Gentrification

Gentrification has been the subject of extensive research and debate, with a wide range of definitions and theorizations being advanced. The term is generally traced back to Judith Glass, who suggested that middle-class people were moving into some central working-class areas of London and fixing up run-down houses. Glass highlighted that the in-movement and physical improvement of buildings was accompanied by the displacement of working-class residents, and although there has subsequently been considerable debate about the meaning of gentrification, and the relative emphasis that should be given to in-migration, upgrading, and social displacement, Glass's definition is still encapsulated within many more recent definitions of gentrification.

Although Glass used the term in 1964, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that gentrification became more widely used to refer to change occurring across a range of urban, and indeed some rural, spaces. Since this time, a series of differing forms and theorizations of gentrification have been identified, which may reflect changes in the nature of gentrification itself and/or philosophical/theoretical changes affecting geography and other social sciences. Gentrification was, for example, viewed with skepticism in the 1970s by adherents of logical positivist spatial science who routinely employed urban structural models that implied that both the physical standard of housing and the social status of residents increased with distance from the city center. Much of the early interest in gentrification indeed stemmed from the way it seemed to contradict such models given that middle-class people seemed to be moving into areas close to the center of cities.

Gentrification studies were indeed an important impetus in the critique of positivist urban models and the development of alternative approaches. Behavioral perspectives, for instance, emerged focused on identifying the motivation for inner-city living, while managerial and structuralist approaches were used to consider the role of governmental policy and the availability of finance. By the early 1980s, such differences were often expressed in terms of production-side and consumption-side perspectives, with a trenchant debate emerging between their exponents, although there has been a subsequent reappraisal of this dualistic construction of gentrification studies, as well as the emergence of new theoretical emphases related, at least in part, to the incorporation of further theoretical perspectives into geography. By the early 1990s, it was possible to identify at least five distinct, albeit overlapping, approaches to gentrification studies, each of which are briefly outlined in this entry.