Leslie Kern: Resisting gentrification.

Defining Urban Gentrification

0:00Hello. One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes, upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages, two rooms up and two down, have been taken over when their leases have expired and have become elegant, expensive residences. Once this process of gentrification starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed. The invasion has since spread. That's Ruth Glass naming the phenomenon in her 1964 introduction to London, Aspects of Change.

0:35Gentrification, with its sardonic echo of the landed gentry, in Glass's telling implied that what is presented as urban improvement is, in fact, a reassertion of class hierarchy in spatial form. In recent years, perhaps, things have moved on, away from what might be seen as an evolutionary, Darwinian process of cultural and economic enrichment, where artists and bohemians and thinkers and web designers happen upon hidden gems and find space for their creative praxis. The market makes it. The government, which serves it, spreads its taxes to make it more likely to occur.

1:08In this episode of the AS4 Architecture podcast, I spoke to scholar, activist, author and feminist totem Leslie Kern about Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, which she published with Verso in 2022. In our conversation, we speak broadly about her work and approach, some themes from the book, and how resistance is not just necessary, but possible too.

1:29If you want to support the AS4 Architecture podcast beyond listening to and sharing it, you can do so by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via BuyMeACoffee.

1:39A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Background in Feminist Geography

1:46Hello, and welcome to another episode of the AS4 Architecture podcast. I'm talking today to Leslie Kern. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Now, I wrote to you because I wanted to talk to you about your most recent book. I think it's your most recent book. You could please correct me. Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, which you published with Verso. I think in 2022, the edition with Verso came out. That's correct. I do have one more recent book about how to survive academia called Higher

2:18Expectations. But in terms of my city-focused books, yes, Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies is the most recent one there. I did see the one on academia, and I thought that was incredibly timely because it's, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but kind of hard in Britain at the moment. But yeah, we're going to be talking about gentrification and Other Lies. And I really want to understand its lineage and its relationship, I think, to your two previous books. And hopefully we'll get to that. But before we get to that, Leslie, who are you? Sure. Well, as you've said, I'm the author of several books about cities. For about 15 years,

2:54I was a professor of urban geography and women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, a small liberal arts college on the East Coast here. And yeah, I have a PhD in women's and gender studies, and kind of accidentally became a geographer along the way. So I think we'll get into that as we talk more. Yeah, for sure. So your background is not in architecture, planning, town planning, urban design, anything like that? Not at all. No, zero qualifications in that respect. But I found that geography,

3:32perhaps one of the most wide open disciplines that exists in academia. And it was a really great place from which to explore some of these questions of power that I was interested in all along. Was your PhD aligned to kind of urban sociology and the ideas of power within urban realm? Is that where your interest was first peaked in this area? My interest was first peaked actually during my

4:02master's, which was in a program called Social Justice and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. And I took a really cool course called Race, Space and Citizenship with Dr. Shireen Razak, who is a scholar around race and education in particular. And that was the first time that I'd been exposed to the idea that space and place are also not just the containers for social relations,

4:33but actually play kind of an active role in shaping society, shaping how we relate to one another, shaping inequalities. And that perspective was really, you know, kind of mind blowing, really exciting for me. So I then, you know, discovered that there was this whole subdiscipline called feminist geography that looked in particular at a gender and space and place and kind of launched me from there.

5:03It's going to sound a bit annoying, but I think for some listeners, certainly for me, space and place probably need a little bit of definition in terms of the way that you're talking about. So how are you using these terms? Yeah, well, not to put too fine a point on it. Sometimes geographers do make a distinction between space and place. Space being a kind of more wide open, abstract term that, you know, just encompasses the world around us, the kind of, I don't know, the fabric of space, if you will, that we move

5:36through. But place is perhaps more relevant here. Place is the term that we use to basically describe when space takes on meaning, when spaces actually start to have an identity. So a neighbourhood, for example, is a place. A neighbourhood has meaning. It has symbolic identity. It has a kind of material role in shaping people's lives. People identify with their

6:07neighbourhood. People care about their neighbourhood, perhaps, in different ways. And so in that way, the sort of abstract space of, say, I don't know, 12 square blocks in an urban environment actually then becomes a place with an identity with meaning attached to it. And why is it important that we understand this notion of place from the perspective that you're coming from, this kind of feminist geography? What is significant about it?

6:41Well, perhaps in the most broadest sense, what's significant about it is recognising that as human beings, we really need place. We really care about place. And place is a really significant part of forming who we are, how we understand our place in the world, how we understand and make sense of who we are, both as individuals and as members of society, perhaps even as members of a global community. And we can understand this when we think about what happens when we lose a sense of place,

7:15right? And that might be because we have been forcibly dislocated from where we live. This, of course, happens all over the world every day in terms of war and conflicts and refugee situations. It happens perhaps on a less dramatic level in our everyday lives when maybe, you know, the landlord decides to sell the house that we're renting and suddenly you need to move. And that might mean a change of neighbourhood, maybe even a change of city, and suddenly you're kind of

