutas, Thomas. 2012. ‘Contextual Diversity in Gentrification Research’, Critical Sociology 38(1): 33–48. Martin, Leslie. 2007. ‘Fighting for Control: Political Displacement in Atlanta’s Gentrifying Neighborhoods’, Urban Affairs Review 42(5): 603–28. Oberti, Marco, and Clément Rivière. 2014. ‘Les effets imprévus de l’assouplissement de la carte scolaire. Une perception accrue des inégalités urbaines et scolaires’, Politix 107(3): 219–41. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reay, Diane. 2006. ‘The Zombie Stalking English Schools: Social Class and Educational Inequality’, British Journal of Educational Studies 54(3): 288–307. Tissot, Sylvie. 2013. ‘“Anything but Soul Food”. Goûts et dégoûts alimentaires chez les habitants d’un quartier gentrifié’, in Philippe Coulangeon and Julien Duval (eds), Trente ans après La Distinction de Pierre Bourdieu. Paris: La Découverte, pp. 141–52. Van Criekingen, Mathieu. 2021. Contre la gentrification. Paris: La Dispute.

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van Zanten, Agnès. 2009. Choisir son école. Stratégies familiales et médiations locales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vargas, Jairo. 2017. ‘Los pisos turísticos devoran la ciudad: consecuencias del “efecto Airbnb”’, Público, 10 April. Retrieved 28 November 2021 from https://www.pub lico.es/sociedad/turistificacion-pisos-turisticos-devoran-ciudad.html. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

INDEX

‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ A affordable housing, 12, 55, 83, 87, 98, 100, 155, 171, 203, 208 Africa (and Africans), 33–34, 127, 129–30, 190, 194, 199, 203, 205, 206, 209, 215–16, 217 ‘Africanization’, 200 North Africans, 112, 184, 187–88, 189, 192–93, 218, 221 sub-Saharan Africans, 218 Airbnb, 228 Alcântara neighbourhood of Lisbon, 29–30, 32, 33 built environment, urban morphologies in, 63, 66, 67, 71–72 domestic migrants moving to, 187 former resident returning with frequent regularity, case of, 183 industrial wastelands of, 114–15 localized nature of residential gentrification in, 195–96 metropolitan strategies, effects on local gentrification, 113–15 pauperization, coexistence of gentrification and, 161–62, 167, 172–78 reinventions, contradictions and tensions in, 194 Algeria (and Algerians), 83, 184, 193, 197, 216, 219, 220 alliances, 13, 26, 39, 109, 142, 213–14 alternative economy, 20 amenities, 105, 110, 111–12, 113, 190 community amenities, 115–16 cultural amenities, 109, 111, 112, 115, 169 sports and leisure amenities, 146, 148, 154

The American Enterprise (conservative magazine), 62 anchorage, 8, 210 Antwerp, 103 appropriation of space, 2, 35, 227, 228 unequal social relations and, 25–31 Arbaci, Sonia, 226 architects, 19, 23, 50, 62, 66, 102, 112, 114, 153, 204, 208 architecture, 29, 63–64, 94, 129, 202 architectural composition, 44, 63 architectural cycles, 75 architectural design, 62 architectural heritage, 85, 126, 148, 171 architectural morphology, 71 architectural quality, 150 architectural standards, 65 architectural styles, 33, 201 architectural value, 30, 87 depreciated architecture, 12 faubourg-style architecture, 137 industrial architecture, 137 older neighbourhoods, architectural potentials of, 64–67 urbanism and, ideas in, 22 ARI (integrated rehabilitation area), 107 Arthies, 185 artists, 4, 6–7, 30, 45, 80, 89, 93–94, 132–33 artistic ‘pioneers’, 8, 51, 78, 81–82 artistic value of cities, contributions to, 231–32 theatre and visual artists, 27, 93 workshops of, 12 assets, 7, 47, 114, 232 capital assets, 48

238

index

housing and building assets, 84 rental property assets, 87 associations, 20, 28, 84, 127, 128, 137, 205 local associations and community organizations, 195 local history associations, 135 networks of, 189 Athens, 15, 179n4, 226 Atkinson, Rowland, 36, 98, 100n3 attractiveness, 12, 23, 35, 44 families, attractiveness to, 92 interurban competitiveness and, 99 Australia, 8 Authier, Jean-Yves, 12, 13 power relations within neighbourhoods, 167, 168, 173, 174, 179n2 B Bacqué, Marie-Hélène, 12, 100, 127, 129, 134, 214, 215, 220 Badalona, 171 Bamako, 207 Barcelona, 104, 110, 111, 116, 122, 123, 137–38, 161–62, 228 Barri Gòtic in, 169, 170 Casc Antic in, 168 Ciutat Vella district in, 32, 33–34, 35 Ciutat Vella district in, images and representations in, 125 Ciutat Vella district in, nonresidents, presences and practices of, 194 Ciutat Vella district in, power relations within, 167–72, 179 Ciutat Vella district in, pro-gentrification policies, evidence-based inquiry on, 106–8, 110–11, 112, 115–16, 116–17 El Raval in, 29–30, 99, 112, 122, 123–26, 168–70 La Barceloneta, 125 La Rambla del Raval in, 110, 126 La Ribera in Ciutat Vella in, 33, 107, 126, 168, 171 MACBA (contemporary art museum) in, 113, 123 municipal power in, 34 Poblenou district in, 107, 112, 115, 116–17, 125 Sant Cugat neighbourhood in, 171 Universal Forum of Cultures in, 113 Via Laietana in, 170 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of Paris, 29–30, 32, 33

diversity of gentrifications within, 79–80, 81–82, 83–84, 85–87, 88–90, 91, 92, 93–94, 99, 122 generations of ‘gentrifiers’ in, 44–45 images and representations of, 132, 133–34, 136–37 industrial architecture in, faubourg identity and, 137 ‘industrial vocation’ of, 134 luxury housing units, 48 OPAH rehabilitation programmes in, 134 press review of, 36–7n16 urban dynamics of, 34, 35 ZACs (joint development zones) in, 137 See also Paris: Montreuil suburb of Belgium, community housing movements in, 229–30 Berlin, 132, 230 Berriat-Saint-Bruno district in Grenoble, 32, 33, 162 built environment, urban morphologies in, 63, 66, 67, 70 nonresidents, presences and practices of, 184, 187–89, 190–91, 192–93, 195–96 pro-gentrification policies, evidencebased inquiry on, 105, 106, 111, 113 Bidou-Zachariasen, Catherine, 5, 6, 11, 20, 97–98, 163 Bilbao, ‘Guggenheim eff ect’ in, 112 Blair, Tony, 146 blue-collar workers, 4, 5, 20, 33, 86, 183 Bondues, municipality of, 49 Boston, 4, 5, 228 South End in, 214 Bourdieu, Pierre, 227–28 Bourdin, Alain, 16, 23 bourgeoisie, 20, 29, 49, 50, 66, 84, 138 bourgeois elites, 10, 23, 87 bourgeois neighbourhoods, 123, 167, 169, 170, 190, 202, 204 ‘bourgeois recapture’ of inner cities, 123 embourgeoisement in Paris, 125, 130–31 intellectual bourgeoisie, 132 Brard, Jean-Pierre, 86, 135 Brenner, Neil, 18 Brussels, 103 built environment, 7, 10, 15, 35, 44, 74–75, 106, 113, 178 degradation of, 200 transformation of, 201 built environment, urban morphologies in, 62–75

