Globalization and Gentrification on Local Shopping Streets: Regulation, Revitalization, Moral Ownership

• In Event: 417 - Regular Session. Urban Sociology: Perspectives on Urban Change

Abstract

No city can survive today without carefully considering the social costs of integrating the fabric of local streets into the broad transformations brought by globalization and gentrification. Local shopping streets face special risks, for small businesses and cultural communities that have formed historically significant agglomerations must contend with new technologies from online shopping to social media communication and dramatically rising rents. Moreover, targeted investments by both the public and private sectors, and public-private partnerships, promote strategies of “urban revitalization” that displace traditional, low-price stores, especially those owned by transnational migrants. The sense of belonging, or of “moral ownership,” that has been nurtured by the ecosystem of local shopping streets is in disarray.

Building on multi-sited research covering 12 local shopping streets in six cities around the world, we outline an analytic framework to understand how this archetype of urban space is socially produced. We describe a local shopping street as a social, economic, and cultural ecosystem that supports both a neighborhood habitat and a globalized habitus. We note how distinctions are made between high-status and low-status streets, how the presence of immigrant entrepreneurs has expanded from ethnic concentration to superdiverse diffusion, and how changes in the composition and ownership of retail stores cause feelings of loss in cultural communities. Finally, we describe how a global toolkit of revitalization strategies encourages or even imposes the ABC’s of gentrification—art galleries, boutiques, and cafés—on everyday shopping streets, in some cities, with the strong support of the local state.

Authors

• Sharon Zukin, City University of New York-Brooklyn College and Graduate Center

• Philip Kasinitz, City University of New York-Graduate Center

• Xiangming Chen, Trinity College