Gentrification has three meanings. All refer to a kind of relentless nicening, the civilizing process at work. First a process whereby by affluent, middle classes take over a previously working class area or occupation, as in the gentrification of Leith or of football. Estate agents think it is a good thing. So do most residents. I like nice cafes and cute bookshops. Some activists criticize it for pricing out locals and fraying neighborhood relationships. I think that matters how the process increases wages and the variety of relationships and networks that are formed. It can be quite varied. It is often caricatured as Middle Eastern sheiks and Russian oligarchs buying up London, while Google employees buy up San Francisco. The broad evidence is that gentrification does benefit the original residents as well. On the other hand, if I lived in San Francisco, London, or parts of New York, I might feel very differently.
Second, the substitution of previously violent or otherwise coercive interpersonal exchange relations with contract and market-based ones, as in drug market gentrification. Although often associated with the rise of mobile telephony, and especially digital-based dealing that is not determinative. The existence of County Lines operations shows that remote relationships can be quite coercive and exploiting.
Finally, the process where a human problem becomes represented by those most able to articulate it. Disability, addiction, poverty have all been gentrified in that sense. In turn suffering becomes rationalised as a source of identity, distinction and difference. Whether drug addiction problem gambling or any kind of oppression. A much rehearsed example is autism which has come to be treated as something close to a superpower rather than a spectrum disorder which causes a range of difficulties.. This process is especially apparent when there is a resource to be gained such as the favour of states or corporations. A variant of this is articulating other people’s suffering, as in when a tragic death, suicide or murder is used to back up one’s own arguments. Another variant is sanewashing where an extremist group’s aims are explained as being ‘really about’ what the observer cares about.
One of the reasons I am wary of the gentrification of suffering is, it denies the reality of social suffering and the agency and choice of people involved. An example comes from the work of Alice Goffman.Her excellent ethnography focused on people she said were criminalised and who were definitely involved in shady dealings. But in the area she worked in, as she notes there are plenty of people who live different lives, who avoided drugs, who stayed in school. The temptation with the gentrification of suffering is to articulate those who are at the most extremes. It is a problem for theory that does not account for the middle range.
