About the gentrification civic dialogue

Overseas and local experiences show that while gentrification can have positive impacts on an area in terms of upgrading infrastructure and bringing in capital, it can also have negative impacts such as displacement and isolation. Council wants to further develop its understanding of this complex subject and to share this understanding with the community.

As part of the Civic Dialogue series, three forums on the issue of gentrification were held over a period of six months in late 2003 and early 2004.  The first in the series, Gentrification - tracking the changes was held on Saturday November 29. Forum 2 Gentrification - recreating urban culture took place on March 24 with the third forum, Gentrification - dealing with dislocation, rounding out the series on April 29th. Details of the forums including some of the presented papers, can be viewed below.

The series goals were:

• To identify and understand the demographic and social changes that have occurred, variously described as gentrification / urban renewal
• To explore disadvantage and opportunity implied by these terms
• To consider the practical implications of the issues discussed
• To stimulate/raise individual responsibility for community cohesion & well-being

Saturday November 29, 2003

Speakers:  Cr David Brand
                 Alistair Chisolm
                 Christine Kilmartin
                 Kate Shaw

Cr David Brand
St Kilda - my role in its downfall - Cr David Brand
Cr David Brand is an architect and ward councillor for St Kilda.

Alistair Chisolm
Alistair Chisolm founded Chisolm and Gamon Real Estate in Elwood in 1972 and has a continuing interest in local housing and community issues.

Christine Kilmartin
Port Phillip: Change and Gentrification - Christine Kilmartin
Christine Kilmartin is Manager of Sustainable Settlements Research at the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Kate Shaw
Local limits to gentrification: implications for a new urban policy - Kate Shaw
Kate Shaw has taught urban planning at RMIT and is currently completing a doctorate  on cultural heritage and the politics of preservation at Melbourne University.

Wednesday March 24, 2004

Speakers:  Cr Carolyn Hutchens
                 Professor Kim Dovey
                 Dr Lisanne Gibson
                 Dr Martin Mulligan

Dr Martin Mulligan
ABSTRACT Dr Martin Mulligan has had personal experience of gentrification growing up at Sydney's Bondi Beach and then Leichhardt (Sydney's equivalent of Carlton). He has recently completed a study for VicHealth on Sense of Place and Community Wellbeing in Daylesford and Broadmeadows and will talk about the contradictory effects of gentrification in Daylesford. He is particularly interested in ways in which local communities respond to changes that seem to be externally driven and will argue that a sense of place can be consciously nurtured and can lead to building more resilient local communities. However, there will always be many more than one sense of place for any one area and it is essential to look at how diverse senses of place can coexist. He will suggest that the way to work with sense of place is through the collection and analysis of action-oriented stories.

Full text: Martin Mulligan's presentation

Dr Martin Mulligan is a senior research fellow at the Globalism Institute at RMIT University

Dr Lisanne Gibson
ABSTRACT Lisanne outlines some of her concerns regarding the increasingly high profile nature of cultural programs in inner city urban regeneration initiatives. Whether these initiatives come under the rubrics of 'creative industries', 'creative cities', 'cultural planning' or 'cultural development', they have at their core a nexus between urban planning and cultural programming. The logic of this nexus is to ensure urban development facilitates the possibilities for community and citizenly social democratic participation, culture is thought to be an ideal tool for ensuring both diverse community representation and participation. However, to what extent are the cultural components of such urban regeneration schemes window dressing for middle class cultural consumption, or are there real social and cultural benefits for those publics (and practitioners) who although being priced out of many of the leisure, cultural and residential facilities provided, nevertheless, flock to its spaces?

Full text: Lisanne Gibson's presentation

Dr Lisanne Gibson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cultural Industries and Practices Research Centre at the University of Newcastle

Professor Kim Dovey
ABSTRACT Entitled Gentrification and Urban Character this talk will be about how issues of gentrification intersect with those of urban character and urban morphology. I will suggest that sensible and robust urban design and planning controls (parking, density, grain-size and height) can mediate the effects of gentrification while encouraging regeneration. It will link to the themes of creating and sustaining urban culture and social capital. It will also open up the paradox of a market that is attracted to diversity but then serves to diminish that diversity.

Full text: Kim Dovey's presentation

Kim Dovey is professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Melbourne

Wednesday April 28, 2004

Speakers Cr Peter Logan
                 Bernadette George (Urban Solutions)
                 Alison McClelland (Latrobe University)
                 Janet Goodwin (South Port Community Housing)

Bernadette George
ABSTRACT Bernadette George's presentation will raise and respond to the following questions.

• What are the benefits of diversity and social inclusion, versus market forces and exclusivity?
• What can the planning system do to facilitate the retention of housing and social diversity?
• Is this in accordance with orderly and proper planning?
• And what are the hallmarks of a City with Soul?

Full text: Bernadette George's presentation

Bernadette George is a consultant urban planner with many years experience and the past president of the Planning Institute of Australia (Victoria).

