From Toxic Wreck to Crunchy Chic

Environmental Gentrification through the Body

Bibliographic Data

ID4475290
AuthorsLeslie Kern (Mount Allison University, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume33
Issue1
Pages67-83
Publication date2015-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/d13150p
OpenAlexW2155313176
LanguageEN
Citations received42
References cited68

This paper takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on environmental gentrification by considering bodies and embodied practices as significant dimensions of this process. In considering the question of how a polluted past can be mobilized as an asset for neighbourhood rebranding and gentrification, this research suggests that the conflation of both pollution and 'health' with different kinds of urban bodies and practices is an important strategy for solidifying a clean and green neighbourhood future. I argue that some bodies are constituted as 'dirty' by the symbolic and substantive displacement of environmental pollution onto those bodies, in ways that allow the neighbourhood to redefine itself as clean (whether it is environmentally clean or not) once those bodies are displaced, contained, or made invisible. This perspective requires us to consider the radically coconstitutive character of representations and materiality, bodies and cities, nature and social relations. Based on a case study of Toronto's Junction neighbourhood, this paper maintains that bringing bodies to the foreground attends to the power of embodiment in producing and reproducing urban change and, critically, urban inequalities

Aesthetics · Art · Civil engineering · Conflation · Economic geography · Embodied cognition · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Gentrification · Geography · Materiality (auditing · Neighbourhood (mathematics · Sociology · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Urban Green Space and Health

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub