Through an analysis of restaurant reviews, this paper examines the production and consumption of food, as well as ideas and symbols about food, within a gentrifying neighborhood, the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver. In particular, it analyzes how reviewers frame culinary "authenticity" and attach symbolic value to a low-income area of the city, while often acknowledging an emerging civil discourse that sees gentrification as a problem. I explain the tensions and contradictions in the orientations of newcomer restaurateurs and the food writers who report on their activities with a concept drawn from the sociology of culture, omnivorousness. It refers to a broad shift in the consumption patterns of high-status groups in Western society from highbrow snobbery, to an eclecticism of tastes drawing from all levels of the cultural hierarchy. The analysis shows how the populist impulses of "foodie" discourse and "social preservationism" come into conflict with the drive to achieve status and distinction through omnivorous consumption practices. Gentrifiers try to resolve this tension through "ethical entrepreneurialism" which fails to address ongoing structural inequality in the neighborhood.

No abstract

Drawing examples from the North American food cart movement and restaurant scenes in gentrifying neighborhoods, sociologists Amy Hanser and Zachary Hyde explore the role of food in transforming urban spaces.

The policy of density agreements, allowing extra density for condominium developers in exchange for affordable housing units, is seen as an example of the neoliberalization of urban governance in North American and European cities. The consensus of scholarship on urban neoliberalism has suggested this practice is indicative of the rise of the entrepreneurial, market-orientated local state. Through a study of urban development in Vancouver, British Columbia. I illustrate how exchanging density for affordable housing also operates on the basis of gift giving. In doing so I integrate Karl Polanyi's framework of substantivism, which highlights various forms of economic exchange including markets, redistribution, and reciprocity, into research on urban governance. Applying the principles of substantivism to the case of Vancouver, I argue that reciprocity obfuscates the negative effects of the privatization of affordable housing provision by making social welfare contingent on increasing profits for developers, concealing the role of political power in land-use decisions, and gentrifying low-income neighbourhoods. These findings hold implications for the study of urban politics, the neoliberalization of affordable housing, and urban-economic research more generally.

This chapter examines foodies and social enterprise restaurants in the low-income Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, and asks: What is the role of ethically progressive business owners in the dynamics of neighborhood change? Focusing on reflexive gentrifiers, newcomers who express awareness of their social position in low-income communities and counter the negative effects of their presence, I explore how newcomer restaurants to the Downtown Eastside promote cultural omnivorousness, serving high-brow food with a low-brow twist, and engage in “caring capitalist” business practices that integrate progressive objectives alongside profit-making. In the Downtown Eastside, however, these efforts are ultimately rejected by the low-income community, who interpret them as a way to deflect attention from the harmful effects of gentrification. I argue that social enterprise works to preempt resistance to gentrification by co-opting anti-gentrification activism while perpetuating symbolic and material power imbalances between old-timers and newcomers.