index housing stock, transformation of, 63 older neighbourhoods in, architectural potentials of, 64–67 potentials for gentrification, 63–64 potentials for gentrification, variations of, 67–70 real-estate ownership, potential for transformation and, 70–74 urbanism in United States, criticisms of, 62 business owners, 23, 27, 28, 97, 127, 128, 163, 188, 195 ethnic business owners, 130 retiring business owners, 200 small-business owners, 20 Butler, Tim, 19, 220 C Cairo, 15 Canada, 3, 4 capitalism, 7, 16–17, 18, 23, 49, 59, 109, 144 capitalist economy, Lefebvre’s view of, 47–48 capitalist modes of production, 24 platform capitalism, rise of, 228 See also cultural capital; economic capital; symbolic capital Carignon, Alain, 105–6, 108 Castel, Robert, 17, 84 Castells, Manuel, 36n7, 36n13 Catalonia, 118n8, 125 centrality, 28, 29, 86, 91, 98 Chamboredon, Jean-Claude, 219 Charmes, Eric, 23, 68 Château Rouge in Paris, 30, 32, 162, 168 built environment, urban morphologies in, 64–66, 67–70 gentrifying neighbourhoods, trajectories and mobilities in, 199, 200, 203, 205 nonresidents, presences and practices of, 184–86, 189–90, 191, 194–95, 196 social makeup of buildings in, 34–35 Châtenay-en-France, 185 Chicago, 227 Chicago school of sociology, 5, 36n9, 78, 94, 171, 187 children, 87, 91, 173, 175, 190, 202, 204, 209, 213, 218 integration and education of, 203 schools and, 205, 207, 220–21 social encounters and, 92, 93, 121 Ciutat Vella district of Barcelona, 32, 33–34, 35, 161–62

239

images and representations, 125 nonresidents, presences and practices of, 194 power relations within, 167–72, 179 pro-gentrification policies, evidencebased inquiry on, 106–8, 110–11, 112, 115–16, 116–17 Clark, Eric, 15 class. See social class Clay, Phillip, 5, 77–78, 88 Clerval, Anne, 10–11 Clos, Joan, 107 coalitions, 44, 47, 48–49, 99, 126, 154, 156, 158, 159 Cócola Gant, Agustín, 228 coexistence, 13, 14, 73, 116, 167, 178, 182, 201, 210, 215, 229 diverse lifestyles, coexistence of, 231 diverse populations, coexistence of, 210 social coexistence, 67, 213–14 spatial coexistence, 67 cohabitation, 13, 16, 35, 67, 72, 78, 82, 167, 198, 219, 229 ‘happy’ cohabitation, 216 inhabitation and, spatial and social consequences of, 210 interactions between residents and, 163 multicultural cohabitation, 137–38 residential mix, cohabitation included in, 201, 202, 203, 204 Collomb, Gérard, 86 commercial activities, 8–9, 67, 68, 69, 112, 134, 137, 161, 181, 229 commercial dynamics, 187, 199 commercial fabric (of districts), 129–30, 161–62, 182, 210 commercial gentrification, 205 commercial hubs, 33–34, 195, 200, 205 commercial landscape, 171–72, 199 commercial leases, 129, 187 commercial spaces, 193, 194, 213 competitiveness, 17, 99, 113–14 conflict, 1, 6, 51, 52, 98, 117, 148, 158, 208–9 NIMBY-type conflicts, 150, 159n3 racism and, 219 risks of, limitation of, 218 social conflict, 135, 210 tension and, 213–14 use-related conflict, 125 Congress for the New Urbanism (1993), 62 ‘Contextual Diversity in Gentrification Research’ (Maloutas, T.), 15

240

index

Corajoud, Michel, 135 counterculture, influence of, 6 Covid-19, 233 creativity, 17 creative class, 18, 24, 29, 98–99, 115, 142, 143, 150 creative economy, 102, 108 Creative Sheffield, 152 cultural and creative industries (CCIs), 102 cultural capital, 19, 30, 79–80, 112, 130, 216 D Damascus, 15 Decroly, Jean-Michel, 170 deindustrialization, 12, 43–44, 58–59, 79, 145, 227 social impact of, 143 Delanoë, Bertrand, 130 Delluc, Manuel, 135 density, 28, 29, 69, 98, 185, 227, 233 Destot, Michel, 105–6, 108, 109–10 Detroit, 12, 227 Diligent, André, 49, 51–52 displacement, 100n3, 117n1 diversity, 28, 29, 121, 131, 163, 198, 223, 230 buildings, diversity and condition of, 161–62 buildings, negotiation of diversity in gentrification of, 214–15 buildings, positivity on diversity in, 217–18 ‘contextual causality’, sociospatial differentiation and, 226–27 contextual diversity, 15–16 cultural diversity, 135–36 cultural openness and, 221 diverse populations, coexistence of, 210 ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, 215–16, 222 forms, places and actors in gentrification process, diversity of, 2–3 gentrification, diversity of processes, 12–13, 14, 91, 178 gentrification, diversity produced by, 208–9 individuals in gentrification process, diversity of, 11, 44, 132–33, 194 reactions to, mix of, 215–17 religious diversity, 128 residential situations, diversity of, 200, 203

residential trajectories, diversity of, 167–68, 173 ‘respecting diversity’, local power and, 214 school choice and defence against, 220–22, 223 social diversity, 23, 214 sociological backgrounds of residents, diversity of, 130, 213 spatial practices, diversity of, 167–68 diversity in everyday life, negotiation of, 213–24 diversification process, 213–14 diversity, mixed reactions to, 215–17 France, private schools in, 224n1 neighbourly relations, variety of forms of, 223 school choice, 220–22 sociability between neighbours, 217–20, 223 social relations at work in neighbourhoods, complexity of, 214 spacial and social proximity and distance, interplay of, 214–15 diversity of gentrifiers, 77–95 artists as ‘pioneers’ of gentrification, 81–82 backgrounds of gentrifiers, 80–84 concentrations of professionals, effects on local life of, 93–94 depoliticization in housing, 82–84 employment, transformations in, 80–84 housing stock, 84–90 job security, 82–84 life stages, everyday practices and, 91–92 local policies on housing stock, 85–87 property buyers’ rationales for purchases, 87–90 real-estate markets, effects of, 84–90 relationships in housing, 82–84 social downgrading, 82–84 urban morpholigies, effects of, 91–94 DIY (do-it-yourself ), 20 domination, 14, 26, 161, 166, 222 mechanisms of, 24 social dominatuion, 30–31, 75, 178 Duany, Andrés, 62 Dubai, 19 Dubedout, Hubert, 105–6, 108 E economic capital, 27, 79–80, 174, 177, 232 education, 20, 92, 159, 164, 169, 223

index attainment levels in, 19, 173 educational capital, 19, 174, 216, 222 educational institutions, 17 educational options, 220 educational standards, 221 France, state education system in, 221–22 higher education, democratization of, 20 higher education and research market in UK, 147 integration and education of children, 203 levels of, 5–6, 78 religious education, 221 social control and, 129 social mobility and, 21 El Raval area in Barcelona, 29–30, 99, 112, 122, 123–26, 168–70 elected officials, 25, 27, 35, 103, 114, 163, 227, 231 elected representatives, 55, 85, 107, 109, 120, 124, 131, 136, 137 elections, 144, 147, 154 municipal elections, 20, 107, 117, 118n8, 136, 139n3 electoral impact of change in inner cities, 1 elites, bourgeois and social, 10, 36, 47, 143, 144, 150 employment, 8–9, 11, 21, 52, 79, 80, 146, 157–58, 218 Paris, employment trends in, 93 public employment, 20, 83–84 skilled employment, transformations in, 80–84 working conditions and, deterioration of, 83–84 encounters, 16, 24, 35, 70, 83, 183–84, 201–2, 218 chance encounters, 190 cultural encounters, 231 diversity, children and encounters with, 221 informal encounters, 177 schools’ role in exchanges and, 231 social encounters, children and, 92 entrepreneurs, entrepreneurialism and, 13, 25, 60, 109, 120, 121, 149–50, 232 entrepreneurial cities, 18, 144–46 entrepreneurial strategies, 195 entrepreneurial turns, 53, 99, 148–49, 153, 157 immigrant entrepreneurs, 111–12 North African entrepreneurs, 187–88, 193 urban entrepreneurialism, 43, 113, 145, 159

