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Does gentrification destroy diversity? Or does it thrive on it? Boston’s South End, a legendary working-class neighborhood with the largest Victorian brick row house district in the United States and a celebrated reputation for diversity, has become in recent years a flashpoint for the problems of gentrification. It has born witness to the kind of rapid transformation leading to pitched battles over the class and race politics throughout the country and indeed the contemporary world.
This subtle study of a storied urban neighborhood reveals the way that upper-middle-class newcomers have positioned themselves as champions of diversity, and how their mobilization around this key concept has reordered class divisions rather than abolished them.
Sylvie Tissot
Sylvie Tissot is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Paris-8; she has previously served as a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies (Harvard University) and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (New York University). Her research has focused on urban reform and the upper classes, with particular interest in impoverished areas in France and gentrified neighborhoods in the United States. Her new book De bons voisins (Good Neighbors. Researching Upper Middle Class Progressives, 2011) and her article, �?oOn Dogs and Men: The Making of Spatial Boundaries in a Gentrifying Neighborhood�?� (City and Community, 2011) are based on her fieldwork on gentrification in Boston. A member of theeditorial board of Pierre Bourdieu�?Ts Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, she has co-directed several issues on urban space for the journal. She has also written on Simone de Beauvoir (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2008) as well as religion and politics (Public Culture, 2001).
Her current research studies upper middle class residents in two gentrified neighborhoods, Park Slope (New York City) and Le Marais (Paris), evaluating the role of �?ogay-friendly�?� attitudes in the development of social class and urban space.
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