7:46uprooted from that community. So when we think about what happens when we are disconnected from place, or when a place that we really care about gets demolished or changed beyond recognition, we start to recognise that, oh yeah, place really matters to people. And in a more, somewhat more specific sense, in terms of how it matters, thinking as a feminist geographer, the way I would think about it would be, you know, places are not neutral, right, in terms of those

8:20meanings and identities. And we might live in the same neighbourhood, but we could experience it in different ways. So for example, if someone is from a marginalised racial group that is not the majority in that neighbourhood, they might experience, you know, unwanted attention, or perhaps discrimination in that place. As a woman walking down the street at night, I might experience that neighbourhood as potentially a site of harassment or danger. So understanding place doesn't mean, you know, giving it a sort of

8:54static, static, unified identity, but it means thinking about it as a kind of dynamic set of meanings and identities that will be different for different people. That's really very useful background. And I think for architects, we have this concept at the moment about placemaking. I don't know if this is a global phenomenon, but it's certainly something that seems to exist within urban planning at the moment, this notion of placemaking. And it seems to me to be a response to a sense of

9:24placelessness that pervaded high modernist, mid-century modernist kind of ubiquitous, universalised housing. It seems interesting to me that alongside the emergence of place as a necessary response to the abstraction of modernity, you also then immediately have the interrogation of what this means and the identification of the power dynamics within that, which is kind of fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is one of the challenges of placemaking is that, you know, you can kind of do

9:57everything right, if you will, from a design perspective, right to being, you know, whatever kind of seems to be the in vogue way of thinking about places at the moment. And it still might not be a place that works for everybody. And there's a lot of reasons why that could happen. Maybe some people simply weren't consulted or involved in the, you know, design decision making process. Maybe people who use that space have decided to use it in a completely different way from what the placemakers thought it would be. And therefore, it has ended up being, you know,

10:33more welcoming to some than others. Maybe the actual physical infrastructure of the place, you know, decays or falls apart faster than it should have. You know, maybe the surrounding context changes and, you know, this lovely, I don't know, park or pedestrianized zone becomes less enjoyable because, oh, the city's now decided to open up to increase, I don't know, the speed of traffic on an adjoining road or something like that, right?

11:08So it's, I think there's always that tension in placemaking of how much you want to try to control the outcomes through good design, with recognizing that human beings are, you know, unpredictable

Tracing the Path to Urban Scholarship

11:21in what we might actually make of those places. Yeah, I guess the reason that I'm asking this is as a way of foregrounding talking about your book. Because, of course, things like placemaking have been utilized or leveraged, maybe well-intentioned ideas like placemaking seem to me to have been leveraged towards gentrification, gentrifying goals. I guess to come back to where this book came from, I would be really interested in finding out how you got to here from your previous work, Sex and the

11:53Revitalized City and Feminist City. How did you get to this point? Was this a natural progression in your scholarship? It feels that way to me. So after my undergraduate education in the mid to late 90s, I actually moved to London in the UK for about a year and a half. I had family there and, you know, wanted to do a little, have a little break, a little post-university gap year, I guess we could

12:24call it. And when I returned to Toronto, my hometown in the year 2000, I had a baby at that point. I should mention that. That's significant. And I'm, you know, trying to push the pram through the city streets and I'm finding I'm having to do a kind of slalom course around all of these sandwich boards, these advertising signs that are all over the sidewalks. And what are they advertising? New condominiums, new apartment buildings going up all over the city that are promising, you know, the new pinnacle of

13:00modern living and kind of refreshed urban experience, a revitalized urban experience, if you will. And I really had no idea what this was all about. All I noticed was that it was getting hard to move around the city because of all the construction and the skyline, the familiar skyline of my city was now littered with cranes, construction cranes all over the place. And, you know, this was kind of in the back of my mind. And when I started my PhD, I was working with Dr. Gerda Wecker-Lee, who was an urban

13:31sociologist, actually. And she had done research back in the 1960s on apartment living in an area of Chicago called the Carl Sandburg Apartments. And we were talking about this condo phenomenon happening in Toronto. And she was like, you know, it would be really interesting to look at, you know, what is what is going on here? Right. What is the context for this? How is the market suddenly opened up in this way? And what does this mean? And alongside that, from a feminist perspective, it was interesting because the newspapers, there were all these like op-eds talking about

14:05condos as like a form of liberation for women, because for the first time really in history, women were able to become homeowners as single women, right, not as married women. So this was kind of this sociological phenomenon that was happening in that moment. But of course, as a feminist scholar, whenever somebody says, oh, this is liberation for women, you kind of have to go like, is it? You kind of have to, you want to interrogate that a little bit. So yeah, exactly.

14:37And for who, maybe which women might be finding this liberating. So those things kind of coming together sparked a PhD project that eventually became Sex in the Revitalized City. But when I started it, I did not know what gentrification was. That was not, at that time, that wasn't a word that had entered the kind of more mainstream talk about cities and urban change. It was certainly an academic term. Planners knew it, didn't want to say it out loud, but they knew about it. But it wasn't something that

15:11you would hear kind of everyday people talking about. So I started to learn about what that was and whether, you know, this phenomenon of condo construction sweeping the city was a kind of gentrification, which I did come to the conclusion that it was. And yeah, so that kind of led me to, I guess, explore this, this nexus, if you will, of gender, urban development, gentrification that, yeah, has been an ongoing thread, if you will, in my work.

