How to reduce the damage done by gentrification. We cannot let our cities descend into islands of privilege amid seas of disadvantage. With the right policies and investments, a better future is possible. Guardian Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 29 June 2023 Cities are now home to more than half of the global population, a share that will rise to two-thirds by 2050. That means the forces shaping life in cities now also shape our world as a whole. Cities throughout history have been the great incubators of human progress, through their power to bring us closer together – something we need now more than ever. Many of the answers to our greatest challenges are to be found in reforming our cities, but if we fail to take action, cities will magnify the perils that lie ahead. The populist politics of recent years has been tinged with resentment against global metropolises such as London and New York. These cities have boomed while others have struggled. But while the gulf between thriving cities and everywhere else has widened, so too has the disparity within these cities. Inequality has risen in most metropolitan areas in the US since 1980, but it has risen fastest in large, thriving cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago, where it is now much higher than the national average. Wages for high-skilled knowledge workers in these places have soared, but pay for the low-skilled service workers supporting them has languished, a gulf that is compounded by the rapidly rising cost of living in these cities.
These global metropolises have increasingly come to resemble ivory towers, with a highly concentrated core of prosperity served by a sprawling periphery of disadvantage. Urban centres have seen increasing employment, falling crime and significant improvements in the performance of public services. Warehouses and factories from Kings Cross in London to Brooklyn in New York have been converted into upmarket apartments for well-educated (and typically white) professionals. Former working-class housing has been renovated or redeveloped. Trendy cafes and bars have appeared, along with high-end fitness studios and organic food stores. Formerly affordable, working-class areas have seen significant gentrification. To be clear, the growth in the population size of inner cities has been modest compared to suburbanisation. In fact, a new ring of sprawl dubbed the “exurb” has emerged. What has changed is the socioeconomic makeup of the concentric circles of cities. Whereas once the well-off fled for suburbia, today in many cities they are heading back to the urban core, while poverty is increasingly moving out to the suburbs. The journalist Alan Ehrenhalt has aptly described this process as “the great inversion”. The increased attractiveness of many urban centres can be seen in the shifting profile of house prices within the concentric circles of cities. One study of the top 20 cities in the US over time found a major shift in recent decades in the relationship between house prices and distance from the city centre: while in 1980 house prices increased the further away a property was from the central business district, by 2010, that relationship had inverted. The premium on housing in urban centres has further increased since then: median home prices in the five inner boroughs of New York City increased at four times the rate of the rest of the metropolitan area between the start of 2010 and the start of 2020. The faster growth of suburban house prices during the pandemic has already tapered off, leaving the long-term picture largely unchanged.
What has led highly paid professionals to swap a freestanding house and garden in the suburbs for high-density living in urban centres? Multiple factors have been at work.For an emerging educated elite that blended the aesthetic of the counterculture with the economic advantages bestowed on them by the transition to a knowledge economy, the mark of success is not a double-garage home in the suburbs, but a home in an inner-city neighbourhood surrounded by creativity, culture and convenience. Indeed, the lifecycle of gentrification in recent decades has tended to follow a predictable pattern: first come the artists, then the real estate developers and then the professionals. This same story has played out everywhere from London’s Shoreditch to New York’s SoHo to Sydney’s Surry Hills. The great inversion has taken an immense toll on many of society’s most disadvantaged. As wealthy urbanites move in, the existing poor residents are pushed away. For those who happen to own their properties in gentrifying neighbourhoods, this process can create a windfall financial gain. Unfortunately, the most disadvantaged in these areas tend to be renters, who find themselves confronted with rapidly rising housing costs. While the effects of gentrification may be more muted in cases where the neighbourhood in question was once made up primarily of industrial and commercial real estate, the stock of such property has rapidly been exhausted in New York, Chicago and London. The result is a combination of increasingly concentrated disadvantage in a small number of inner-city neighbourhoods.....the Long Read....continue on https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/jun/29/how-to-reduce-the-damage-done-by-gentrification.......and then there's Vienna- explore the site......
Transformations are a common task......As the climate and innovation agency of the City of Vienna, we promote sustainable change processes in the city. We collaborate with partners from different sectors to shape the future of the city. Transformation is a process that can only take place through dialogue. At UIV Urban Innovation Vienna, we support the development of strategies, but also their implementation by supporting and coordinating steering structures, advisory committees and platforms. As Smart City Ambassadors, when supporting international delegations or on themed city walks, we make the transformation understandable and tangible.Public events are an important tool for bringing people together and opening up echo chambers. Whether solution-oriented workshops, inspiring discussions or conferences with impact: we regularly organize events for our customers both inside and outside the City of Vienna that enable encounters, promote exchange and inspire action....explore the website and check out solutions https://urbaninnovation.at/platforms-and-communities/
