Commercial gentrification: local politics and the construction of place-based commercial identities

"A ‘Bedford Falls’ kind of place: Neighbourhood branding and commercial revitalisation in  processes of gentrification in Toronto, Ontario," Urban Studies 53 (2016): 5

The take-away: This article contributes to the commercial gentrification literature by considering a Toronto neighborhood political battle that erupted in response to the prospect of a strip club opening there. It observes how ‘place’ became embroiled in a public debate through which residents worked to define the neighborhood’s land use in terms of a class-based commercial identity. Through this debate, common notions of acceptable forms of consumption and corresponding notions of ‘community’—and how these operate politically—came into view.

Abstract: Drawing on in-depth stakeholder interviews and media accounts, we explore a case of civic  activism over the opening of a strip club in a neighbourhood of Etobicoke, one of six  municipalities amalgamated in 1998 to form the current City of Toronto, Ontario. In 2008, the growing residential gentrification of the area had not yet extended into the commercial district and the opening of the strip club challenged the gentrifiers’ nascent ‘revitalising  and family-friendly’ neighbourhood brand – a brand that became integral to their civic and  legal strategies to impede the opening of the club. This case highlights the ways in which  gentrifiers participate in processes of commercial gentrification by enacting place  marketing strategies that express social and spatial class-based disaffiliation and that  define suitable uses of neighbourhood public spaces. The political contestation of neighbourhood boundaries takes shifting civic and legal forms, and the place branding expressed and promoted by these strategies encourages commercial gentrification by  inviting particular patterns of class-based consumption into neighbourhood business  districts. The case also underscores the contingent meaning of neighbourhood land uses for  gentrifiers and the growing potential importance of commercial identities for gentrifiers’  relational constructions of ‘community’ and its boundaries. We contextualise this case  within literature on commercial gentrification and the constitution of identity – individual,  neighbourhood and class – through processes of ‘othering’, demonstrating that  gentrification is a politically contested social and spatial practice with affective and  material consequences.

Full article (FREE public access)