15:47Yeah, I think this is very interesting. And I did want to understand better whether that intersectionality that you bring to this, this idea that gender, race, so on and so forth, as they overlap with gentrification, or as they are impacted and impact back, gentrification processes is distinct to your work. I mean, it's very difficult to think to say, isn't it? And it would be a massive claim to make. But is this the contribution? Is this where you've taken this, this discourse, which started back in what, the 60s with Ruth Glass? I mean,

16:19it's been going on a long time.

Intersectionality and Class Dynamics

16:21Yeah, I do think it's a contribution of my work, although I would certainly not claim that it is a sole contribution. It certainly builds on other feminist work on gender and gentrification, that a lot of it actually coming out of the UK in the 90s, and maybe even a little bit before that. But yeah, I mean, I really wanted to help, you know, through, through, you know, different sets of case studies, like condo development in Toronto, try to drive home the point that impacts on women,

16:56impacts on racial minority groups, of gentrification were not kind of like side effects of a class-based process, but that they were also really key forces in shaping that process. Because if we go back to, you know, the Ruth Glass definition from, I think, 1964, and her book Aspects of Change, where she was writing about Islington in London, and she, you know, identified this process of

17:26middle-class or kind of aspirationally middle-class people. She called it households tiptoeing in to a neighbourhood, and over time having this kind of gradual process of change that would lead to displacement of working-class inhabitants. And, you know, that definition, and I don't necessarily quibble with that definition, but over time, as we could call them sort of neo-Marxist political economy scholars took up gentrification studies, class has really always

18:01been like the central analytic, the central focus of the inequalities. And indeed, it's right there in the word gentry, right? The gentry coming in and taking over. And I think it's key that we have that political element of the definition. But I also, and again, not the only person to argue this, would say that other factors, including gender, race, sexuality, age, and disability, to name a few, are also contributing to the process in ways that are not just kind of like incidental or accidental.

18:38I think that's really interesting. I remember giving a talk in Glasgow, it was kind of comic talk about gentrification. And I made that exact point about gentry. And that gentrification wasn't really occurring through sort of, I don't know, periwigged men on giant horses coming clip-clopping through the neighbourhood, but was actually the product of a much more horizontal process that had been very cleverly articulated across a number of socioeconomic sectors of society, which I thought, and possibly it's because I'd read your work by that point. So just repeating without citation,

19:12my apologies. But I, yeah, I'm kind of interested in this idea that you seem to be extending or in a way distributing the responsibility for gentrification and therefore the blame in a way for gentrification across a broader sector. Is that, is that how I'm supposed to read this? I mean, blame is a hard word, isn't it? Blame is a hard word. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, we're talking about, you know, if you're talking about like a long standing, you know, historical force such as racism or white supremacy, right? I mean, we don't,

19:49you know, it's not easy to sort of assign a particular blame to any, you know, individuals or even a small group of individuals, right? It's something that is literally like baked into the fabric of society. And so it's really not surprising that other processes that are have to do with or create inequality, such as gentrification are also going to be picking up on racial inequalities or gender inequalities, because these things are so deeply rooted in just about every system, every

20:24institution, every, even into our interpersonal relationships, right? They're so embedded in society that even, you know, those of us who would probably describe ourselves as anti-racist or anti-sexist, like we're still socialized into this milieu. And we, especially if you are a white person or a man, you know, you benefit from the privileges that come from those things. So I don't know if it's so much about like redistributing blame, if you will, but maybe more about, yeah, understanding that all of

21:00those forces of oppression, you know, they work together, they're not kind of running in parallel to one another, but they are so interlaced with one another that you can't, for example, you know, separate capitalism from sexism, from white supremacy. They're, they kind of arise together, they work together, they articulate together, and they continue to impact our lives in these intersecting ways. And as a consequence of that, the resolution of gentrification as a problem,

21:36and let's take gentrification as a problem, because I know there's plenty of people who argue that it's wonderful. But gentrification as a problem, the resolution becomes difficult because of that intersectionality, because there's so many moving parts, because there's so many forces pulling in various directions. And I was quite interested in this idea, because the book deals with this through these seven different chapters, right? So you kind of present these moving parts in this way. And for me, that helped unpack that complexity. It's not enough to deal with simply the socioeconomic thing. If we dealt with the socioeconomic thing, we'd still have these other forces that were pushing for the

22:10same ultimate goals. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that, with that last statement, absolutely, that even if somehow we solved the class inequality, if we had not also solved sexism, racism, ableism, and so on, then we would still have, be seeing impacts, even, you know, within housing as one, you know, particular subsector of society, I think we would still be seeing inequality happening there, and certain groups excluded, or pushed out of places where they live. But yeah, I mean, in terms of, you know, okay, does this mean

22:48that now we've just made gentrification into an even more horribly complex problem that it's even more difficult to solve? That's one way of looking at it. But I think we could also look at it as, okay, now we can also see there's like a whole bunch of other ways to perhaps tackle it, right, to kind of like, attack this monster, if you will, if again, if we take it to, if we understand it to be a problematic thing, that we have a lot of other angles, and there's a lot more room, perhaps for solidarity across different causes, right, across different movements, across different interest

