Gentrification as the appropriation of therapeutic ‘diversity’: A model and case study of the multicultural amenity of contemporary urban renewal

Abstract

Scholarship on urban renewal readily recognises the conversion of ‘cultural diversity’ from a progressive ethic that once addressed ethnic/racial marginalisation into a trope that services early-stage gentrifiers. Through successive rearticulations of cultural diversity as a middle-class lifestyle amenity by various actors, this paper presents a model and case study of gentrification as an incremental act of cultural displacement of racial/ethnic ‘Otherness’ from the valued social ideal of the immediate post-Civil Rights era. Successive waves of new actors in the inner city can be conceptually linked by their reformulation of the amenity of cultural diversity so as to service their interests.

Keywords

displacement diversity ethnicity gentrification urban renewal

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