Alison McClelland: Change Vulnerability and Impact
ABSTRACT This presentation will deal with the large forces of social and economic change that are confronting countries and communities, such as globalisation, technological change and individualisation. The impacts of these changes on families and communities will be discussed and the implications for policy identified.

Alison McClelland is Associate Professor and Head of School, in the School of Social Work and Social Policy at La Trobe University

Janet Goodwin
ABSTRACT People on pensions and benefits, young people, and people who are ill or disabled have great difficulty in obtaining good, secure accommodation in today's market, particularly in the inner suburbs. For many people especially those with limited mobility, it is important that they can live close to friends, relatives, doctors and community services. Janet Goodwin will consider the impacts of gentrification from the perspective of community organisations whose primary focus is to assist people on low incomes who are experiencing housing difficulty.

Janet Goodwin is Manager of the South Port Community Housing Group

Gentrification is a process in which higher income households displace lower income residents of a neighbourhood, changing the essential character and flavour of that neighbourhood.

Under this definition, gentrification has three specific conditions: displacement of original residents, physical upgrading of the neighbourhood, particularly of housing stock, and change in neighbourhood character. 

Therefore gentrification does not automatically occur when higher income residents move into a lower income neighbourhood.  For example, when the movement of higher income residents moving is small scale, or the movement is to vacant land or buildings, it is called urban regeneration. 

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in London in 1964.  Gentrification is an ongoing, cyclical process that is widespread in the developed western world.  It is a process that is hard to grasp, partly because commentators disagree over how and why it happens, and partly because most of the discussion occurs in the UK and the US context and is not easily transferable to an Australian context.  In Australia, gentrification occurs in most inner urban municipalities of capital cities.

Port Phillip is growing at a rapid rate - faster than the metropolitan Melbourne average over the five years between 1996 and 2001. Many of the people who have moved in to the area in this time have particularly high incomes. The attached Persons who have moved to Port Phillip by Income, ABS Census 2001 graph shows that 28.9% of people who have been living in Port Phillip for less than five years have a personal income of more than $1,000 a week. In the greater Melbourne area, 11.9% of people earn this much.

Gentrification in Port Phillip is not just a recent phenomenon. If you look at the attached graphs, based on household income figures from the last five censes, you will see the extent of change over the past twenty years. They show that there are significantly fewer low-income households and substantially more higher income households in the municipality now than there were in 1981. It is a long-term issue requiring long-term responses.

Overseas and local experience shows that while gentrification can have positive impacts on an area in terms of upgrading infrastructure and bringing in capital, it can also have negative impacts such as displacement and isolation. 

Gentrification is a highly visible expression of wider social and economic change. There have been demographic and household changes that create the potential for new patterns of housing demand, including trends to later marriage, lower rates of marriage and increased divorce and relationship breakdown. 

Globalisation is redrawing inner cities, as previously unfashionable areas attract business executives, senior bureaucrats and a range of well-paid workers in financial services, advertising, and the media. Access to the city and key facilities is vital for these groups, to maintain their position in the dynamic and insecure economic environment. Central location and apartment living reduces time lost in traditional suburban pursuits of commuting and house maintenance.  

At the other end of the income and employment scale, low paid service workers whose labour maintains the amenity of redeveloped areas must move elsewhere, often commuting long distances back to work. Older long-term residents can be forced out, driven as much by the disappearance of familiar landmarks and memories as by rising rents, living costs and diminishing services. This can result in family or generational separation. Low-income people living in gentrified areas have reduced opportunities for community participation, and there are well-documented links between social isolation and ill health, irrespective of income levels. An increasingly segregated and unequal city is not in any one's interest.

Long-term responses to gentrification depend on action from all levels of government and from individuals. Housing market, employment, welfare and taxation reforms require State and Federal government responses.   

The City of Port Phillip's Community Housing Program, funding for community organisations that support low income people, council services that are aimed at and sensitive to low income people, leadership on diversity, and a commitment to tolerance and social justice are all ways in which the council currently seeks to address the impacts of gentrification.  The council is keen to identify other ways, in partnership with the community of Port Phillip and other levels of government, that more can be done.  

http://members.lycos.co.uk/gentrification/
This UK website is a comprehensive on-line resource for anyone interested in learning more about gentrification.

http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/gentrification/gentrificationexsum.htm
This American website reviews the findings, analyses and frameworks developed during the gentrification wave of the '70s and '80s. It suggests policies and strategies that can be pursued to advance equitable development in the American context.   

http://www.policylink.org/EquitableDevelopment/
This American site has a "tool kit" for use in ensuring that new investment in an area benefits all community members and to integrate strategies to avoid gentrification and displacement

Community and Governance; Urban Activism in Melbourne in the 1960s and beyond
Information about a research project into urban activist responses to gentrification in inner Melbourne in the 1960s and 70s.

Use eServices to ask us a question, request information or give us feedback online. If you prefer call ASSIST on (03) 9209 6777 or TTy (03) 9209 6713 and ask for Social & Cultural Planning & Policy.

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