Urban Gentrification Essay

Words: 491
Pages: 2

Municipal governments harness the political agency to change the cultural landscape of gentrified neighbourhoods by eliciting partnerships that attempt to integrate the “creative class” of residents into the city. Towards the 1990’s a massive wave of capital reinvestment in inner cities caused the accelerated geographic expansion of gentrification processes in Toronto (Lehrer et al, 2009, p. 143). One of the features of this capital reinvestment and accelerated gentrification process, is the “strategic use of cultural urban policies in order to attract and retain investors and new creative middle classes, by utilizing branding exercises and place making via flagship projects” (Lehrer et al, 2009, p. 146). Richard Florida’s “City and the Creative …show more content…
34). Florida contends that encouraging creative people to move into the city will stimulate economic and urban growth and is an urban governance strategy that supports, indirectly or directly the process of gentrification (Lehrer et al, & Florida, 2005). Toronto’s collaboration with Artscape can be analyzed as a municipal urban governance partnership, which attempts to integrate the creative class into the city, while simultaneously proliferating gentrification through the rebranding of a neighbourhood. Artscape is a non-profit organization that makes space for creativity by subsidizing rents to artists in certain urban areas, aiding in the survival of the creative class within a globally expensive and competitive city such as Toronto (Torontoartscape.org, 2011 & Lehrer et al, 2009). This collaborative non-profit partnership has become a “veritable developer of arts districts and live/work experiences for artists over the past twenty years and constitutes Toronto’s own local version of creativity-inspired gentrification” (Lehrer et al, 2009, p.