Gentrify, Gentrify

The newest issue of N+1 has an article about super-gentrification called "Gentrify, Gentrify." I don't know who wrote it, because it doesn't say who wrote it. It's short, and I wish there was more to it, but it's worth checking out. Here are a few stand-out quotes for your consideration:

"In place of [Jane] Jacobs's supersubtle network of human contacts, we would get demographically homogenized cities that celebrated absolute simplicity as hominess. (Witness the proliferation of restaurants with single, 'folksy' names: Egg, Can, The Farm, Home, Spoon, and--of course--Simple.)"



"...not even the metropolis dreamed of by the most Panglossian of gentrifiers could consist exclusively of bike-riding, cupcake-eating financial analysts. Gentrification had no jobs to offer--only Jane Jacobs-style 'neighborhoods.' The new IKEA-hoods that the corporations and their celebrity architects proposed were dystopias, to be sure..."


photo by Lori Nix

"Sex & the City, the greatest paean to credit card debt ever produced, gave us four professional, 'third-wave' women who consumed men and products with equal abandon... Now, in 2009, the city of Sex & the City is gone. Darkly silhouetted condominium towers--nobody home--haunt the skylines. The designer shoe stores are shuttered. Rents have plummeted. Gentrification, seemingly inexorable, has suffered an enormous setback."

But has it really? And how much of a setback is needed to save the remains of the city?

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