23:23groups, that, you know, it's not just like a working class problem, for example, right, it's a society-wide problem. And so, in that sense, maybe then we can leverage that as a way to say, okay, this is something that affects lots of different people. It's not just about whether you can pay rent or own a home, but it's about a lot of different things. So, you know, now there's perhaps more justification to, you know, embark on some anti-gentrification strategies. Well, I'd like to know what they are. In the town that I live in, and as I said in my notes to you,

23:56I live in probably the epicentre of British hipsterdom and gentrification, a town called Margate, on the southeast coast of England, about 70 miles from London. And it should be gentrified, insofar as it's really lovely, and it's been very run down for a very long time. But it's quite interesting to watch it as a process, actually to be part of that process, in a way. I mean, interesting is a funny way of putting it, but it is sort of fascinating to find oneself at the vanguard of a process one has sort of decried, and sort of by accident, because of the, again,

24:28as you say, these kind of forces. But one of the things that happened in the town, as far as I know, was a move to limit the amount of Airbnbs, as this was seen as being an instrument, platform capitalism being seen as an instrument of gentrification. And I believe the local council elected not to do that, voted not to do that. Instead, it's sort of allowing, not putting up a limit on the number of Airbnbs, which has this very strange deforming effect on housing and on actually on the occupation of the town itself. So during the winter, it becomes extremely quiet, because no

25:00one's renting Airbnbs during the winter, because the weather's horrible. So it's been kind of interesting to see that, that even had they put that cap on Airbnbs, it probably wouldn't have changed much about the ongoing outcome, that it's not just platform capitalism, and as you say, class distinctions, but there's all of these other things. We've kind of used the word

Power and Profit in Place

25:20gentrification a lot. I think it would be really good to have your working definition. Sure. So for me, I understand gentrification as being about power, the power to come into a space and to, in some ways, take that space over and remake it in your own image. And when I say your, I don't just mean as an individual, perhaps, you know, homeowner or someone who's moved into a town like you described, but especially today, when we're talking about, you know, who's moving

25:53in and taking over, we might be talking about transnational corporations, we might be talking about real estate investment trusts, we might be talking about speculative investors. In fact, we are talking about all of those things in addition to, you know, the everyday hipster who might be moving to market or not. But in any case, it's to me, it's about having that power to take and remake space, right, to change it in some way for your own benefit, and usually with a profit motive

26:24attached to that. So for your own benefit could mean a lot of different things. But I think it, you know, in most cases, it means creating some vehicle from which to extract wealth and value from from that place. So place kind of becoming a commodity, in this sense. And, you know, something that is, yeah, to be taken over. And, you know, I would still go back to Ruth Glass, who very carefully made sure that displacement was part of her original definition of the term. And, you know, I would not

26:59want to lose sight of that as well, that this kind of takeover and remake of space tends to result in various kinds of displacement, sometimes physical displacement of people moving out, but also that kind of symbolic loss of a sense of place, a sense of identity and sense of belonging. That's a really good and challenging way to think about it. Thank you for that. There's these two kind of ways, as I've understood it, there's these two kind of ways that gentrification is generally spoken about, which is this, one, is this organic process. And you talk about this in chapter two,

27:33gentrification is natural, that it's this kind of organic process that often enough creative people, artists, move into a rundown place, probably an area characterized by ethnically marginalized populations or economically marginalized populations, or generally speaking, both. And artists move in, and then following that, there's this kind of slow escalation towards cultural capital, which then leads to investment by neoliberal capitalists. And lo and behold, you have your first cafe selling

28:05baba ganoush and flat whites, soy lattes, and I don't know, other things like that. And then there's the other thing, the other way of thinking about it, which is that it's an instrumentalized or an imposed process from above that masquerades as a kind of organic process. So you'll get the large art gallery in an old industrial building, which will be then used to kind of generate cultural capital, to draw in the soy macchiato drinkers. And then from that, you will get a kind of reverse generation. But these are not sufficient, are they, for the way that you're thinking about

28:37gentrification?

Disputing the Organic Process

28:38Yeah, not entirely. I mean, I definitely dispute the whole gentrification is natural approach to things. Because I think even when we look at neighborhoods where the process that you described a moment ago, artists moving in and so on, when we look at neighborhoods where we can kind of see that that trajectory happened. And there's some, you know, right here, you know, near where where I live in Toronto, the area of Yorkville, which was a kind of a hippie enclave in the 60s. And is now like that, that's where if you want Louis Vuitton, that's, that's where you're going to go

29:10and shop, right? So a massive transformation over that time period. But even in those cases, it's not happening without any kind of, let's say, a higher up direction of some sort. So for example, to, if artists are living in like old industrial loft spaces, and so on, well, for them not to become, you know, condominiums, for example, zoning decisions have to be made about, you know, the way that that

29:41space can be used. You know, all sorts of kind of policy and planning choices are being made at different levels that are either facilitating the process to continue or slowing it down or hindering it or directing it in a different kind of way, right? So even in the organic process, it's not that it's devoid of any sort of agency on the part of more powerful actors in the city, right? And even investors who might buy that industrial building and decide to turn those funky, unheated lofts into,

