Why Is Gentrification Important

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Pages: 3

In today’s world, gentrification is a dirty word. Hearing the word can make just about an architect, designer and urban citizen cringe. A quick search for gentrification on Google brings up hundreds of articles about the attack of coffee shops, boutiques, and white upper-class college graduates on minority neighborhoods throughout the world, with a majority of occurrences in America and Europe. On the flip side, most any developer or government official would be more than willing to tell you ten reasons why gentrification is necessary, and often “good.” Redevelopment is often seen as the influx of wealthy, white individuals and families in an area, which leads to the unavoidable displacement of the lower-income residents. This in turns leads to a breakdown of culture and place. However, gentrification is so much more than …show more content…
Researchers, professors, and journalists don’t have an agreed upon definition. The terms in which a journalist might define gentrification will be much different from those used by a social researcher. One might believe that it is a “matter of forcing people to move,” or that it is the “transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value.” Another might believe it stems from developers while others believe it comes from government policy. The truth of the matter is neither is wrong. It is because if this fact that in this essay, gentrification should be understood as more of a concept than an action with a defined set of perimeters or definition. The allowance of this fluid all encompassing definition offers us the view of gentrification in its many different platforms and occurrences. Understanding the term this way also leads one to believe that the definition of gentrification can be shifted from negative connotations to positive connotations and has yet to be truly defined as it is still