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237 Gentrification KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN The urban alchemy that once transformed Vancouver’s Yaletown and Toronto’s Parkdale into trendy places to live is working its magic once again, luring the creative class to newly hip areas. But this time, the hottest districts are an array of ever-smaller “microneighbourhoods” that are changing the nature of the real-estate market across North America.1 When cultural guru Richard Florida made his move to the University of Toronto in 2007, he was greeted with a great deal of fanfare. His ideas about “creative classes” and the positive gentrifying role they play in revitalizing cities have won him numerous fans impressed by a theory that brings together creativity with economic potential and consumerism.2 Reporter Misty Harris describes the trend across Canada: The gentrification of SoMa [South Main Street in Vancouver] mirrors what’s going on across Canada, as large neighbourhoods are being balkanized into chic living spaces and shopping niches characterized by vintage stores and gritty, old-school coffee joints. In Toronto, young professionals are tripping over their Prada shoes for a piece of suddenly hip Queen East. The area’s most coveted microhood is Leslieville, where hipster havens like Kubo resto-bar have popped up in recent months. In Edmonton, the bohemian-cool lofts along the 104 St. slice of the warehouse district are hot, as is the historic Highlands area—but only on the elegant elm tree-lined streets, not the poplar-dominated blocks. And in Calgary, willowy urbanistas are colonizing Marda Loop—a five-block oasis of new and old housing, eclectic shopping and inventive restaurants —as well as parts of Bridgeland, an up-and-coming microhood in the inner city that pundits predict will skyrocket in value once the area’s former hospital lands are redeveloped.3 But, as was noted long before Florida came on the scene, the gentrification of neighbourhoods tends to bring constant movement: “Whether it’s called urban renewal or gentrification, its effect has become familiar to all of us: when loft living and old neighbourhoods become trendy, property values and rents skyrocket and the artists who colonized the area are squeezed out,” wrote Hamish Buchanan in 1987.4 Such strategies are not without a price, and, as has been documented in a number of the Imagining Resistance 238 chapters in this volume, gentrification tends to result not only in revitalized city centres but also in increased inequality and the squeezing out of precarious populations. As Benjamin Shephard and Ronald Hayduk wrote, gentrification tends also to bring with it wider and more draconian social control. They note: With public space under increasing control, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the gentrification of inner cities as wealthy return from the suburbs, policing strategies intervene more and more in public behaviour. This has shrunk the stage on which social movements can operate without harassment. Where “quality of life” issues are heavily policed, police budgets and discretionary power have created a situation where even the tamest protest becomes the target of police attention. The right to assemble in front of public buildings has been challenged in New York City. Permits are needed to march on the street, use a bullhorn , put up a poster, or gather in the park.5 Further, gentrification is often the outcome of a neoliberal system that encourages further inequality, greater gaps between rich and poor, and increased real estate prices. Not surprisingly then, gentrification and homelessness tend to go hand in hand. Because this issue so profoundly affects and is affected (and effected) by artists, it may not be surprising that a number of politically motivated art projects have taken place in recent years in response to the gentrification of Canadian cities. Central among these is the work of the February Group and their “sculpture of sanctuary” Mattress City, which “makes its bed and blissfully lies in it.” The 24-hour sculpture of was made of used mattresses laid out in Nathan Phillips Square (a central public space in downtown Toronto). The idea was to draw attention to homeless populations in the area and to create a participatory sculpture. For the time that Mattress City was in the square, people came by to sleep, to converse, to jump on the mattresses, and to generally turn it into a utopian space. As the members of the February Group wrote, “The mattress raft acts as both a warning of the possible homelessness and migration brought about by a...

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