Suchergebnisse

AbstractSchlichtman and Patch suggest that there is an elephant sitting in the academic corner: while urbanists often use 'gentrification' as a pejorative term in formal and informal academic conversation, many urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. Even though urbanists have this firsthand experience with the process, this familiarity makes little impact on scholarly debate. There is, Schlichtman and Patch argue, an artificial distance in accounts of gentrification because researchers have not adequately examined their own relationship to the process. Utilizing a simple diagnostic tool that includes ten common aspects of gentrification, they compose two autoethnographic memoirs to begin this dialogue.

This article suggests a research tool, the temporal map, for ethnographers to employ in supplementing the accounts of urban change provided by local informants. Such a map, created using city business directories, can provide an external validity check to ethnographic research. The authors' tool allows urban ethnographers to extend contemporary ethnographic accounts backward to a period prior to the beginning of fieldwork. It provides a geo–temporal contextualization by fitting fragmented, geographically and historically specific ethnographic accounts into a broader area and across a broader period of time. The authors show how two ethnographic case studies were enhanced by such temporal maps. Their cases involve a redeveloped central business district in North Carolina and a gentrified neighborhood in New York City.