I am currently writing a first draft of an article about a gentrified town in a recently turistified small city in South Portugal. This city had a quasi-abandoned historical zone, with a large number of ruined buildings and had never enacted a rehabilitation program. The inhabitants were mostly older people with little economic power.
New residents from northern and central Europe began purchasing old and historical buildings, restoring them and moving in. Some permanently, others as seasonal tourists and others yet in a multiple housing circular mobility pattern.
What I wasn't quite expecting was how much these new inhabitants wanted to protect the historical zone. They are fighting the tourism growth in the historical zone, the demolition of historical buildings and want to avoid at all costs that the original inhabitants of the neighbourhood get displaced in the process.
This case presented itself as a nexus of lifestyle mobilities, anti-tourism manifested mostly by new, foreign residents who were, at one point, tourists in that same city, and a gentrification process that is being fought by the gentrifiers themselves. Quite an unusual set of circumstances.
So I wanted to call upon the knowledge of all researchers who use Research Gate and kindly ask if you knew of any empirical studies about similar processes.
Thanks in advance!
Dear J. André Guerreiro, very interesting question. By analogy it recalls me Alain Bourdin's, french sociologist, L'Invention du Patrimoine, and some British works on localism (namely on social recomposition of localities and the discussion on communities, see Howard Newby's "classical" works and more recently Graham Crow's reviews and advances). Best wishes, João Pedro
Thanks, João! I'll definitely check those authors. I managed to find some interesting data about symbolic gentrification, the term Janoschka, Sequeira and Salinas (2014) used in their paper about gentrification caused by artists in Bilbao, Madrid and Barcelona. They reviewed several works about gentrification in such cities and compelled them by gentrification type, so its a great reference for empirical works about several different forms of gentrification.
I've decided to run for the Open Soc PhD program with João Filipe Marques as my advisor. I believe you know each other well, since you lectured in FEUAlg. I'm also applying for an FCT PhD scholarship, presenting a comparative study about the relationship between gentrification and anti-tourism social movements in three different sites: Algarve, Lisbon and Évora.
If you are interested in the subject, I would be happy to show you my project. I think your feedback would certainly help my chances!
Best regards,
André
Hi André,
well, there's quite a lot of work on so-called "pioneers" of gentrification (who are often considered to be individuals with relatively low economic capital and relatively high cultural and social capital) in North American cities and their role in organising resistance to further waves of gentrification and touristification. That's also what brought some authors (including Jorge Malheiros and his colleagues in a project that included Mouraria/Lisbon) to use the concept of "marginal gentrification".
But then one of the points is how you define a "gentrifier" in the first place - especially with regard to the demand vs supply explanations. If you focus on the demand side, then indeed "pioneers" are gentrifiers; but if you focus on the supply side (above all, rent gap theories developed by N Smith), then "gentrifiers" are investors, real estate corporations, you name it, who tend to enter neighbourhoods once they have been *revitalized* (much more than gentrified), and push gentrification.
Then, you may also want to distinguish among anti-gentrification movements that focus above all on housing (and displacement and social justice) and those that focus on "identity" (of course there are no stark divisions here).
At any rate, there are not studies on movements by early gentrifiers/pioneers in Portugal, to the best of my knowledge. Some of the colleagues in the project HOPES (https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/projeto/housing-perspectives-and-struggles-futures-housing-movements-policies-and-dynamics-lisbon) are working exactly on this (Guya Accornero, Alexandre Vaz), happy to make links (drop me an email if you wish).
Yes, Japonica Saracino-Brown's book lays out a nice typology supported by 4 case studies: 2 urban and 2 rural.
Saracino-Brown, J. 2009. A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.