241

Ernst & Young, 156 ethnic businesses, 129–30, 178, 206–7 ethnic diversity, 215, 222 ethnic homogenization, 232 ethnic minorities, 24 ethnicity ethnic mixing, 128, 163 multiethnic neighbourhoods, 128, 135, 192, 216, 221, 226–27 social and ethnic makeup, 98 ethnicized groups, 27 Europole, 105–6, 109–10, 111 everyday life, 126, 162, 164, 182–83 constraints on, 190 everyday living costs, 176 everyday practices, 196, 199, 227–28 everyday practices beyond neighbourhoods, 204–9 everyday relationships, 167 everyday socioeconomic competition, 229 places, everyday avoidance of, 179 politicization of, 20 popular continuities, everyday local effects of, 192–95 stages of life, everyday practices and, 91–92, 167 evictions, 4–5, 7, 13, 23, 32, 75, 97, 105, 196 direct eviction, phenomena of, 228 mechanisms leading to, 184 prohibition in Lisbon on, 72 exclusion, 161, 228, 229, 231 F factories, 18, 52, 54, 64, 66, 79, 89, 93, 132–33 demolition of, 136–37 ‘gentrification factories, universities as, 143 homes and, entanglement of, 134–35 metallurgical factories, 125 textile factories, 56–57 family life, 92, 202 fieldwork, 31–35 Fijalkow, Yankel, 138 Fleury, Antoine, 70, 103, 111 Florida, Richard, 17, 29, 47, 98–99, 102, 108, 117n1, 232 Fol, Sylvie, 134, 210 food, 176, 185–86, 201, 205, 218 culinary tastes, practices of distinction and, 227–28 fast-food establishments, 111, 193

242

index

food businesses, 178–79, 228 food dependency, 233 food purchases, 191 ‘food-fashion-home’ triad, 199 TV programmes on home improvement and, 9 Fordism, 18, 48 fixed capitals of (factories), 18 Fordist cities, ‘rigidities’ of, 6 ‘Fordist compromise’ on wage and productivity growth, 17 Fordist mass-production, 16–17 See also post-Fordism France, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13 ‘bobos’ in, 1, 18, 51, 216–17, 230 carte scolaire in, 231 collectives or associations supporting migrants and people in substandard housing in, 189, 196–7n4 Communist Party (PCF) in, 133, 136 community housing movements in, 229 executive occupations in, expansion of (1962–1982), 19 fieldwork in, 32 HLM (habitations à loyer modéré, lowincome housing) in, 219 Loir-et-Cher department, 190 municipal elections in (1977), 20 National Assembly in, 55 National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) in, 106 National Urban Renewal Agency (ANRU) in, 127–28 periurban areas in, emergence of, 20 PLAI (very low-income rental housing) scheme in, 200, 211n2 PLI (loan for intermediate rental housing) in, 201, 211n2–3 PLS (loan for affordable rental housing) in, 211n2–3 politique de la ville (urban policy) in, 60n1 politiques de la ville in, 23 PS (Socialist Party) in, 55, 86, 105 real estate market in, 19 ‘residential economy’ in, debates about, 18 RPR (Rally for the Republic) in, 86, 105 Seine-et-Marne department, 191 Seine-Saint-Denis department in, 132, 190, 202 SRU (urban renewal law of 2000) in, 106, 110

student protests in (1968), 20 Val-de-Marne department, 185 Villeneuve-d’Ascq in, 49 Vincennes, municipality of, 86 Wattrelos in, 55 Franco, Francisco (and regime of ), 106–7, 108, 110 frontiers ‘gentrification frontiers’, 9–11, 14, 57–58 North American frontier, romantic image of, 132 urban frontiers, 9–10 funds, 73–74 EU funds, 114 municipal funds, 8 private funds, 43, 123–24, 148, 151 public funds, 18, 124, 148–49, 151, 154, 157 G Gale, Dennis, 5, 77, 88 gated communities, 227 gay people, 6, 24, 36n7 generations generation-related effects, 80–84 of gentrifiers, 8, 44–45, 78–79, 83–84 migrants, most recent generation of, 193 post-war generation, 20 ‘gentrification’, 1–2 appropriation of space, unequal social relation to, 25–31 classical theories of, 3 demand explanation for, 4–7 DNA of, search for, 2, 25–35 economic, social and political dynamics, 16 economic transformations of Western societies, 16–19 emancipation, gentrification as, 4–7 emergence of, neighbourhoods, policies, business dynamics, residents and, 2–3 empirical and throretical approach to, 2–3 employment, transformations in, 19–21 excessive use of term, 2 gentrifications, 12–25 pioneering studies, 3–12 plurality of approach to, benefits of, 31–35 populations, transformations in activities of, 19–21 postinductrial cities, as feature of transition towards, 6

index ‘sociocultural’ approach to, 3–4 space, unequal social relation to appropriation of, 25–31 ‘stage models’ of (and criticisms of ), 5–6 supply explanation for, 7–12 urban change, multiple facets of, 2 urban policies for inner cities, renewal of, 22–25 urban research on, early studies of, 3–4 urbanisation of class struggle, gentrification as, 7–12 vocabulary of, 2 ‘gentrification frontiers’, 9–11 gentrifying neighbourhoods, trajectories and mobilities within, 198–211 cohabitation, challenge of, 198 copresences, complexity of, 199 cross-analytical methodology, 199 diversity of forms and temporalities of gentrification, 198–99 everyday practices, extention beyond neighbourhood of, 204–9 residential situations, varied mix of, 200–204 geography, 2, 31, 32 residential geography, 179 social geography, 116 Germain, Annick, 130 Germany community housing movements in, 229–30 student protests in (1967), 20 ghettos, 132, 202, 208, 210, 216 ‘deghettoization’, 201 shifting representations and, 127–28 simplistic choice between ‘ghetto’ and renaissance, 2227 Giraud, Colin, 199, 214 global cities, 19, 21, 46, 57–58, 97, 143 Global Gentrifications (Lees, Shin and LópezMorales ??), 15 Global North (and South), 58, 60n1 globalization, economic change and, 5–6 La Goutte d’Or in Paris, 11, 32, 33, 99, 162 built environment, urban morphologies in, 63, 64–66, 67 everyday life, negotiation of diversity in, 215–17, 217–20, 220–22, 223 gentrifying neighbourhoods, trajectories and mobilities in, 198–99, 200–209, 210 images and representations, 122, 126–31, 137–38

