‘Gentrification’ as a grid of meaning

Abstract

The openness of the concept of gentrification—its practical flexibility as a sign—makes it useful, and thus prominent, in everyday conversations about the socio-spatial changes affecting Oakland, CA and other US cities. Within gentrification studies, however, this openness has often been seen as a conceptual problem to be corrected. In this paper, rather than refine a categoric definition of gentrification, we focus on the contingent ways that a range of political actors articulate relational identities and claims in struggles over public space. We observe that, as a situated and unstable constellation of meanings and resonances, the talk of gentrification is central to urban cultural politics in places like Oakland. We thus argue that the ‘chaotic’ use of the term is neither a conceptual problem nor a political failure. Instead, it is in itself a rich and meaningful subject of research on urban life, pointing to a multiplicity of sites in which new and consequential formations of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and disbelonging, are forged in practice. Using six months of ethnographic fieldwork, we detail the struggle over Oakland First Fridays, a downtown street festival. In particular, we show how a diverse group of organizers drew on ‘gentrification’ as a grid of meaning to configure and reconfigure the event’s deserving public in ways that rendered commercial vendors, young people of color and political protesters increasingly out of place. We thus argue that viewing ‘gentrification’ as a grid of meaning allows us to appreciate fluctuating formations of inclusion and exclusion—formations that a too-rigid focus on gentrification as a socio-spatial and political–economic process of urban change can either naturalize or obscure.

Key words:

• gentrification
• street festival
• deserving public
• cultural politics
• exclusion
• Oakland

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jake Kosek, Kathe Newman, Ananya Roy, Alex Schafran, Dick Walker, Elvin Wyly and two anonymous reviewers at City for their generous and useful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The authors are responsible for the final arguments and any factual errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Ealey and Monique (2015), Levin (2015a, 2015b) and Tsai (2015) for a recent sample of articles that articulate disparate socio-spatial changes and conflicts in Oakland in terms of gentrification.

2 As a useful corrective to the Euro-centrism of urban studies, this discussion focuses on countries such as India that feature political, economic and tenurial arrangements that differ from those taken to exemplify not only ‘classic gentrification’, but also ‘classic capitalism’ (cf. Chakrabarty 2000).

3 These trends have since accelerated. Between November 2013 and 2014, the city’s median rent grew by 9.1%, the steepest rate of inflation in the country (Levin 2014).

4 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUp4NjI-nyw for a video that conveys the feel of these actions.

5 An American slang term meaning ‘to sell’, usually something illicit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex Werth

Alex Werth is a PhD candidate in geography at UC Berkeley.

Eli Marienthal

Eli Marienthal is a PhD candidate in geography at UC Berkeley. Email: [email protected]