Gentrification

Multi-Level Perspective Modeling

Team: Ashlesha Dhotey, Scott Dombkowski, Eunjung Paik, Tammy Tarng

Our group started this assignment by gaining a better understanding of the multi-level perspective (MLP) approach. We looked at Geels article and saw how the different levels of practices affected the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles.

Gentrification MLP Context

Once we became familiar with Geels application of the MLP approach, we applied it to gentrification and created the multi-level perspective map below.

During this activity, we saw connections with all sorts of practices. These included:

• Capitalism’s connection with the hoarding of data (organization utilizing ownership of data as a competitive advantage), going to college (teenagers and their family’s desire to go to college so that they can acquire a job with a solid salary), and how existing infrastructure is considered for future expansion (developer’s desire to lower expenses while increasing income).
• Organizations’ hoarding of data and its possible connection with the misuse of big data.
• “Yuppie Culture” and its connection to the use of iPhones and technology (including the desire to consume more and more information/stay connected), living a sustainable life (new residents want to live closer to work, replacing existing residents living in city centers), and buying furnishings/going to coffee shops (people interested in one aesthetic, new shops and stores move into new neighborhood and replacing old shops and stores).
• One particularly interesting connection our group discussed was the connection between living a sustainable life and the practice of cycling/riding bikes. While both living a sustainable life and cycling/riding bikes positively effect the environment, they have the ability to accelerate gentrification. For example, you add a bike lane to a neighborhood undergoing gentrification. Cyclists would be likely to ride through a neighborhood they might have never visited before, while existing residents would be thrown off by these new visitors.

Proposed Interventions

Our group came up with a number of different interventions that could be bundled or implemented separately.

Intervention 1: A platform that allows for the dissemination of gentrification stories and imagery. Many of us hear about gentrification all the time, but rarely see gentrification unless it is not occurring in your neighborhood, or do not see the negative effects of gentrification since its downsides are not as readily visible. The people who are pushed out, the culture that is overshadowed, and the effects of the “new and shiny” are not brought to the forefront because the data is harder to package and communicate. This platform would allow you to see gentrification and how it is changing neighborhoods around the world.

Intervention 2: A platform that allows for a communication channel between the incoming residents and less affluent existing residents. New and existing residents would have a place to communicate their issues and desires for their neighborhood. Conversations could be seeded by addressing the hard problems from the beginning. This would mean small talk in getting to know one another, but also expressing opinions in a courteous manner.

Intervention 3: Utilize big data to make communities and policy makers aware of gentrification in communities. This could be similar to the Gentrification Analytics platform inspired by Ken Streif and Alan Mallach’s.

https://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2017/02/algorithms-that-predict-gentrification/516945/

Challenges

• Gentrification is pervasive. Everything that surrounds us in our daily lives has been affected by it, and practices some part of it. As a viewer watching television, for instance you are given access to shows that promote a certain way of living. Viewers then desire certain lifestyles, that do not coexist with the large majority of communities.
• Determining whether a practice was a niche, regime, or landscape. For instance, the ever existing rise in the cost of living. Is that rise a “large and slow moving social/economic/political/cultural/environmental event” or a “networks, groups and institutions and/or infrastructure that can become ‘entrenched”?