Gentrification

Small Picture

Cities are too complicated to study directly in their totality, so we look for models and analogies.

Recent work on cities suggests that ecosystems can serve as an analogy for cities.

The basic thought is this:

Ecosystems and cities share some fundamental structure. Because of this, if an ecosystem has property P, then a city is likely to also have property P.

If we use this analogy, then we need to assume that cities do not have a teleology, or goal, since ecosystems do not have a goal.

One property of ecosystems is that they naturally move from one state to another in predictable ways.

This is called ecological succession.

For example:

Lichen-covered rock field → grassland → shrubland → forest

If cities are like ecosystems, then we would expect cities to share this same property of moving from one state to another.

One example might be gentrification.

Risk-tolerant but wealthier individuals move into impoverished neighborhoods in search of excitement.

They then create interesting amenities in the area, which draws more wealthy people.

These wealthier people are often less risk tolerant, so they bring in more boring amenities.

All of this increases housing costs and changes the original nature of the neighborhood.

We call this gentrification.

We do not usually say that ecological succession is wrong. We treat it as a natural occurrence.

Analogously, perhaps we should not say that gentrification is wrong. Perhaps it is just a natural occurrence.

Big Picture

Many of the people making the analogy between cities and ecosystems are doing so to make a progressive argument about the political organization of the city.

But let’s assume for a moment that the analogy is a good one and that it runs very deep.

If that is true, then many of the progressive traits these theorists want from cities may disappear.

For example, if cities really are like ecosystems, then cities will be very dynamic.

People will always be displaced.

There will be no single organization of the city that maximizes justice across all cities.

Even if a city reaches such an organization, it will likely change as the conditions in the city change.

There is also no way to precisely predict what the best organization will be.

If this is true, then the analogy between ecosystems and cities may support a liberal argument, not a progressive one.

We need to give people the freedom to figure out what works best for the city.

We cannot plan it out ahead of time.

Questions

1. How good is the analogy between cities and ecosystems? What are some points of commonality between the two? No analogy is ever perfect, so what are the points of difference? How important are those differences? Is there a better analogy?

2. One of the assumptions the paper makes is that ecosystems do not have a teleology. In other words, there is no such thing as a good ecosystem or a bad ecosystem. Put another way, there is no such thing as a healthy ecosystem or an unhealthy ecosystem. Is this true? If it is not true, what is the goal of an ecosystem?

3. Based on the assumptions made in question 2, the paper assumes that cities do not have a teleology. Do cities have goals? Can you have a healthy or unhealthy city? If you can have a healthy city, what does it look like compared to an unhealthy city?

4. Is gentrification bad? Why is it bad? If gentrification is bad, is that a reason to reject the analogy between cities and ecosystems? If gentrification is natural but also bad, maybe we could stop it somehow. How would we stop it?