ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how representations and constructions of ethnicity in print media contribute to gentrification processes by presenting particular aspects of a neighborhood's ethnicity as conducive to the fulfillment of the yearning for diversity and authentic experiences, even if these are packaged as tamed commodities. It focuses on the origins and the development of the potential gentrifier's value structures and the function that ethnicity fulfills within these structures. The chapter deals with mass media representations and their capacity to construct collective spatial images and associations that support the marketing and selling of certain neighborhoods. In the gentrification of ethnic neighborhoods, the media play an important role in shaping the neighborhood's image by both highlighting and promoting its desirable features as well as by moderating, framing, and downplaying the more problematic ones, all of this from a middle-class and urban boosterist perspective.
