Second wave gentrification in inner-city Sydney

doi:10.1016/j.cities.2005.09.001

Cities

Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2006, Pages 99-108

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2005.09.001 Get rights and content

Abstract

There are few processes more central to the social and cultural transformation of the inner city in the past half century than gentrification. The social and economic changes that have engendered gentrification have transformed its character and meaning; it has become principally a strategy for redevelopment of brown field sites by the state and capital interests. Based on research in the formerly derelict harbour-front Sydney suburbs of Pyrmont and Ultimo, this paper shows how economic restructuring, state intervention, developers and cultural change have combined to totally transform the area. Drawing on [Wyly, E K and Hammel, D J (2001) Gentrification, Housing Policy, and the new context of Urban redevelopment, in Critical perspectives on Urban Redevelopment, 6 pp. 211–276], we have termed this second wave gentrification.

Introduction

The character of gentrification has changed dramatically in the past two decades (Butler and Robson, 2001, Hackworth, 2002, Phillips, 2004). Several inter-related factors lie behind this transformation, including economic restructuring; urban consolidation or compact city policies; state intervention in the development of brown field sites using principally the housing demand of the new middle class; the rent gap of rust belt zones and the windfall profits of private developers who restructure and redevelop inner-city areas. This paper examines the decline and revitalization of Pyrmont Ultimo in inner city Sydney and compares this experience with recent developments in other “postindustrial” cities. We briefly review Wyly and Hammel’s (2001) argument regarding three waves of gentrification and conclude that although the gentrification process in Pyrmont Ultimo cannot be neatly captured by Wyly and Hammel’s periodization, it does have components of what they have described as second wave gentrification. We show that gentrification no longer invariably means the displacement of an industrial working class and its replacement by a wealthy, young middle class who restore traditionally working class housing. Rather, it is now a multi-class phenomenon and the accommodation offered is often in apartment blocks built by major developers that differ significantly in quality, prestige and view.

Section snippets

Defining the concept of gentrification

Some have argued there is little point in creating a hegemonic definition of gentrification or engaging in endless debates about the meaning of the term (Slater et al., 2004). We agree that a single hegemonic definition of gentrification is of little utility due to the variability of the processes involved. Others have sought to separate urban development from gentrification, seeing gentrification as a bottom-up process, whereas urban development is driven by the state and/or developers (

The gentrification process

The debate on gentrification has been dominated by the question of what drives the process (Smith, 1996, Wyly and Hammel, 2001, Zukin, 1990). Analyses have focused on shifts in individual preferences and lifestyle leading to a desire for inner-city living; sectors of capital creating the conditions for the process to take off; global restructuring and a remaking of the class structure, or the state endeavouring to curtail urban sprawl through high density development (Smith, 1996, Hamnett, 1991

Displacement

In the early stages of the economic restructuring of developed economies, gentrification of inner urban areas certainly did mean displacement, as these areas were predominantly inhabited by aging members of an increasingly marginalized, industrial workforce. In the nearly half a century since Ruth Glass coined the term, many cities in the developed economies have experienced an expansion of the service class and declining industrial employment (Hamnett, 2000, Sassen, 1991, Wilson, 1996). In

Gentrification wave theory

In reviewing our findings from this research, we use the term second wave gentrification with a question mark due to the difficulty in definitively periodising gentrification. The notion of waves of gentrification and the term ‘second wave gentrification’ is deployed in the work of Wyly and Hammel, 1999, Wyly and Hammel, 2001, which we will discuss here as a basis for comparing contemporary gentrification in Sydney to other contexts. According to Wyly and Hammel (2001), in the US context the

The research area, Pyrmont–Ultimo

In this section, we examine the dramatic decline and more recently the spectacular and rapid revitalization of Pyrmont and Ultimo (Pyrmont Ultimo), two adjacent inner-city neighbourhoods in Sydney, located on the harbour and within walking distance of Sydney’s CBD (see Figure 1). In order to understand gentrification in Pyrmont Ultimo in the 1990s, it is essential to take cognizance of the general structural and cultural shifts and to highlight the specificities of the neighbourhood. We show

