Commercial Gentrification Indexes: Using Business Directories to Map Urban Change at the Street Level

Abstract

This article presents the case for utilizing business directories in building commercial gentrification indexes as tools for research on neighborhood change. It reviews several existing methods of capturing retail change within the growing literature, codifies them as the boutique index, the food index, and the ethnic index, and discusses methodological issues that emerge in building them. A comparative case study of two Little Italies in NYC employs multiple indexes to reveal that the food index––rather than ethnic index––provided the key variable in understanding how consumption practices marked different trajectories of neighborhood change. Whereas the sociological literature on gentrification has primarily relied on socioeconomic indicators and housing data, changing retail landscapes have been understudied and measuring commercial gentrification remains a site–specific, ad–hoc endeavor. To overcome this gap, the article calls for methodological standardization across different sites to increase attention to the role of commercial spaces in accounts of gentrification.

The student urban leisure sector: Towards commercial studentification?

“…Therefore, although this paper examined pubs, cafés, clubs and cinemas, other types of leisure and retail venues might be included in future studies. Second, as the commercial gentrification debate shows, there is a need to find proper tools and measures to investigate this phenomenon (Kosta, 2019). Thus, the same issue will inevitably arise in any research into commercial studentification.…”

“…This perspective seems promising due to the new developments in gentrification theory. More precisely, gentrification scholars have recently disentangled commercial gentrification from its 'classical' residential archetype (Kosta, 2019;Parker, 2018;Pastak et al, 2019;Tuttle, 2020;Zukin and Kosta, 2004). Put briefly, residential and commercial facets of gentrification are no longer considered axiomatically parallel to each other, so they might take place independently in different urban areas and transform them under different logics.…”

Venues and segregation: A revised Schelling model

“…From behind, there is the example in many American communities of the old Italian or Polish church in a majority-Latino community, a vestige of the previous immigrant community that continues to shape the present neighborhood [ 46 , 47 ]. Looking forward, there is the first restaurant concept of what will be a popular fad and attract new groups to the area [ 48 , 49 ]. Introducing venues allows us to model these processes.…”

Centering Small Cities for Urban Sociology in the 21st Century

“…Urban research after World War II maintained a disciplinary interest in community life, but the empirical focus largely solidified around specific neighborhoods and groups in America's largest cities (Anderson 1978; Gans 1962; Hannerz 1969; Kornblum 1974; Suttles 1968; see Vidich and Bensman (1958) for a notable exception). This pattern is perhaps a consequence of the Chicago School's powerful influence over generations of scholars through its qualitative approach (see Fine 1995), and, given the great number of studies conducted in that city, Chicago's symbolic placement within the discipline as the quintessential 20th century American metropolis.…”

“…Today's debates on gentrification have problematized nearly every aspect of these early narratives (see Brown-Saracino 2010, as the process itself has become more widespread, complex, and ongoing. We are well into a new era of gentrification research with promising new directions that include, among others, "planetary gentrification" (Lees et al 2016), commercial/retail gentrification (Hubbard 2017;Kosta 2019;Mermet 2017), advanced (Ocejo 2014) or "super-gentrification" (Lees 2003), and rural gentrification (Ghose 2004;Hines 2010;Phillips 1993). City & Community has been at the forefront of some of these developments, aiming to understand where this scholarship is headed and set an agenda for research (Brown-Saracino 2016).…”