243

nonresidents, presences and practices of, 187, 189 Grafmeyer, Yves, 36n9, 214, 219, 227 gratification, ‘potential for’, 44, 63–64 Great Britain. See United Kingdom (UK) Greenberg, Miriam, 9 greening, plans for, 233 Grenoble, 104, 105, 108, 109, 111, 116 Berriat-Saint-Bruno district in, 32, 33, 162 Berriat-Saint-Bruno district in, built environment, urban morphologies in, 63, 66, 67, 70 Berriat-Saint-Bruno district in, nonresidents, presences and practices of, 184, 187–89, 190–91, 192–93, 195–96 Berriat-Saint-Bruno district in, progentrification policies, evidence-based inquiry on, 105, 106, 111, 113 political leadership in, 34 H Hamnett, Chris, 11–12 Harvey, David, 7, 8, 18, 48 Haussmannization, 25, 202, 203 Hereu, Jordi, 107 heritagization, 52–53 hipsters, 1, 230 historicity, 28, 29, 98 history, 67, 74–75, 117, 122, 125, 198, 203 biographical history, 176 of ideas, 22 industrial history, 93, 106, 125 lifelong residential history, 200 local history, 28, 29, 135 Montreuil, history of, 93, 135 Paris, history of, 128 political history, 30 Sheffield, history of, 149 urban history, 33, 201 of urbanization, 48, 56–57 homeownership, 59, 113–14, 115, 176, 192, 232–33 I images and imagery, 2, 3, 6, 9, 13, 17, 29–30 African neighbourhood, image of, 205 city images, 50–51, 52, 55, 56–57, 59, 145–47, 148–49, 171–72, 233 gentrifying neighbourhoods, images of, 181–82, 182–83 ‘hip’ images, 54, 55

244

index

homogenizing image of gentrified districts, 167 neighbourhood images, 94, 105, 111–12, 134, 163, 192, 194, 195 picturesque image, 68–69 places, images and representations associated with, 93–94, 99 stereotypical images, 171, 178 trailblazer image, 78 images and representations, 120–40 Barcelona, gentrifier attraction to neighbourhoods, 125–26 Barcelona, image of central discricts, urban landscape transformation and, 122–26 Barcelona, neighbourhood image change enough for gentrifier attraction, 125–26 Barcelona, urban heritage promotion at service of local marketing policy, 123–25 La Goutte d’Or, gentrification as subject of debate, 130–31 La Goutte d’Or, shifting representations of area, 127–28 La Goutte d’Or, social mixing at service of neighbourhood revitalization, 128–30 La Goutte d’Or, social mixing in lowerincome neighbourhoods, 126–31 Montreuil, changing representations in press, 132–33 Montreuil, crisis in workers’ suburb, new outlook for, 132–37 Montreuil, from ‘problem suburb’ to ‘working-class faubourg’, 132–33 Montreuil, image renewal for, 135–37 Montreuil, local translation of national watchwords, 135–37 Montreuil, new ‘popular’ neighbourhood, invention of, 133–35 Montreuil, social mixing, film and market gardening in, 133–35 neighbourhood change, image change and, 137–38 representations of gentrified neighbourhoods, 120–22 immigrants, 24, 49, 166, 168, 171 African immigrants, 112, 127, 187–88, 192–93, 194, 200–201, 205, 209, 218, 221 Asian immigrants, 112 cohabitation with, 202 European immigrants, 169

foreign immigrants, 169, 188 immigrant businesses, 185 immigrant communities, 219 immigrant districts, 181 immigrant entrepreneurs, 111–12 immigrant families, 74, 201–2, 219–20 immigrant hubs, 190, 209 immigrant neighbourhoods, 192, 202–3, 210, 213, 215 immigrant populations, 30, 33–34, 187, 194, 205–7, 214, 216, 218–20, 222–23, 231–32 immigrant workers, 86–87 Indian immigrants, 125–26, 169 neighbourhoods, immigrant appropriation of, 229 newly-arrived immigrants, 187, 229 Pakistani immigrants, 125–26, 169 South American immigrants, 112, 125–26, 169 immigration, 164 foreign immigration, 172 processes of, 171 income decline in household income, 202 double-income households, 6, 20 high-income households, 179 high-income neighbourhoods, 171 income inequalities, 232 income levels, 5, 16, 48–49, 78, 92, 143 low-income households, 181, 185, 187–88, 230 low-income neighbourhoods, 45, 97, 98–99, 105–6, 107–8, 109, 111, 121, 122–23, 136, 142, 161, 167, 192, 229 low-income neighbourhoods, normalization of, 126–31 low-income housing, 200, 211n2, 219 incumbent residents, 164, 167, 171, 173, 175–76, 177–78, 179, 198–99, 201, 207, 208–9, 229, 232 ‘incumbent upgrading’, 170 India, 125, 169 industrial activities, cities previously dominated by, 46–47 industrial activities, suburbanization of, 7 industrial buildings, converstion of, 149–50 industrial capitalism, rules of, 144 industrial cities, housing crisis and change in, 137–38 industrial cities, specialization in (and problem of ), 144–45

index industrial cities, urbanization of, 48 industrial crisis, 48, 59, 122, 133, 136 industrial design, 131 industrial economics, 157, 232 industrial heritage, recognition of, 105–6 industrial memory, preservation of, 148 industrial sites, redevelopment of, 99, 105 industrial warehouses, transformation of, 12 industrial wastelands, 6 industrial wastelands, destruction of, 49–50 industrial wastelands, influx of artists into, 51 industrial wastelands, land market and, 54 inequalities, 27, 31, 210, 220, 226 creation of, 14 economic inequalities, 24, 166 geographical inequalities, 98 housing, inequalities in access to, 103 housing, inequalities in conditions of, 64 inheritance, inequalities in, 21 living conditions, maintenance of inequalities in, 178 rise of, contributions to, 17–18 schooling, inequalities in, 222 in Sheffield, report of inequalities in, 158–59 social inequalities, 22, 23, 36n13, 117, 166, 178, 199, 227 sociospatial inequalities, 1, 167, 227, 229, 232 inheritance, 17, 21, 27, 63, 73 interviews (and interviewees), 35, 64, 80, 82, 84, 94, 135, 152, 182, 184, 197n6, 208 investment attraction of, competition in, 18 capital gain, investment for, 72 ‘disinvestment’, areas of, 9 disinvestment and, processes of, 7 economic investments, 14 homebuyer investments, 80, 88 investment flows, redeployment of, 49 investment properties, 33, 64, 86–87 investment-based ratuionales, rise of, 82 mixed investments, 148 nanotechnologies, investment in, 113 outside investments (and targeting of ), 34, 145–46, 232 ‘pioneers’, investments by, 177 place, investment in, 181–82, 194, 199, 204 private investments, 8, 103, 105, 112, 114, 123–24, 152 profitable investment, 21, 51, 54 public investments, 8, 59, 97, 123, 150–51

245

race for, 47 real-estate investments, 19, 33, 78, 90, 91–92, 94, 103, 114–15, 155 reinvestment in built environment, 9–10 rental properties, investments in, 87 ‘safe sites’ of, 46–47 Scottish Widows investment fund, 155 symbolic investments, 94 trade and investment banks, 47–48 urban fabric, early 20th centuray investment in, 66 Istanbul, 15 J Jacobs, Jane, 36n2, 36n13 Jerusalem, 15 K Kaika, Maria, 48 Karachi, 15 Kerslake, Bob, 155 Kinshasa, 191 L labour income from, inequalities in, 233 labour market, 17, 18–19, 20, 21, 82, 83 labour-intensive firms, 52 manual labour, 93 spatial division of, 18 Lagos, 15 landlords, 25, 70–72, 74, 75, 175–76, 179, 203, 227, 228 social landlords, 106, 199, 201, 214–15 Landry, Charles, 102 land-use planning, 105 Leeds, 144, 150 Lees, Loretta, 5, 8, 9, 11, 45 Lefebvre, Henri, 47–48, 231 Lemaire, Madeleine, 219 Lévy, Jean-Pierre, 13, 70, 134, 167, 176, 211 Lévy-Vroelant, Claire, 63 Ley, David, 5–6 life stories, 182 lifestyles, 1, 6, 9, 11–12, 14, 19, 59, 78–79, 83, 98, 198, 203–4 buildings, legitimacy of lifestyles and, 216–17 functional mix, lifestyle and, 230–31 immigrant lifestyles, 219–20 lifestyle magazines, 9, 132 mobilities and, 207–8

