Don’t Shoot the Pianist: Creative Firms, Workers, and Neighborhood Gentrification
研究了英国英格兰和威尔士地区2001至2021年间创意活动与社区绅士化的关联，发现创意集群与后续绅士化之间的总体关联很小，但在伦敦等大城市中关联更强，艺术工作者和企业与绅士化关系最密切。
We examine links between creative activity and gentrification at the neighborhood level. These dynamics are both complex and important to understand. Artists may help upgrade inexpensive neighborhoods before being displaced, including by higher-paid creative services workers. Alternatively, creative activity may follow patterns of high-income customers and locales. Many city leaders hope creative industries can drive urban growth while worrying about these highly localized impacts. However, outside case studies, these links are poorly understood. Drawing on urban theory and recent creative industries debates, we frame neighborhood upgrading in larger processes of competition for urban space, then identify distinct creativity–gentrification channels for firms, workers, and arts/service activities. We explore impacts on neighborhoods in England and Wales, via rich microdata on firms and workers between 2001 and 2021. We test aggregate links between creative activity and subsequent gentrification, then explore channels across actors, activity types, level of clustering, the urban hierarchy, and property types. Largely, we find very small associations between creative clustering and gentrification in the following decades. Associations are larger for creative workers than firms, though less stable. Links are stronger in London and larger cities; in neighborhoods with denser clusters of creative firms, changes in gentrification scores are three to seven times larger. Overall, arts workers and businesses are most implicated in gentrification, though the former lead and the latter follow neighborhood change. The findings have important implications for urban economic development and urban planning policy.