Aesthetics of Gentrification

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city.

In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

Lindner Christoph :

Christoph Lindner is Professor of Urban Studies and Dean of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London.Sandoval Gerard :

Gerard F. Sandoval is an Associate Professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy and Management at the University of Oregon.

"Aesthetics concerns in urban design often belong to one of two camps. In the first camp, urban aesthetics is reduced to an endorsement of traditional architectural styles and human-scale urban types. [...] In the second camp, urban aesthetics is regarded as a superficial concern, based on opposition between aesthetics and function, between surface and structure. [...]Aesthetics of Gentrification, edited by Christoph Lindner and Gerald F. Sandoval, is a vital source of urban designers who do not belong in either of the two camps and recognize that both approaches end up solidifying existing socio-economic arrangements and racialized imbalances of power. [...] Aesthetics of Gentrification contributes to a different, to a radical understanding of urban aesthetics. In thirteen substantive chapters, a range of superb scholars examine relationships between aesthetics and gentrification from global and transnational perspectives."
- Günter Gassner, Journal of Urban Design (2022)

"The book brilliantly demonstrates that a focus on aesthetics should be at the core of our understanding of gentrification and displacement forces."
- Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA

"In this powerful collection of essays, editors Christoph Lindner and Gerard Sandoval identify the seduction of gentrification's aesthetics, its power to exclude, and the activism that can change its course."
- Karen Chapple, Professor of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley

"From the visual politics of street art in Paris, through the location and design of office parks in California, to the gendered spaces created by CCTV cameras in India, this fascinating collection of essays travels through some of the newest spaces and practices of gentrification."
- Alison Young, Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology, University of Melbourne

"The Aesthetics of Gentrification offers genuinely fresh thinking on a pervasive urban phenomenon, bringing together a diverse and distinctive collection of scholarly voices that push us to think differently about the representation, politics, strategies, and silences of contemporary urban change."
- David Madden, Co-Director of the Cities Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science