246

index

nonconformist lifestyle, 77 student lifestyle, 92 urban lifestyles, 214, 223, 231–32 urban morphologies, lifestyles and, 91–94 lifestyles of social groups, 1 Lille Roubaix luxury real-estate market, Lille urban area and, 54–55 Urban Community strategy, 52 Vieux-Lille (old town), 49, 50, 58 Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing conurbation, 52, 55 Lisbon, 15, 104, 109, 111, 116 Alcântara neighbourhood in, 29–30, 32, 33 Alcântara neighbourhood in, built environment, urban morphologies in, 63, 66, 67, 71–72 Alcântara neighbourhood in, domestic migrants moving to, 187 Alcântara neighbourhood in, former resident returning with frequent regularity, case of, 183 Alcântara neighbourhood in, localized nature of residential gentrification in, 195–96 Alcântara neighbourhood in, metropolitan strategies, effects on local gentrification, 113–15 Alcântara neighbourhood in, pauperization, coexistence of gentrification and, 161–62, 167, 172–78 Alcântara neighbourhood in, reinventions, contradictions and tensions in, 194 analysis of gentrification in, 44 Parque das Nações district in, 113–14 political leadership in, 34 Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship in, 66–67 Liverpool, 144 local markets, 27, 158–59 local marketing policy, 123–26 lofts, 12, 51, 82, 89, 115, 132, 155 Brooklyn lofts, 30 City Lofts (developer), 156 loft ‘lifestyle’, 59 ‘loft living’, 6–7 loft market, 33, 44, 49, 54–57 New York City lofts, Sharon Zukin and, 64 Roubaix loft market, 54–55, 59 London, 12, 143 Barnsbury in, 19

Bethnal Green in, 163 Brick Lane in, 30 East London district of Shoreditch, 36n1 Stoke Newington in, 29 Lyons Croix-Rousse district in, 163 municipal power in, 34 older central or pericentral neighbourhoods in, 63 Pentes de la Croix-Rousse in, 29–30, 32, 33, 70 Pentes de la Croix-Rousse in, diversity of diversifications, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83–84, 85–86, 87–88, 90, 91–92, 94 Pentes de la Croix-Rousse in, generations of ‘gentrifiers’ in, 44–45 Saint-Georges neighbourhood in, 168 Vieux-Lyon (old town), 12 M Major, John, 146 Maloutas, Thomas, 15–16, 25, 226 Manchester, 143, 144, 150 manufacturing, 5, 22–23, 47, 134, 230 manufacturing suburbs, 33 Maragall, Pasqual, 107 Marseilles, 47 Martínez Monje, Pedro Manuel, 112 neo-Marxist models, 9–10 mayors, 49, 52, 54, 55, 86, 117, 127–28, 129, 130, 133–34 mayoral elections, 107 media, 10, 20, 51, 77–78, 98, 121, 122, 133 analyses of transformations of central neighbourhoods in, 1 communication technologies and, emphasis on, 115–16 concentration of, 9 European media, 113 mainstream media, discussions in, 1 media debates, 97 media exposure, 131 national media, 126, 127 Meier, Richard, 112 Méliès, motion picture studio of, 134 Messamah, Khelifa, 215 metropolitan areas, 4, 32, 166–67, 183–84 metropolitan attractiveness, reinforcement of, 138 metropolitan change, 9, 103 metropolitan dynamics, 63 metropolitan levels, 70, 80, 112–13, 116

index metropolitan markets, organization of, 94 metropolitan planning, 232 metropolitan real-estate market, 183 metropolitan strategies, effects of, 104–8, 113–16 Mexico, 15 middle class, 13, 54, 72, 87, 187 European migrants, 169 households, 59, 131, 136, 216, 217, 218, 222 neighbourhoods, 137–38 parents, 220, 222, 223 residents, 23, 32, 44, 47, 49, 55, 60, 108, 125–26, 128–30, 201, 210, 214, 219–20, 223, 231–32 tenants, 129, 202, 211 workers, 89, 156 Milan, Bicocca neighbourhood in, 48 Le Monde, 127 Le Moniteur, 135 Montpellier, older central or pericentral neighbourhoods in, 63 Montreal, 6, 199 Mulhouse, 47, 103 multivariate analysis, 168–71, 179n3 municipalities, 46, 49, 55–56, 57, 58–59, 66–7. 75, 80, 86, 121–22, 166–67, 192, 230 Aubervilliers, municipality of, 130 Barcelona, municipality of, 122–26 Paris, municipality of, 126–31, 132–37 private interests and, 51–54 Sheffield, municipality of, 144–59 urban strategy and, 103, 105–6, 108, 110–12, 115–16 N neighbours, 24, 65, 92, 163–64, 174, 183–84, 199, 202, 203–4 diversity, mixed reactions to, 215–17 sociability between, 217–20, 223 neoliberalism, 145, 157, 158, 199n1 Netherlands, community housing movements in, 229–30 networks, 17, 218 of cities, rise of, 46 family networks, 175, 177, 204 friends, networks of, 92 social networks, 116, 174, 178, 189, 196, 218 transport networks, 113 Nevin, Brendan, 143 new urban frontier, 9–10

247

The New Urban Frontier (Smith, N.), 10 new urban hub, Grenoble as, 165 New Urban Left, 144–45, 158–59 new urban patchworks, 228–29 new urban policies, 48, 52, 56–57, 79 new urban practices, emergence of, 213–14 new urban ‘question’, 22 new urban social class, 3–4 New Urbanism, 62 New York City, 8, 103, 132, 228 Brooklyn Heights in, 19, 45 Brooklyn in, 30, 45 ‘degeneration’ in, 8 Greenwich Village in, 8 Lower East Side, 8, 10 ‘second generation’ of gentrifiers in, 8–9 SoHo neighbourhood in, 6–7, 8, 12 ‘sporadic gentrification’ in, 8 Tribeca in, 8 newcomers, 31–32, 35, 72, 74, 78, 81, 87, 199, 214 coexistence and, 201–2, 209–10 diversity of residential trajectories and, 173–75 interaction with, immigrants and, 218–19 welcoming newcomers, 187–88 Neyreneuf, Michel, 128 nightlife, 91–92 1968 Generation, 137 Noir, Michel, 86 nonresident inhabitants, 102 nonresidents, presences and practices of, 181–97 everyday local effects of popular continuities, 192–95 ‘inhabit’, use of term, 181–82 neighbourhoods, inhabiting without residing in, 182–86 visits to neighbourhoods, multiple and interlinked reasons for, 187–92, 195–96 North America, 7, 8, 12 middle class in, 6, 9 Nouvel, Jean, 114 O Oberti, Marco, 222 Olives Puig, Josep, 171 Olympic Games, 107, 123, 124 OPAH (scheduled housing-improvement schemes), 86, 87, 106 ownership, 24, 56, 63–64, 176 co-ownership, 65, 203

