The Atlantic has been running a series on urban life and the future of cities. One of these is gentrification-and-its-discontents by Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic’s literary editor and national editor.

It is structured around a review of Sharon Zukin's Naked City:The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places and Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, both of which visits the argument laid out by Jane Jacobs in the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which an important influence on the New Urbanism architecture and planning movement which emerged in the 1980s.

Jacob's core argument is that local communities (‘urban villages’ ) engaged in a pitched battle against government bureaucratic power seeking to create a cookie-cutter corporate city of glass-box office towers, high-rise apartments, and limited-access highways. Zukin's work----Loft Living (1982), Landscapes of Power (1991), and The Culture of Cities (1995)-- chronicles how the forces of creative destruction of capitalism work to continually refashion the urban environment in pursuit of profit.

The result is a process of gentrification that usually forces out an area’s original working class inhabitants in favor of a more-affluent, middle class or professional clientele. Ironically, what happens in the process is that more and more of the urban environment has become just a ‘hipper’ variation of the standardized world Jacobs abhorred. Vince Carducci at Pop Matters says that Zukin evokes French urbanologist Henri Levebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’:

that is, the claim an individual or a group has to a particular piece of urban territory. In Zukin’s reading, this right is now negotiated as a clash of ‘authenticity’, the moral claims of old vs. new, of origins vs. style. The former often takes the form of the traditions and activities pursued by ethnic inhabitants of previous generations who populated a particular area, as in the soul-food restaurants, jazz and R&B joints, and sanctifying storefront churches of Harlem in its twentieth-century ghetto incarnation. The latter are basically the tastes and pursuits of what Richard Florida terms the ‘creative class’: the trendy little shops of entrepreneurial designers, nouvelle cuisine restaurants and cappuccino bars, microbreweries, galleries, and the like.

Schwarz says that the lament for the the passing of SoHo’s exhilarating, creative days—characterized by “the mix of artists, crafts-people, small manufacturers, researchers, as well as of commerce oriented to their needs” (a few funky bars for the artists) fails to recognize that this SoHo was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.