| The revitalization of distressed neighborhoods often disproportionately and negatively affects longtime residents of these urban areas. Not only do revitalization polices displace some residents from their residences, in surprising ways, well-intentioned planning and policy-making may also dislocate long-timer cultures from a neighborhood's everyday public spaces. Though gentrification is well theorized in terms of the political economy, the land market and property values, and increased investment in transportation and entertainment infrastructure, ethno-racial neighborhood change on the ground, specifically in publicly accessible spaces, remains under-theorized. People reside in homes and apartments. They live in their neighborhoods. That is, they socialize on front stoops, walk down sidewalks, hang out in parks, and drive up streets. I put forth that dislocation from these everyday public spaces is a component of neighborhood change, and consequently, of gentrification. In order to test this claim, I construct a model of the production of space that captures not only public practice, but also the formal regulations and cultural norms that regulate public behavior. Drawing both from archival and ethnographic research, I closely examine four types of publicly accessible space in North Denver: vacant land, temporary spaces, neighborhood parks and city streets. Since neighborhood change works in at least two directions---the displacement of long-timers and the luring of newcomers---I conclude that the minutiae of municipal code and commonsensical cultural norms play salient roles in neighborhood change. In a word, changes to formal and informal regulation of public space impact who feels at home in neighborhoods, who feels uncomfortable there, and subsequently who moves from and who moves to them. |