The decline of Pyrmont–Ultimo

The decline of Pyrmont Ultimo is, in many ways, a classic illustration of the potential impact of economic restructuring on inner-city neighbourhoods. The decline, as will be illustrated, closely followed the shift in advanced capitalist economies away from the “mass production system” to more service-based economies (Wilson, 1996, pp. 26–27). Accompanying this deindustrialization of the city in advanced economies was a dramatic decline in the availability of blue collar jobs in inner-city

Analysing the gentrification of Pyrmont Ultimo

The end of the 1980s saw the start of a dramatic shift in the perceptions of Pyrmont Ultimo. The state Government undertook the redevelopment of the goods yards of the adjacent Darling Harbour as a commercial and entertainment space for Australia’s bicentennial in 1988. In the 1990s, the redevelopment of Pyrmont–Ultimo began in earnest with the establishment by the state of the Urban Development Authority the City West Development Corporation in October 1992 and by the end of the decade the

Conclusion

Like other global cities, Sydney is rapidly moving toward the social and economic character of a post-industrial service city (Hamnett, 2000). The gentrification process in Pyrmont Ultimo reflects a global phenomenon underpinned by these economic structural changes. Like Hackworth (2002) observations of New York it reflects a coalition of the state and private developers mobilising gentrification as a strategy for redevelopment, escalating property values and declining resistance to

References (42)

R.A. Beauregard
The chaos and complexity of gentrification
Berry, B J L (1999) Comment on Elvin K Wyly and Daniel J.Hammel’s “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy...
M. Bounds
Urban Social Theory: City Self and Society
(2004)
T. Butler et al.
Social capital gentrification and neighbourhood change in london: a comparison of three south london neighbourhoods
Urban Studies
(2001)
T. Butler
Gentrification and the Middle Classes
(1997)
J. Caulfield
Gentrification and desire
Canadian Review of Social Anthropology
(1989)
City Residential Monitor (2003) City Residential Monitor, March...
City West Corporation and Park, M (1997) Doors Were Always Open: Recollections of Pyrmont and Ultimo, City West...
M. Daly et al.
Sydney: Australia’s financial and corporate capital
R. Fagan
Industrial change in the global city: Sydney’s new spaces of production

S. Fitzgerald et al.

Pyrmont & Ultimo Under Siege

(1994)

R. Glass

London: Aspects of Change

(1964)

R. Glass

London: Aspects of Change

(1964)

J. Hackworth

Postrecession gentrification in new york city

Urban Affairs Review

(2002)

C. Hamnett

The blind men and the elephant: the explanation of gentrification

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

(1991)

C. Hamnett

Gentrification, postindustrialism, and industrial and occupational restructuring in global cities

Hickie, T (1979) Urban Renewal in the Ultimo-Pyrmont-Haymarket Area of Sydney, Dissertation submitted to School of...

D. Harvey

Social Justice and the City

(1973)

D. Harvey

The Urbanisation of Capital

(1985)

D. Harvey

The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis

Jacksons Landing Brochure (2001) Lend Lease,...

Cited by (63)

