On place and privilege: Varieties of affluence in cities and neighborhoods

Abstract

Affluent people have long used places, including residential areas and their associated commercial districts and public spaces, as markers of class status. In doing so, they have often sought places that are homogeneous in terms class, and often race/ethnicity, and sought to preserve elite enclaves through a variety of policies and practices. But as we detail here, affluent people are now drawn to different types of residential settings, and their presence influences these places in sometimes surprising ways. In this essay, we review both exclusionary forms of affluent placemaking and more complex and varied forms emerging in gentrifying and super-gentrifying places. There, the strategies that affluent residents use to create and preserve places have become more varied, as have the relationships between place and class status. These more nuanced understandings of class and place reflects scholars' heightened interest in the cultural dimensions of social class, intersections of race and class, and attention to the ways in which class and affluence reflect and influence the political context.