Calla Wright
Senior Seminar
Professor Joseph Heathcott
27 February 2009
RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Topic/Research Question
I am studying the impact of gentrification on working-class youths’ ability to appropriate space on the Lower East Side. I want to find out whether gentrification displaces youth socially and spatially so that I may help to bridge the ongoing conversations about gentrification and youth’s interaction with public space. This will help my reader understand the importance of considering youth–– as they are forming identities, learning independence, and becoming autonomous–– during discussions of gentrification.
Abstract
Interacting with peers, forming identities away from adults, learning independence and seeking autonomy are natural and necessary processes during adolescence. Youth, however, are unlikely to own or even rent property. Youth possess limited funds for recreational and commercial activities; they rely on public spaces to fulfill these developmental roles.
Many of the studies about gentrification focus on its financial and spatial elements as they pertain to adults. However, teenagers in neighborhoods undergoing substantial change may lose the places on which they depend to develop and socialize. This is an understudied area.
This paper will bring together studies that examine youths’ already complicated relationships with public space, with studies that investigate the ongoing problem of gentrification for working-class families. With a focus on the Lower East Side, a unique area that has been through cycles of renewal and disinvestment, this paper will examine the impact of gentrification on youths’ ability to appropriate public spaces.
In addition to the secondary research, this paper will draw on interviews of young men and women born in the 1980s, who grew up in the L.E.S. This will draws on quantitative methods, and does not claim to be statistically representative. The interviews will offer insight into the world of working-class youth who experienced transformations in their urban environments in the 1990s. The focus will be on their uses of and access to public space at a crucial stage of development.
Source Plan
As there are limited resources addressing the combination of gentrification, the Lower East Side, and youth in public settings, many of my secondary sources address those issues separately. Though some of my sources contain overlapping elements, for example Cahill’s 2000 piece combines youth and the Lower East Side while her work from 2006 combines the Lower East Side and gentrification, all address at least one of the three main subjects. Thus, I investigate youth appropriation of space through a variety of lenses in order to understand the essential need youths have for spaces of their own, and the barriers that make such need hard to meet. I am also reading about gentrification in communities other than the Lower East Side to understand the commonalities between the cases, as well as the aspects of gentrification unique to the Lower East Side. The pieces I use in regards to the Lower East Side all focus on, or at least mention, gentrification. However, not all of them are centered around youth.
For my primary sources, I will be conducting a series of interviews with young adults. They will be young enough to remember their pre-teen and teenage years, and some may still consider themselves youth. Further details on this process are to follow.
Working Bibliography
Cahill, C. (2000). Street Literacy: Urban Teenagers’ Strategies for Negotiating their Neighbourhood. Journal of Youth Studies, (3)3, 251-256. Retrieved February 8, 2009 from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/.
Cahill, C. (Spring 2006). “At Risk?” The Fed Up Honeys Re-Present the Gentrification of the Lower East Side. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34, 334-63. Retrieved February 23, 2009 from ProQuest Database.
Childress, H. (2004). Teenagers, Territory and the Appropriation of Space. Childhood, 11, 195-205. Retrieved February 8, 2009 from SAGE (DOI: 10.1177/9070568204043056).
DeSena, J. N. (2006). “What’s a Mother To Do?”: Gentrification, School Selection, and the Consequences for Community Cohesion. American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 241-57. Retrieved February 25, 2009 from SAGE (DOI: 10.1177/0002764206290639).
Fudoni, M. (Summer 2005). Teen Empowerment: Youth, police and neighbors in partnership. New Directions for Youth Development, 106, 61-71. Retrieved February 26, 2009 from ProQuest Database.
Hackworth, J. (2002). Postrecession Gentrification in New York City. Urban Affairs Review, 37, 815-843. Retrieved from SAGE February 25, 2009. (DOI: 10.177/107874037006003).
Lees, L. (2000). A reappraisal of gentrification: towards “ a geography of gentrification.” Progress in Human Geography, 24, 389-408. Retrieved February 26, 2009 from SAGE (DOI: 10.1191/03091320070154048).
Matthews, H., Limb, M., & Taylor, M. (2000). The “Street As Thirdspace.” In S. L. Holloway & G. Valentine (Eds.). Children’s Geographies: playing, living, learning (pp. 63-79). London: Routledge.
Matthews, H. (2003). The street as a liminal space: The barbed spaces of childhood. In P. Christensen & M. O’Brien (Eds.). Children in the City: Home, neighbourhood and community (pp. 101-17). London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Mele, C. (200). Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate and Resistance in New York, 1880-2000. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Newman K., & Wyly, E. K. (2006). The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City. Urban Studies, (43) 23-57, 24-57. Retrieved February 26, 2009 from SAGE (DOI: 10.1080/00420980500388710).
Travlou, P. (2007). Mapping youth spaces in the public realm: Identity, space and social exclusion. In C. Ward Thompson & P. Travlou (Eds.). Open Space: People Space (pp.71-81). Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis.
White, R. (1993). Youth and Conflict over Urban Space. Children’s Environment (10)1, 110-123. Retrieved February 8, 2009 from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/.
Wridt, P. J. (2004). An Historical Analysis of Young People’s Use of Public Space, Parks and Playgrounds in New York City.” Children, Youth and Environments, (14)1, 100-120. Retrieved February 8, 2009 from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/.
You should know by now I don't fix any of the things that got messy during the copy and paste
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