Building a predictive machine learning model of gentrification in Sydney
2023, Cities
In an era of rapid urbanisation and increasing wealth, gentrification is an urban phenomenon impacting many cities around the world. The ability of policymakers and planners to better understand and address gentrification-induced displacement hinges upon proactive intervention strategies. It is in this context that we build a tree-based machine learning (ML) model to predict neighbourhood change in Sydney. Change, in this context, is proxied by the Socioeconomic Index for Advantage and Disadvantage, in addition to census and other ancillary predictors. Our models predict gentrification from 2011 to 2016 with a balanced accuracy of 74.7 %. Additionally, the use of an additive explanation tool enables individual prediction explanations and advanced feature contribution analysis. Using the ML model, we predict future gentrification in Sydney up to 2021. The predictions confirm that gentrification is expanding outwards from the city centre. A spill-over effect is predicted to the south, west and north-west of former gentrifying hotspots. The findings are expected to provide policymakers with a tool to better forecast where likely areas of gentrification will occur. This future insight can then inform suitable policy interventions and responses in planning for more equitable cities outcomes, specifically for vulnerable communities impacted by gentrification and neighbourhood change.
Uneven development and tourism gentrification in the metropolitan fringe: A case study of Wuzhen Xizha in Zhejiang Province, China
2022, Cities
Citation Excerpt :
Researchers refer to the social spatial differentiation caused by tourism development as tourism gentrification (Gotham, 2005). According to the existing literature, tourism gentrification mostly occurs in urban and its fringe areas with good natural landscape and cultural heritage (Borsdorf & Hidalgo, 2013; Bounds & Morris, 2006). On the one side, it reflects the coupling relationship between economic benefits of tourism and the aesthetic needs of the middle class (Mowforth & Munt, 2009).
Gentrification has now unfolded at a planetary scale and has broken down the center-periphery structuring of urban and rural areas. In the context of new-type urbanization and rural revitalization, tourism gentrification has gradually become a new frontier of the rural-urban relations in China. Taking Xizha as a case study, this paper aims to explore the characteristics and mechanisms of tourism gentrification in historic districts through temporal analysis and multi-scalar approaches. Based on recent field visits and semi-structured interviews with administrative staff, enterprise managers, residents, and tourists in the study area, three main arguments are put forward in this paper. First, a phased tourism gentrification process has taken place in Xizha, with significant shifts in lifestyle, industry and investment, physical infrastructure, property rights, and the rent gap. Second, tourism gentrification in Xizha is a multi-subject and multi-scalar consequence of uneven development in China, with power-oriented, capital-driven and class-separated processes as the core mechanisms. Third, Xizha's tourism gentrification is regional and endogenous, with the local government and the rural-urban dual structure being the principal influencing factors. Further discussions are provided to expand the general significance of the case study and increase the contribution to the planetary gentrification.
Global city Sydney
2020, Progress in Planning
Citation Excerpt :
Areas that historically were predominantly working class have become highly sought after by the middle classes. Former inner city warehouses have been replaced by high quality residential, commercial and tourism developments that, combined with the picturesque harbour side environment, have produced global city amenity (Bounds & Morris, 2006; Spearritt, 2000). At the same time, continuing suburban expansion and under-investment have compounded the earlier trends towards spatial socio-economic inequality and infrastructure backlogs, particularly in Western Sydney (Division of Local Government, 2013).
Sydney has emerged as a major global city in the 21st century. We review the “global city thesis”, which dominates urban scholarship and practice, and ask whether it adequately captures the Sydney experience. Although the global city thesis is a useful analytical construct for policy makers and scholars, we argue that it does not adequately chart Sydney’s rise as a leading global city and its current problems. The global city thesis ignores the political institutions and processes that shape and direct the global city. The City of Sydney is a small area of the city-region, accounting for only about four percent of the metropolis. Sydney lacks a metropolitan or regional government and has few regional collaborative processes or platforms. Instead the global city strategy of Sydney is shaped and directed by the New South Wales state government. This is contrary to the political decentralisation and devolution trends heralded by international actors such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Sydney also illustrates the dilemma of global cities in that those members at the top of the knowledge economy are highly rewarded and those in the middle and lower strata face difficulty maintaining or improving their situations. Local governments lack the capacity to act independently and the state and federal governments are unwilling to address serious urban problems associated with globalisation, such as public transit or housing. Given the governments' embrace of neoliberalism, the global city vision advanced by leaders is threatened. There is little concrete policy offered by any level of government to address the crisis.
The role of the private actor in cultural regeneration: Hybridizing cultural heritage with creativity in the city
2018, Cities
Citation Excerpt :