30:17you know, trendy, hipster living spaces, right? So, you know, we can still look for the agents, you can still take that political economy perspective, even in that case. But then, yeah, I mean, the kind of more critical perspective on gentrification, you know, wants to take that step back and see all the ways in which policy, financial instruments, government decisions,

30:47planning, design, all of those things, you know, shape and direct the process. And of course, we even have very much, you know, state-led gentrification that's occurred in many places. And I guess for me, certainly I fall within the, you know, that kind of critical political economy perspective. But as we were talking about earlier, I want to make sure that we don't then only, you know, continue to focus on kind of class, class relations, class distinctions as the only

31:18forces that are within that. And as such, your critique becomes much more about addressing gentrification as a form of colonialism, essentially, where colonialism wasn't one simple thing of a military power taking other people's resources and there being a kind of singular dynamic, but as sort of post-colonial literature and now literature around decolonization kind of demonstrates was a deeply complex web of

31:53actors at different scales producing and motivated by different agendas, kind of producing a tide rather than a kind of single thread that's pulling through this thing, rather it's a sort of atmosphere. And I thought that that was really interesting. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit to that idea of how you see this kind of colonialist idea manifesting. Yeah. Well, let me just say, first of all, that I, I myself, I would, I would not actually say that

32:26gentrification is a kind of colonization or colonialism, just because, especially as someone who lives now in a settler colonial context, colonialism, the old kind, is still very much present and alive here. It's still the context in which, you know, my, my country, you know, exists, right? And so I don't want to, you know, by saying, oh, gentrification is a kind of colonialism, I think sometimes that can end up taking away from or distracting us from the fact that colonialism itself, settler colonialism,

33:00is very much alive and real. And sometimes when we use colonization as a metaphor, right, for talking about other processes, we can end up, you know, yeah, losing sight of the fact that colonization exists today. And I would, I would say, and I think I do try to articulate this in the book, although it's, it's not an easy thing to, like, to lay out there, is that colonization and gentrification, especially in places like the country that I live in, they're operating together,

33:32right? One is not something that ended in the past and the other something that is happening now that bears similarities to it. They kind of operate together in that our urban spaces are still spaces where Indigenous people are being, you know, dispossessed of and displaced from their lands. But, okay, having said that is my kind of caveat or my, you know, kind of like picking that apart a little bit, you know, certainly a lot of literature on gentrification did try to, you know, point to

34:08those similarities in the processes of, of kind of, you know, taking, taking over land or place,

34:19displacing the inhabitants that were there, and then using everything that those inhabitants had built previously to kind of extract wealth and profit from that place, and then to remake it, you know, for the benefit of others coming in. So in that sense, gentrification definitely bears some of those similarities to colonization. And I think as you were getting at, you know, again, colonization is not, not one, not, not a singular kind of process in that it, it also makes use of other forms of power

35:01relations like gender, for example, to kind of accomplish its, its aims. So in that sense, you know, I think we have to, like, both recognize those similarities and also, you know, always be, be careful of how we're using the language there. For sure. I stand corrected. However, I think it's kind of, I think it's kind of interesting, because in chapter three, which is gentrification is about taste, you talk about the way that gentrification is presented as something to do with the delivery

35:32in a salvific way, I think, of better values, particularly aesthetic taste values. And, and to me, that seems to have very strong parallels with some of the 19th century kind of discourse around the other, the newly encountered peoples from different parts of the world who sort of needed, needed the saving virtues of bourgeois Western taste. But at the same time, also, and, and I, again, to go back to where I

36:09live, you see also the, the, the fetishization of the, quote, unquote, indigenous taste culture, where it becomes leveraged and utilized as a mark of authenticity. I mean, it's, it's essentially a culturally appropriative process. And I think, particularly in the town that I live in, I've been writing a paper with a colleague for, for bloody years, actually, about this idea that actually, it

36:41becomes a new form of capital, that the embracing of the aesthetic culture that you're replacing is a new form of currency, is that you don't want to erase it all, you don't want to turn it all into soy latte shops, you don't want to turn it all into, you know, Louis Vuitton, you still want a bit of that kind of that grit and squalor. Yes, absolutely. And, and where, so, so yeah, I totally agree that, you know, and I think I, in the book, I write about a neighborhood where I lived in Toronto for a long time called The Junction, which was formerly a very

37:13industrial neighborhood, you know, train tracks running through it, very working class, certain, you know, kind of ethnic minority groups living there. And as the neighborhood gentrified, you kind of saw this, like, romanticization of the railroad and the stockyards, for example, like, in terms of the imagery of the neighborhood, the murals on the walls, those kinds of things. But what's interesting is that, you know, we want that, that authenticity, we want that grit, we want that, like, say, like, the greasy diner experience, or the, that the taste of the ethnic food of the

37:51group who live there, but we don't want the people, right, that's where the problem is, you, you want the, the, those cultural markers of authenticity, but without the people who actually, you know, created that culture or lived that culture, whether it's, you know, working class folks, like in, in the junction, people who worked in the stockyards and meat factories and on the railroads, like, no, you don't want the poor working class immigrant communities anymore, but you want the romanticized idea of a railroad, right? So that's