248

index homeownership, 59, 113–14, 115, 176, 183, 192, 232–33 horizontal ownership, 74 joint ownership, 72 ownership structure, potential for transformation and, 70–74 public ownership support policies, 72 vertical ownership, 72

P Paris, 103 Abbesses area of Montmartre in, 127, 206, 216, 221 analysis of gentrification in, 44 Aubervilliers in suburbs of, 130 Boulevard Barbès (and Brasserie) in, 128–29, 131, 200, 208 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, 29–30, 32, 33, 99 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, diversity of gentrifications, 79–80, 81–82, 83–84, 85–87, 88–90, 91, 92, 93–94 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, generations of ‘gentrifiers in, 44–45 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, images and representations, 122, 132, 133–34, 136–37 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, luxury housing units in, 48 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, OPAH rehabilitation programmes in, 134 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, press review of, 36–7n16 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, urban dynamics in, 34, 35 Bas-Montreuil in suburbs of, ZACs (joint development zones) in, 137 Belleville in, 11, 12 Belville in, 11, 12 Brasserie Barbès in La Goutte d’Or in, 131 carte scolaire (school catchment area) system in, 220 Château Rouge in, 30, 32, 64–66, 67–70, 162, 168, 184–86, 189–90, 191, 194–95, 196, 199, 200, 203, 205 Château Rouge in, social makeup of buildings in, 34–35 Commune in (1871), 10 Faubourg Saint-Denis in, 11 Haussmannization of, 25 Jeanne d’Arc area in, 163 La Goutte d’Or in, 11, 32, 33, 99, 162

La Goutte d’Or in, built environment, urban morphologies in, 63, 64–66, 67 La Goutte d’Or in, everyday life, negotiation of diversity in, 215–17, 217–20, 220–22, 223 La Goutte d’Or in, gentrifying neighbourhoods, trajectories and mobilities in, 198–99, 200–209, 210 La Goutte d’Or in, images and representations, 122, 126–31, 137–38 La Goutte d’Or in, nonresidents, presences and practices of, 187, 189 Marais in, 29, 199 Montmartre in, 11, 68, 132 Montparnasse in, 132 Montreuil suburb in, industrial history of, 93, 135 Montreuil suburb of, 132–37, 137–38 municipal power in, 34 Nanterre in, 190 older central or pericentral neighbourhoods in, 63 Parc des Buttes Chaumont in, 11 Porte de Clignancourt in, 217 Sacré-Coeur basilica in, 68 Saint-Germain-des-Prés in, 132 social mixing in, promotion of, 214, 215, 221 Paris sans le peuple. La gentrification de la capitale (Clerval, A.), 10 Pathé, motion picture studio of, 134 patrimonial value, 22 Pattison, Timothy, 4 pauperization, 7, 12, 59, 144–45, 154, 161, 167 social pauperization, 13, 171 Pentes de la Croix-Rousse in Lyons OPAH (scheduled housing-improvement schemes) in, 85 PRI (real-estate refurbishment area) in, 85 UNESCO World Heritage listing of, 85–86 perceptions of artists as ‘pioneers’, 78 built environment, perceptions of, 75 of cohabitation, 202 gentrification, positive perceptions of, 163 of housing stock, 64 of mixing and relationships, 164 of neighbourhoods, 120, 123, 145, 215, 217

index of pillars of urban prosperity, 18 superficial perceptions of process, 2 PERIs (special inner-city reform plans), 107 periurban areas, 17, 20, 23, 47, 80n1 Pfirsch, Thomas, 204, 211n4 Philadelphia, 5 Society Hill neighbourhood in, 12 Piketty, Thomas, 17, 227 Pirelli, 48 planning, 13, 18, 23, 28, 55, 60, 86, 92, 97, 121, 142, 227 development and, 133 planning communication, 43 planning regulations, 64, 66 planning revisions, 135 planning tools, 116 publicized planning projects, 114 urban planning departments, 134–35, 232 Poblenou district, industrial heritage of, 125 Poblenou district in Barcelona, 107, 112, 115, 116–17, 125 policies favouring gentrification, genesis of, 48–49 policymakers, 29, 94, 97–98, 136, 164, 195, 213–14 political science, 2, 31, 32 politicians, 1, 22, 99, 112 Portugal fieldwork in, 32 ownership structures in, transition period for, 72–74 post-Fordism, 29, 48, 149 post-Fordist cities, 17, 18 post-Fordist economy, 233 post-Fordist firms, hierarchy of, 17 post-Fordist production transformations, 22 post-Fordist social structure, complexification of, 21 post-Fordist urban policies, 17–18 postindustrial cities, 6, 43–44, 46–47, 148 research on, 60n1 postindustrial period, 26 ‘potential for gratification’, 44, 63–64 poverty, 13, 22, 23, 57, 106, 163, 164 precarity and, 210 spatial concentration of, 225–26, 227 power relations within neighbourhoods, 166–79 analytical frameworks, 166–67 central neighbourhoods, characterisation of, 167

249

process of gentrification, only one among others, 167–72 residential mobilities, gentrification in tangle of, 172–78 sociospatial inequalities, 167 socio-urban dynamics, intertwinng of, 178–79 stereotypical image of historic inner cities, 178 See also Barcelona: Ciutat Vella district in, power relations within press, 9, 35, 36–7n16, 132, 174 cultural diffusion, role of press in, 47 local press, 121, 152 national press, 128 national press groups, 82 representations in, change in, 132–33 Préteceille, Edmond, 138 PRI (real-estate refurbishment area), 87 private actors, 8, 24–26, 32, 35, 54, 57–58, 74, 78, 97, 138, 156, 226 within coalitions, 47 in land and housing development, 115–16 local actors, 54 ‘vision for quality’ of, 142–43 professionals, 19, 27, 49, 89, 91, 93–94, 105, 106, 134 performing-arts professionals, 21, 81–82, 87 profitability, 73, 74, 234 ‘frontier of profitability’, 10 pro-gentrification policies, evidence-based inquiry on, 102–18 gentrification policies in disguise?, 104–8 metropolitan strategies, effects on local gentrification, 113–16 public policies, ambiguous and variable effects of, 109–13 prostitution, 110, 123, 126, 127, 201 PSC (Catalan Socialist Party), 107, 118n8 public actors, 9, 11, 26, 33, 35, 57, 74, 78, 97, 104, 117, 127, 138, 156, 226, 230 local actors, 99, 142, 154, 201, 210, 216 ‘vision for quality’ of, 142–43 public authorities, 4, 6, 8–9, 13, 28, 29, 31–32, 44, 49, 163, 195, 201, 206, 227, 229, 230–31, 239 built environment, urban morphologies in, 66, 75 diversity of gentrifications, 78, 85, 87, 90 images and representations, 121–22, 123, 124, 127, 138 policies of, 98–99

