Communities should mobilise against the property industry and its partners, not the people who move in their wake
On a trip to Mexico City, a bus tour whisks me through neighbourhoods teeming with cool cafes, elegant wine bars and stylish twentysomethings. Starbucks are surprisingly thick on the ground. When I ask my Spanish teacher about these areas, he rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb and fingers together: a universal sign for too expensive and full of unpleasant people.
You don’t need to be a gentrification researcher (although I am one) to read these signs and immediately understand what is happening here. Gentrification feels, sounds and looks familiar wherever you are: young hipsters transforming neighbourhoods according to a remarkably homogeneous global code of taste and style.
Leslie Kern is a professor of geography and environment at Mount Allison University in Canada and the author of Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies
