https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6409-5155
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ABSTRACT
In global cities, the impacts of gentrification on the lives and well-being of socially vulnerable residents have occupied political agendas. Yet to date, research on how gentrification affects a multiplicity of health outcomes has remained scarce. While much of the nascent quantitative research helps to identify associations between gentrification and determined health outcomes, it tends to draw from static datasets collected for other studies to draw a posteriori and non-longitudinal conclusions. There is little attention in traditional public health research to purposely understand the health impacts of the complex, multi-layered, and rapid change produced by gentrification. Moreover, few studies examine the pathways and socio-spatial dynamics of the association between gentrification and health. In response, we use qualitative data collected in Boston and Barcelona to comprehensively identify how the health and well-being of long-term residents may be affected by gentrification and to call for new multi-methods research. In this initial assessment, we find a range of potential detrimental factors and potential pathways associated with gentrification, including individual-level physical and mental health outcomes such as obesity, asthma, chronic stress, and depression; neighborhood-level health determinants such as safety and new drug-dealing/use; and institutional-level health determinants such as healthcare precarity and worsened school conditions.
Data Availability Statement
The data presented here is part of a broader dataset collected for the ERC funded project called GreenLULUs. The data is unfortunately not available upon request. Data is not available due to confidentiality agreements with the participants of this study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. See for example in Barcelona: https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/alcaldessa/en/noticia/common-front-by-world-cities-to-combat-gentrification_573419.
2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/middle-class-families-feel-more-squeezed-by-rising-u-s-rents-1462738692.
5. https://northendwaterfront.com/2018/04/extinction-events-and-airbnb-there-goes-the-neighborhood/.
14. https://www.lavanguardia.com/local/barcelona/20180919/451895906402/delitos-ciutat-vella-robos.html.
16. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/02/20/how-gentrification-is-leaving-public-schools-behind.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Isabelle Anguelovski
Prof. Isabelle Anguelovski is the director of BCNUEJ, an ICREA Research Professor, a Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at ICTA-UAB, and coordinator of the research group Healthy Cities and Environmental Justice at IMIM. Trained in Urban Studies and Planning (MIT, 2011), her research examines the extent to which urban plans and policy decisions contribute to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities. The current ERC-funded project she coordinates, GreenLULUs, explores the extent and magnitude of environmental gentrification in 40 cities as well as civic mobilization to address physical and socio-cultural green displacement and create greater urban green equity.
Margarita Triguero-Mas
Dr. Margarita Triguero-Mas is Co-Coordinator of the urban environment, health and equity research area of BCNUEJ and member of the research group on healthy cities at UAB-ICTA-IMIM, where she also holds a Juan de la Cierva-Formación Fellowship. She is an environmental and public health scientist trained in urban planning, environmental epidemiology, environmental justice and mixed methods. Her research focuses mainly on (i) natural outdoor environments (but also on air pollution, transport and climate), (ii) gentrification, (iii) mental health, (iv) vulnerable populations. Before her current position, she was a researcher at Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
James JT Connolly
James JT Connolly is Co-Director of BCNUEJ and Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación Fellow at ICTA-UAB. He is a social scientist trained in urban planning and geography with specializations in spatial analysis and urban social-ecological conflicts. His research is supported by the US National Science Foundation, the European Research Council, the US National Social-Environmental Synthesis Center, and others. Before his current position, he was Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston and Resident Fellow at the Northeastern Humanities Center.
Panagiota Kotsila
Dr. Panagiota Kotsila is a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ. Her research examines the unequal distribution of risk, affecting livelihoods, health and well-being, and how the very concepts of risk, health and well-being are constructed, mobilised and interpreted through and for power. Her recent work critically studies different forms of urban greening/re-naturing and the way interventions inform (in)justice in cities. She is also a member of the WEGO EU network for feminist political ecology and the UAB PI on the WEGO project.
Galia Shokry
Galia Shokry is a doctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ. Her research focuses on how current approaches to urban climate risk and resilience relate to socio-political vulnerabilities to displacement and what practices to protect cities and livelihoods mean for equity, inclusion and wider structural transformation. She has an MSc from the Department of Sociology of the London School of Economics, a Master of Urban Studies and Planning from the Ecole d’Urbanisme de Paris.
Carmen Pérez Del Pulgar
Carmen Pérez del Pulgar is a doctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ. Her research focuses on the inclusiveness and environmental justice of urban spaces. She explores the political and social production of green-playful entanglements in cities and questions how conflicting discursive, affective and material registers of green and child friendly cities become populated, renegotiated and fragmented through everyday urban spaces by race, gender and class. She holds an MSc in Human Geography from the Universiteit van Amsterdam and a Bachelor in Political Science from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Melissa Garcia-Lamarca
Melissa Garcia-Lamarca is a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ. Her research seeks to untangle the structures and channels through which political economic processes generate urban inequalities, as well as how collective urban struggles can disrupt the inegalitarian status quo and open up new alternatives. A geographer by training, she is particularly concerned with issues related to housing injustice, as both a researcher and an activist.
Lucia Argüelles
Lucia Argüelles is an affiliated researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ. Her research focuses on how socio-environmental transformations interact with broader political and economic dynamics as well as how people imagine and perceive such relations. In her Ph.D. dissertation at ICTA-UAB, she studied the power and privilege dynamics entangled in the emergence and consolidation of the alternative food networks with case studies in Europe and US.
Julia Mangione
Julia Mangione is an affiliated researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ. She holds a dual MSc in International Cooperation in Urban Development from the Technische Universität Darmstadt and in International Cooperation in Sustainable Emergency Architecture from the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. Her research focuses on the impacts, opportunities, and challenges of social and spatial factors in cases of environmental racism and corresponding environmental justice movements in California.
Kaitlyn Dietz
Kaitlyn Dietz is an affiliated researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ and holds a dual MSc in International Cooperation in Urban Development from the Technische Universität Darmstadt and in Sustainable Emergency Architecture from the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya through the Mundus Urbano program. Previously, she completed a BSc in Architectural Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin with high honors. Her research focuses on a socio-spatial analysis of community mobilization around the right to housing.
Helen Cole
Dr. Helen Cole is a postdoctoral researcher at BCNUEJ, ICTA-UAB, and IMIM and Co-Coordinator of the urban environment, health and equity research area of BCNUEJ. Her research explores whether, and how, healthier cities may also be made equitable, placing urban health interventions in the context of the broader urban social and political environments. She holds a Doctorate in Public Health from the City University of New York Graduate Center/Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy and an MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
