Gentrification has become a central pillar of urban policy in cities around the world. Proponents often frame it as a necessity plus the sole alternative to neighbourhood decline. Critics call this a ‘false choice’ as it ignores other possibilities for improvement without gentrification. But how do working-class residents who live through the process of gentrification view the impact it has on their neighbourhood? Do they see it in such a stark binary way? This article addresses these questions by using qualitative interviews with long-term residents of the Afrikaanderwijk, a multicultural neighbourhood in Rotterdam where municipally-led gentrification is taking place. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon literature on experiencing gentrification, our respondents had far more mixed, complex plus ambivalent perspectives on the process. To some extent, this was due to the neighbourhood’s recent history as a stigmatised ‘ghetto’ plus the expectation that the arrival of white, ethnically Dutch middle-class people would help to improve the neighbourhood, which was ranked worst in the country in 2000. We also stress the role of local context, such as the early phase of gentrification plus the comparatively strong social housing sector plus tenant protection laws in the Netherlands, in contributing towards a more nuanced experience of gentrification.
Introduction
Gentrification is one of the biggest forces shaping cities plus neighbourhoods plus a central strategy for the neoliberal remaking of urban space (Kallin plus Slater, 2014; Paton, 2014; Smith, 2002). In many policy plus political circles, gentrification is heralded as the saviour of cities plus is framed as both necessary plus as the opposite of neighbourhood decay (see Davidson, 2014; Duany, 2001; Rotterdam Municipality, 2007, 2016). Critical scholars have described this as a ‘false choice’ binary where gentrification has:
left residents of low-income neighbourhoods in a situation where, since they exert little control over either investment capital or their homes, they are facing the ‘choices’ of either continued disinvestment plus decline in the quality of the homes they live in, or reinvestment that results in their displacement. (DeFilippis, 2004: 89, as quoted in Slater, 2014a: 518)
Dominant discourses in gentrification research tend to also be polarised plus support the idea of ‘winners’ plus ‘losers’. Empirical studies reinforce this by focusing either on the gentrifiers themselves (e.g. Boterman, 2012; Butler, 2003) or those displaced or under threat of displacement (e.g. Atkinson, 2015; Huisman, 2014; Kern, 2016; Sakizlioğlu, 2014). Perspectives from those who live through gentrification have, until relatively recently, been less engaged with.