38:25the, kind of, the rub there, right? How has scholarship, particularly academic scholarship, and

The Creative Class and Policy

38:31to use an appalling phrase, thought leadership, been sort of leveraged in this process? And I'm thinking here, of course, of the great rich in Florida and culture and the creative classes. Has there been a body of knowledge that has sort of well, I mean, very clearly, there's been a body of scholarship that has worked to construct a kind of logic for this process? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, again, kind of going back to, you know, thinking about a post

39:02industrial transformation of cities, you know, particularly, you know, global north cities, kind of moving away from the 1960s onwards, away from production and manufacturing as their kind of sole economic base. But there's kind of a time lag there, right? In terms of, okay, well, what, what do cities then draw on? How do they attract people if you don't have big jobs and big factories, right? Like, how to, who, who, who is the new city dweller, right? Well, what is the attraction of

39:35urban life? Or what are the ways in which cities kind of regain their tax base? And so one of the things that certainly gained, you know, started out as an academic idea and kind of gained this wide, almost worldwide policy, like, trendiness, if you will, was this idea that came from Richard Florida of the creative class. And it was simply, you know, in its most, you know, innocent, if you will, version, just just like, okay, well, if you don't have an industrial base to cities anymore,

40:08what you need is a knowledge economy base, a creative economy base, this is, these are the jobs of the future, right? People are not working in factories as much, some people still are in the global north, of course, but, you know, many people are go on now to post-secondary education, they want knowledge economy jobs, they're not working with their hands, they're working with their minds, right? Whether that's in a more like professional or data driven sense, or whether that's in a more creative and artistic sense. And so these people are going to be the new tax base for your city. So you got to come up with ways to keep them interested, keep, you know, attract them

40:43to the city, and they don't want the city of old, right? They want, or not exactly, maybe they want elements of it, but they want interesting things to do, they want green spaces, they want bike lanes, they want coffee shops, they want public space, they want interesting cultural experiences, they want diversity. And none of this is like bad on its face, right? Like, these are all things that many people value about cities, people of all classes and backgrounds. But what it kind of became,

41:16and, you know, we don't even, you know, have to, you know, assign blame for this, but what it's kind of uptake then became a way of like, okay, so we got to kind of revitalize cities in this way. And it doesn't matter what kind of neighborhoods or spaces we kind of destroy along the way, we're going to, you know, pursue this creative class agenda wholeheartedly. And it kind of became this mask for, for a lot of gentrification, gentrification centric policies and planning

41:49decisions. For sure. When I lived up in Scotland, before I came down here, I gave a talk in Dundee, a city in central North Scotland, where they had just built a Victorian Albert Museum, Dundee, by the great Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma. Dundee's wonderful city on an estuary, and had a really great heritage of industry and journalism and comic making and various other things. And marmalade, which makes it a very important city indeed, for the British. But they'd built this thing for,

42:24and it says online, it says it cost 80 million quid. And my argument in the talk was that if they had spent 80 million quid on existing community arts, the impact of that could have been absolutely transformational. And so I wonder whether the kind of the Floridian approach has preferenced or pressed the button on everybody going for the Bilbao effect. Everybody goes for the Bilbao effect. Except for one city, I heard that Montreal did it differently, and that they did this thing of

42:56distributing essentially the same quantities of money in a much more granular and distributed way. Are there examples of cities who haven't approached the problematic of the post-industrial urban center in innovative, non-neoliberal, non-gentrifying ways? Can you think of any? Because it's really tempting, isn't it? Because it's a simple solution. Get a stock architect, build a squiggly shaped box. Yes. Bingo. Yeah. I mean, I think you're absolutely right that the kind of chasing the Bilbao effect was

43:27quite a global phenomenon for many years through the 90s, 2000s, even into the 2010s. To some extent, I do think there's been a bit of a kind of a slowdown on that. I mean, we've had, you know, serious global economic, you know, slowdowns within those time periods and a kind of realization that, yeah, tourism and competition between cities is not necessarily going to be the savior of a kind of urban economic base that, you know, it was this kind of seemed to be in that

44:03moment. And so, you know, there, there perhaps is some more thought to other ways to like, yeah, accomplish those same ends. But I don't know that they have necessarily been better in terms of redistributing resources. It's, it's perhaps even more of a concentration on like the real estate market, for example, as the, as the savior, if you will, of, of urban economics. Yeah. And that has the effect of sort of even more deeply embedding

44:38this non-quantifiable characteristic of gentrification that you've spoken of.

