CityReads│Who First Coined Gentrification?

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Who First Coined Gentrification?

Gentrification still relevant today as it was back in 1960s when it was first coined by Ruth Glass.

Ruth Glass and coining 'Gentrification'

Sources:https://bartlett100.com/article/ruth-glass-and-coining-gentrification

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab/news/ruth-glass-seminar

Picture source: https://nextcity.org/gentrificationtimeline#in1964

Germany-born English sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term 'gentrification' in 1964 to describe change in London.

"One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower …Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed."

This is a passage that could have been written today, but it comes from the introduction by sociologist Ruth Glass to London: Aspects of Change, a book of essays by scholars from various disciplines that she put together in 1964. The book includes ten chapters contributed by sociologists, geographers, planners, historians and health scientists to sketch a general social profile of a city that had undergone rapid contemporary change.

In coining the term 'gentrification', Glass wryly subverted the image of the British upper-class 'gentry'. The concept stemmed from her observations of how houses in Notting Hill and Islington were being taken over by bohemian couples with the money to refurbish them, squeezing out existing blue-collar communities from these neighborhoods. It's a phenomenon we're familiar with today, and a term that has leapt out of academia into popular usage by everyone from housing activists, to politicians, to consumer magazines.

A multidisciplinary approach

Glass's contribution to our understanding of our cities went far beyond the coining of this single word. Indeed, in his 1990 obituary of the Berlin-born Marxist, historian Eric Hobsbawm credited her as a “key figure in the institutionalisation of British sociology as an academic subject”.

When she arrived in London in the 1930s, she studied at the London School of Economics and quickly established a reputation in her field. In 1950, she joined UCL and founded the multidisciplinary Centre for Urban Studies a year later – a precursor to today’s cross-faculty Urban Laboratory.

Glass’s own work was equally eclectic – she refused to restrict herself to a single methodology, instead drawing together qualitative and quantitative research in a manner that still offers an important model for contemporary urban scholarship.

"We have a lot to learn from the way she didn't pigeonhole herself," says Andrew Harris, Co-Director of the Urban Lab and Associate Professor in UCL's Department of Geography, who has organized events to bring greater attention to Glass's work. "She saw herself working very much in a tradition of London research that included [19th century researcher and social reformer] Charles Booth."

Her book Newcomers: The West Indians in London (1960), was a groundbreaking exploration of the experiences of Caribbean migrants to the city, shining a light on racial discrimination and suggesting solutions for the growing tension between new arrivals and existing social groups.

Cover of Ruth Glass's book 'Newcomers: The West Indians in London', published in 1960 by the Centre for Urban Studies at UCL.

Her interests also went beyond the UK and even Europe. "An important part of her work was the way that she drew on different parts of the world," Harris says. "She did a lot of work in what was then Bombay [modern-day Mumbai], which was perhaps not high on the agenda of urban studies. In some ways she was a pioneer in a form of global comparison in [the field]."

Ruth Glass was a prescient "comparative urbanism" that was concerned about the dominance of western thought and experience in studies of urbanization in developing countries. She wrote about the "gaps in knowledge" in studies of urbanization in non-western contexts:

"so far, our knowledge of the current processes, configurations and implications of urbanization in the developing countries has been limited, or even apparently arrested, in several interrelated respects. First, the framework of analysis and enquiry in this field (as in many others) has been heavily conditioned by Western, and particularly Anglo-Saxon, experience- or rather by categories of thought derived from the as yet inadequately documented, only sketchily compared and partially interpreted, history of nineteenth and early twentieth urbanization in the now industrialized countries, notably Britain and the United States. It is partly because the ‘shock of urbanization’ felt in these countries during earlier periods is still reverberating, that the notions formed under its impact, whether expressed in terms of reason or unreason, have remained so tenacious and pervasive. The influence of such notions is reflected in the choice of subjects with which students of contemporary urban growth and phenomena in the developing countries have been preoccupied. The predominance of western thought, in general, is reflected in the treatment of such subjects, which tends to follow both the conventional line of demarcation between the various disciplines of the social sciences (Glass, 1964)".

A female voice in a male-dominated world

Ultimately for Glass, academia was not simply a cerebral pursuit, but a living practice and form of activism – she is believed to have been a voracious writer of letters to newspapers and intent on using research as a way to influence public policy.

A female voice in a male-dominated environment, she became known at UCL for speaking her mind – a personality trait that would no doubt have been less noteworthy had she been a man. This is also perhaps why her name isn’t as well-known as might be expected of someone who produced work of such significance.

"Her reputation in this field was established from the late 1930s by studies of housing developments and planning in Watling and Middlesborough, and later by pioneer work on black immigration, although the text of what would have been her major work, the Third London Survey (successor to the surveys of Booth and Llewellyn Smith), was unfortunately never quite completed".

Today, gentrification is an entire subdiscipline within urban studies, and the notion has evolved as its manifestations have been witnessed around the world and as the role of the state and private developers in exacerbating it has become more significant and evident. As Glass rightly noted, gentrification is a process that – once started – is hard to stop. Gentrification has gone global and unfolded in a planetary scale, or planetary gentrification.

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