| dc.description.abstract | This study investigates the case of an urban core neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, where rapid neighborhood changes in terms of the cultural, demographic, and built environments have prompted tensions between residents and concerns over gentrification. While the label ‘gentrification’ has become commonplace to describe changes across the city, a close analysis of the dynamics in changing neighborhoods can shed light on the conditions that make up everyday life that are conducive to, complicit in, or resistant toward the political-economic drivers of neoliberal urban development. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participant observation of community meetings, this research analyzes discourses of place meaning – both uttered and performed – to reveal process of marginalization (especially based on race and class) and resistance. Accounts of gentrification resistance are few, and those that do exist are focused primarily on institutionalized efforts. Additionally, while there is a longstanding empirical literature on the impacts of individuals’ positive place meanings and relationships, there is little investigation of the multivalent nature of place meanings and how dynamics of power, inclusion, and exclusion are present in their expression. Bringing an analysis of place meanings to the study of the case neighborhood finds that resistances are expressed through discourses that disrupt assumptions of inevitability, universal benefit, and political, racial, and social neutrality of market-driven development process. These critical interpretations of neighborhood development as well as this way of listening to neighborhood discourses can inform anti-gentrification organizing efforts that seek to challenge hegemonic place meanings based on property and economic prospect. | |
