Suchergebnisse

Book reviewed in this article:Davis, Mike 1990: City of quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles.Sennett, Richard 1990: The conscience of the eye: the design and social life of cities.Wilson, Elizabeth 1991: The sphinx in the city: urban life, the control of disorder, and women.

The recent proliferation of new market-based consumer goods and experiences, and the high visibility of such consumption-biased spatial complexes as `gentrification' and `Disney World', call attention to the real, rather than the symbolic, role of cultural capital in contemporary service economies. Cultural capital is linked, on the one hand, with the circulation of financial capital in investment and production. It is related, on the other hand, to new demands more affluent consumers make of the consumption process ( e.g., demands for authenticity and security), and a changing nature of consumer products. These observations suggest a new organization of consumption, most marked at the high end of the market, that has to be examined in terms of spatial embeddedness, which locates consumption in space and localizes specific features of a service economy; the social creation of new relations between cultural producers and consumers, especially a relation of mediation; and the role of new consumer products and practices in instituting circuits of cultural capital that articulate with more traditional economic circuits. Gentrification and Disney World are described in terms of these three concepts, suggesting their role as socio-spatial prototypes of a new organization of consumption.

Gentrification, the conversion of socially marginal and working-class areas of the central city to middle-class residential use, reflects a movement, that began in the 1960s, of private-market investment capital into downtown districts of major urban centers. Related to a shift in corporate investment and a corresponding expansion of the urban service economy, gentrification was seen more immediately in architectural restoration of deteriorating housing and the clustering of new cultural amenities in the urban core. Research on gentrification initially concentrated on documenting its extent, tracing it as a process of neighborhood change, and speculating on its consequences for reversing trends of suburbanization and inner-city decline. But a cumulation of 10 years of research findings suggests, instead, that it results in a geographical reshuffling, among neighborhoods and metropolitan areas, of professional, managerial, and technical employees who work in corporate, government, and business services. Having verified the extent of the phenomenon, empirical research on gentrification has reached a stalemate. Theoretically interesting problems concern the use of historic preservation to constitute a new urban middle class, gentrification and displacement, the economic rationality of the gentrifier's behavior, and the economic restructuring of the central city in which gentrification plays a part. Broadening the analytic framework beyond demographic factors and neoclassical land use theory is problematic because of serious conceptual and methodological disagreements among neo-Marxist, neo-Weberian, and mainstream analysts. Yet efforts to understand gentrification benefit from the use of economic paradigms by considering such issues as production, consumption, and social reproduction of the urban middle class, as well as the factors that create a supply of gentrifiable housing and demand for it on the part of potential gentrifiers. An emerging synthesis in the field integrates economic and cultural analysis. The mutual validation and valorization of urban art and real estate markets indicates the importance of the cultural constitution of the higher social strata in an advanced service economy. It also underlines how space and time are used in the social and material constitution of an urban middle class.