David Ley

The new middle class and the remaking of the central city

What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city. Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.

Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification

Gentrification involves the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment. This paper reconsiders the role of artists as agents, and aestheticisation as a process, in contributing to gentrification, an argument illustrated with empirical data from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Because some poverty neighbourhoods may be candidates for occupation by artists, who value their afford ability and mundane, off-centre status, the study also considers the movement of districts from a position of high cultural capital and low economic capital to a position of steadily rising economic capital. The paper makes extensive use of Bourdieus conceptualisation of the field of cultural production, including his discussion of the uneasy relations of economic and cultural capitals, the power of the aesthetic disposition to valorise the mundane and the appropriation of cultural capital by market forces. Bourdieus thinking is extended to the field of gentrification in an account that interprets the enhanced valuation of cultural capital since the 1960s, encouraging spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist. This approach offers some reconciliation to theoretical debates in the gentrification literature about the roles of structure and agency and economic and cultural explanations. It also casts a more critical historical perspective on current writing lauding the rise of the cultural economy and the creative city.

Gentrification and the Politics of the New Middle Class

Whereas authors have frequently alluded to an adversarial politics among the new middle class of professional and managerial workers, surveys and electoral returns confirm a generally conservative disposition in this group as a whole. In this paper I seek to specify a social location for left—liberal politics among a distinctive cadre of social and cultural professionals, the cultural new class. This cadre also bears a distinct geographical identity, with an overconcentration in the central cities of large metropolitan areas, not least in their gentrifying districts. The part played since 1968 by the cultural new class in these gentrifying districts in redefining the urban politics of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver is examined. In particular, the role of a gentrifying middle class in challenging a postwar hegemony of growth boosterism practised by the conservative regimes in all three cities, and their parallel attempt to sustain an alternative regime of reform politics, are assessed.

Landscape as Spectacle: World's Fairs and the Culture of Heroic Consumption

The meaning of a public spectacle, worlds fairs, is examined, with particular emphasis on the 1986 worlds exposition in Vancouver. Various theoretical readings of mass culture and popular culture are analysed: on the one hand, the view of the culture industry, imposing hegemonic meanings through spectacles onto a depoliticised mass audience, and on the other the view of an active interpenetration of cultural producers and consumers, which includes the capacity for resistance to the web of signification spun by dominant elites. The thesis is considered that worlds fairs are an instrument of hegemonic power. Although Expo 86 was organised by a political and economic elite, evidence from 2200 visitors points to a fractured and negotiated power that was never absolute.

Seeking Homo Economicus: The Canadian State and the Strange Story of the Business Immigration Program

Abstract Through a policy study, this article examines the active but compromised authority of the state as it engages the global “space of flows.” Business immigration programs in close to thirty countries announce the states intent to domesticate the unruly forces of globalization by enticing its principal agent, homo economicus. With the objective of priming economic development using immigrant capital and proven entrepreneurial skills, the Canadian business program has permitted the entry of nearly 300,000 immigrants, primarily from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Government statistics have emphasized program success in terms of capital invested and jobs created. However, census data and tax-filer returns suggest modest income generation and limited entrepreneurial endeavor by business immigrants. Interviews with government managers reveal that the pressures to meet high immigration targets were accompanied by inadequate monitoring resources that have compromised the states due diligence. Annual statistics produced under these conditions become an all-too-human text, representing as much the desires of government and immigrants as they do a reliable assessment. The study emphasizes this social embeddedness of immigration at all levels and the passion and persuasion in a fully social context that lie behind the often suprahuman problematic of globalization.

Are There Limits to Gentrification? The Contexts of Impeded Gentrification in Vancouver

This paper examines conditions that impede inner-city gentrification. Several factors emerge from review of a scattered literature, including the role of public policy, neighbourhood political mobilisation and various combinations of population and land use characteristics that are normally unattractive to gentrifiers. In a first phase of analysis, some of these expectations are tested with census tract attributes against the map of gentrification in the City of Vancouver from 1971 to 2001. More detailed qualitative field work in the Downtown Eastside and Grandview-Woodland, two inner-city neighbourhoods with unexpectedly low indicators of gentrification, provides a fuller interpretation and reveals the intersection of local poverty cultures, industrial land use, neighbourhood political mobilisation and public policy, especially the policy of social housing provision, in blocking or stalling gentrification.

