XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

391

Ethnographies of Transnationalism, Gentrification, Displacement and Belonging: The Intersection of Lifestyle Migration/Residential Tourism and Urban Transformation

RC21 Regional and Urban Development (host committee)

Language: English

Studies of gentrification have sought to visualize the global or ‘planetary’ nature of the process, assessing how a term used in one local context (Great Britain in the 1960s, see Glass 1964), and the actual process, differ in distinct urban and cultural environments (Janoschka, Sequera and Salinas 2014; Lees, Shin and López-Morales 2016; Roy and Ong 2011). In many of these cases, neighborhoods are being transformed by foreign investors, who participate in market valorization with varying degrees of attachment to place. This panel draws attention to a growing number of cities in different geographical regions that have experienced transnational forms of gentrification—processes linked to the mobility of individuals from higher to lower latitudes of the global division of labor. Increasingly, gentrification processes are linked to holiday rentals, lifestyle migration or residential tourism (Cocola Gant 2016; Sigler and Wachsmuth 2016). While transnational gentrification can be caused by the world’s super-rich (Forrest et al. 2017; Hay and Muller 2012; Ley 2010), in many places it is the work of middle class people, whose global social positions enable them to compete with locals on available and new-build housing (Haramati and Hananel 2016; Hayes 2015; Zaban 2016). Our panel seeks to explore how the lifestyle ideals and place imaginaries of privileged migrants influence the political economy of cities and the production of space and place. We are interested in ethnographic work that deals with the local consequences of global inequality in various global settings, and acts of resistance that seek social justice.