Reproducing race in the gentrifying city: A critical analysis of race in gentrification scholarship

ABSTRACT

While the term gentrification in an American context often incorporates racial turnover, the role of race in gentrification remains undertheorized. Employing a critical race lens, this study explores the historical relationship between race and gentrification in academic studies. I conduct a systematic review and a discourse analysis of 331 empirical studies of gentrification from 1970–2019. Findings show that although studies frequently employ racial categories, they do so in imprecise ways, subsuming race under class. Race-based theory is rare; race is primarily used as a variable of measure to examine conflict-oriented outcomes, such as displacement. This creates oppositional and homogenizing racialized typologies of “poor minority incumbents” and “wealthy White newcomers,” which remain steady despite an increasingly complex urban landscape. I argue that this limits our ability to understand how race, class, and power operate in space and underscores the need for a more clearly defined role of race within gentrification that focuses on positionality and power in lieu of a groupist emphasis on antagonistic racial categorization.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Gary Green, Myra Marx Ferree, Katrina Quisumbing King, Casey Stockstill, and the Race and Ethnicity section at UW–Madison for their assistance with this project.

Notes

1. Racialization occurs at multiple social levels. At the macro level it occurs through structurally enforced, sanctioned, or monitored division. Census categories, for example, define the spectrum of racial categories and which individuals belong in these categories (Bailey et al., 2013; Burawoy, 2003; Hirschman et al., 2000). Racial designations have then been used to (re)produce inequality explicitly (such as voting rights [Klarman, 2004], housing access [Glaeser & Vigdor, 2012; Massey & Denton, 1993], labor [Bonacich, 1972; Lieberson, 1980; Wilson, 2007], and education [Myrdal, 1944]) and implicitly (examples include welfare and criminal justice policies target racialized groups). At the micro level, individuals perceive and categorize individuals based on socially significant cues and indicators gleaned through interaction (Glenn, 1999; Green, 2011) and tie treatment and perception to those cues.

2. The definition of race has been used inconsistently over time and across geographic and cultural contexts. Within the United States, for example, federally recorded Census categories have shifted almost every decade for the last 100 years, responding to political pressures and popular perceptions. Assignment into these categories has changed from enumerator assignment to self-selection in the 1960s and likewise shifted from single response to multiple response in the early 2000s (Hirschman et al., 2000; Nagel, 1995). Similarly, individual self-identification can change over an individual life span (Saperstein & Penner, 2012). As such, these concepts are not strictly defined but are malleable and unstable—as both the macrocategories change and assignment into them shifts.

3. Many review articles and meta-analyses have compared definitions, finding they vary in inclusion and emphasis on infrastructural upgrading, the influx of a culturally or economically distinct population, a shift in neighborhood identity, increases in market values, changes in ownership, and local population turnover, among other definitional components (see Atkinson, 2000; Redfern, 2003).

4. Focusing on causes, supply-side arguments posited that change was driven by uneven development, capital accumulation, and rent gaps that benefited capital expansion in disinvested regions (Smith, 1979). Demand-side arguments focused on changes in the workforce, family, and economic power that shifted preferences to urban spaces, leading to a repopulation of disinvested regions (Butler & Hamnett, 1994; Zukin, 1987). Similarly, studies of gentrification’s consequences—revanchist and emancipatory positions—debated the implications and outcomes of the process using class and culture. Revanchist arguments characterized cities as contested sites of material and symbolic power in which market forces enabled upper-class newcomers to exert economic and cultural dominance (Slater, 2004; Smith, 1996). The emancipatory approach argued that gentrification allowed multiple classes to co-exist, reversing disinvestment and segregation (Lees, 2008; Slater, 2004).

5. I contacted a set of content-specific e-mail lists and planning forums, requesting unpublished studies of gentrification, neighborhood effects, and the ghetto. The combination yielded more than 3,000 unique documents, reasonably representing a comprehensive sample of studies on these topics developed between 1970 and 2013.

6. Given the constructivist nature of this exploration, I suggest that it is theoretically appropriate to exclude cross-national studies in this examination. The construction of race varies by nation such that comparing race in U.S. studies and other nations would not provide insight into the same historical contexts, e.g., the difference between American and French designations (Blum & Guérin-Pace, 2008).

7. Citation numbers for this study were provided by Web of Knowledge. While citation numbers are not a perfect indication of influence, they provide a degree of insight into articles most frequently referred to by other scholars focusing on gentrification.

8. To ensure a consistent measure of race across analyses within this study, I compared the “race” concepts from Analysis I with the coding scheme from Analysis II to ensure consistency between both race-based coding schemes.

9. During analysis, multiple word-length tests were conducted including ~3, ~4, ~5, ~8, and ~10. Analyzing each return, ~3 provided very few associations once scrubbed for stop words, while ~10 provided few strong associations. Word-length tests ~5 and ~8 provided similar results, and I chose ~5 for ease of analysis.

10. Scholars define displacement in various ways; Valli (2016), for example, discusses emotional, psychological, and affective displacement that affects the phenomenological experience of place. Others focus on spatial displacement; Marcuse (1985), for example, defines four different types of displacement, including direct last-resident, direct chain, exclusionary, and pressure. The role of displacement in gentrification and the appropriate definition of displacement are both topics of debate within the field (Redfern, 2003; Vigdor et al., 2002). For this study, I quantify displacement by relying on the author’s use of the term or variable. I do not distinguish between types of displacement but argue that these all entail some form of removal or exclusionary behavior that is enacted upon a specific population.

11. Brubaker (2004) argues that groups and categories are not the same; groups are a specific set of mutually interacting, mutually recognizing, mutually orienting, and bounded collective with a sense of solidarity, identity, and capacity for action. Categories, by contrast, are imposed by outsiders and do not necessarily lead to groupness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine F. Fallon

Katherine F. Fallon is the Director of Housing Policy at the Ohio Housing Finance Agency. She focuses on the intersection of housing, race, and inequality. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and received her undergraduate degree in Public Policy at Princeton University.