Gentrification, revitalization and children raising. Family gentrifiers in a post-socialist city

Abstract

<jats:p>The aim of the article is to provide a case study of a post-industrial, post-socialist city analyzing gentrification processes in their initial phase within the context of a large municipality-led revitalization program with focus on experiences of family gentrifiers. Inspired by Robert A. Beauregard’s framework (1986), the analysis concentrates on ‘the potentially gentrifiable neighborhoods’, ‘the potentially gentrified’, ‘the facilitators and active agents of gentrification’, and ‘the potential gentry themselves’. The empirical part of the text is based on qualitative study, that is, selected interviews collected within a research project on gentrifiers in the process of social revitalization, conducted in the city of Lodz (central Poland).</jats:p>

The kaleidoscope of gentrification in post-socialist cities

“…State, city and district governments could influence the scope of transformation, in particular through the privatisation of housing, abolishing rent regulations and tenants’ protection, providing subsidies for physical regeneration, implementing area-based regeneration projects and adequate spatial planning measures. In some Polish and Hungarian inner-city neighbourhoods where the share of public rental housing was high, local governments were able to launch renewal projects associated with physical upgrading and ‘controlled’ or ‘organised’ gentrification, in cooperation with private real estate developers and/or urban development organisations (Bunio-Mroczek, 2017; Kovács, 2009; Wiest and Hill, 2004). In these cases, long-term residents had to be offered alternative housing (c16), mainly in low-status mass-housing estates or rural settlements with cheaper housing.…”