It's not Just a Question of Taste: Gentrification, the Neighbourhood, and Cultural Capital

Abstract

IntroductionFrom a range of perspectives there has been a long-standing interest in the connections between economic capital and neighbourhood, from the early work of the Chicago School on the impact of economic processes on the ecology of the city (Burgess, 1925) through Marxist explorations of the relationship between use and exchange value in neighbourhoods (Logan and Molotch, 1987), to a sustained research interest in contrasting landscapes of consumption (Jackson and Thrift, 1995). In addition to a concern with the effects of economic capital on neighbourhood there has been more recently an explosion of interest in social capital. Translated into a neighbourhood context this can be seen in terms of understanding the potentials of civic participation and social capital as important mechanisms in neighbourhood renewal (Putnam, 1994;2000) as well as a significant aspect of gentrification (Butler and Robson, 2001). The degree to which social capital is fostered at the neighbourhood level is of intense interest to policymakers. What has received much less attention in the literature are the links between neighbourhood and cultural capital. It is possible to argue, however, that it is the deployment and circulation of cultural capital that is the major force shaping the fates of neighbourhood in metropolitan areas today.The significance of the links between cultural capital and neighbourhood trajectories have been implicit in the gentrification literature for some time now. For instance, there seems to be a mutually reinforcing relationship between the deployment of cultural capital in certain urban neighbourhoods, and the enhancement of social capital and economic capital for the new middle-class gentrifiers in the process. The stage model of gentrification suggests a sequence from high to low investments of cultural capital and low to high investments of economic capital as gentrification proceeds. The high cultural capital of groups such as artists can act as a catalyst for neighbourhood transition. The fate of former manufacturing lofts in lower Manhattan, occupied by artists and then marketed for the new middle professional class is a case in point of the critical efficacy of first cultural and then economic capital in neighbourhood change (Zukin, 1982;1995). Ley ( 2003) also points to the significance of artists

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