Urban Revival: Good for the Neighbours or the Neighbourhood?

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Gentrification

Abstract

Due to the disproportionate attention for middle class preferences for urban revival, many scientists and grassroots organizations start from the implicit assumption that lower SES inhabitants of reviving neighbourhoods are opposed to the changes their neighbourhood undergoes. However, the scarce research investigating this assumption finds opposing results. In order to test this assumption further, the association between living in reviving neighbourhoods and wanting to move is investigated. Urban revival brings new inhabitants and (often) new amities to the neighbourhood. These changes are assumed to be associated with moving propensities through their association with residential satisfaction and stress, i.e. the fulfilment of residential aspirations and needs. Logistic multilevel analyses are performed on data coming from the Liveability Monitor conducted by the city council of Ghent, a middle sized city in Belgium. The results indicate that lower SES respondents living in reviving neighbourhoods are neither more nor less likely to express moving propensities than their socio-economic peers living in other deprived neighbourhoods. Middle class (i.e. higher educated) inhabitants, on the contrary, express higher moving intentions in reviving neighbourhoods than in deprived neighbourhoods. Both findings oppose the (implicit) assumptions many scholars have and indicate that the responses to urban revival are much more complex than often accounted for in other research.

Authors

• Ad Coenen, Ghent University

• Bart Van de Putte, Ghent University