Materialities of Gentrification

Newtown Creek Nature Walk, New York City

The community of Marin City faces long term threats from both sea level rise and gentrification. The proposed park around the lagoon at the base of Marin City intersects both of these issues. On the one hand, a good park design could help solve the town’s increasingly urgent drainage issues and increase its resilience to coastal inundation while providing valuable green space for recreation and community gatherings. On the other hand, it could increase the property value of market-rate units in Marin City, and in doing so exacerbate wealth disparity and the threat of gentrification. How do we navigate this tension as designers? I started googling.

It turns out this question was a research topic for former UC Berkeley CED dean Jennifer Wolch, whose team studied examples of “eco-gentrification“ and investigated design solutions to counteract it. Through this research they identified a strategy of design that is “just green enough,” a term coined by urban geographer Winifred Curran to describe Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek Nature Walk. This design strategy alters the landscape just enough to clean the environment and provide public open space, but not enough to be seen as attractive to wealthier residents outside of the community. Most importantly, they match the “local personality” instead of importing an outside design aesthetic.[1]

The “just green enough” approach seems promising in that it should lead to sites that better respond to their surrounding context while reducing the risks of gentrification. But I find myself questioning, is this what the community always wants? Should we limit the amount of natural green space in a design just because it makes a place more attractive to gentrifiers? Does a limited palette of simple, recycled materials and low-budget furnishings result in a park that a community takes pride in and wants to show off? Can we disguise high quality design so that the yuppies don’t notice it?

I found an interview with Walter Hood in Architectural Record that touched on this issue:

“People have ideas about what a place should become, without any understanding of what’s there. You hear people say “placemaking,” which I really hate. It’s this colonial attitude, versus going into a place and trying to cultivate what’s there. But it’s hard to do because of these aesthetics, and the ways that making landscapes are codified, bureaucratized, and maintained.” [2]

My research ended with an article written by Alessandro Rigolon and Jeremey Nemeth, very promisingly titled “Not all new parks are linked to gentrification in low-income neighborhoods.” They evaluated new parks according to location, size, and function to see if particular park features triggered more gentrification than others. They found that parks built closer to city centers and along transportation lines were the most likely to result in increased gentrification, with the effect being strongest for linear parks such as New York’s High Line. However, the size of the new park did not seem to be a factor. Here’s the key takeaway from their research:

“… our findings on park size also suggest that policymakers, planners, and community organizations can build new large parks in park-poor, low-income communities located at the edges of cities without excessive risks of gentrification. These initiatives can help address historical inequities in access to parks that affect low-income people and people of color in the US and around the world.”[3]

GGN design for India Basin Shoreline Park, San Francisco

Sources:

(1) https://www.fastcompany.com/3037135/how-parks-gentrify-neighborhoods-and-how-to-stop-it

(2) https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/11/01/not-all-new-parks-are-linked-to-gentrification-in-low-income-neighborhoods/

(3) https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/14749-interview-with-walter-hood-on-history-and-race-in-landscape-design