The migration of the creative class into cities has led to the relocation of residents and the reordering of urban social and cultural priorities (Lees, 2000). Gentrification has become a much debated issue internationally, in cities such as New York (Zukin, 1982), London (Pratt, 2009), Bilbao (Plaza, 2000), and Sydney (Bounds & Morris, 2006), all generally considered to be creative cities. Other contradictions come into play in the cultural consumerism that can lead to the commodification of urban landscapes – criticized as McGuggenization (Go & Trunfio, 2014; McNeill, 2000), Dubaisation (Al Rabadya, 2012); and eventification (Jakob, 2012) – which occurs when the leisure and entertainment city comes to dominate the knowledge city, the actual-producer of the goods and services which define the city's high cultural and symbolic value.
Building on the most relevant literature on cultural regeneration and creative cities, this paper provides an integrated framework to investigate the factors exploited by private actors to stimulate the hybridization of urban cultural heritage with creativity and the strategies adopted to engage stakeholders in bottom-up cultural regeneration processes. Two recent Italian cases of cultural regeneration driven by private actors, which exemplify two sharply contrasting urban extremes, have been chosen to validate this integrated theoretical framework of cultural regeneration in the city. Both have been recognized nationally and internationally as examples of best practice: IlCartastorie Museum in Naples and the Farm Cultural Park, Favara. Our results show that private actors mainly draw upon the innovative thinking of the creative class and innovative approaches to stimulate cultural regeneration. The evolutionary processes, and the resulting models of cultural regeneration, are shaped by the visions of these private actors, which are, in turn, influenced by specific urban conditions. In Naples' highly touristic inner city, the managerial innovation of the IlCartastorie Museum is fostered by the Foundation's pro-tourism growth strategy aimed at increasing both social inclusion and the organizational value of the actual museum. In Sicily, Favara's socio-economic marginalization means that its transformation into a creative city has to be supported by a strategy conducive to social inclusion and sustainability, which conjoins the explicit strategy of the private actor with an implicit emerging community strategy. Preliminary managerial recommendations and suggestions for effective private engagement and community involvement in cultural regeneration and creative city building are given.
‘They try to avoid.’ How do parents’ feelings about ethnicised and classed differences shape gentrifying school communities?
2017, Emotion, Space and Society
Citation Excerpt :
Before proceeding to this discussion we introduce the setting and focus on feelings more fully. Like other areas in inner Sydney that were formerly working class and ethnically diverse, gentrification in Cooper was initially stimulated by a wave of ‘diversity-seekers’ (Blokland and van Eijk, 2010)—artists, musicians, students and public sector workers, who were attracted to the suburb's post-industrial aesthetic, cheap housing and food, and its cultural mix (Tonkiss, 2005; Bounds and Morris, 2006). Middle-class businesses—cafes, restaurants, bars—followed.
This article reports on interview-based research into the everyday consequences of gentrification as seen through the prism of local public primary schools in inner Sydney, Australia. We explore the feelings involved in negotiating relations across ethnicised and classed differences within four school communities. Common though contradictory themes across the interviews include: the positive worth accorded to contact with ethnicised difference among white parents; the avoidance of interpersonal contact across ethnicised and classed differences; and the positive worth accorded to classed sameness. Our research finds that the feelings that attend to these themes—discomfort and comfort, desire and disdain—play a significant role in shaping everyday school communities and relationships between parents. We examine the ways in which white parents’ desires for social contact with ethnicised others are frequently disappointed and note the disdain and discomfort involved in negotiating contact with classed others. We conclude with a case study involving a complex mix of the themes and feelings listed above: parental engagement with the schools’ Parents and Citizens Associations (P&Cs). We argue that P&Cs constitute social spaces dominated by parents with a class-based disposition towards entitlement and authority, from which ethnicised and classed others frequently feel excluded.
Special Feature: Putting urban displacement in its place
2024, City

View all citing articles on Scopus

¹: Tel.: +612-9385-7800/08.

View full text

Second wave gentrification in inner-city Sydney

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Defining the concept of gentrification

The gentrification process

Displacement

Gentrification wave theory

The research area, Pyrmont–Ultimo

The decline of Pyrmont–Ultimo

Analysing the gentrification of Pyrmont Ultimo

Conclusion

The chaos and complexity of gentrification

Urban Social Theory: City Self and Society

Social capital gentrification and neighbourhood change in london: a comparison of three south london neighbourhoods

Urban Studies

Gentrification and the Middle Classes

Gentrification and desire

Canadian Review of Social Anthropology

Sydney: Australia’s financial and corporate capital

Industrial change in the global city: Sydney’s new spaces of production

Pyrmont & Ultimo Under Siege

London: Aspects of Change

London: Aspects of Change

Postrecession gentrification in new york city

Urban Affairs Review

The blind men and the elephant: the explanation of gentrification

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Gentrification, postindustrialism, and industrial and occupational restructuring in global cities

Social Justice and the City

The Urbanisation of Capital

The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis