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This paper considers recent pleas for a 'geography of gentrification', arguing that they have been very urban in focus and often enact what, following Soja (1996), might be described as `firstspace epistemology'. The paper identifies traces of other, secondspace and thirdspace geographies of gentrification. It is argued that these geographies may not be fully commensurable with each other but that they each may have some commensurability with rural as well as the urban spatialities. The paper goes on to explore these arguments in relation to studies of gentrification of the British countryside, focusing particularly on gentrification in rural Norfolk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of social mixing has recently moved to the forefront of gentrification debate. In part, this has been stimulated by neoliberal urban policies promoting 'social mix' research showing the inability of gentrified neighbourhoods to remain socially mixed and attempts to rethink the association between gentrification and displacement. This paper draws upon a mixed-methods study that examined levels of social mixing between gentrifying and incumbent communities in three neighbourhoods undergoing new-build gentrification in London, UK. Little evidence was found for substantial interactions between populations, and there were few shared perceptions of community. The author claims that the particular character of new-build gentrification has played an important role in generating this socially tectonic situation. Husserl's concept of the lifeworld and Bourdieu's thesis on the relative structuring of class identity are drawn upon to provide an explanatory framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that gentrification, despite the many arguments over its continuing validity as a concept, retains its key importance in understanding processes of class change. For some it is a process of colonising the city, for others a manifestation of belonging; for some the concept can be used as a radical critique of neoliberalism whilst for others this very critique is an exemplar of the hegemonising tendencies amongst (often radical) North American urban scholars. I argue that the concept has grown somewhat middle-aged and overendowed with its own history. I suggest that it needs to retain a focus on the implications of macro social change for individuals and social groups. In particular, gentrification needs to decouple itself from its original association with the deindustrialisation of metropolitan centres such as London and from its associations with working-class displacement. Recently, gentrification has occurred across the spatial scale—in second-order cities and in hitherto suburban locations as well as in the countryside. Processes such as 'greentrification', 'gated communities', and 'studentification' often coexist in quite close proximity to each other; the influence London exerts over the southern half of England is a good example of this. I argue that the concept of gentrification functions as an important way of understanding the mediations between global processes and flows, on the one hand, and the construction of identities in particular localities, on the other. With the decline of social class as providing an overall explanation of cultural, social, and spatial behaviour, this notion of gentrification as a form of 'elective belonging' has considerable potential for uniting geographical and sociological approaches to agency and structure. I illustrate this by drawing on three recent studies on the relationship between people and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore elements of the relationship between deployments of cultural capital and neighbourhood change. Based on research in a gentrified neighbourhood of Bristol, England, I argue that for gentrifier households with children the need to reproduce (institutional) cultural capital in the education market can conflict with the desire to display (objectified) cultural capital via the gentrification aesthetic in the inner-urban neighbourhood. In the trade-off between aesthetics and education, education wins, resulting in a much more conventional suburban, exurban housing/neighbourhood career for onward-moving gentrifiers. I conclude by suggesting a more diffuse, provincial form of gentrification in which the different strands of cultural capital can conflict in urban space (rather than the smooth reproduction of cultural capital assumed by the idea of a gentritication habitus). It confirms that the intergenerational reproduction of an (urban) new middle class is likely to be confined to large metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Barbican Estate, in London’s square-mile City financial district, is one of the capital’s most unique residential spaces. In the 1950s the City Corporation redeveloped the war-damaged site as a “high class” neighborhood even though the prevailing planning dogma was to usher the well-heeled out of the crowded center. To sanitize the inner-city site, the Barbican’s architects created a radically modernist residential precinct elevated above City streets. This social history examines the Barbican Estate as a unique intersection between modern architecture and the emerging discourse of gentrification in London. In creating spaces of comfort and exclusion, its architects drew from the same new middle-class culture that influenced the gentrification of existing London neighborhoods. The Estate’s eventual residents continued this interpretation and revision after the flats opened in 1968. The Barbican demonstrates the flexible nature of early gentrification and suggests how it must be approached as a diversified spatial phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the early period of "gentrification" of the inner residential districts of London, when the process was particularly rich in cultural meaning and symbolism. It focuses on the distinctive culture of the gentrifiers, including styles of house refurbishment, interior design, gastronomy, entertaining, networking, and amateur property speculation, and suggests that this culture allowed the middle-class incomers to make sense of their new life choices and social identities. The gentrifiers promoted an idea of the "urban village" that enabled them to be both part of the inner city and separate from it, close to its amenities but cut off from its social problems. As the process developed momentum from the late 1960s onward, they used their influence as cultural producers and opinion formers to comment on the process of gentrification in a way that combined self-promotion, satire, guilt, and exculpation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]