‘Gentrification’ as a grid of meaning

The openness of the concept of gentrification—its practical flexibility as a sign—makes it useful, and thus prominent, in everyday conversations about the socio-spatial changes affecting Oakland, CA and other US cities. Within gentrification studies, however, this openness has often been seen as a conceptual problem to be corrected. In this paper, rather than refine a categoric definition of gentrification, we focus on the contingent ways that a range of political actors articulate relational identities and claims in struggles over public space. We observe that, as a situated and unstable constellation of meanings and resonances, the talk of gentrification is central to urban cultural politics in places like Oakland. We thus argue that the ‘chaotic’ use of the term is neither a conceptual problem nor a political failure. Instead, it is in itself a rich and meaningful subject of research on urban life, pointing to a multiplicity of sites in which new and consequential formations of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and disbelonging, are forged in practice. Using six months of ethnographic fieldwork, we detail the struggle over Oakland First Fridays, a downtown street festival. In particular, we show how a diverse group of organizers drew on ‘gentrification’ as a grid of meaning to configure and reconfigure the event’s deserving public in ways that rendered commercial vendors, young people of color and political protesters increasingly out of place. We thus argue that viewing ‘gentrification’ as a grid of meaning allows us to appreciate fluctuating formations of inclusion and exclusion—formations that a too-rigid focus on gentrification as a socio-spatial and political–economic process of urban change can either naturalize or obscure.