Gentrification and Resistance: Researching Displacement Processes and Adaption Strategies

284 Pages·2018·13.4 MB·English

by  Ilse Helbrecht (eds.)

Ilse Helbrecht Editor
Gentrification
and Resistance
Researching Displacement
Processes and Adaption Strategies
Gentrification and Resistance
Ilse Helbrecht
Editor
Gentrification
and Resistance
Researching Displacement
Processes and Adaption Strategies
Editor
Ilse Helbrecht
Berlin, Germany
ISBN 978-3-658-20387-0 ISBN 978-3-658-20388-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20388-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960879
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© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018
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We dedicate this book to displaced people,
for their voices too often go unheard.
Acknowledgements
When it succeeds, the unity of teaching and research can be so rewarding! This
book speaks to the possibility of uniting the academic duty of lecturing and the
joy of research. I would like to thank the wonderful former students who ac-
companied me on the long journey from seminar to seminar to book publication.
Beginning in the summer semester of 2012, we explored gentrification and
displacement in a series of modules in the Masters program "Geography of
Urbanization" at the Humboldt University of Berlin. These seminars—in which
there was intense debate and collaboration in the classroom—led to the chapters
in this collection. During these classes I was, time and time again, deeply im-
pressed by the persistence and commitment of the students to work hard and
transform their project reports into publishable papers. This inspiring experience
will remain with me, and help me to continue searching for the synergies be-
tween research and teaching. A heartfelt thanks also goes to Matthias Bernt,
Daniel Förste, Andrej Holm, and Guido Schulz for enriching what was original-
ly a student project with their contributions. For the English edition of the book
I am very much indebted to a group of talented translators who were assembled
by Sandra Lustig. And last but not least: I am enormously grateful for the kind-
ness, prudence, reliability and all encompassing support of Francesca Weber-
Newth. She was so valuable in the production of this English edition, that it
simply would not have been possible without her. She is a postdoc in my won-
derful cultural and social geography department at the Humboldt University of
Berlin. I am grateful and humbled to have such gifted young scholars around
me.
Ilse Helbrecht
Contents
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................. vii
Ilse Helbrecht
Gentrification and Displacement .......................................................................... 1
Christian Döring and Klaus Ulbricht
Gentrification Hotspots and Displacement in Berlin
A Quantitative Analysis ....................................................................................... 9
Daniel Förste and Matthias Bernt
The Black Box of Displacement
Do People Remain in their Neighborhoods or Relocate to the Periphery? ......... 37
Simon Koch, Marrike Kortus, Stephanie Schramm and Christine Stegner
Where Do They Go? Where Do They Want to Go?
Displacement from Kreuzberg ............................................................................ 57
Greta Ertelt, Carlotta-Elena Schulz, Georg Thieme and Christiane Uhlig
The State-Made Rental Gap
Gentrification in Subsidized Rental Housing ...................................................... 91
Lisa Heidsieck
Kotti & Co:
New Forms of Displacement, New Forms of Protest ........................................ 131
Nelly Grotefendt, Malve Jacobsen, Tanja Kohlsdorf and Lina Wegener
Unemployment Benefit Recipients:
Causes, Reactions and Consequences of Housing Relocations ......................... 161
X Contents
Paul Neupert
Trailer Living:
A Displacement Phenomenon? ......................................................................... 189
Camilo Betancourt
Residential Biographies as an Instrument of Sociospatial
Displacement Analysis ...................................................................................... 227
Andrej Holm and Guido Schulz
GentriMap:
A Model for Measuring Gentrification and Displacement ................................ 251
Authors .............................................................................................................. 279
Gentrification and Displacement

