Welcome to Main Street: Selling the Work and Worth of an Urban Neighborhood

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Consumption and the City

Abstract

Many urban studies scholars have readily addressed the imagery and discourse of consumption that often occurs alongside commercial gentrification. Building off of this work, others have drawn attention to shifts in both production and consumption that have changed the dynamics of the urban economy, calling into question the future of the urban neighborhoods where city dwellers live and work. One way cities have restructured their neighborhoods is the Main Streets initiative, a national organization that partners with communities through local commercial districts to transform neighborhoods by bringing in diverse new business, from coffee shops and restaurants to drug store chains. Boston, the home to the first urban Main Streets program, draws attention to the great variation among these revitalizing neighborhood zones, both as residents experience them and as they are represented in the media. These differences necessarily beg the question “ how are Main Streets changing the work and worth of urban neighborhoods?” In light of these dynamics, I ask, “what is communicated to urban dwellers and visitors about the meaning of shopping on Main Street districts?” I conduct an analysis of print media from the Boston Globe and the Jamaica Plain Gazette, in Main Street districts of two neighborhoods in different stages of gentrification— Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain. Preliminary findings indicate that new meanings of consumption accompany new understandings of employment and urban growth. These meanings are not evenly distributed but are heavily determined by neighborhood demographics and histories that in turn shape how local business is defined.

Author

• Taylor Cain, Boston University