250

index

pro-gentrification policies, 103, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114–15, 116 Puig, Josep Olives, 171 Q qualifications, 17, 26, 79, 80, 173–74, 222 R racism, 193, 219 redevelopment, 52, 53–54, 99, 102, 114, 115, 149–51, 154, 156, 158, 234 economic redevelopment, 47 exogenous redevelopment, 232 models, 43 policies, 51, 54, 58 projects, 8 ‘socialist’ redevelopment, 157 strategies, 34, 47, 49, 54, 56, 57, 59, 144, 145–47, 153, 155–57 touristic redevelopment, 123 urban redevelopment, 48, 148 regeneration, 15–16, 33, 99, 123–24, 171, 174–75, 176, 233 in Sheffield, 145, 148, 150 rehabilitation, 8, 12, 21, 22–23, 24, 33–34, 98, 122, 134, 169, 175, 205 diversity of gentrifications and, 78, 85, 86, 88 pro-gentrification policies and, 103, 106, 107, 110, 115 in Roubaix, 50, 52, 53, 54 social relation to appropriation of space, 26, 28–29 relations and relationships, 24, 92, 146, 164, 171, 214, 218 competition, relations of, 26 constituents, relationships to, 133 homosexual relationships, 20 housing, relationships to, 82–84, 87 inequalities in, 31, 227 interpersonal relationships, 163 local spaces, relationship to, 20 neighbourhoods, relationships to, 106, 130–31, 162, 167, 177, 196, 199, 210, 223 neighbourly relations, 27, 214, 216–17, 219, 223 ownership, relationships to, 56–57 places, complex relationships between, 183–84 places of residence, relationships to, 162 power relations, 109, 161, 166, 178, 179, 219–20

relations of cohabitation, 204 relationship breakdown, 202 ‘residential relationships’, notion of, 200 school, relationship to, 222 social relations, 2, 15, 22, 27, 31, 35, 75, 102, 175, 188–89, 200–201, 210, 214, 226, 229–30, 231 transformation of relationships to ownership, 56–57 religions, 189, 218 religious diversity, 128 religious education, 221 religious question, public management of, 130 renovations, 4, 111, 123–24, 129, 134, 143, 154, 164, 188, 203, 206 built environment, urban morphologies in, 65–66, 73–74 diversity of gentrifications, 77–78, 85–87 façades, renovation of, 52–53, 121, 125 housing renovation projects, 107, 113–14 investments in, 105 renovation grants, 87 renovation processes, 71 renovation programmes, 67 slum renovation, 113–14 waterfront redevelopment, ‘good practice’ in, 148 rent gap, exploitation of, 54–55 replacement, 26, 169, 178 representations of transformations of inner cities, 1–2 representations. See images and representations Requena Hidalgo, Jesús, 171 resistance, 161 forms of, 229 to gentrification, 27, 62, 114, 130, 162, 164, 179, 182, 194 to investment, 10–11 ‘nodes of resistance’, 10 zoning, resistance to pressure of, 135 resources, 14, 26–27, 52, 64, 72, 78, 87, 94, 121, 136, 163, 208 access to, 210, 230–31, 232, 234 accumulation of, 28, 109 commercial resources, 112 cultural resources, 26, 122 educational resources, 147 financial resources, 64, 65, 207 habitus and, 164 housing resources, 167 local resources, 138, 210

index municipal resources, 145 neighbourhood resources, 182 nonfinancial resources, 27 skills and, 162 symbolic resources, 122, 195, 197, 220 tax resources, 55 restaurants, 12, 20, 30, 151, 168, 169, 205, 206–7, 228 nonresidents, presences and practices of, 181, 185–86, 188 retail, 98, 109, 158 retail centres, 67, 68–69, 91 retail environment, 228 retail properties, 187–88, 189, 209–10 retail structure, 188–89, 200, 206 Sheffield new retail quarter, uncertainty surrounding, 153–55 strategy to move retail upmarket, 153–54 retailers, shopkeepers and, 127, 146, 193, 207, 208 revaluation of neighbourhoods, 22–23, 24–25, 26, 29, 30–31, 97–98, 176 revitalization, 103, 111, 177 social mixing ar service of, 128–30 strategies for, 130–31 Rhein, Catherine, 5 The Rise of the Creative Class (Frorida, R.), 98–99 Rivière. Clément, 220, 231 Rose, Damaris, 6, 11, 16, 78 Rotterdam, 103 Roubaix, 32, 33, 103, 112 aestheticization of architecture in, 52–53 aestheticization/heritagization of architecture in, 52–54 architectural heritage, preservation of, 49, 51 architectural heritage of, 49, 51, 52 gentrification as solution for, 48–49, 49–51 gentrification policies in, 44 gentrification process in, 58–60 heritage policy, drivers of, 52 heritage preservation association, 54 journées du patrimoine in, 55 La Redoute in, 50–51 Le Pile neighbourhood in, 56–57 loft market, extension in gentrification and emergence of, 54–57 loft market, extension of gentrification and emergence of, 54–57 luxury housing units in, 48

251

luxury real-estate market, Lille urban area and, 54–55 municipality, private interests growing closer to, 51–54 newfound attractiveness of, 57 political leadership in, 34 private interests, municipality interests and, 51–54 restored bourgeois residences in, 49–50 shrinking city of, 34, 60n1 solution for problems of, gentrification as, 49–51 ‘urban Fordist compromise’ in, 48 Ville d’art et d’histoire (Artistic and Historic City), 53 Villeneuve-d’Ascq near, 49 RREEF (Deutsche Bank real-estate investment fund), 155 Ruggiero, Luca, 48 rural gentrification, 234 S Saint-Etienne, 47, 103 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 66–67 San Francisco, 5, 227 Sassen, Saskia, 18, 19 Savage, Mike, 17, 21 Savary, Sophie, 123 Scalbert-Dupont Bank, 54–55 school catchment areas (carte scolaire), 220, 231 school choice, 164, 220–22, 223 segregation, 18–19, 167, 178, 220 exclusion and segregation, 229 microsegregations, 161 segregation processes, 226 spatial segregation, 227 Senegal (and Senegalese), 185–86, 199, 208–9, 215, 222 Seoul, 15 Sheffield, 99, 103, 143–59 City Lofts developments in, 156 Creative Sheffield, 152–53 economic restructuring in, ‘moving upmarket’ and, 156–57 Hallam University in, 146–47, 149–50, 156, 157, 158 ‘Heart of the City.’project, 148–49, 152 industrial identity and ‘red’ period in, 145–46 inner city of, 32, 33 Labour Party in, 145–46 Liberal Democrats in, 156

252

index

Lower Don Valley in, 145, 148, 152 luxury housing units in, 48 Meadowhall shopping centre in, 145, 153–54 Moor development project, 153–54, 154–55 New Retail Quarter in, 153–54 New Urban Left in, 144–45 NIMBY-type conflicts, emergence in, 150 political leadership in, 34 Sheffield Development Corporation (SDC), 145 Sheffield One urban regeneration company (URC), 150–53, 153–54, 156 shrinking city of, 34, 60n1 St Paul’s Tower in, 156 A Tale of Two Cities: The Sheffi eld Project (Thomas et al. 2009), 158–59 universities in, 146–47 World University Games in, 148–49 Sheffield Star, 149, 155 short-term rentals, 228, 234 Silicon Valley, 17 Simon, Patrick, 23 Siza Vieira, Alvaro, 114–15 Slater, Tom, 5, 8, 9, 11 Smith, Darren, 143 Smith, Neil, 7–10, 14, 19, 46, 57, 102–4, 109 ‘rent-gap’ theory of, 7–8 urban studies, influence of theoretical perspective in, 9–10 sociability, 175, 223 neighbourly sociability, 217–20 social backgrounds, 14, 83, 133, 147, 161, 163, 181, 231 social capital, 32, 177, 220 social categories, 49, 173 social class, 3, 106, 166. See also middle class; upper class; working class social closure, 214 social control, 110, 128, 129, 163, 183–84, 215, 219–20 social distinction, 26, 56, 214 social homogeneity, 2, 215, 216 social housing, 10, 17, 22, 33, 34, 58, 65, 68, 75, 131, 132, 155, 198–99, 214 access to, 202–3, 208–9, 215 complexes, 217–18, 219, 220 mandatory units, 106 middle-class applications for, 202 mixed social housing, 221 neighbourly relations within, 223

