No abstract

This paper explores the effects of gentrification on industrial displacement. Although urban manufacturing centres are not as central to the urban economy as they once were, they still house a vibrant and varied manufacturing sector that serves urban niche markets and provides employment for a less-educated and largely immigrant and minority workforce. As urban neighbourhoods gentrify, these manufacturers are faced with displacement because their space has become attractive to developers who convert lofts into residences. This paper looks at the process of gentrification and the experience of industrial displacement in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, in order to challenge existing theories on the impacts of gentrification and thus help to make clear the processes and interests at work. Through buy-outs, lease refusals, zoning changes and increasing rents, small manufacturers are being actively displaced, endangering the diversity of the economy and the employment outcomes of unskilled and immigrant workers.

This paper looks at the linkages between gentrification and the displacement of small-scale manufacturing and blue-collar work in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Although the link between global economic change and gentrification has been made for the upper classes who are the consumers of the gentrified landscape, very little work has been done on the bluecollar work and workers that remain in the central city despite the assumption by policymakers that deindustrialization is complete. I argue that manufacturing is still a viable sector of the urban economy that is increasingly at risk of displacement because of the conversion of industrial space to residential use and speculative real-estate pressure. In this way, gentrification is encouraging industrial displacement, which in turn is leading to the degradation of the blue-collar work that remains and to the increasing informalization of work.

No abstract

innovation , clusters , manufacturing , USA ,