Loretta Lees

Year of publication: 2008

This paper investigates the ‘uneasy cohabitation’ between gentrification and social mix and challenges the notion that gentrification will help increase the social capital and social cohesion of inner-city communities.

The paper explores that gentrification is used as a tool in which to ‘socially cleanse’ neighbourhoods and forge a relationship between property and proprietary, suggesting that owner-occupiers are well behaved and ‘normal’, whilst social tenants are problematic and abnormal - they are ‘othered’.

The author concludes that social mix policies are cosmetic rather than ones prepared to deal with a host of complex social, economic and cultural reasons as to why there are concentrations of poor, economically inactive people in cities.

Content type: Equality

Tags: paper

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