Ilse Helbrecht

Gentrification, displacement, skyrocketing rents—aside from the ever-present
topic of refugees, no other issue in urban development in Germany has attracted
as much attention in recent years as this. Since the 2008 financial crisis—and
with the new-found, old love of investors for (residential) real estate as a
lucrative investment, real estate prices in many cities have been spiraling
upward, with many critics warning of the risk of a speculative bubble.
Accelerated by the ongoing trend toward metropolitanization and
reurbanization, the urban housing markets in conurbations such as Munich,
Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Leipzig are suffering from
intensifying competition. Debates on the problem are widespread throughout the
world, focusing on cities such as London, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and
Santiago de Chile (Smith 2002; Ley and Teo 2014; Lees et al. 2016). High-
income groups are displacing lower-income residents, especially from
neighborhoods in city centers. Against the backdrop of an income gap that is
widening in many Western countries and that has made social polarization a
tangible aspect of the everyday city life, good, inexpensive housing is not only
scarce in urban areas, but is fiercely fought over (Holm 2010).
For more than fifty years, urban researchers have been explaining the
underlying processes in pleasingly context-sensitive and theoretically nuanced
ways. Beginning with Ruth Glass (1964) and her seminal definition of
gentrification, researchers have produced a large number of empirical studies
and conceptual findings worldwide. However, despite all of this scholarly
insight and expertise, they have focused on only one side of this urban
revitalization process. For a long time in urban research, gentrification has been
competently examined solely from the perspective of renewal (see Helbrecht
1996; Ley 1996). A variety of questions have been posed and answered: Who
are the pioneers of gentrification? What factors make a neighborhood attractive
for the gentrifiers? Who arrives after them? What real estate conditions are
prerequisites (rent gaps, etc.)? What forms and phases of gentrification can be
observed? How does gentrification change a neighborhood’s commercial
structure ("commercial gentrification")? Common to all of these questions—and
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018
I. Helbrecht, Gentrification and Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20388-7_1
2 Ilse Helbrecht
also to the answers formulated by the international research community—is the
exclusive interest in the social, functional, and architectural renewal of urban
spaces. Whether from a sociological, geographical, ethnological, or urban
planning perspective, the field of urban studies has long been preoccupied with
explaining gentrification and thus with elucidating the root causes of its
processes, forms, and phenomena.
What is almost entirely overlooked are the consequences of gentrification for
the displaced population (Slater 2009; Atkinson et al. 2011; Butler et al. 2013).
Courageous pioneering attempts in the 1980s to shed light on the demographic
characteristics of the displaced people and the scope of displacement (Henig
1980; Gale 1985) attracted almost no followers—and thus had no impact. More
than 30 years ago, Peter Marcuse extensively defined and differentiated various
forms of displacement (Marcuse 1985, p. 204ff.), yet empirical studies and valid
findings in this field are a rarity today. As Tom Slater succinctly writes, "There
is next to nothing published on the experiences of non-gentrifying groups living
in the neighborhoods into which the much-researched cosmopolitan middle
classes are arriving en masse" (Slater 2006, p. 743). And just as we know little
about the people who have remained in their old neighborhoods, we know even
less about those who were forced out as a result of renewal and displacement.
The only recent study to look at the consequences of gentrification for the low-
status groups who remain in their neighborhoods was undertaken by the
Australian geographers Kate S. Shaw and Iris W. Hagemans. Using Melbourne
as a case study, the two researchers conclude that even in places where low-
status populations are able to remain in a gentrified neighborhood because of
public housing, they nevertheless suffer from a sense of alienation and
uprootedness due to gentrification pressures. In summary, the authors write:
"This research shows that secure housing is not sufficient to alleviate the
pressure of displacement on low-income residents in gentrifying areas. Although
these residents remain in place, the class remake produces a sense of loss of
place: of entitlement to be there and be catered for" (Shaw and Hagemans 2015,
p. 33).
Thus, as a displacement process, gentrification has grave consequences for
the people affected. However, we have far too little scholarly knowledge about
both extent and nature of these consequences. Urban research is a one-eyed
cyclops that operates with an enormous intellectual bias because it observes
only the upgrading aspect of the gentrification process while ignoring the aspect
of displacement. From a scholarly perspective, this is both untenable and has no
basis in reason. Furthermore, for urban policy, this (thematic) "displacement" of
displacement is just as tragic as it is consequential. After all, gentrification is by
no means a smooth, conflict-free process that we can observe only from a
scientific remove. Rather, it is a process of displacement, a process in which