As etymologists instruct, the meaning of words evolve. NPR has a series, devoted to this phenomenon. Occasionally, the series covers academic and medical terms that seep from the domain of their expert-creators into popular culture, taking on new significance. The series spotlights words such as , , and . For the most part, those who first used the terms are not here to tell us what they make of this evolution. We would have to ask 17th-century doctors about and an about robot.
Not so with gentrification, a word that migrated from academia to entertainment, politics, and social media in a comparatively short period of time. Ruth Glass coined the term just over 60 years ago to describe the movement of the professional classes into traditionally working-class inner-London neighborhoods.
Today, talk of gentrification abounds and that talk is increasingly heterogeneous. On a field trip with my students, a tour guide used the term not to describe class turnover in post-industrial neighborhoods, but to gesture to a much longer history of population replacement. For him, gentrification conveyed a century of racialized displacement: from the replacement of Black populations by changing industrial uses, to urban renewal, and, finally, to present-day real-estate speculation. Used in this manner, gentrification encompasses the displacement of marginalized populations, regardless of form, decade, or origin. This example is just the tip of the iceberg. All kinds of people rely on gentrification to talk about transformations, many of them unrelated to cities. For instance, reporters refer to the and the . Here, gentrification denotes the upscaling of entities that aren鈥檛 neighborhoods; the churro has become more expensive and Burning Man has transmogrified into a festival-destination for the wealthy and celebrities.
Beyond my personal curiosity about the circulation and evolution of gentrification, I have been reflecting on what it means, more generally, to share an academic term with others, and to recognize that when they hand it back to you, it won鈥檛 be the same as when they borrowed it.
For twenty-five years, much of my research and writing has focused on gentrification, which borrowing from Ruth Glass鈥檚 original definition, I think of as the movement of highly educated and affluent individuals into traditionally working-class spaces, producing displacement. I have studied gentrification on the ground as it proliferated in a . I attended contentious meetings at Provincetown Town Hall and cozy selectboard meetings in Dresden, Maine. I observed street festivals in Chicago鈥檚 Andersonville and safety meetings in nearby Argyle. With collaborators, I am editing a book on anti-gentrification activism around the globe; we spotlight stories from those resisting displacement in cities like Louisville, Boston, Lisbon, Bangkok, and Delhi.
But while I, with legions of other urbanists, have been studying brick-and-mortar gentrification 鈥� and, in journals and at conferences, have engaged in relentless debate about the process 鈥� others outside of academia have been relying on gentrification to accomplish different aims. Television series feature evil developers and self-righteous affordable housing advocates. Novels emphasize the authenticity of lead characters by presenting them as enmeshed in as-yet-ungentrified neighborhoods; they spotlight characters鈥� personal 鈥済entrification鈥� by hinting at how the neighborhood is about to change and their central character with it. Journalists, scholars, and social media users toss the word around to describe how items 鈥� from music to pubs 鈥� have entered the realm of the elite or how the upper-middle class appropriates working-class items, like .
While scholars argue over how to define and measure gentrification, the word has found a new home for itself. A broad range of people deploy the term, many of whom are less concerned with parsing its meaning than scholars like me. Journalists and scriptwriters liberally use it to describe how people, food, music, art, and even and change.
Should those of us who study gentrification as a brick-and-mortar process, or who wade, chest deep, into academic debates about the concept, try to reclaim it for ourselves? Surely some scholars would take this position. Alternately, they might say that gentrification has lost its core meaning and that we should 鈥溾�� 鈥� leaving it for others. Should I have offered a counter perspective to our tour guide when he used gentrification to encompass over a century of racialized displacement?
I think not. I think the word has found a new life, just when we needed it. The more I watch it circulate, the more prepared I am to let it go. Instead of trying to save gentrification for urbanists, how much better to watch it move through popular culture, finding new homes in sculpture, songs, and protest chants. How wonderful that the word is at home in the world, particularly in a moment of rising inequities; a moment when it seems that many seek ways to talk about how the in favor of a few. Gentrification implies a critique of unequal systems and, today, people rely on it to offer that message in a pithy and indirect manner.
Rather than adjudicating the word鈥檚 accuracy as protesters, guides, artists and playwriters deploy it, it is better to engage with the different realms of life in which gentrification appears and how it accomplishes distinct aims for different people.
This was the approach I took with my students after our field trip. I acknowledged that the guide used gentrification differently than the narrower definition I鈥檇 previously introduced, and I asked the students what they thought of those differences. Ultimately, we had a conversation about the stakes of different ways of using the word, and I let the question of which definition is correct remain unresolved. We considered together why a word coined to describe a very specific process in a specific time and place now arguably signifies more than one version of neighborhood change 鈥� and, increasingly, changes divorced from cities.
As a longtime scholar of brick-and-mortar gentrification, I find value in charting how the word gets tossed around 鈥� including how it works as a metaphor. By shifting my gaze from the question of what gentrification ought to mean to how it gets used I鈥檝e learned about the broad range of concerns that gentrification signifies, and I鈥檝e also garnered insight about how everyday people experience brick-and-mortar gentrification. For instance, while academics debate the consequences of gentrification ad nauseum, gentrification only works as a metaphor to describe the upscaling of previously humble items because those who deploy it in this way assume that brick-and-mortar gentrification strips places of 鈥渁uthenticity鈥�, in part by pushing out the working-class.
If my scholarship centered a term that comes under more direct political attack, such as climate change, diversity, or intersectionality, it might be more challenging to advocate for a more curious than proprietary position. After all few impugn the notion of gentrification when they take it up as a metaphor or a literary device. Indeed, across a diverse set of usages, many of the core characteristics of classical academic definitions of gentrification remain intact. Even when gentrification is used purely as a metaphor 鈥� say to describe the transformation of 鈥� foundational characteristics of the process as described by scholars come through. These include appropriation, change, upscaling, renovation, displacement, and loss of 鈥渁uthenticity.鈥� Would I be equally at ease if the term were rendered unrecognizable or attacked for signaling a specific political position?
Perhaps not. Still, I鈥檇 hope that I would recognize the shortsightedness of trying to reclaim the word for my own purposes or of abandoning it altogether. If I have learned anything from watching gentrification circulate, it is the fallacy of the notion that any concept is strictly 鈥渁cademic鈥� or purely popular. Words belong to all of us. We pass them back and forth. I study gentrification on the ground, but I also watch films and read novels that feature gentrification. I listen to music that evokes gentrification, and I absorb social media posts that bemoan the 鈥済entrification鈥� of music. I can鈥檛 help but carry those messages back to the classroom and even to my scholarship. By watching how gentrification circulates, I am confident that the old image 鈥� which stokes fear today 鈥� of the ivory tower as separate from the 鈥渞eal鈥� world 鈥� is an increasingly faulty notion. When academic concepts aptly capture something that many encounter, as Ruth Glass鈥檚 word surely does, there is no reason to expect that those concepts will belong only to scholars, nor that those of us who study the subject will be untouched by how a word is given new meaning by all who engage with it. I recognize that I am part of a messy world of circulating ideas that we pass back and forth to one another.
Letting go of the definition of a term seems counterintuitive to everything we learn and do as academics; after all, we are encouraged to categorize discoveries and coin novel terms to capture them. But I am increasingly certain that we learn more by attending to the meaning a whole host of people assign to a word, and how they use it, than by insisting that academic concepts belong to any of us alone.
Japonica Brown-Saracino is a regular commentator for major news organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Atlantic and is the award-winning author of A Neighborhood that Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities. She is professor of sociology and women鈥檚, gender, and sexualities studies at Boston University, where she serves as faculty fellow at the Initiative on Cities.