policies on, 110, 184 rehabilitation of, 98 residents, 215, 216, 217, 222 social housing units, 86, 110–11, 134, 136–37, 177, 201–2, 230 stock of, 201 social inequalities, 22, 23, 36n13, 117, 178, 199, 227 social justice, 59, 116, 159 social mixing (and ‘social mix’), 23, 34, 35, 55, 56, 63, 98, 104, 106–7, 111, 122 discources surrounding, 210 lack of, 206–7 legitimization of strategies for, 216 objective of, 201 promotion of, 126–31, 214 pro-social-mix left-wing policy, 108 public authorities and, 230 public authorities and ‘social mix’, 230–31 in schools, 137, 221 in Sheffield, 149 upgrading strategy in Paris and, 138 urban reform and, 134–35 social mobility, 21, 84, 204 social reproduction, 221 sociologists, 6–7, 9, 13, 22, 23, 63, 112, 167, 175, 200, 222 sociology, 2, 5, 18, 31, 32, 51, 194 sociability and, 217–20 sociological change, 136 sociological research, 163 urban sociology, radical geography and, 109 urban sociology research, 174 See also Chicago school of sociology sociospatial inequality, 1 South America, 112, 125, 169 South Asia, 112 Spain community housing movements in, 229–30 fieldwork in, 32 speculation, 4, 5, 48, 56–57, 66, 77–78, 80, 86, 87, 90, 115, 117, 177, 229 speculative bubbles, 59–60, 156 stage models, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 54, 77, 78, 80, 82, 90, 94, 196n1 stigma (and stigmatization), 22, 126, 127, 128, 197n6, 220, 223, 231 struggles, 162, 200, 210, 219 class struggle, 14, 25 class struggle, urbanization of, 7–12

index for housing improvement, 24 power struggles, 27, 31 social struggles, 132–33, 229 urban space, struggle for appropriation of, 227–28, 229–30, 234 urban struggles, 22, 28–29, 108, 117, 189 studentification, 24, 143, 155–56 students, 6, 24, 80, 83, 91, 111, 112, 125, 147, 155, 157–58, 190, 206 foreign students, 34 international students, 144 Students for a Democratic Society in US, 20 subsidization, 53, 72, 124, 129, 131, 145, 147, 200, 232 suburbanization, 3, 7 suburbization, decline of central districts and, 3–4 suburbs, 3, 7, 49, 92, 183–84 inner suburbs, 66, 79, 90, 93, 132, 185–86, 190, 191, 202 manufacturing suburbs, 33 Montreuil, ‘city in the suburbs’, 135 outer suburbs, 185, 190, 191 Parisian suburbs, 122, 130 postwar suburbs, 137 working-class suburbs, 122 symbolic capital, 23, 27 ‘systems of places’, 162, 165n2 T Taipei, 15 taste, 3–4, 28, 30, 64–65, 98, 121, 137, 143, 158, 207, 216 culinary tastes, 227–28 cultural tastemakers, 6–7 tensions, 78, 161, 163, 183, 194 social housing, emergence in social housing of, 210 Thatcher, Margaret, 144 Tissot, Sylvie, 23, 28–29, 135, 137, 214–15, 228 Toronto, Caulfield’s analysis of gentrification of, 36n5 Toubon, Jean-Claude, 86, 129, 133, 215 trafficking, 110, 123, 126, 127, 153–54, 200, 203 transport, transportation and, 17, 55, 59, 69–70, 110, 113–14, 195, 205 public transport, 70, 185, 200–201, 205 U unemployment, 128, 144

253

United Kingdom (UK), 5, 6, 24, 143 British Steel Corporation, 144 Conservative Party in, 144, 146, 154, 159 fieldwork in, 32 higher education and research market in, 147 Housing Market Renewal Initiative in, 143 Labour Party (and government) in, 144–46, 148, 150, 153, 156, 158 Liberal Democrats in, 153, 156 New Labour government in, 143, 146, 148, 156 New Labour in, 143 school catchment areas in, 231 Towards an Urban Renaissance (Urban Task Force 1999), 150 United States, 3, 4, 6, 24 land trusts in, 229 Students for a Democratic Society in, 20 suburban model in, 20 upper class, 20, 30, 99, 170 households, 109 neighbourhoods, 137–38 newcomers, 81, 116, 214 residents, 63, 67, 81, 98, 108, 111, 161, 169, 213, 227 urban lifestyles, 214 urban (re)development, moving upmarket and, 142–59 crisis for downtown Sheffield, 154–55 downtown Sheffield Inc., 153–54 moving upmarket, problems with strategies aimed at, 157–58 moving upmarket, roots of strategies for, 146–47 neoliberalism and, 146, 157–58 new retail quarter, uncertainty surrounding, 154–55 ‘pioneers’, settlement of, 149–50 residential sector, real-estate bubble and, 155–57 retail offer, setbacks to strategy for moving upmarket, 153–54 two-tier city, dismay at emergence of, 158–59 urban crisis, genesis of entrepreneurial city and, 145–46 urban governance, change in, 146–47 ‘vision of quality’ for city centre, working towards, 149–53 See also Sheffield

254

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Urban Development Corporations (UDCs), 159n2 urban entrepreneurialism, 43, 113, 145, 159 urban lifestyles, 9, 214, 231–32 urban marketing, 47, 99, 142 urban morphology, 24, 44, 63–64, 71, 80, 116 effects of urban morphologies, 91–94 V Vaillant, Daniel, 130 Valsassina, Frederico, 114 Van Criekingen, Mathieu, 109, 170, 227, 232 Van Zanten, Agnès, 164, 220, 231 Vancouver, 12 Vandierendonck, René, 51–52 Versailles, older central or pericentral neighbourhoods in, 63 Vervaecke, Monique, 175 Veschambre, Vincent, 23, 138 Vicario, Lorenzo, 112 W Washington DC, 5 Western Europe, 8, 12 white flight, 3 Wilmott, Peter, 174 working class, 87, 106, 111, 126, 135, 144, 147, 162, 167–68, 192, 222 built environment, residents and urban morphologies in, 67, 69, 75 character, 85, 128, 206–7 density of gentrification in neighbourhoods, 77, 83, 84–85 diversity in lives of residents, negotiation of, 213, 214, 215

diversity within, negotiation of, 213, 215–16, 220–21 heritage, 128 households, 81, 175, 176–77 images and representations of neighbourhoods, 122, 123, 130–31, 136 immigrant neighbourhoods, 194, 202–3, 216, 218, 219, 229, 231–32 inhabitants, 98, 169 multicultural neighbourhoods, 126, 131, 137–38, 206, 215 neighbourhoods, 1, 6, 10, 29–30, 34–35, 64–65, 163–64, 190, 227 power relations whthin neighbourhoods, 171–72 press representations of working-class areas, 132–33 pro-gentrification policies in neighbourhoods, 102, 105, 108 residential space, continuities in, 63–64 residents, 1, 5, 13, 20, 26, 99, 103, 107–8, 145, 210, 231 Roubaix neighbourhoods, 49, 54 World Bank, 142 Wyly, Elvin, 5, 8, 9, 11 Y Young, Michael, 174 youth, 20, 21, 28, 83, 91 unemployed youth, 132 yuppies, 1 Z ZACs (joint development zones), 105, 110 Zukin, Sharon, 6–7, 9, 64, 228