Towards the end of the Festival of Scholars poster celebration, where I presented my independent study and group project on the Urban Growth Boundary, I took the opportunity to talk to Aaron Fellows, a senior Environmental Studies major, about his thesis. Aaron’s thesis concerns the amenity value of the urban tree canopy and the inequitable socioeconomic access to trees in the city. His methods are quite in line with my independent study, involving GIS analysis and a linear regression to assess the relationship between his independent and dependent variables. His overall process is thus rather similar to what I anticipate doing over the course of my thesis next year—incorporating a spatial analysis of economic data within a situated research framework. He had a great figure illustrating Portland’s contradictory relation to trees, reproduced at the right—it shows the aristocratic park blocks, filled with newly planted urban trees, against the denuded West Hills. Through his regression, Aaron found that the urban canopy increased home value and access to urban trees was positively associated with income, education, and race.
I then showed him my own project, and asked broadly about any tips he had about the thesis process. He emphasized the importance of constant questioning of your topic, relaying the process of how he used, yet eventually challenged, the Louis Sullivan quote, “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.” For Fellows’ capstone, the form pertains to the urban canopy and the function is the housing of people (differentiated by class and race). While there is a great deal of truth to structuralism, it is also important to keep in mind the potential bi-directionality and mixed-up nature of the relationships embedded in cities.
For my concentration, such questioning would involve the interrogation of gentrification as a term. Aaron recommended that, within my thesis, I should challenge the totalizing definition of gentrification, and consider how it might refer to diverse processes which individuals in different contexts will interpret in varying ways. Frankly, I am a little reluctant to embrace this kind of hyper-differentiated framework. Scholarly works which take twenty dense pages to conclude that an issue is complicated are a bit of a pet peeve of mine, and I think these pitfalls arise due to the While it’s undeniable that gentrification is driven, expressed, interpreted, and resisted differently in according to context and one’s individual standing, I find the inclusiveness of a more structuralist/Marxist perspective of gentrification rather more illuminating, at least as the theoretical basis for research. Through such a perspective, gentrification can be defined as simply the class upgrading of an area, providing a cogent means for understanding the central equity implications/contradictions of its relationship vis-a-vis transit . Nevertheless, the is certainly room for an interpretation which more carefully notes the importance of context. This reconciliation may involve the categorization of gentrification as a very broad class process containing displacement, reinvestment, revitalization, demographic and racial politics, and conflicts over the right to the city. It will likely be worthwhile, however, to interrogate whether or not this is really the best theoretical model.
Leave a Reply