Amorphous Everyday Displacement

44:46In chapter six, you, you, you sort of argue against this. Gentrification is about physical displacement. And then when, when people talk about gentrification as a kind of process of invader species, so to speak, taking over from the people that were there before. And that's most clearly seen in something like the big museum, taking over old sites and, you know, and then, and then the hipster artists taking over the, the buildings that the working classes used to get sort of tortured for no, for virtually no wages in, but have now become deeply desirable residences,

45:21which is really cool. But actually that's a rather simplistic, again, rather simplistic way of thinking about it. And actually this, this displacement is much more, it's much more amorphous. It's, it's much more, as you sort of propose, multi-layered that encompasses a sort of everyday social displacement, including sensory displacement, including the articulation of instruments of state power to control populations that are being occupied and including, strangely

45:52enough, things like environmental displacement as well. So that the kind of the way that environmental goods are redirected, as I see it in two, two ways, one public resources, public ecological goods are directed towards this incoming group of people, but also that the existing ecological goods are suddenly ramped up in terms of their quality to meet this charming new taste guided gentrifier. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's worth, you know, paying attention to all the, all the

46:23ways in which we can kind of be displaced, right? So if we kind of pull that word a little apart and think about, you know, what being placed means, it doesn't just mean being, you know, physically in, in a place or having a certain four walls around you, but it means being like embedded in a community, in a web of relations, in a set of networks that are economic, cultural, social, you know, emotional, um, familial, all of these kinds of things, right? It's, it's, it's not just about having, you know, a physical location. And when key

46:58elements of the places around us change, even if we are still physically in our same apartment or home, uh, we can start to feel that loss of place when we don't see the same people on the street anymore, when people don't greet us in our own language anymore, when the sights and smells change, when, uh, you walk into a sandwich shop. I think I quoted one article where an older gentleman was interviewed and he was like, maybe, he's like, maybe I don't want a panini. Maybe I

47:29don't know what a panini is, right? And, and that was, you know, not someone who had been physically displaced from his neighborhood, but just going out to, to the high street and trying to grab a bite of lunch had become like an alienating experience for him, right? So, so thinking about displacement in that way, I think also, uh, matters because it's not always possible to say, well, okay, this new development happened. And so then, you know, 1500 people moved out of the area. Like it doesn't typically happen that way, but people can be pushed out in all sorts of, um, different, different ways

48:05that are kind of no less, uh, significant. And, and, and over time, you know, I think we, what we do see is that those, you know, original inhabitant populations kind of are lost, maybe not because they've been directly evicted or kicked out, but because, um, so for example, I cite a study in, in Harlem where a lot of older seniors, they're black, uh, seniors, they own their homes. They're not being kicked out, but they know that their children and grandchildren will never be able to afford to live in Harlem because of the gentrification. And that's like a kind of an intergenerational loss of,

48:40of that space, a kind of intergenerational displacement, if you will. Um, yeah. So I think there's a lot of different ways we can look at, at displacement and recognize the, the impacts that it has on people. I'm kind of interested. And I think this follows that, um, that narrative,

Metaphors and Material Effects

48:57this idea of gentrification, not being a metaphor or gentrification is a metaphor. And this is one of the ways that folk talk about it. What do you mean by that? Is this again, this idea of displacement that, that we, we sort of try and think about gentrification in metaphorical terms, but actually those metaphors are kind of covers for material changes to environment. Yeah. Yeah. So when gentrification kind of became a more widely used word in the sort of everyday cultural lexicon,

49:31you'd hear people using it to describe pretty much anything that had like kind of been upscaled, that had gone from kind of alternative or working class or counter-cultural, uh, that had become kind of mainstream, more expensive, more trendy, you would say, oh, that thing's been gentrified. Like, uh, tattoos have been gentrified, right? I mean, in my parents' generation, right? Having a tattoo, you were a criminal, you were a biker, you were an outcast, right? But for our generation, tattoos certainly have been gentrified. And I mean, if you've ever got one, you know, they're very expensive

50:03too, right? So, um, but, uh, yeah. So what does that have to do with, with actual gentrification? Well, something, I think I talk in the book about a couple of examples of, um, like yoga and even veganism as things that once were quite, again, counter-cultural, marginal, not mainstream, even looked down upon as kind of weird and, and out there, that as they became more mainstream, um, you started to see a kind of emplacement of those things. So yoga studio opening in a

50:38neighborhood could be as much a sign of gentrification as a Starbucks opening in that neighborhood. Um, and vegan restaurants popping up could also be a sign that gentrification is there or is, is on its way. So even a neighborhood in Toronto, uh, Parkdale, that was, you know, a very low income, um, kind of psychiatric ghetto, if you will, uh, for, for people who had been deinstitutionalized in the 1960s and 70s, um, immigrant neighborhood as well, uh, a whole

51:12concentration of vegan restaurants opened in this neighborhood. It became known as Vegandale. And this was like part of the, the overall gentrification of, of Parkdale. So yeah, gentrification can be a metaphor. We can use it to talk about, you know, anything culturally that has kind of had a glow up, I guess, if we didn't use the youthful language, but it can have the, end up having those material effects, right? When those glowed up things, whether it's a fancy coffee or an avocado toast

51:42or whatever, suddenly are in your high street and the cost of getting a cup of coffee or of, you know, going out for the day or whatever, um, starts to climb. Um, and then the overall, you know, perceived value of the neighborhood starts to climb with it. Then we start to see those knock-on effects. Rent gets more expensive. Groceries are more expensive. Um, home ownership is more expensive. And so then we get, you know, the real non-metaphorical gentrification, uh, starting

52:14to take root. And it's funny that in that context, these massive international corporations like McDonald's become in fact, and KFC and stuff like that, Tesco's or whatever it is in your own countries, they actually become the resistance in a peculiar kind of way, because you can get a coffee and a sausage roll for two pounds at Greg's, which by the way, you might not know what Greg's is, but I do, I do. It's a marvel. I'm not sponsored by Greg's. I wish I was. Um, but actually it becomes

52:48the site of resistance. It's where the working class and the poor go. And also, you know, actually hungry people versus, you know, the boutique eatery with sourdough fennel sandwiches or whatever it is. Yes. I mean, in, well, it's just an interesting intersection, isn't it? That neoliberalism then suddenly becomes the kind of the point of resistance. Well, and sometimes then even, you know, the Starbucks might become the, like the kind of the local cafe in a sense, right. In that it, um, has like a predictable set of offerings and you know what you're going to get when you go in. It's

53:22not something that is like so new and trendy that it's alienating to people. And yes, it's not that it's cheap, but it's prices are perhaps like more accessible than a kind of independently run, uh, cafe. So even though, you know, many of us, I think would say like, oh, I prefer to go to the local cafe than the Starbucks. Uh, there is that certain irony that the Starbucks might be like more affordable in a more comfortable place for, um, you know, certain people in the neighborhood than that kind

Financialization and Future Resistance

53:51of, yeah, hipstery or trendy new place that's opened. You've used the word solidarity. And I really like this because this in, I recorded a podcast two ago. So the one before the one that just came out with Hilda Heinen and Lucia Perez Moreno, and they use this word solidarity as well. And this, that again was a, was an episode about the sort of Hilda's, um, feminist scholarship. So I'm kind of interested in this word and its relationship to feminist thinking. And I'm interested in it

54:27specifically in relation to this idea of gentrification. What is the future of gentrification and what is the future of the resistance to it? And does it have something to do with this idea of solidarity? Well, the, the future of gentrification, I mean, the future that is, that is already here and that many people are just sort of, um, perhaps waking up to and realizing is something that I alluded to earlier in terms of the role of, you know, multinational corporations, real estate investment, trusts, pension funds, um, speculative investment in

55:00terms of, um, controlling housing, right? The financialization of housing, housing as an asset class, right? This is the kind of frontier, if you will, of, of gentrification where, you know, we are definitely not talking, um, about middle-class homeowners tiptoeing into working class neighborhoods, although that can still happen. What we're talking about is, you know, real estate investment trusts or collectives of investors, you know, buying up huge swaths of real estate, homes, apartment buildings, and so on. And, um, I don't know, turning them over to private equity,

55:35right? Like all of these kinds of, um, financial instruments happening to take control of housing and to kind of, uh, almost de-link housing from people who live there, right? To kind of create almost this total separation where, um, housing is like an investment vehicle for, for the people who, who own it and control it. And the people who live there are almost like inconveniences in a way, right? Uh, and, and we're seeing this happen all over the world, although there is, you know, some, some pushback against it in, in certain places. So then when we think about, okay, solidarity

56:11and the, what is the future of resistance to gentrification? I mean, I think part of it is, yeah, breaking out of these old kind of simplistic, um, narratives of, oh, it's, it's the hipsters that are coming and, and, you know, taking over and, and they're the problem. Like, okay, sure, maybe some of them, but most of them are not in and of themselves. Um, the directors of real estate investment trusts, right? Uh, they're not billionaires. Um, maybe there's some hipster billionaires, I don't know, but you know, your average, like yoga teacher is not, not a billionaire. Um,

56:46so, you know, directing our attention to where the, where the real power and where the real money, uh, is and, and solidarity then I think comes in because we, we can recognize that like, this is reshaping housing, uh, not just for those who are like at the bottom of the market, the most vulnerable, but it's like reshaping housing and what it means for all of us, right? Nobody's really kind of safe from this. Um, and, you know, if we want to kind of reclaim housing as a human right, as something that we're all entitled to, as something that is,

57:23you know, a common good, a collective good, that's key to the survival and the thriving of, of our societies, um, then, you know, we can perhaps come together and recognize it's not a single, uh, single stream issue, right? That it is, uh, much broader than that. And the way, you know, housing goes is also, you know, very germane and material to how other sectors of the economy go and work or, or not work or not function. Um, and, and yeah, taking that, that broader

57:56view of it. Fantastic. That's a good point to finish on. Thank you so very much, Leslie. It was a real privilege to hear you talk. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Great questions.

58:06How is it me? Asked Howard. Do you know what it says? Asked Barbara. It says you're a radical poseur. It tells how you've substituted trends for morals and commitments. You've not read it properly, said Howard. It's a committed book, a political book. But what are you committed to? Asked Barbara. Do you remember how you used to say maturity all the time and it never meant anything? Now it's liberation and emancipation, but it doesn't mean any more than the other thing because there's nothing in you that really feels or trusts. No character. You're jealous, said Howard. I did something interesting and you're jealous because I didn't even tell you.

58:39No character, said Barbara again, sitting in his chair. That's from Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man. That's it, isn't it? Thank you to Leslie for speaking with me and to Sam Kelly at Verso for all the backstage stuff. See the podcast description for links to the book, to Leslie online, and to Money Methods for backing this podcast. And thanks for listening.