ABSTRACT
Alternatives to the aforementioned connections between sustainability policies, planning initiatives and gentrification are emerging in response to concerns about the everyday impacts of gentrification. This chapter addresses community-level organizational practices that either implicitly or explicitly challenge these connections as a way to generate new understandings of social and environmental equity and justice. Discussions about alternative practices that counter gentrification have been notably absent from gentrification scholarship (Slater, 2009). Yet, as Slater underlines, researchers must reorient gentrification research towards social justice issues and a reframing of traditional understandings of property and its ownership and exchange (2009, p. 307). This suggestion widens a space for the consideration and integration of scholar-activist and community-based activist perspectives that challenges the threats and outcomes caused by gentrification in cities. Community-based organizations (CBOs) and resident activists are often on the front lines of addressing gentrification in cities and are left to enact the service and care work of tending to its outcomes and impacts on individuals and families, such as physical eviction from housing, to the search for free legal services, childcare and affordable housing alternatives. Such work has been well documented in research that identifies the important role of CBOs in providing care for communities that are facing complex problems caused by gentrification. Often, this literature has demonstrated how community-based strategies to resist gentrification pressures can include different practices that aim to defy displacement or which encourage the community control of land and housing stock as practices of de-commodification (Blomley, 2004; DeFillippis, 2004; Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy, 2013; London Tenants Federation, Lees, Just Space, and Southwark Notes Archive Group, 2014; Medoff and Sklar, 1999; Rameau, 2008; Robinson, 1996).
