scholarly journals Of Yuppies and Housing: Gentrification, Social Restructuring, and the Urban Dream

1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
N Smith

The question of whether gentrification can and should be explained as the result of contemporary processes of social restructuring is considered. It has been proposed, in particular, that gentrification is caused by the rise of a ‘new middle class’, and this argument is evaluated in theoretical and empirical terms. There is, in fact, better evidence for the significance of women in the gentrification process, because of changing work patterns, changing patterns of reproduction, and the changing relationship between work and reproduction. In light of these arguments, issue is taken with the claim that gentrification is a ‘chaotic conception’ and it is suggested how, instead, the social restructuring that is currently being observed is closely related to an economic restructuring, and that both together involve a dramatic spatial restructuring of which ‘gentrification’ is one part. The new urban patterns now unfolding do involve the construction of ‘consumption landscapes’ in the city, and the emergence of an incipient ‘urban dream’ parallel to the suburban dream of the last decade, but this docs not imply that urban geographical change is now somehow demand led.

1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Eckersley

The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-class or new-class interests while the ‘new childhood’ argument claims that the development of the green movement is the result of the spread of post-material values, the main bearers of which are the new class. Against these arguments a more comprehensive explanation is presented, which focuses on the education of the new class and its relative structural autonomy from the production process.


TERRITORIO ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 88-94
Author(s):  
Luca Gaeta

The precise boundaries of the supply chain for the production of housing for the middle classes in Milan during the boom years are not clearly defined. And yet its activity is of crucial importance to an understanding of the social and tangible forms of the middle class city. Construction companies constituted the key link in relations between land owners, clients, architects and end users of the asset that is a home. This paper offers a provisional picture which documents the firms most active in the sector, the prevailing operating practices and two businessmen who were interviewed. The conclusions identify two lines for further research into the middle class city: the role of non-professional mediators in the property market and the high concentration of up-market new housing construction within the ‘cerchia dei bastioni' (inner part of the city).


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (88) ◽  
pp. 72-95
Author(s):  
Paulo Ricardo Zilio Abdala ◽  
Maria Ceci Misoczky

Abstract The argument of this essay is that the ideia of emergence of a new Brazilian middle class was a stratagem adopted to create a positive agenda with transitory social consensus. In order to develop it, we return to the social class theory to discuss the stratification theory, which is the methodological and theoretical support of the so called new middle class. In addition to that, another possibility of analysis is presented, based on the theoretical propositions by Alvaro Vieira Pinto and Ruy Mauro Marini, two authors from the Brazilian social thought, articulating consumption, social classes, work and production as inseparable relationships, part of dependent capitalism contradictions. From these authors´ perspective, it was possible to understand that the expansion of consumption, basis for the new middle class stratagem, temporarily improved the living conditions of people at the expense of deepening the overexploitation of labor, reproducing the development of dependency.


1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Abrahamson

This article discusses factors contributing to the rapid proliferation of restaurants in Sweden in the 1980s and to the current tension between restrictive legislation, legal praxis and public alcohol culture. Transformations in towns and in public life, the transition from modernity to post-modernity, the emergence of a new middle class and the redefinition of women's use of alcohol were among the important changes. Departures from the traditionally strict control of restaurants were made in the late '50s and in the early '60s. Competititon grew and Swedish restaurant culture loosened up. In the 1980s, the restrictive laws governing restaurants began to lose legitimacy. Legal praxis was applied in a more liberal spirit. The Stockholm Water Festival, which allowed central parts of the city to be transformed into a gigantic beer hall, is one example of this. As in many other countries, age limits have become almost the only actual restriction to the availability of alcohol. The aim of alcohol and especially restaurant policy today is on minimization of damage, not protection, as formerly.


PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-305
Author(s):  
Gisela Cánepa-Koch

In the 1970s many persons of andean origin migrated to Lima. Informally and through the mediation of emerging grassroots organizations, the nuevos limeños negotiated with the state for their right to residency in the city and to sanitation and other services. They struggled for recognition as citizens. Gradually an informal economy mainly based on Andean cultural practices of production gave way to entrepreneurship, which created a new middle class. In this way Andean migrants to Lima became urban workers and consumers and appropriated and transformed the city.


1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Schneck ◽  
Douglas Russell ◽  
Ken Scott

In discussion of the social structure of modern capitalist societies the distinction between the “old” and “new” middle class is common. The old middle class is epitomized by the small businessman and the new middle class by the bureaucratic manager and employee. It has been postulated that the political sentiments and attitudes are different among these two subsets of the middle class. Specifically, it is hypothesized that the old middle class in a mature industrial and capitalistic system is especially vulnerable to right-wing extremism. It is the purpose of this paper to report research testing the above general hypothesis by using three factors of explanation.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Emilio Spadola

The city of Fes, the once “bourgeois citadel” (J. Berque’s words) of Moroccoand once the world’s most populous city (1170-80), has in modernity beenunhappily bypassed for coastal trading hubs and global mega-cities. Materialand symbolic elements of Fassi power persist, however, and anthropologistRachel Newcomb’s finely researched and written ethnography identifies them in upper-middle-class women’s gender identity. In so doing, Women ofFes helps the fields of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and Islamicstudies to illuminate the often-neglected power of class to shape gender in theMuslim Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating, not pointedly, thatclass divides women within as much as across cultures.Newcomb’s book concerns women of, not merely in, Fes, namely, a classof women of “original” Fassi families navigating the social ruins and newopportunities of daily urban life. Its disparate topics – urban rumors, women’sNGOs, reforms of the Moroccan Muslim family code (mudawanah), flexiblekinship, public space, a dépassé lounge singer – shift the book’s centerfrom class to gender and public life. Her skillful identification of class issueswithin the latter, however, gives the book a necessary coherence ...


