From Toxic Wreck to Crunchy Chic: Environmental Gentrification through the Body

Abstract

This paper takes up the challenge o f extending and enhancing the literature on environm ental gentrification by considering bodies and embodied practices as significant dimensions o f this process. In considering the question o f how a polluted past can be mobilized as an asset for neighbourhood rebranding and gentrification, this research suggests that the conflation o f both pollution and 'health' with different kinds o f urban bodies and practices is an im portant strategy for solidifying a clean and green neighbourhood future. I argue that some bodies are constituted as 'dirty' by the symbolic and substantive displacement o f environmental pollution onto those bodies, in ways that allow the neighbourhood to redefine itself as clean (whether it is environmentally clean or not) once those bodies are displaced, contained, or made invisible. This perspective requires us to consider the radically coconstitutive character o f representations and materiality, bodies and cities, nature and social relations. Based on a case study of T oronto's Junction neighbourhood, this paper m aintains th at bringing bodies to the foreground attends to the power o f em bodim ent in producing and reproducing urban change and, critically, urban inequalities.

The gentrification of progressive red-light districts and new moral geographies: the case of Amsterdam and Zurich

“…We question why and how two of the most progressive cities (when it comes to past drug and sex-work policies) develop policies to make RLDs less visible and displace sex-workers and how these policies are legitimised. Certain bodies and embodied practices like sex work apparently cannot (or not easily) be mobilised as an asset for gentrification and are considered 'dirty' or not 'fit' (see also Kern 2015). Along the same lines, Hubbard (2016) shows how retail gentrification is a form of moral regulation because it promotes particular modes of consumption over others.…”

“…If we look more in detail at who, exactly, is targeted under urban regeneration in RLDs it becomes clear that illegal immigrants and drug-addicted sex-workers are the categories that has been displaced from most visible RLDs all over Europe (Kern 2015;Künkel 2012). And that the process of gentrification also coincides with greater criminalisation of migrant sex-workers in general (Andrijasevic 2004;Chimienti and Bugnion 2017).…”

“…In line with Smith (2000), we also engage with the literature on moral geographies and look into interactions and variations within morality, place and space to understand why sex work is located where it is. Feminist geographers have conceptualised the urban as an important social and spatial context, attaching cultural and political meaning to corporeal, material bodies and affirming that there is a relationship between bodies and cities (Kern 2015;Longhurst 2001). This literature also offers an interesting new perspective on gentrification and fits very well with the gentrification of RLDs in which sex-workers have been targeted for removal by urban renewal campaigns (see also Hubbard 2004;Papayanis 2000).…”

Time, space, and the authorisation of sex premises in London and Sydney

“…It is evident here that the recognition of sex premises as potentially legal land use relies on the use of certain vocabularies and procedures which produce particular 'facts' about commercial sex in the city: despite their obvious moral dimensions, these truths are ostensibly stripped of political resonance or moral sentiment given they appear to relate solely to environmental impact and the material consequences of sexual uses of space (Frisch, 2002;Kern, 2015). In this sense, while municipal law appears unconcerned with anatomo-politics and sex itself, the suggestion here is that it is fundamentally implicated in the making of social norms through regulation of what sexual behaviour is permitted where (Hubbard, 2015).…”

Informal Urban Green Space as Anti-Gentrification Strategy?

“…Recently, some researchers have observed that urban greening can trigger 'environmental-gentrification', further entrenching environmental inequalities (Checker 2011, Eckerd 2011, Kern 2015, Pearsall 2010). Environmental-gentrification occurs when the conversion of brownfields to greenspace, provision of new greenspace, or redevelopment of existing greenspace drives-up property values, because a location becomes more attractive to investors and/or more desirable for residents (Millington 2015, Quastel 2009).…”