gentrification

smart and equitable growth?

With the rise of “smart growth” approaches to urban development, which promote dense, walkable urban centers as an alternative to sprawl, there are questions about whether smart growth is actually equitable.[read more]

sprawl/shutterstock

The problem, as I see it, is the normative embrace of certain land use patterns. Sprawl is bad. Density is good. You are either with Kotkin or Florida. Choose a side, now.[read more]

gentrification and the arts

A bit of grittiness in city life creates the authenticity and diversity that makes cities attractive places to live and work. How can artists shift from being victims of gentrification to becoming agents of change?[read more]

image via shutterstock

The central lesson of this critique of gentrification is that none of this is accidental or "natural". Cities put policies in place to encourage development while ignoring the needs of existing residents.[read more]

7,500 American Dollars per m2 is the price you have to pay if you want an office near the most important square of Istanbul. Seems reasonable, right? Until recently though, the area where the office is located was occupied by people in the poorest portion of the population, and the neighborhood’s name was associated with unsatisfactory living conditions. Now a giant gentrification project is underway.[read more]

Dom Dada, Flickr

A proposed park on Washington, D.C.’s 11th Street Bridge is set to bring together two neighborhoods of distinctively different socioeconomic classes. Currently, the 11th Street Bridge in Southeast D.C. still carries traffic, but a new bridge is being built for vehicles, offering an opportunity for developers to plan a park to connect the...[read more]

There is a suggestion that the contemporary models conceived for ‘creative’ urban regeneration are ones that lend themselves to the UK’s neoliberal framework of urban policy, policies that favour free markets and free trade, and ultimately promote private sector involvement in London’s ‘creative’ and cultural communities.Culture is...[read more]

What happens when you provide something that everyone wants? When there is a huge demand for something prices are high, and usually markets answer with a large supply. As a result prices lower. Supply and demand…we all learned about it in high school. But in the case of housing along transit lines, in many places across America that demand is never met.[read more]

The above photograph was uploaded to a Google Maps server in June 2009.The below photograph was taken last month and shows the same parking lot but instead of different advertisers on the billboard and mural, Molson M blends digital art with traditional advertising. You will also notice a block of small print toward the bottom.Designed...[read more]

  Washington, DC, where I have lived for over 40 years, is changing.  The central city of Washington is changing, and so is the metropolitan region.  Both are becoming more urban.   And, while I believe the changes are good for the city and good for the environment, they do not come without consequence or...[read more]

By Alistair Mackay at Future Cape Town When you fly into Buenos Aires, the city stretches for as far as the eye can see – it’s an unimaginably big sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks, urban squares and neat, rigid avenues that eventually deteriorate into slums and suburbia. It is completely flat, and so European in the...[read more]

by Rashiq Fataar Gentrification has many forms and definitions. A recent Case Study on gentrification in Woodstock defines it is as, “a transformation of a dilapidated neighbourhood into an upgraded, attractive area with an influx of a higher social class that is pushing out the original, poorer residents”. For Cape Town, the...[read more]