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-141
Author(s):  
Dries Goedertier

Vanaf de jaren 1880 was de Vlaamse beweging het toneel van een belangrijke politieke en ideologische vernieuwing. Het zogenaamde cultuurflamingantisme verruimde de politieke eisen van de Vlaamse beweging tot de sociale kwestie en het vraagstuk van de economische ontwikkeling. Het sluitstuk van deze analyse was de these dat de secundaire positie van het Nederlands en de sociale en economische achterstelling van Vlaanderen onlosmakelijk verbonden waren. Spilfiguur achter deze economische heroriëntatie van de Vlaamse beweging was de ingenieur, socioloog en econoom Lodewijk De Raet. In deze bijdrage wil ik de politieke vernieuwing die het cultuurflamingantisme vertegenwoordigde in de verf zetten aan de hand van een kritische dialoog met het belangrijke werk van Olivier Boehme. Waar hij De Raet in de eerste plaats ziet als een primordiale nationalist, beschouw ik hem als een intellectueel die het nationalisme omarmde in een context van kapitalistische versnelling. De Raet schreef in een periode van belangrijke sociaaleconomische transformaties die verklaren waarom hij zoveel belang is gaan hechten aan de ‘economie’. In zijn denken toonde hij zich bewust van mondialisering, de concentratie van kapitaal en de ontwikkeling van een nieuwe middenklasse. Ik argumenteer dat De Raet optrad als een organische intellectueel die aan een embryonale ‘Vlaamse leidende stand’ van kapitalisten en ingenieurs duidelijke richtlijnen meegaf. Zij moest het Vlaamse ‘stambewustzijn’ vergroten door zich in te zetten voor de economische, culturele en intellectuele ontwikkeling van Vlaamse middenstanders, boeren en arbeiders. Alleen een ‘Vlaamse Hogeschool’ in Gent zou volgens De Raet bij “machte zijn om de verschillende standen der maatschappij weer samen te brengen”.________Lodewijk de Raet: Primordial Nationalist or an Organic Intellctual of the New Middle Class?From the 1880s onwards, the Flemish Movement was the scene of an important political and ideological renewal. The so-called “cultural flamingantisme” broadened the political demands of the Flemish Movement toward the social question and the issue of economic development. The capstone of the this analysis was the thesis that the secondary position of Dutch and the social and economic backwardness of Flanders were intextricably linked. A key figure behind this economic reorientation of the Flemish Movement was the engineer, sociologist and economist Lodewijk de Raet. In this article, I want to highlight the political renewal represented by cultural flamingantisme by means of a critical dialogue with the important work of Olivier Boehme. Where he sees De Raet as a primordial nationalist first and foremost, I portray him as an intellectual who embraced nationalism in a context of capitalist acceleration. De Raet wrote during a period of important socioeconomic transformations, which explains why he placed so much importance on “economics”. In his thinking, he showed himself to be conscious of globalization, the concentration of capital and the development of a new middle class. I argue that De Raet acted as an organic intellectual who provided clear guidelines to the embryonic “Flemish leading estate” of capitalists and engineers. They had to expand the Flemish “ethnic consciousness” by devoting themselves to the economic, cultural and intellectual development of the Flemish middle class, farmers and laborers. According to De Raet, only a “Flemish University” in Ghent would be able “to bring the different classes of society back together again.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Jansson

While the ‘media city’ has gained academic attention for over a decade, the role of the media in urban gentrification processes has been an overlooked issue. Due to the rapid expansion of geomedia technologies, for example, app-based social media and location-based services on mobile platforms, there is a growing need to address this area from a critical perspective. The article develops and tries out an analytical framework for studying the mutual shaping of geomedia technologies and gentrification processes, using alternative tourism apps as its illustration. The middle-class biased appearance of such mobile apps is hypothesized as an articulation of a broader trend, through which geomedia recognizes and gains affordances that fit the ambitions of certain social groups and their spatial norms, preferences and practices. The framework comprises two steps: (1) a media-technological unpacking exercise inspired by affordance theory and (2) a critical consideration of how geomedia play into the distribution of spatial capital in the city. The first step outlines how representational, logistical and communicational affordances of alternative tourism apps represent the broader shift from mass media to geomedia. The second step discusses the social logics whereby alternative tourism apps are adapted to middle-class spatial interests, and thus to gentrification, and how geomedia technologies in general affect the ability of different groups to access, appropriate and define different places and neighbourhoods in the city.


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