Gentrification and the Heterogeneous City: Finding a Role for Design

In cities where de-industrialization has left large segments of their populations in poverty,once thriving working class neighborhoods are increasingly threatened by rapidmarket-driven gentrification that transforms them in terms of race and economic class. Poorresidents are pressured to move by rising living cost, local cultures are erased and replacedby dominant cultural norms and urban space evolves towards a homogeneous formal language.Gentrification poses a threat to the realization of just and democratic urban life, alife in which a broad array of people have the “right to the city” which, as Lefebvre suggestsincludes the right to appropriation: access, use and pleasure that constitute a broader conceptualizationof ownership.1

Volume Editors
Robert Corser & Sharon Haar

ISBN
978-1-944214-03-6