Explaining Variations in Business Performance Among Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Canada

This paper seeks to explain the self-reported business performance of entrepreneurs who entered Canada through the Business Immigration Programme. The study draws upon a detailed face-to-face questionnaire with 90 entrepreneurs in Vancouver, a third each from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. As suggested by the mixed-embeddedness model, state regulations provided a significant context for the economic actions of immigrant entrepreneurs. But opportunities were also narrowed by a perceived precariousness in the regional market. Overall, business performance was weak for entrepreneurs, despite significant pre-migration resources. Some factors regarded as encouraging entrepreneurialism were also important in shaping business outcomes. Human capital, though not the scale of investment capital, influenced business success. Consistent with European research, the ethnic enclave economy imposed a penalty on outcomes. Inter-ethnic variation was significant, with Korean-Canadians, who disproportionately sought mainstream markets, by far the most successful of the three groups. In addition they were less involved in transnational business activities, which seemed to compete with, rather than complement, Canadian enterprise.

Styles of the times: liberal and neo-conservative landscapes in inner Vancouver, 1968–1986

The paper adopts Bernice Martins argument that two major ideologies may be traced in western culture over the past two hundred years: the rational (or instrumental) and the romantic (or expressive). Their appearance has been intermittent and is closely related to broader trends in society. The argument may be extended to the built environment, where planning and architectural theory reflect the same flux (and conflict) over appropriate landscape styles. The modern movement in architecture and planning projects a functional and universal rationality to space; in contrast, post-modern currents pose a more personal and contextual design solution. These ideologies are placed in historic contrast as responding to particular societal challenges: modernism from the 1910s to the 1960s has responded to the challenge of establishing social order for a mass society; post-modernism since the 1960s has responded to the challenge of placelessness and a need for urban community. These themes are particularized through an interpretation of two emerging landscapes in inner Vancouver, initiated by different levels of government. The first, begun in the mid-1970s, is a self-conscious attempt to build a post-modern landscape sired by a municipal reform movement of liberal professionals, the so-called new class who have been identified as receptive to expressive values. The second landscape is a product of a neo-conservative provincial government. In its attempt to re-establish appropriate icons for a mass society rooted in the market place it has revived some of the precedents and solutions espoused by a rational ideology carlier in this century.

The Immigrant Church as an Urban Service Hub

This paper draws from interviews conducted with leaders of 46 immigrant Christian churches in Vancouver. The congregations comprise newcomers from Korea, ethnic Chinese who are primarily recent immigrants and an older post-1945 German migration. The churches are identified as a hub in which relations of trust and compatibility generate bonding social capital; from this base, a wide range of personal and social services is provided, significantly aiding co-ethnic members to adapt to their new conditions. In a neo-liberal era, the state is facilitating such activities as part of a policy of contracting-out its own former in-house functions. The capacity of the immigrant church to serve both its own members and adherents and also a broader expanded constituency beyond its co-ethnic clients is important. The paper examines the activities of some of the churches in this transition from bonding to bridging social capital and the challenges that they confront.

Social geography and the taken-for-granted world

This paper addresses the lack of both a clear theoretical direction and an appropriate philosophical underpinning in recent commentaries on social geography. It argues that in extending analysis beyond the map to social and cognitive processes, the researcher has entered a world where objectivity is joined by subjectivity. Vidalian geography, Parks urban sociology, and behavioural geography, all promising precedents for a social geography of man, have foundered in part because they failed to draw upon an appropriate philosophical underpinning to engage the distinctive epistemological issues of subjectivity. Either they were absorbed into a tradition which rejected the place of subjectivity, or else their humanist focus was lost in the inflexible scientism of a hypothetico-deductive mould. A social geography which delves beneath the map cannot avoid the subjective, for in the taken-for-granted world of everyday experience, which is the ground of group behaviour and decision-making, every object is always an object for a subject. Phenomenology is a philosophy which takes the everyday world with its inevitable mesh of fact and value as its centre of concern. The theory of social action of the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz is suggested as an appropriate underpinning for a social geography concerned with the social and cognitive processes which lend a meaning to place, and guide the decision-making of both groups and organisations.